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http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028272155
FROM PERICLES TO
PHILIP
BY
T. R. GLOVER
PREFACE
THE period
from Pericles to Philip is in many ways the most interesting of Greek history.
Indeed, when we use the word “Greek”— whether we think of art or literature, of
philosophy or politics, of the Greek spirit or of the Greek attitude to
life—nine times out of ten we are turning, consciously or unconsciously, to the
century and a quarter between the birth of Pericles and the accession of
Philip. It is because in all the regions of thought and life, which I have
named, the formative impulses come from this time, or reach maturity in it,
recognize themselves or are recognized in it. But, if we are to understand
history, we have to ask, more carefully than we sometimes do, what are the
things that matter. In the perspective of time, for instance, how many events
of the decade 185060 are yet of such consequence as the publication of The
Origin of Species, or have meant so much to mankind? Lecky spoke of John
Wesley’s conversion as an epoch in English history. Can we imagine the comment
of Horace Walpole, or of Dr. Johnson himself, on such a criticism, if it had
been made by a contemporary? Yet it is hard to say that Lecky was not right.
But do the histories as a rule give us such events in a perspective, that will
bring out their significance ?
I. The
Traveller in the Greek World
II. The
Age of Pericles .
III. Thucydides
IV. Athens
in the War-Time
V.
Euripides
VI. The
Youth of Xenophon
VII.
Persia . . .
VIII. The
Anabasis . .
IX. The
New Age . .
X. The House of Pasion .
XI.
Country Life . .
XII. Under
which King, Bezonian?
FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP
CHAPTER I
THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD
GOETHE and Eckermann were once talking about Schlegel, and his criticisms
of Euripides came up, and Goethe, as frequently happened, said something that
Eckermann carried home with him and wrote down. “ If a modem man like
Schlegel,” said Goethe, ‘‘ must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he
ought only to do it upon his knees.” Goethe is profoundly right; the great vice
in criticism of ancient literature is that the critic seems more often anxious
to find out what is wrong than what is right. Something must be very right
indeed in a man’s work if it can hold and delight mankind centuries after he is
dead and gone, and not only his fellow-countrymen, but every foreigner also,
who can even with a lexicon’s aid pick out his meaning and who has, consciously
or unconsciously, any idea of what a book is. For it is only to the
sympathetic, to those who somehow have the right instinct, that a book will
reveal itself. Books are strange things and have strange ways—like certain
insects, when they feel themselves in wrong hands, they will sham dead. With
the great writers of ancient Greece this often happens, and men say they are
dull, and find faults in them; but when they reach the right hands, they change
and live and move, and even the barest minimum of Greek will let the right man
see that they too are right, and life begins anew with all its gladness and
variety.
Herodotus is an author "Who has suffered terrible things from clever
critics in ancient days and in our own. But if ever a writer gave delight to
his readers, held their attention,
We might begin by speaking of the width of his interests and of his
sympathies. He is so intensely human that nothing that touches human life,
nothing that quickens men’s thoughts, or makes their hearts beat, fails to
appeal to him. All the business of all the world is his, and he enjoys it. If,
like Greeks of his day, he thinks of human life in the abstract, he may share
their doubts of it. “ Short as life is,” says Arta- banus, “ there is no man so
happy, no man among all these, nor anywhere else, to whom it will not come
often, and not once only, to wish to die rather than to live ” (vii. 46). “ Not
to be born is, past all prizing, best,” said Herodotus’ friend, Sophocles (O.C.
1227)—or rather, so says the chorus in the play of Sophocles, for Sophocles was
a poet, and a poet draws many conclusions from life, and in a certain sense the
more inconsistent they are the better. But if Herodotus sighs with Artabanus,
when he thinks of life in the abstract, when he comes to actual life, whether
it is only the bandages the Persians use with the wounded (vii. 181) or the
horns of the cattle which the Libyans keep (iv. 183), whether it is the strange
practice of making butter that prevails among the Scythians (iv. 2) or the
sugar-making—honey, he calls it—of the Libyans, who smear themselves red and
eat monkeys (“ and they have plenty of monkeys in their mountains,” iv.
194)—life is too interesting to be sighed over. There then is one element of
his great charm—“ the world’s no blot for him, nor blank,” but various sfid
bright with life, always something to catch the eye and to wake the mind.
Herodotus is thoroughly Greek here. “ Oh! Solon! Solon! ” says the old
Egyptian in the Timaeus (22 b), “ you Greeks are always children . . . you are all young in your souls.”
It is a true judgment. Young they all were in soul, busy, curious, and
open-eyed, till they found out how great they were, and grew didactic and dull.
The open eye and heart of Herodotus call down on him
Herodotus was perhaps helped to this power of understanding men of alien
speech and alien thought by the very circumstances of his birth and upbringing.
Halicarnassus, his birthplace, was a Dorian colony from Troezen, planted long
ago in Caria (vii. 99).3 As in many of the Greek cities of Asia
Minor there was a strong infusion of Carian blood in the people, and
Halicarnassus was in a sense a town apart, excluded from the common worship of
the Dorian cities, its neighbours . It is noteworthy that critical as
Herodotus frankly is of “ Ionians,” for Carians he has perhaps no unkind word.
That he should write an Ionic dialect seemed to later Greeks to need
explanation, and in Suidas’ lexicon, which
It is interesting to see how Herodotus looks back to his native land. The
Ionians “had the fortune to build their cities in the most favourable position
for climate and seasons of any men we know”;and the Dorians were
not far away. Herodotus is constantly interested in climates—the Egyptians, he
says, are the most healthy of men after the Libyans, partly, he thinks, because
of their seasons which do not change, for diseases are most apt to be produced
by changes of seasons; but after all, while the ends of the earth
have allotted to them by nature the fairest things—gold, cotton, frankincense,
and so forth—it is the lot of Hellas to have its seasons far more fairly
tempered than other lands. As for the Canans, they
gave the Hellenes three warlike inventions—crests on helmets, devices on
shields, and handles instead of straps to hold shields with ; and when
the Ionians first secured the opening of Egypt for the Hellenes, there were
Carians with them bronzen men. Men of war they remained, not easily
to be conquered even by the Persians.4 The Persian king might be
suzerain, but the queen or king at Halicarnassus was half independent. And if
we turn to ways of peace, we learn that the old Ionian dress of the women was
really Carian, “ for the old Hellenic fashion of dress for women was everywhere
the same as that we now call Dorian ”.
In this Dorian-Carian town, looking from its headland across the sea,
Herodotus was bom (c. 484 B.C.), and there he grew up, with open ears, we can
well believe, from earliest
“ Of the rest of the officers,” Herodotus wrote long after, “I make no
mention (since I am not bound to do so), but only of Artemisia, at whom most of
all I marvel that she took part in the expedition against Hellas, though a
woman ; for after her husband died, she held the power herself, and, although
she had a son who was a young man, she went on the expedition, impelled by high
spirit and manly courage, no necessity being laid upon her. Now her name, as I
said, was Artemisia, and she was the daughter of Lygdamis, and by descent she
was of Halicarnassus on her father’s side, and on her mother’s a Cretan. She
commanded the men of Halicarnassus and Kos and Nisyjros and Calydna, furnishing
five ships; and of all the fleet, after those of the Sidonians, her ships were
counted the best; and of all his allies she set forth the best counsels to the
King ” (vii. 99).
There was another Lygdamis of whom Herodotus must have heard a good deal
in his youth, though he does not mention him. For Artemisia left a son called
Pisindelis, and this man’s son Lygdamis was tyrant or king of Halicarnassus in
his turn. And here we depend on the lexicon of Suidas, and whence that work
derived its information we do not know, but much of it can only have come in
the long run from Halicarnassus itself.
There was then in Halicarnassus a man named Panyasis, son of Polyarchus,
a “ seer of signs ” and a poet, who revived epic poetry which had now well-nigh
died down to ashes. He
All this is open to question, but several things are definitely known.
Herodotus clearly lived in Samos at some time or other, as his close
acquaintance with the stories of Polycrates and other Samians shows—he even gives the name of the artist who made the famous ring, Theodorus,
the son of Telecles, one of the two men who introduced brassfounding
into Greece; and he pauses to speak with admiration of three
works at Samos,greater than any made by Hellenes—viz. the temple of Hera, the
largest temple known, first designed by Rhoecus, son of Philes, a Samian, and
spared by the Persians on the suppression ofj the Ionic Revolt; the mole round
the harbour, twenty fathoms deep and more than two furlongs in length; and the
famous tunnel which carried the water seven furlongs through the mountain
ridge. The tunnel is mentioned
nowhere else in ancient literature, and all trace of it was lost till
1878, when it was found by accident, and some part of it cleared and restored.1
That Lygdamis had trouble with his subjects or fellow- citizens was in
any case likely, and it is proved by an inscription now in the British Museum,
which Sir Charles Newton found at Halicarnassus. Scholars date the
stele between 460 and 455 B.C. It contains an agreement between Lygdamis and
the citizens of Halicarnassus and Salmakis, relative to the return of exiles
and their reinstatement in their lands and houses. A tribute-list setting forth
payments made by her allies to Athens in the year 454 B.C. mentions the
Halicamassians among other tributaries—evidence that Lygdamis was gone. What part Herodotus had or had not in all these transactions can only be
guessed.
But there is no doubt about his sentiments as to tyrants. In a famous
passage in his Third Book there stands the discussion of the Persian nobles,
who overthrew the false Smerdis, as to the type of government it would be well
to establish. Otanes pleads for Democracy. " Monarchical
power,” he urges, " would set even a good man outside the ordinary
thoughts ”—that sense of limitation and restriction which works for sanity in
ordinary intercourse. Plato’s myth of the ring that made Gyges invisible shows
how Gyges got outside ordinary thoughts. “ A tyrant disturbs the customs handed
down from of old, he does violence to women, and he puts men to death without
trial. On the other hand,” continues Otanes, “ the rule of the many has a name
which is the most beautiful of names, Equality”. A German scholar, Maass, has suggested that the whole discussion
was quietly taken from Protagoras. Eduard Meyer emphatically rejects this : “
Maass makes him outright a Dummkopf.” Herodotus himself found the story
challenged, for in another passage he refers to people who would not believe such a debate had taken place, and he produces another
fact which he says will astonish them . He evidently believed the story
himself. It probably came from some of those Persian friends to
whom, as we shall see, he owes a great deal of important information, for there
were Philhellenes among the Persians as well as among the Egyptians.
But the strong, wholesome democratic flavour of the advice of Otanes is
clearly to the historian’s mind. When he tells of the liberation of Athens from
her tyrants, and then of her great victory on one and the same day over
Boeotians and Chalcidians (506 B.C.), and cites the inscription recalling it, he goes on to add : " It is evident not by one instance only, but in every
way, that Equality (40-9770/3497) is a good thing (airovSaiov); for the
Athenians, while they were under tyrants, were not better in war than any of
their neighbours, but, once rid of the tyrants, they became far the first. . .
. When once they had been set free, each was eager to achieve something for
himself” ). Yet the other two speeches in the Persians’
discussion show that Herodotus was not blind to the drawbacks of Democracy—few
thoughtful lovers of it are—nor blind to the advantages of aristocracy and
monarchy. The many tyrants mentioned in his pages fare well at his hands; he is
far too much interested in them to be angry with them. Herodotus believed that
on the whole more could be made of life under a democracy; so he was a democrat
and a friend of Athens.4
That he took part in the colonization of Thurii is established on the
evidence of Aristotle and Plutarch and the general belief of antiquity ; and it
is confirmed by his full knowledge of persons and places in Italy and Sicily.
To illustrate the general shape and lie of the Tauric Chersonese he compares it to the
promontory of Sunium—“ for him, however, who has not sailed along this part of
the coast of Attica, I will make it clear by another comparison:—it is as if in
Iapygia another race and not the Iapygians had cut off for themselves and were
holding that extremity of the land which is bounded by a line beginning at the
harbour of Brentesion and running to Taras ” (iv. 99). He has tales which he
could only have learnt, one might say, among the Italiot Greeks—of Democedes, the
Crotoniate physician, who was held in such high honour at the court of Darius,
and what difficulty he had in getting away, and of the message he sent to the
king that he was married to the daughter of Milon, " for the wrestler
Milon had a great name at the king’s court ” (iii. 125-138); of Dionysius, who,
after the collapse of the Ionians at the battle of Lade, escaped to Sicily and
commenced pirate, plundering “ none of the Greeks at all, but Carthaginians and
Etruscans ” (vi. 17); of Carthaginian invaders of Sicily and the house of Gelon
at Syracuse ; and of the terrible battle in which the Tarentines and their
allies from Rhegium lost so many men, the latter three thousand, while of the
Tarentines there was no numbering made—in fact, “ the greatest slaughter of
Hellenes that we know ” (vii. 170).
Thus far authority takes us—the youth at Halicarnassus, the troublous
times under the tyrant, and the disastrous settlement at Thurii, for the colony
was one of Pericles’ failures.1 And what happened next ? That is a
problem as soon as we touch detail. Thurii was planted in 443 B.C., and
Herodotus mentions one or two occurrences in the first two or three years of
the Peloponnesian War. If we allow him fifteen years of life after his becoming
a Thurian, it is probably all he had. Where we suppose he went depends on a
good many things, and there is a good deal of choice. There is his great
history and there are his travels—each must have taken a long time. Did he make
his travels before he went to Thurii, or after—always disallowing the mean
suggestion that a good many of his journeys were in other men’s books ? When and where did he
write his own nine books, and which did he write first ? Did he begin with Book
vii., the expedition of Xerxes, and write the others after an interval, in which
he travelled ? A good many other questions are bound up with these.
A certain tone, for instance, is to be felt in Books vii. to ix., when Herodotus writes of the gods and other divine beings and their part in the war, which is missed in the earlier books. Does it imply that Herodotus was an orthodox believer when he wrote the war of Xerxes, that he afterwards travelled, and in Egypt became involved in speculations which warred against a conventional orthodoxy? Or is it possible that a man of open mind and many thoughts, when he came to the great deliverance, felt with so many of his countrymen that the cause lay not in man’s valour alone, nor in the wisdom of Themistocles (whom Herodotus did not highly esteem), but beyond—flavit Deus et dissipati sunt ?
Then, again, practical questions arise. How far was it possible for a
Greek to travel in the Persian Empire before the pacification of Callias in 448
B.C. ? Egypt in rebellion from 460 to 454—war in Cyprus again in
449, if it had ever left off for ten years—was it open to a Halicarnassian to
go where an Athenian and an Ionian might not for it seems trade between the
interior and the coast cities was interrupted —when Halicarnassus was a part of
the Athenian Empire, and the particular Halicarnassian an exile and an
especially warm admirer of Athens and of Pericles ? What welcome
would have waited him in Tyre, the very centre of Persian naval activity
against Greece and the fleets of Cimon? To Tyre, he says, he went from Egypt, and in Egypt it is
clear he was travelling a number of years after the battle of Papremis,
which was fought in 460. He visited the battlefield and examined the skulls of
the fallen—and “ the skulls of the Persians are so weak that, if you hit them
only with a pebble, you will make a hole in them, while those of the Egyptians
are so exceedingly strong that you would hardly break them if you struck them
with a large stone ” (iii. 12). Herodotus believed that the difference between
the skulls was explained by the Egyptian habit of shaving the head—the bone was
hardened by exposure to the sun—and the Persian practice of wearing "
tiaras, that is, felt caps.” Whatever the answer to the physiological
problem—and it reveals something of the historian’s many-sidedness—it looks as
if the visit to the field of Papremis must have been quite a number of years
after 460. It might have been possible after the destruction of the Athenian
forces in Egypt in 454, but it would have been safer after 448.
Other travels have to be fitted in—Tyre after Egypt, with the suggestion
that it may have been immediately— ' Babylonia too—for his language about the
millet-fields implies a visit. A phrase suggests that he visited Babylonia before Egypt. In addition there are
travels in the North: in Thasos he saw the wonderful old Phoenician mines (vi.
47), Samothrace he visited perhaps (ii. 51), Thrace (vii. 115), the Black Sea
(iv. 85), Colchis (ii. 104), and perhaps Macedon, where his hero, Alexander,
died in 454.2 Sardis (i. 80-84) was nearer home, though
here again war might hinder a visit, while Cyrene and North Africa, if he
visited them, were in another direction. He says he was at Dodona (ii. 52) and
at Zacynthos (iv. 195) ; and it is fairly clear that he must have lived for
some time in Athens, and visited Sparta.
The questions have been asked with what object Herodotus travelled, and how an exile paid his way upon so many journeys;
Whatever the avowed objects of his journeys may have been, his purpose was
travel, at his own easy pace, always at leisure for life. The Greeks of his day
were interested in Geography; Aeschylus cannot keep it out of his plays; the
map was one of the curiosities of the school of Socrates, Aristophanes would
have us believe; and Plutarch drew the Athenians in 416 before the Sicilian
Expedition busy with the Geography of the West—“ young men in
wrestling-grounds, and old men in shops and semicircles, sitting and sketching
the lie of Sicily and the nature of the sea around it, and the
He did not learn their languages, as his great discovery about Persian
names proves—a fact “ which the Persians have themselves failed to notice, but
I have not failed to do so ; their names are like their bodily shape and their
magnificence, and they all end with the same letter, that letter which the
Dorians call san and the Ionians sigma ” (i. 139). Xerxes seems to have spelled
his name without a final “s”—in spite of Herodotus and the Book of
Esther—Khsajarsa—simpler as the Greek form sounds to Western ears. Herodotus,
of course, picked up words here and there—he tells us that the Persian name for
petroleum was thadinake (vi. 119), that they called a particular measure artabe
(i. 192), and thirty furlongs a parasang—just as when he deals with
Egypt he tells us the Egyptian name for a crocodile champsai (ii. 69, representing
msh-u). But he evidently found Persian friends who could
speak Greek, and as ever he listened with open ears and open heart. Some of
these have been conjecturally identified by modern scholars as the satraps of
Daskyleion, of the house of Artabazos,3 and Zopyrus, who was an
exile in Athens at one time, the son of the Megabyzos who reconquered Egypt in
454.
It will not be expected that everything these friends told him would of
necessity be indisputably accurate—they had their lapses of memory and temper,
and no doubt were ignorant of much that modem arch ceologists have since
learnt. When they told him of the ancient history of Persia, they were as
liable to error as any of his Spartan or Samian informants— liable to mass
things into one place and one time, in accordance with that instinctive
dramatic tendency which all men share— liable to drop insignificant names and
to get significant ones
from the wrong angle. And their guest recpgnized some of their
limitations—they told him among them three several stories about the rise of
Cyrus ; and he chooses that which the Persians " who do not wish to
glorify Cyrus ” tell (i. 95). Later on he was certainly informed about Darius
by Persians who did not wish to glorify him either. He listened and noted and
asked questions and wrote his history, and if he had made no slips of his own,
he would have been less human than he is.1 One thing is remarked by
Spiegel that, while the tale of Cyrus is not historical, it has yet historical
traits and is of high value, for, among the fabulous stories told of Persia, there
is none “ so thoroughly Iranian ” in its general character.2 When in
1837 the rock-inscription of Behistun was deciphered by Henry Rawlinson, it
came to light that Herodotus’ account of the rise of Darius was very much that
of the king himself.3 Of the seven conspirators, who slew the false
Smerdis, or Bardiya, Herodotus names six aright. He had never seen the rock,
and he could not have read the inscription if he had seen it. As Spiegel
suggests, it speaks well for the accuracy of his authorities 4—and
it says something, too, for the guest who listened.
What matters beside actual history he discussed with his Persian friends,
it is not hard to trace. Politics for one thing occupied both him and
them—politics and political
Of Persian character it is clear that he thought highly. We have seen how
he praised Persian valour at the battle of Plataea; and elsewhere he says,
" Of all men whom I know the Persians are most wont to honour such as are
valiant in war ” (vii. 238). Next after excellence in fight they honour the
possession of many sons, and they educate their boys from five years old to
twenty in three things only, to ride the horse, to shoot with the bow, and to
tell the truth (i. 136). What they may not do, they may not speak of; but the
greatest disgrace of all with them is to lie, and, next after that, to be in debt,
for they hold that a man in debt is bound to lie a little (i. 138). It is
remarkable in this connexion to find the stress laid by Darius in the Behistun
inscription on truth and falsehood—“ the people became wicked and the lie was
great in the land,” and so forth.2
The fifth century b.c. was one in which speculation as to the gods occupied a large place in
men’s minds. Wherever he went, Herodotus had a curious and friendly eye for the
beliefs of the foreigner, and Persian religion interested him. What he tells us
belongs more properly to a later chapter. Meanwhile, it is recognized that
there is a certain latent sympathy to be felt in his account of the Persian
attitude to the gods—it is in a sense a criticism or a suggestion offered to
Greece. But the way in which it is offered should be noted—
In many ways the Second Book is the most interesting part of Herodotus’
history, for there he treats of Egypt. Egypt from the very beginning was a
surprise and a paradox to the Greeks. It was to them what Japan in one way and
Australia in another have been to Europeans—everything was the wrong way round.
The fauna of Australia, with its kangaroo and omithorhynchus types, is utterly
unlike that of any other continent; and in the same way Egypt surprised the
Greeks. Greece proper has no navigable river; Egypt is nothing else— a country
eight hundred miles long, and twenty or thirty broad, with a delta. The delta,
as Herodotus says, is “ added land and the gift of the river ” (ii. 5), and a
very “ busy ” river it is (ii. 11).1 Greek rivers often dry up
altogether in summer, but “ the Nile comes down increasing in volume from the
summer solstice onwards for a hundred days, and then, when it has come near the
number of these days, it turns and goes back, failing in its stream, so that it
continues low all the winter
Greeks
came to admire Persian virtues, but never grasped their spiritual and
intellectual basis. ,
1 It is not
the only one, for the Achelous “ has already made half the Echinades from
islands into mainland ’’ (ii. 10). Cf. Mark Twain’s account of Mississippi
shifting and silting. Life on Mississippi, p. 4: “ Nearly the whole of that one
thousand three hundred miles of old Mississippi river which La Salle floated
down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good, solid, dry ground now; ”
and ch. xvii. for further illustrations.
long until the summer solstice again ” (ii. 19). No Egyptian could
explain this to Herodotus, and he was not satisfied with the explanations of “
certain Greeks who wished to be notable for their wisdom ” (ii. 20). The
Egyptian towns standing out of the water in flood-time recalled the Cyclades
(ii. 97).1 The lizards of Greece are little creatures; the same sort
of thing in Egypt, “ of all mortal things that we know, grows to the greatest
bulk from the smallest beginnings ; for its eggs are not much larger than those
of geese, and the young one is in proportion to the egg, but he keeps on
growing till he is seventeen cubits long and even larger yet” (ii. 68). The
hippopotamus again was almost as strange as the crocodile (ii. 71); and men
told still stranger things about a holy bird called the phoenix, but Herodotus
never saw it himself (ii. 73). Finally, like their climate and their river,
which are quite unlike any others, the Egyptians have manners and customs in a
way opposite to other men in almost all matters (ii. 35). Women go to market and
men stay at home and weave, and they weave down where others weave up. Men
carry loads on their heads; women on their shoulders. They eat out of doors. No
god or goddess has a priestess, nothing but men priests, who, unlike priests
elsewhere, shave their heads instead of wearing long hair ; but they let it
grow as a sign of mourning instead of cutting it. Men and beasts live together;
and men and women refuse to eat food made of wheat or barley. They knead dough
with their feet and clay with their hands. They make fast the rings and ropes
of boats inside the gunwale and not outside. Greeks write from left to right,
but Egyptians write from right to left and have two scripts. Their religious
rites are their own, though these have influenced the beliefs and rituals of
Greece. They are divided into castes, and the priests have a very special
position ; and (which is very strange) “ no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a
Greek on
1 Cf. Eliot
Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross, p. 21, on the Nile in flood. “ The stream
. . . spreads abroad its beneficent deluge over the vast valley. Then it is
that Egypt presents the most striking of its Protean aspects, becoming an
archipelago studded with green islands, and bounded only by the chain of the
Lybian Hills and the purple range of the Mokattam Mountains. Every island is
crowned with a village or an antique temple, and shadowy with palm-trees or
acacia groves. Every city becomes a Venice.”
the mouth, nor use a Greek’s knife, nor his spits, nor kettle, nor taste
the flesh of a clean cow if cut with a Greek’s knife ” (ii. 41).
Till the nineteenth century Herodotus was our oldest, fullest, and
brightest source of knowledge about ancient Egypt; but, with the decipherment
of the actual monuments of the Pharaohs and the growing accessibility of
Egyptian documents, it is not surprising that Egyptologists to-day know vastly
more about Egypt’s history than Herodotus was able to learn from what, rather
ungratefully, one of them calls “ the current gossip of the traders, guides, and
priests whom he met there.” Herodotus tangles the dynasties, he is ignorant
" even of the most important phases of the history,” and he weaves into
his narrative fairy tales of Rhampsinitus and impossible legends of Sesostris;
he attributes Hittite monuments in Western Asia Minor to the Egyptian conqueror
who never was there ; and, in addition to believing the tales of his
informants, he is guilty of increasing the confusion by blunders of his own. On
the other hand, Mr. Llewelyn Griffith, the author of these criticisms,1
admits that he gives fairly accurately the names and the succession of the
builders of the three Great Pyramids, and shows “ a decided improvement ” when
he comes to the history of the last two centuries —the Saite and Persian kings.
This praise is qualified by the complaint as to “ the ffequent absence of even
superficial knowledge ” of the country ; “ his few geographical remarks upon
it seem only to show his complete ignorance of Egypt above Memphis,” and his “
picturesque touches are exceedingly few.”
One feels that the critic wishes the author to share his interests
instead of illuminating his own. The fact is that the ancient writer and
traveller neither notice nor record quite the things that modems would wish or
expect. Where we are careful, they are careless—about dates and distances and
so forth. They look for other things and see them, and miss what we see at the
first glance. Arguments have been framed about the dates of Herodotus’ life
from his failure to allude to the great Periclean buildings on the Acropolis.
But he had no occasion to mention them.2 The temples which do
We have seen his comment on the “ busy ” river ever at work giving land
to the people, and on this strange people who do everything the wrong way round
as the Japanese once did. Most of all their religious usages were peculiar. The
worship of animals always struck the Greeks as in some way odd. “ An Egyptian
temple, outside all splendour, and inside a priest singing a hymn to a cat or a
crocodile,” is a phrase that occurs several times.2 Why should the
Egyptians be so fussy about cats and dogs ? “ In whatever houses a cat has died
by a natural death,” says Herodotus (ii. 66, 67), “ all those who dwell in this
house shave their eyebrows only,
1 Erman,
Egyptian Religion (English translation), p. 175. Mr. Grundy—it is in another
connexion, of course—emphasizes Herodotus’ demonstrable care and the pains
which he devoted to topography ; he is the best and most conscientious
topographer in ancient history (Persian War, pp. 223, 559).
“Lucian,
Imagines, 11; Celsus, ap. Orig. c. Cels. iii. 17; Clem. Alex. Paed. iii. 4. 2.
but those in whose houses a dog has died shave the whole body and also
the head. The cats, when they are dead, are carried away to sacred buildings in
the city of Bubastis, where they are embalmed and buried ; but the dogs they
bury each people in their own city in sacred tombs ”; and the mouse and the
sparrowhawk, the ibis, and especially the bull, are similarly honoured, while
the sacred cows are thrown into the Nile (ii. 41). Modern discoverers have
found cemeteries where cats were laid by hundreds of thousands, vaults where
crocodiles, their eggs and young were buried, and the graves of ibis, hawk,
serpent, and fish. Indeed, the export of mummied cats to be used for manure has
been a modern industry of Egypt.1 Apis is a more familiar figure in
story— his miraculous birth as the child of a flash of light, his special
markings, the joy and festival that attend his discovery, his life and death in
sanctity—and the madness of Cambyses who slew him wantonly and perished “
wounded in the same part, where he had formerly struck Apis, the god of the
Egyptians.” 2
The festivals of the Egyptians are described by Herodotus vividly
enough—the draping of Amun in the skin of the slain ram (ii. 42), the fight at
the temple of “ Ares ” at Papremis (ii. 63), the illumination at Sais on one
night of the year (ii. 62). He tells how seventy myriads of men and women
gather at Bubastis every year, coming in boats from all parts, playing on flutes
and castanets, singing and clapping their hands, and dancing, and how the women
pilgrims taunt the women of every place the boats pass, and how " more
wine is consumed at this feast than in all the rest of the year.” In some of
these festivals foreigners join—the Carians dwelling in Egypt take more part in
the mourning at Busiris than the Egyptians themselves " inasmuch as they
cut their foreheads also with knives; and by this it is manifested that they
are strangers ” (ii. 61) ; but, adds Herodotus, “ for whom they mourn, it is
not permitted to me by religion to say.”
In fact, Herodotus has been initiated into some of the mysteries here 3
as elsewhere—“ whosoever has been initiated in the mysteries of the Kabeiroi,
which the Samothracians perform, having received them from the Pelasgians, that
In this connexion it may be worth remembering that in 1903, when
Naukratis was excavated, the base of a vase was found in the remains of the
Hellenion with the lettering H .. AOTOT—an inscription not hard to restore ;
and the question suggests itself, did the historian dedicate it ? Many men
called Herodotus are mentioned in inscriptions. Even if it was our
Herodotus who dedicated the vase, conformity, as we all know very well, is not
inconsistent with irony. So, when Herodotus, after some speculation about
Herakles, ends with the words : “And now that we have said so much about all
this, may the gods and the heroes be propitious”, it may be, as Prof.
Bury has suggested, “a graceful genuflexion” merely and nothing more. It may be that his blending of “
naivete and scepticism ” is “very piquant ”—that he strikes “ the
characteristic note of Ionian scepticism ” from the first, as Prof. Bury
says—that “something closely akin to cynicism and flippancy is common enough
in Herodotus,” as Mr. Comford says—but surely such a spirit is
that of a man who has made up his mind, who is done with religion and theology; and that is assuredly not the position of Herodotus. His general outlook on
life (Weltanschauung), as Eduard Meyer says, did not grow up on
Ionian ground. A man may despise the Ionians and be influenced by them, but in
any case it may be remarked that more is said to-day about Miletus and the
Milesian spirit than it is easy to find evidence for; and Meyer is surely right
in looking elsewhere for the spiritual analogues of Herodotus. Of irony he,
like all large and various human spirits, is capable, but like such spirits he
will not deal in it alone. When Prof. Bury says he is an “ expert in not
committing himself,” that is surely nearer the mark, though the phrase is not
quite happy.3 There may be two reasons for a man not committing
himself : he may not know and not care—or he may care a good deal and yet not
know.
When the great storm played havoc with the fleet of Xerxes, it lasted three
days; “ but at last the Magians, making sacrifices and chanting aloud to the
Wind, and sacrificing to Thetis also and the Nereids, stopped it on the fourth
day—or else, perhaps, of its own will it slackened (ixoiraa-e) ” 4
(vii. 191). It is the perennial problem of prayer that Herodotus raises. Again,
is the gully of the Peneios the work of Poseidon, as the Thessalians say ? It
was evident to Herodotus that it was the effect of an earthquake ; but then
Poseidon is the
Before we answer these questions, let us look at two others. John Evelyn
wrote in his Diary, 12 December, 1680 : “ We have had of late several comets,
which though I believe appear from natural causes, and of themselves operate
not, yet I cannot despise them. They may be warnings from God, as they
commonly are forerunners of his animadversions.” Evelyn was secretary of the
Royal Society, and the contemporary of Hailey and Newton. Again in our own day,
when the conversation turns on psychical phenomena, on phantasms of the dying,
for instance, which way does the evidence turn the scale of belief—or does it
still swing ? Thirty years ago it might not have been swinging.1 Is
a man ironical, flippant, or Milesian when it is clear that, though intensely
interested in a matter, he cannot make up his mind and that he cannot keep off
the subject—even if at times to another man, who is not interested in the
question, for whom it is settled and done with, his language seems susceptible
of an ironical interpretation ? “ It was all being done by the god, that the
Persian navy might be equalized with the Greek one and not be many times
larger,” 2 says Herodotus, when a second storm does still further
damage to the Persians. Some people are a great deal too clever to understand
simple and straightforward minds. It is part of Herodotus’ greatness that he
can be inconsistent, that he can see both sides of a matter and see them too
well to decide quickly. Herodotus is ready to reconcile the two possibilities
as to the cause of the Peneios gully—to discuss the origins of Heraldes, god or
hero, or perhaps both, one of each ; he is open to criticize myth or Orphic
theology, to listen to everything philosophers and others of more flippant
habit may have to say, as he is to be initiated into mysteries; but when all is
said and done, there are gods, and they do influence men’s lives, and they do
reveal their will and sometimes the future. Theory here or theory there, there are the facts of history and of life,
perplexing enough to justify or even to explain—but facts they are, as faf as
he can see, or his friend Sophocles either, and to facts it is wiser to stick.
“ Against oracles I cannot make objections that they are not true, for I do
not desire to try to overthrow them when they speak clearly,” and he gives an
instance, and continues: “ looking to such things as this, and when Bakis
speaks so clearly, I do not venture myself to make any objections about
oracles, nor can I admit them from others (viii- 77V .
Whatever the order in which Herodotus wrote his books, whether he began
with Xerxes and afterwards added Egypt, or wrote straight ahead, it is clear
that he kept his work by him till it was done, and it is humanly probable that
he read over what he had written—and he published it. The speculations which
Egypt wakes in his mind are speculations—and facts are facts. The three books
about Xerxes are full of the divine. A later age might read the story
otherwise. The Corinthian in Thucydides may see facts, thanks to Herodotus, but
judge them differently—" the Mede came from the ends of the earth to the
Peloponnese before the Spartans were quite ready to meet him . . . and chiefly
tripped over his own feet.” 2 But the last three books of
Herodotus are pervaded by the sense of Providence being at work in the
deliverance of Greece, openeyed as he is for Greek bravery and
cunning—Providence, that governs the brute world too, for its preservation,
giving the hare many children and the lioness one only (iii. 108). Neither
gods.nor Providence are shaken by a fair study of facts, even if the facts
raise questions; and facts and questions in plenty Egypt had for Herodotus.
To begin, then, Egypt opened up for the Greeks a vista of the immense
antiquity of the earth and of man, not unlike that which Geology revealed in
the nineteenth century. The suggestion came in two ways. The Nile makes Egypt,
as Hero-
1 Grundy (Persian War, p. 232) suggests that
Herodotus probably had revised versions of oracles given him at Delphi. The
revision would, of course, greatly help belief in one not aware that the
oracles had been revised. See also the remark of Grundy on the oracle in the
tale of Thermopylae, p. 307—which seems just, and, if just, it really disposes
of Professor Bury’s “ graceful genuflexion.”
* Thuc. i. 69.
dotus saw ; and he conjectured that what is now Egypt might once have
been a long narrow gulf, not unlike the Red Sea, but reaching northward to the
Mediterranean, and might in ten or twenty thousand years have been filled by a
river “ so great and So busy ” as the Nile. Geological indications lead him to
hold that it was so—shells on the hills, salt on the surface of the land here
and there, and above all the black and crumbling soil which "is in truth
the mud and silt brought down from Ethiopia by the river ” (ii. 11,12).1
The observation is sound, and the speculation implies some freedom of mind in
dealing with great tracts of time. But Geology is one thing and History another.
“ Formerly," says Herodotus, “ when Hecataios the logo- poios was at
Thebes and told his own pedigree, and connected his own family with a god in
the sixteenth generation, the priests of Zeus did for him much the same as they
did for me, though I told them no pedigree of mine.” (The addition is
delightful.) Each historian in his day was taken into the temple, “ which is of
great size,” and there he was shown a number of colossal wooden statues, each
the likeness of a priest set up by himself, when in his turn he succeeded his
father—each therefore representing a generation. “ And when Hecataios had told
his pedigree and connected his family with a god in the sixteenth generation,
they counted up the statues and anti-pedigreed against him, not receiving his
story that a man was bom of a god ; and they anti-pedigreed thus, saying that
each colossus was a piromis, son of a piromis, until they showed him five and
forty and three hundred colossi; and neither with god nor with hero did they
connect them. Piromis is in the Greek tongue a kalos Mgathos ” (ii. 143).®
There is irony in this passage, but it is directed against Hecataios and not
his sixteenth ancestor.
Herodotus gives it as his opinion that Hesiod and Homer lived four
hundred years before him and not more ; “ and these are they who made a
theogony for the Greeks, and gave the gods their titles, and distributed to
them honours and arts, and set forth their forms ” (ii. 53). Four hundred years
is a much
1 See notes of How and Wells, ad loc.
2 This phrase is so hard to translate that I
leave it, and refer the reader to the treatment of it at the beginning of
Chapter VI.
shorter time than three hundred and forty-five generations. Elsewhere he
tells us that “ the names of nearly all the gods have come from Egypt to
Greece,” and adds : “ that they come from the barbarians, I find on inquiry to
be the fact, and I think they mostly came from Egypt ’’; and we can see how he
reached his view. Certain Egyptian gods were identified with certain Greek gods
in accordance with the habit of men all over the ancient world who found their
own gods in those of most peoples they met, renamed but identifiable. But in
Egypt Herodotus was told that the natives had had the actual names of the Greek
gods in their country for all time (though not of all the gods) ; since they
were the first to use the names of the twelve gods (ii. 4). Since Egyptian
religion, then, is so much older than Greek, Greece must be the borrower.
Poseidon has another origin, for “ no people, except the Libyans, has had the
name of Poseidon from the first ” ; and certain other gods’ names were learnt
from the Pelasgians. This line of speculation was confirmed by the priestesses
of Dodona. Herodotus tells us how he learnt that originally the Pelasgians
worshipped gods without names, “ calling them gods (deovs) as having set all
things in order {6evra<s)," and that then they learnt the names from
Egypt, and in some uncertainty asked the oracle at Dodona whether they should
use them, and the oracle bade do so. Thus late in time did Greece learn to call
her gods by name. How the names came at last, he sets forth in the tale of the
black doves that spoke with human voices—a poetic way, he suggests, of saying
that the dark-skinned Egyptian priestesses spoke a barbarian tongue.1
Not only the names of the gods he attributes to Egypt, but the images and
the solemn assemblies, the processions and approaches to temples, for these
have been in Egypt from a very ancient time, while the Greeks only introduced
them lately (ii. 4, 58). One sacred custom he traces to another source —“ I
think that in these regions [Libya] first arose the practice of crying aloud
during the performance of sacred rites, for the Libyan women do this well ”
(iv. 187). One can imagine him listening to the noise—tolerable because it was
associated with religious emotion and archaeological discovery.
Two or three generations had passed since Xenophanes of 1 See
Herodotus, ii. 50-57.
Colophon had told the Greeks that Hesiod and Homer attributed to the gods
all that was shame and blame among mankind, and had added the ironical
suggestion that, if cows and horses could carve gods, those gods would not be
anthropomorphic. Aeschylus, whom Herodotus read1 and used and
quoted by name, taught that the popular idea of divine envy is not true
enough—divine judgments are just and inexorable ; not God’s envy, but man’s
overweening is their cause. But Herodotus, to whom they would attribute
Milesian irreverence, keeps to the old paths. “ The deity (to delov)” says Solon in his
story, “ is altogether envious and apt to disturb our lot ” (i. 32). " To
me,” says King Amasis to Polycrates, “ thy great good fortune is not pleasing,
since I know that the deity (to delov) is envious” (iii. 40). “God,” says Artabanus, “is wont to cut down
all that exceeds . . . for he allows none to think great things save himself ”
(vii. 10). Xerxes is for Aeschylus a warning to men against the blindness of
overweening ; in Herodotus’ story he is driven into the folly of his great
expedition by divine compulsion that he may be brought low. So near does he
keep to popular thinking, or popular fear ; slowly do the great ideas penetrate
a people.
A curious hint almost of antipathy comes out when he is ending the
splendid but improbable tale of Rhampsinitus. The king, they told him in Egypt,
went down alive to that place which the Greeks call Hades, and there he diced
with Demeter and came back with a gift from her. Certain usages of his own day
were supposed to commemorate this—“ but whether it is from this cause that they
keep the feast or for some other, I cannot say.” And then, in the next chapter,
he makes an apologia, and adds a most striking fact (which modem scholars hold
to be in part wrong), and concludes with a dark touch at certain people.
“ Now as to the tales told by the Egyptians let him accept them to whom
they are credible. As for me, it is to be understood throughout the whole of
the history that I write what I hear said by the people in each place. The
Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysos are rulers of the world below. And the
Egyptians are also the first who spake this word that the soul
1 Herodotus did a good deal of reading—especially
poets. See vi. 52. Cf. iv. 36, his study of geography and maps.
of man is immortal, and that, when the body dies, the soul ever enters
into another creature that chances then to be coming to birth ; and when it has
gone the round of all the creatures of land and sea and air, it enters again
into a man’s body then coming to birth; and its circuit takes three thousand
years. This,word tertain Greeks made use of, some earlier, some later, as if it
were their own ; the names of these men I know, but I do not write them ” (ii.
123).
Now the god Dionysos and his name came to Greece long after the other
gods (ii. 52); and the coincidence between his rites in Egypt and in Greece is
not accidental; the rites are not like other Greek rites, " nor certainly
shall I say that the Egyptians took from the Greeks either this or any other
custom,” says Herodotus. He adds his belief that Melampus who introduced
Dionysiac rites to Greece must have learnt them from Cadmus of Tyre, and so
they came from Egypt (ii. 49). For in Egypt “ the customs of their fathers they
use, and they add no other thereto ” (ii. 79). Accordingly when rite and god
and linen garb coincide, and the Egyptians are in agreement with the
observances “ called Orphic and Bacchic, but really Egyptian, and with the
Pythagoreans ” (ii. 81), it is clear which borrowed from the other.
The Egyptians indeed taught the immortality of the soul; but as to its
transmigration scholars are not agreed. Professor Burnet says categorically
they did not;1 Professor Erman says we cannot judge whether
Herodotus was rightly informed.2 Herodotus, Professor Burnet says,
does not refuse to give names except in the case of contemporaries; so, as
Pythagoras was dead, he accepts Stein’s suggestion that Empedocles is meant,
whom Herodotus might have met at Thurii. Southern Italy, as the Orphic gold
tablets may remind us, was full of Orphic teaching. Whoever is meant, the
phrase used implies disfavour ; there is detachment in this reference to the
Orphics— the first allusion to them in literature.
First and last Herodotus attributes so much of Greek religion to Egyptian
influence as to rouse still more the indignation of Plutarch, who remarks
that, while he witnesses to the
1 Burnet,I Early Greek Philosophy, 95 n. Cf.
Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, i. 126.
2 Erman, Egyptian Religion, 191,
great piety and justice of the Egyptians, he acquits Busiris of human
sacrifice and the slaying of guests, and attaches these sins to Menelaus—a
Greek, of course ; " such a lover of barbarians is he.” 1 It is
possible to sympathize with Plutarch’s wrath, for scholarship has other canons
than those used by Herodotus to explain similarity of custom and belief, and
the indebtedness of Greece to Egypt in this field is given up nowadays. But for
our present purposes it does not so much matter that Herodotus was perhaps
wrong in his conclusions as that he thought deeply over certain questions, and
that he gave his mind at once to the quest for evidence upon them, and to the
study of such evidence as he found—and this in so frank and whole-hearted a
way. It is also particularly interesting that, after initiation in several
varieties of Mysteries, he cares so little for Orphism. Euripides disliked the
Orphics; Plato borrowed from them, and detested them—the one counting their
rites qfiackery, the other indignant at the strong emphasis they laid on the
wrong features of religion. The reasons of Herodotus are not so clearly
given—unless it is that a strong, simple, truth-loving nature revolts at a
divine revelation which turns out to be a mere plagiarism from Egypt. The soul
may indeed be immortal; but a religious confraternity that trades in this
immortality, as if the teaching were their own—“ the names of these men I know,
but I do not write them.”
Herodotus is not in the least ashamed of the fact that Greece has borrowed
her arts from the barbarians. It was Cadmus and his Phoenicians who brought
letters to the Greeks among “ many arts,” as old inscriptions testify which
Herodotus saw at Thebes in Boeotia. Only, as so often happened, the Greeks “
having received letters by instruction of the Phoenicians, changed their form
slightly and so made use of them ” (v. 58-60). Whether we owe more to Cadmus
and his friends for the consonants or to their Greek neighbours and successors
for the vowels, only those perhaps who have tried to learn Semitic languages
are quite qualified to say. The art Of geometry, Herodotus says, was derived
from Egyptian experiments in land measurement for purposes of taxation, "
and afterwards came into Hellas also.” (Plutarch attributed the
1 De Herodoti malignitate, 12, 13, p. 857A-D.
stimulus to geometry to an ingenious command given by Apollo.1)
“ As touching the sun-dial and the gnomon,” Herodotus continues, “ and the
twelve divisions of the day, they were learnt by the Hellenes from the Babylonians
” (ii. 109). Professor Sayce will not allow this about geometry—“ only a Greek
guide could have invented this story ”—but he concedes the twelve hours to the
Babylonians—“ this is perfectly correct.” It would be hard to deny it as long
as every hour has sixty minutes. But the Greeks might even now go further and
borrow still more, Herodotus holds—“ As to human matters, the priests agreed
with one another in saying that the Egyptians were the first of all men on
earth to find out the course of the year, and to divide the seasons into twelve
parts to make up the whole ; and this they said they found out from the stars.
And they reckon this so much more wisely than the Greeks in my thinking, in
that the Greeks every other year throw in an intercalated month to bring the
seasons right, but the Egyptians reckon the twelve months at thirty days each,
and bring in, every year, five days outside the number, and thus the circle of
their seasons comes round to the same point in its course ” (ii. 4).2
What Greece owes to the Carians, we have seen.
In short Herodotus sees that every race has, as we put it to-day, its
contribution. His language is simpler, and till we grasp the strong, clear
wisdom that underlies it we shall undervalue him. “ Every way then,” he says,
“ it is plain to me that Cambyses was mad exceedingly; for he would not have
taken in hand to deride sacred usages and customs. For if one were to set
before all men a choice and bid them pick out the best customs (vofiov*?) from
among all customs, each race after examination would choose their own ; so much
the best do all count their own customs. So that it is not likely that any but
a madman would make laughter of such things ” (iii. 38). He fortifies his
conclusion with the tale of how King Darius contrasted the usage of Greek and
Indian in the disposal
1 To double the size of the temple.
2 Cf. Solon’s reckoning of the days of a man’s
life, cpmplicated by thirty-five intercalary months in seve'nty years, i. 32.
See the interesting note of How and Wells on ii. 4—on calendars. See also
Chapter VII. p. 223.
of the dead, and ends, " I think Pindar was right when he said in
his poetry that Custom is king of all ” (vofiov tt&vtwv fiacriXia).1
The world is so wide and so various, so full of wonder, that there is
room for all men to learn something of it for themselves and to tell it to
others. There are the strange regions that lie outside the map, and some people
finish their maps off too quickly and too ingeniously. It is curious, for
instance, that about the Hyperboreans, the people at the back of the North
Wind, more is known on the island of Delos than anywhere else—the Scythians,
who ought to know of them, do not. “ If, however, there are any Hyperboreans,
it follows that there are others who are Hypemotians.2 But I laugh
when I see that many have drawn maps (ireptoSow;) of the world already, and not
one of them has set it forth in a sensible way 3—seeing they draw
Oceanus flowing, round the earth, which they make as round as if they had used
compasses [or a lathe, ws otto topvov],
and make Asia and Europe equal in size ” (iv. 36). Things are not as neat as
that, and rumour reaches far into the unknown. There is the tale (iv. 42) of
the circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenicians, from the Red Sea southward, and
the thing “ which I cannot believe, but another may, that in sailing round
Libya they had the sun on their right hand.” He cannot believe that; but he
does believe that the sun is hottest for the Indians at dawn, and not, as for
other men, at midday (iii. 104). He fetches the Danube from the Celts and the
Pyrenees—" the city of Pyrene ”—to the Black Sea, “cutting Europe across
the middle,” to the exclusion of the Rhone, of which we should have expected
him to have heard more—from some Massilian or almost any trader with Marseilles
(ii. 33). Polar nights he has heard of, but not in a convincing way—“ that
beyond these are other men who sleep for six months—that I do not accept at all
” (iv. 36)—“ nor do I know of islands, called Cassiterides, really existing,
from which the tin comes to us,” nor of a river
1 Pindar,
Frag. 149 ; quoted also by Plato, Gorg. 484B, with more context. Herodotus
gives the phrase another sense than that intended by the poet—■“
nearly the reverse,” say's W. H.
Thompson.
8 An
argument oddly linked to a protest against a too symmetrical map; Eratosthenes
called it absurd, there might quite well chance to be Hypemotians (Strabo, 61,
62).
3 We may note how this implies a study of books
and maps.
Eridanos, though tin and amber do come from the end of Europe (iii. 115).
“ As for him who talked about Oceanus, he carried his tale into the unknown,
and needs not refutation; for I for my part know of no river Oceanus existing,
but I think Homer or one of the poets before him invented the word and brought
it into poetry ” (ii. 23). After all this, we are reminded of gold-digging
ants (iii. 102) and one-eyed Arimaspians (iii. 116) and many things improbable
to us, but accepted by our historian.1
So he goes, wavering as every explorer must who has once crossed the line
of the familiar and lived among the marvels of the unknown world. He loses the
common canons of knowledge and probability that every common man in the streets
of Halicarnassus can use, who is clever enough not to believe what surprises
him. But there is a folly which does not believe what it is told. Even the
floundering of Herodotus in and out of probability and impossibility, hearsay
and sight of the eyes, speaks to his being no common man. He has grasped the
wonder of the world—and his discovery is one of his great gifts to Greece and
to mankind.
Much is
there passing strange,
Nothing
surpassing mankind.
He it is
loves to range Over the Ocean hoar Thorough the surges’ roar,
South
winds raging behind.
So sang his friend Sophocles, and none believed more heartily than
Herodotus that there is naught more wonderful than man, with his victories over
sea and earth and sky, the marvels of all the ends of the earth made his, the
sea his bond of union with all men, and the very stars linked to the plough of
the farmer and the helm of the steersman. “ And speech and windswift thought
and all the moods that mould a state hath
1 At the
same time, it is remarked that he is less credulous than Ctesias, and I am told
that gold-digging ants are mentioned in Sanskrit literature—not that this
proves them to exist, but it points to a widespread myth at all events, and
some contact of Herodotus with people directly or indirectly in touch with
Indian story. See H. G. Rawlinson, Intercourse between India and the Western
World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome, who notes the soundness of
some of the historian’s information.'
he taught himself.” And no phase of it all is alien to the interest of
the great traveller.
So far hardly a word has been given to the great history, so much we have
found to absorb us in its writer. All we have dealt with so far, and much more,
comes incidentally in the narrative of the Persian wars with the Greeks—“ for
my tale sought digressions from the beginning of it,” he says (iv. 30). Such a
principle might make any book diffuse, but the art of Herodotus is seen in the
way in which his tale carries all its digressions, all its weight of learning
and wonder, the lore and legend of all mankind, and never loses sight of its
goal. Each digression brings us nearer to that. And as we work deeper and
deeper into the story, and hear less of Egyptians and Libyans in the plural,
and more of this man and that man, we wonder more at the simple skill of the
Storyteller—“ most Homeric of them all,” as Longinus said long ago.1
No one overshadows or warps the tale of the Great Persian War, but as Aristotle
said of Homer, “ with the minimum of prelude,” Herodotus “ at once brings in a
man or woman or other being, none characterless, each with a character of its
own.”2 One instance may suffice, and we will not take any of the
great outstanding figures of the story—the wise Solon, or the cunning
Themistocles, or any of the gallant Persians—but rather a figure from the
background, whose history is suggested rather than told. Of the reign of
Pisistratus we read in the First Book; and in the Fifth we read how his sons
were expelled —Thucydides found something to correct here—and how Athens grew
great in freedom we have seen.3 And the Spartans saw it, too, and
with regret; and they were confirmed in their regret by a strange discovery,
made since they expelled the Pisistratids. For “ Cleomenes had obtained from
the Acropolis those oracles which the sons of Pisistratus possessed before,
and had left in the temple when they were driven out ” (v. 90); we remember
they had to go quickly. In these oracles the Spartans learnt that they were
destined tb suffer many injuries from the Athenians; so to reduce the strength
of Athens they resolved to restore Hippias, and sent for him from Sigeum, where
his family lived in exile, though in a town of their own. But when their allies
gathered, the Corinthians 1 Longinus, 13, 3. * Poetics, 24, 7. s v. 78.
3
told the story of Cypselos, to dissuade the restoration. " And
Hippias made answer, calling to witness the same gods, that assuredly the
Corinthians most of all men would long for the Pisistratids, when the days come
when, it is fated, they shall be troubled by the Athenians. Thus Hippias made answer,
as he that most exactly of all men knew the oracles ” (v. 93). He spoke in
vain. But after twenty years of exile he came again to Attica, an old man, when
the Persian expedition reached Marathon,1 and once more he had to
go away. And then he—or his—went to Xerxes, and with them an old enemy, now
reconciled, Onomacritos, whom Hipparchos had driven from Athens, when Lasos,
the poet, of Hermione, " caught him interpolating an oracle in the works
of Musaeus ” (vii. 6). What do these references to oracles mean ?
Herodotus, as we have seen, believed in oracles, though some might be
forged or false ;2 but here was the man who knew the oracles best
and most surely of all men. Why ? Look at his story. An old man in the year of
Marathon, 490, he must have been a child in those brilliant days when his great
genial father was tyrant and exile by turns, when the men of Athens were glad
to get him out and then content to have him back. Pisistratus was a man—a
large-hearted, big-natured man ; if he was a tyrant, he was a tyrant with
good-humour and friendly ways, who certainly would face the ups and downs of
life with gaiety and spirit. But life was another thing for the tyrant’s
child—the sudden alarm in the night, the hushed flight through the darkness,
the terror of sudden death by Athenian hands before dawn, the side-track down
to the beach, the ship and its muffled oars, pursued still by the dread of
capture—and then the restless years of exile— enlivened for the father by
Thracian adventures among semisavages and gold mines, and filled with haunting
memories for the child, the women’s tales of the night of fear told again and
again, till every night was liable to be one of fear. Then the return—and
Megacles’ daughter—and the second exile; again a return, with mercenary troops
this time.3 And then
* Herodotus, vi. 107, telling of his
dream ; Thuc. vi. 59.
s Cf. i.
66, 75 ; v. 91.
8 This
time, Herodotus tells us (i. 61), Hippias urged his father to recover his
tyranny.
the bright old man died, and the nervous Hippias with his brothers
succeeded, and still the dread of exile never died.1 What had the
gods in store ? He turned to the oracles, gathered them, and studied them ;
none knew them better, none took more care that no other should know them. For
in modem China, as in Chrysostom’s days, it is the experience of despots that
it is better that they alone should have early knowledge of heaven’s will—it
leads eager men to rebellion, and cautious men to expect rebellion to
succeed—difficulty and danger both ways for the monarch.* Then the rebellion
comes, and Hippias loses his nerve ; he tries to smuggle his children out, but
they are caught by the Athenians—and if he will not go, his children will be
killed. He, too, is a man; he agrees and goes; and in the hurry he leaves his
hoard of oracles behind. That is Herodotus’ story, and he hardly pauses to tell
it; he only indicates it, and the reader may find it or let it go as he may.
For, as Dryden said of Chaucer, “ Here is God’s plenty.”
If the history of a war be one of strategies, tactics, and battles, then
certain defects will be felt in Herodotus. He sketches his battles lightly—eyen
such great ones as Salamis ; he is not very clear about such things as the
movements of the Persian fleet and army about Artemisium. Often his accounts of
political motives and actions seem defective to a modern student of politics
who compares him with surprise with such experts as his contemporaries
Aristophanes and Thucydides. He troubled very little about exact chronology,
about which Thucydides troubled a very great deal. These may seem heavy
deductions, and they would be in the case
1
Thucydides, however, says that he too was cimpocroSos.
* Years before the Manchu dynasty fell, I
was told by a missionary of prophecy-books that foretold the fall, and pointed
to the symbol of the button on the official cap—like the seed vessel of the
opium poppy, and like it to be crushed. To be found with such a book in one’s
possession was death ; but, said my friend, many Chinese, when you get to be on
intimate terms with them, will own that they have seen them. See W. R. W.
Stephens’ Life of St. Chrysostom, pp. 57, 58, on the magic book that
Chrysostom, as a student, fished out of the river Orontes, and the real danger
it involved, when it was found that a soldier had seen what was done. The book
was put back into the river. Cf. Ammianus Marcellinus, xxix. 1, on the
disastrous discovery in 371 a.d that the next Emperor’s name began with the
letters 0EOA.
36 FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP
\ .
of many historians. But war and politics are more than manoeuvres—men and
people are involved with all the varieties of mind and temperament that
individuals and communities can show. If these matter, then few can equal
Herodotus for the unsuspected and easy mastery with which in one way and
another he brings before us the world in which the great conflict was fought
out, what manner of men took part on either side, what were their ways of life,
their preconceptions, and outlooks—everything, in short, that most matters in
story or history. He rambles, he digresses, he looks as if he might be wasting
time—but he never does. Men, who have missed his method or lacked the heart to
catch his bright interest in life, may complain of him, but let them try to
name any writer who tells anything like so much in such a compass— even if we
are looking for mere historical material in the most matter-of-fact way. But
history is more than historical material—it is life, and living men make it as
they think and act, as they argue astray and go right by instinct, as they love
and hate—sentient creatures not to be interpreted save by the loving
imagination that cares too much for them to wish to tamper with the facts, and
feels too keenly for them to be able to leave facts dead. All stirs in Herodotus—his
web is woven of life, all of it is living; and one might also say it is all the
life there was in his day. A man’s work may touch life in snatches ; this book
touches it all the time ; and as the life of any period is one in itself, wide
and deep as its roots strike and spread in the generations before it, so the
work of Herodotus is one—its roots deep in the.past, and still part of the
glorious whole—one with the integrity of the world it represents. “ Many are
the wondrous things, and none more wondrous than man,” and in man himself there
are few things so wonderful as the genius that from stray impressions, broken
knowledge, and thoughts that are many and wander and come again, can create a
world for the lasting happiness of mankind. And this Herodotus has done.
THE AGE OF PERICLES
IN the history of the world and in the history of nations there are days
that stand out as marking beyond all chance of error the passing away of one
age and the beginning of another. What is it that makes the difference ? The
men of the day before are still there ; the forces that shaped thought and
action were working before and are working still; but the men are new men, and
thought works in a new way. A line has been crossed in experience and a new
consciousness has been reached ; and as it happens with men, so it falls with
nations—there is no return to the past. The new knowledge, the new realization
of what the world can be and of what indeed it is, has changed everything. The
man and the nation wake up to a new universe, a new creation ; the old
landmarks are gone ; everything has to be thought out anew, to be rediscovered.
The past is outworn and is discarded ; the future—no, the very present is all
to learn ; and in joy and in perplexity they go forward—
Moving about
in worlds not realized.
Such a new dawn broke for Greece, when the day of Salamis was over. There
were battles yet to be fought with the Persian, but they would be fought in a
new spirit on land and sea—in the spirit of victory. It was not contempt for
the foe, for the Persian was a fighting man, whose courage and spirit the
historian says were a match for the Spartans themselves.1 But the
knowledge, the conviction, that they were to outfight such an enemy was part of
the new outlook of Greece. And when the Persian was finally driven back,-there
was a new world to organize and to rule. The islands and the cities of Asia
were free, but far away in Asia lay the strength of the great antagonist
1 Herodotus, ix. 62.
37
yet unbroken, and he might return. The bright variety of the old Greek
days of the sixth century before Christ was gone;1 it was clear
that, if the Persian was not to come again, some barrier must be set up to keep
him back. The old happy-go- lucky sovereignties and independencies of city tyrants
and island republics had meant the steady progress of Persian power; the new
age must strike out some new method of giving effect to what in the hour of
danger all men had felt— the unity of Greece ; “ there is the bond of Hellenic
race, one blood, one tongue, the common temples of the gods, the common
sacrifices, the maimers of life which are the same for all.” 2 The
new era must give some new expression to this new and intenser realization of
old knowledge. There are new seas to sail, new lands to reconnoitre, for it is
one thing to travel a country or to see a house as a stranger on sufferance,
and to enter upon them an heir and a master. Wha/t changes will not sheer
mastery of the sea bring with it ? Every thought of man and nation is crossed
and quickened by a new sense of power.
It is informing to look for a moment at a parallel, when a parallel is to
be found. Let it be Elizabethan England, for there at least a great literature
comes into being when a nation gains a new sense of power, and it is curious to
see how close, the parallel is. The Elizabethan, like the Greek, looked out on
a world larger and more full of wonder than any of the generations before him
could have guessed. What the discovery of America meant to sentient and
reflective natures can be read in the Faerie Queene, in Montaigne’s Essays—a
new door thrown open, through which the human mind will move to new thoughts.
It is a new sense of power over the world itself, and with it comes a new grasp
of the very heavens. Copernicus and Galileo made a new heaven. for the new
earth of Columbus and Cabot; and what that meant we can read in Milton. The
victory over the Armada gave the Englishman the exhilaration of this sense of
power in the sphere of the nation. And in the sphere of thought we meet it
again in Renaissance
1 It is remarkable how many poets and thinkers
and personalities come from the islands in the old days, and how the islands
are all overshadowed afterwards.
2 Herodotus, viii. 144.
and Reformation. What is impossible, when God, making a new universe,
reveals His plans “ first as His manner is to His Englishmen ” ? So Milton
speaks of it. Power and the sense of power pervade the whole life of the
country, and that life has for the time a unity—an “ integrity,” it has been called—
that makes men men indeed—not specialists who can do one thing and do it in a
crippled because a one-sided way—but men who can enter into the whole life of
man—who can sail a ship, can write a poem, can refute a Papist, can plant a new
land and conquer an old enemy, live or die with that intense happiness, which
belief in this glorious universe and the God who made it alone can give.
Let us turn back to Greece now and follow out the parallel, beginning
with the sense of power that came to the Greek when he looked out on the
physical universe. It has been remarked that the Greek nautical terminology is
native bom, and it implies that the Greek found his way to the sea himself, and
taught himself to build his ship and to sail it. What an immense feat this was,
it is not easy to realtee in an age of Mauretanias. No compass, no chart, no
anchor even—yet the Greek mariner crept from land to land and got the sea by
heart. He knew every country " in profile ” as it has been called, and he
learnt every colour and every ripple the sea can have and the meaning of
them—the shallow, the rock, the current. “ Wise shipmasters,” says Pindar, “
can tell of a wind that shall come on the third day, and are not wrecked for
love of gain.”1 Such knowledge is one of the real triumphs of the
human mind.
The Greeks found their way to Egypt early, as we know from the Odyssey,
and at the beginning of the classical period when history begins to have
documents, one of the most interesting of these is the inscription at the
great rock-hewn temple of Abu-simbel in Nubia, made by Greek mercenaries in the
service of King Psammetichos. The temple had been built by Raineses II in 1330
B.C., and now between 594 and 589 the Greek soldiers cut their names in the
legs of the colossi— one of them adding the name of his city, Colophon.2
About the same time another Ionian found his way from Mitylene to Babylon and
served in the army, apparently, of King
1 Nemeans, 7,
17. a Hicks and
Hill, Greek Hist. Inscr., No. 3.
Nebuchadnezzar (605-562 B.C.). His name was Antimenidas; and when he came
home in glory, his brother, the poet Alcaeus, wrote him an ode of which a few
lines survive :
Thou hast
come from the ends of the earth;
And the
hilt of the sword thou dost hold Is of ivory wrought, a thing of worth,
Bound and
studded with gold—
Of thy
prowess the splendid mead—
For in
Babylon’s ranks afar,
Thou didst
mightily aid in war.
And didst
work a valiant deed,
Slaying a
monstrous man,
And dread
was the terror he cast—
Five royal
cubits he towered vast Lacking only a span.1
Yet another contemporary lives in story for a strange adventure westward.
“ The Carthaginians,” we read, “ if any sailed past them for Sardinia or the
Pillars, used to drown him in the sea ”—perhaps ship and all—“ and for this
cause most of the tales of the West were not believed.”2 But about
600 B.C. a Samian sea-captain, sailing for Egypt, was blown out of his
reckoning, “ and, as the wind did not cease to blow, passed through the Pillars
of Herakles and came to Tartessos (Tarshish), aided by divine providence.” So
Herodotus tells the tale of Kolaios, and leaves us to imagine the sudden gust
of realization with which the Samian saw and knew the great rocks of Gibraltar
and Jebel Musa, and how he found by sheer cunning and intrepidity his way
home, coasting along unknown shores, Africa or Spain, either passing by
Carthage to Southern Sicily, or risking all at Scylla and Charybdis. But home
he reached, and he brought, the historian tells us, more profit from his cargo
than any Greek of whom we have certain knowledge, save one, of whom, alas !
modems know nothing.3
Not one of the stories is an empty tale of mere adventure. Each
symbolizes the conquests of the world by the Greek mind. It was profit in money
that men sought, and they found it; but, like Saul seeking his father’s asses,
they found far more than they sought, for in a sense they found the Greece we
know,
1 Cf. Strabo, c. 617 ; the lines restored by
Bergk.
2 Strabo, 802, citing Eratosthenes the
geographer.
3 Herodotus, iv. 152.
or made it. Everywhere they watched and wondered and learnt, and the
tales they brought home worked like leaven, and the Greek mind grew and
expanded to absorb the whole world1—yes, and the stars above it,
that brought the mariner back to his island haven.
In the sphere of the nation, the sense of power that came from this
conquest of all the world and its thoughts, received a new heightening and a
new value, when the Persian was driven back. The Greeks, when they gave their
mind to it, were now the first race on earth.
In the sphere of the mind it was the same. Philosophy, Plato says, is the
child of Wonder.2 As Greece more and more enters into her
inheritance of the world, she realizes more and more the mystery of it all; and
the great questions rise of Whence, and Whither, of the One and the Many, of
God and man, of being and becoming. The history of Greek philosophy is not our
present concern, but let a few great names recall the great progression. There
is Thales of Miletus, the first man of science and the first philosopher of the
Western world3—the first Greek who foretold an eclipse (28 May, 585
B.C.),4 and the first Greek, men said, who made a " comer ”5—“
the greatness of Thales consisted in this, that he was the first to ask, not
what was the original thing, but what is the primary thing now ; or more simply
still, ‘ What is the world made of ? ’ The answer he gave to this question was
: Water." 6 There is Anaximander, who is credited with making
the first map, and whotaughtthat behind the elements is one eternal
indestructible substance, out of which everything arises, and to which everything
returns. There is Heraclitus, greater than any before him or most after him—“
unquestionably the most remarkable figure among the Greek philosophical
thinkers until we come to Socrates ”7—"the parts I understood
of his book,” said Socrates, “ were splendid; and I suppose what I failed to
understand was splendid too ; only it would need a Delian diver to get to the
1 Compare
the interesting phrase of Lucan describing Caesar discussing the Nile at
Cleopatra’s table—quis dignior autem hoc fuit auditor mundique capacior hospes?
(x. 182, 183).
8
Theaetetus, 155P. 3 Bury,
Greek History, p. 222.
* Herodotus, i. 74. 6 Aristotle, Pol. i. 11, p. 1259 a, b.
6 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy3,
p. 48.
7 Adam, The Religious Teachers of Greece, 212.
bottom of it.”1 And there is Xenophanes, traveller and
thinker, who studied the fossil shells in the Sicilian hills and the gods of
Libya, and traced his country’s decline to wrong thinking. “ If horses and cows
could carve gods,” in what shape would they make them ?
When we come to European Greece we find the leaders of thought are more
clearly poets than philosophers, yet they too are touched by the new thoughts
of the day. Pindar speaks of God at times in a strain that suggests
monotheism—in language that fires the imagination : “ God accomplish eth every
end whereon he thinketh—God who overtakes the eagle on the wing and passes the
dolphin in the sea, who bendeth the high- minded in his pride, and to others he
giveth deathless glory.”2 Of course he is no monotheist, but certain
old stories of the gods, he sees, cannot be true : “ Meet is it for a man that
concerning gods he speak what is noble; so the blame is less. . . . For me it
is impossible to call one of the blessed gods cannibal; I stand aloof; in
telling ill tales is oft-times little gain.”3 But there were stories
in which he saw little shame, thinking far otherwise than Euripides. Plutarch
keeps four lines of his, where he speaks of the soul:4 ‘‘The body of
all men is subject to all-powerful death, but alive there yet remains an image
of the living man, for that alone is from the gods. It sleeps when the limbs
are active, but to them that sleep in many a dream it revealeth an award of joy
or sorrow drawing near.” But there is a side to Pindar that is alien to the
higher mind of Greece. “ We do not praise the Thebans in the Persian War,”
writes Polybius,5 “ nor yet Pindar who in his poems told them to
keep neutrality—
The
general weal of the townsfolk set in peace,
Let them
seek the gladsome light Of valour that gleameth bright When the troubles of the
nation find surcease.
“ Large dreamy lines ” 8—what do they mean ? what can they
mean ? And at the end of the last poem which we can
1 Diogenes Laertius, ii. 22. 2 Pindar, Pythian, 2, 50.
8 Pindar,
Olympian, 1, 35.
4 Consol, ad Apoll. 35. See Adam,
Vitality of Platonism, Essay II., on the doctrine of the divine origin of the
soul from Pindar to Plato.
8 Polybius, iv. 31. • Professor Murray’s
description of them.
date—" Things of a day! what are we, and what not ? A dream of a
shadow is man ; yet when some God-given splendour falls, a glory of light comes
over him and his life is sweet.” Good luck, high birth, valour, beauty, and
compromise—it is not quite the sense of power. .
It is otherwise with his contemporary Aeschylus. A quatrain survives,
said to have been written by himself for his own grave in Sicily :
Here
Aeschylus lies in Gela’s land of corn,
Euphorion’s
son, in far-off Athens born;
That he
was valiant Marathon could show,
And
long-haired Medes could tell it, for they know.
Would any but himself have thought of leaving out all mention of his
poetry ?—and he did not think of it—did it without thinking, instinctively ;
for what was his poetry ? " Looking steadfastly into the silent continents
of Death and Eternity,” wrote Carlyle of Sterling, “ a brave man’s judgments
about his own sorry work in the field of Time are not apt to be too lenient.”
Critics have felt that even the poetry of Aeschylus seems inadequate for the
huge conceptions and deep speculations that surge in his mind—that he himself,
when it reaches its most splendid heights, sees it fall short of the wonder and
awe of the world which Zeus governs by laws that man’s experience slowly opens
up to him.
For
something cloaked within the night my mind Stands listening :—the divine eyes
are not blind To men of blood : the man of mere success,
Luck’s
thriver in defect of Righteousness,
Doomed by
the dark Avengers, wanes at last,
Dwindling,
until he fades out where the dim Lost shadows are ; and there, no help for him.1
Never before had man so realized the power of mind— here was the world
reduced to order, to cosmic order and moral law, the judgments of Zeus himself
tracked to great principles which the mind could seize and use—and the world,
and perhaps Zeus himself, explained. Was not all mind ? asked Anaxagoras ; and
the wits of Athens, as he walked the streets, called him Nous 2—a
sign of how widely the knowledge
1 Aesch. Agam. 465 f.
(trans. W. G. Headlam).
2 Plut. Pericles,
4.
was spread of what the leaders of thought were doing. The sense of power
marks the age.
Now let us come a little nearer to Athens, and see what is happening in
our three spheres of world, and state, and thought.
The great Persian Wars left nothing undisturbed. The commercial centre of
the world shifted westward. Miletus was destroyed, and war checked the inland
trade with Asia which had made the Ionian seaports great.1
Meanwhile, as the graves show, culture was spreading in Italy, and the trade
with Italians, Sicilians, Etruscans, and Carthaginians, and with the Greeks of
the West, was growing. Populations were increasing, and the supply of
home-grown wheat was proving too small. Wealth waited for the state that could
find and control new wheat areas. Athens lay now right in the centre of the
Greek world, and before long city and harbour were linked by strong walls and
made into a twin fortress impregnable by land. And if she did not own the
wheat-growing regions, she controlled the trade in grain. The cornfields of
Southern Russia had only one outlet—by the Hellespont, and Athens held it—held
it in virtue of her fleet of warships. Meanwhile, from the days of Solon and Pisistratus
foreigners with trades had been settling in the city.2 Solon was one
of the greatest economists of antiquity, and Pisistratus one of the shrewdest
of rulers; and they meant to have an Athens economically strong and prosperous.
Industries grew, and free labour moved in from the country, and slave labour
was imported from abroad. And then the slave began to encroach on the freeman’s
labour market, and the freeman took to another and a greater trade—the greatest
of all, Empire-ruling; and that too brought wealth to Athens. Mines were opened
up, and Laureion still continued to yield silver, while on Thasos and in Thrace
Athenian valour and enterprise made Athenians masters of gold production. The
horrible condition of the slaves in_the silver mines of Attica is sometimes
noticed by ancient writers,3 but there is no indication that it
troubled
1 On this see Chapter VII. 2 Meyer, Gr. Gesch.
iii. 538.
3 On the silver mjnes, cf. Plut. Nicias, 4; Xen.
Mem. ii. S- 2, and de vectig. 4, 14, on Nicias’ management of his mines ; also
Plut. Comp. Nic. et Crassi, 1. Also compare accounts of washing alluvial gold
in
the capitalists or the public conscience. Mining and manufacture, grain
and the carrying trade of the world, brought wealth and brought with it new
standards—a new scale for the measurement of riches and of poverty—new tastes
in food, and perhaps a new sense of hunger. '
A comic poet, Hermippos, writing about 429, in a mock- heroic passage in
Homeric hexameters calls on the Muses in their Olympic dwellings to tell him
how many blessings, since ever Dionysos launched on the wine-dark sea, come to
Athens in black ships.
With or without their aid he gives a list, which at the risk of being
tedious I will quote, but in prose. I do not think it should be tedious to
anyone who wishes to study the life of a great people, for more turns on food
and standard comforts than we sometimes realize, and a list such as this has a
story to tell of the whole Mediterranean. Some of the imports were perhaps not
very strictly entered at the Custom House; a comic poet may smuggle a few
little items here and there.
From Cyrene, he says, come the drug silphium and hides of cattle ; from
the Hellespont, mackerel and all sorts of dried fish; from Italy, spelt (or
wheat) and sides of beef; from Sitalkes (king of the Odrysians in Thrace), the
itch for the Spartans—perhaps what is to be re-exported at once should not be
reckoned; from King Perdiccas of the Macedonians, lies by the shipload—it is
strange to think of these being imported ;1 Syracuse sends pigs and
cheese. " And the Corcyraeans—may Poseidon destroy them upon their hollow
ships, for they have their mind this way and that way ! ” Then from Egypt come
sails and cord ; from Syria frankincense ; " fair Crete sends cypress for
the gods ”—probably for temple-building ; Libya, abundance of ivory; Rhodes
sends raisins, and figs that give you good dreams; Euboea, pears and “ noble
sheep ” ; Phrygia,
Lydia,
given by Strabo, 626; Plut. de virt. rtmlier. 27; Herodotus, vii. 27; Thasos
(gold), Plut. Cimon, 14 ; Thrace (gold), Thuc. iv. 105.
'A
journalist during the winter of 1914-15 came very near this notion, when he
suggested that Salonika had a special industry—the manufacture and export of
rumour—a trade that kept Greek, Turk, and Jew busy, when all the other trades
were bad. 11 It requires no ships to carry it, which is a
pity, because the export of rumour would make Salonika the busiest shipping
place in the world ” (Daily News,
2 March, 1915).
slaves, and Arcadia, soldiers for hire ; Pagasae (the Thessalian port),
slaves again, and branded slaves at that; the Paphla- gonians send walnuts and
rich almonds, “ for these are the dainties of the banquet ” ; Phoenicia, the
fruit of the date-palm and fine wheat flour ; Carthage, carpets and embroidered
cushions.1
This list we can supplement from a curious inscriptioil, which records
the sale of the property of the men condemned in 414-3 for the mutilation of
the Hermae and the profanation of the mysteries.2 Here is a string
of slaves, with the prices they fetched. None of them is Greek, and some of
them come from far\-away regions. They had all belonged to Cephisodoros, a
metic—a foreigner, that is, domiciled in the Peiraieus. The list runs thus :—a
Thracian woman, 165 drachmas; another Thracian woman, 135 dr.; a Thracian man,
170 dr.; a Syrian, 240 dr. ; a Carian, 105 dr. ; an Illyrian, 161 dr. ; another
Thracian woman, 220 dr. ; a Thracian, 115 dr. ; a Scythian, 144 dr.; an
Illyrian, 121 dr.; a Colchian, 153 dr. ; a Carian boy, 124 dr.; a little Carian
boy, 72 dr.; a Syrian, 301 dr.; a man [or woman, for the last syllable is lost]
from Melittene, 151 dr.; a Lydian woman, 170 dr. Another fragment gives the
bedroom furniture of Alcibiades, which we may leave to the purchasers.
Meantime Athens was becoming an Imperial city. The Persian War had left a
situation that demanded leadership, and Sparta declined the task. Pausanias,
her king, behaved badly when abroad—“ it was more like an imitation of a
tyranny than a commandership,” says Thucydides.3 So Sparta sent out
no more commanders, afraid lest they too should degenerate, and wishful in any
case to be rid of the Persian War.1 A later generation moralized
this—she preferred to have law-abiding citizens than to rule all Greece.6
1 Hermippos, ap. Athen. 27. Cf. Pericles, in
Thuc. ii. 38. 2. Also Polybius, iv. 38, quoted in Chapter X. p. 305.
2 Hicks and Hill, Greek Hist. Inscr., No. 72. As
a drachma (6 obols) was rather a high wage for a rower in the fleet, and 4
obols a fair wage, we may roughly reckon a drachma as equal in purchasing power
to a dollar to-day, and calculate how much our fellow-creatures were worth. We
are told the price of slaves tended to go down, which implies an increased
supply.
* Thuc. i. 95, 3. ‘ Thuc. i. 95, 7. « Plut. Aristides,
23.
But the fact is, as Thucydides says, Sparta wished to be rid of the war ;
and the reason was that, as he adds elsewhere, most of her arrangements looked
toward the Helots, for protection against them.1 With a population
of agricultural serfs—the Messenians among them conscipus of ancient
independence and a glorious struggle for freedom in the past, and still able,
as the year 370 proved, to assert it and maintain it—the Spartans numbered
about one-sixteenth of the community, and they could not risk foreign war.
Defeat, as 370 showed, and accident, as the earthquake year 464 revealed— might
be fatal to Sparta at home; and victory might be as bad. The Helot peril was
always there. So Sparta gave up foreign empire to save her national existence.
To Athens the leadership of Greece was abandoned; the allies from hatred
of Pausanias pressed it on her, and she was not reluctant to undertake it. So
the Confederacy of Delos was formed, and it grew into an Empire—inevitably, for
it was not long before the constituent states became weary of contribution, and
no confederacy can exist as an effective force whose members can retire without
notice on the spur of the moment—on any chance vote of an assembled people. *’
Empire,” says an Athenian, in the pages of Thucydides,2 “ we did not
take for ourselves by force ; you (the Spartans) would not wait to finish the
war with the barbarian, and the allies came to us, and themselves asked us to
be leaders. From the nature of the case itself we were at first compelled to
advance our Empire to its present state—fear was our chief motive, and then
honour, and then interest. It seemed no longer safe when many hated us, when
some had already revolted and been subdued, when we found you no longer as
friendly as you had been, but suspicious and at variance, to run the risk of
letting our Empire go, especially as all who left us would fall to you. And no
one can quarrel with a people if, in matters involving the greatest dangers, it
make the best arrangement it can for itself.”
Let us turn now to the sphere of thought. Here a surprise awaits us. For
we are apt to think of the fifth century in Greece, and especially in Athens,
as the age of illumination— Aufklarung—the time when, we are told, Anaxagoras
and 1 Thuc. iv.
80. ’ Thuc. i. 74.
Socrates
and Euripides moulded the thoughts of men. But this does not represent the
whole situation. It is indeed a period of change, when the conservative and the
questioning spirit met, and when religion shows the influence of both. Pericles
discussed high philosophy with Anaxagoras, and was " filled with
speculation ” ;1 but Plutarch’s story of the ram’s head is very
illuminative.2 The head of a rain with one horn, he says, was
brought to Pericles from his farm ; and Lampon, the prophet, seeing the horn
grew stiff and strong from the middle of the brow, announced the future
extinction of the party of Thucydides, the son of Melesias, and the sole power
of Pericles. Anaxagoras, however, split the skull and showed some strange
malformation within, which afforded a physical explanation of the marvel, and
he captured the admiration of those present. But, when Thucydides was
ostracized, and Pericles attained his sole guardianship of the state, Lampon in
his turn was admired. Plutarch urges that both may have been justified, and
that the discovery of the cause does not mean the invalidation of the sign; but
he owns that this perhaps belongs to another discussion. The story at any rate
illustrates the workings of the Athenian mind. And, again, Cimon, the earlier
rival of Pericles, is the hero of a story as significant. When he took the
island of Scyros, he was led by the sign of an eagle scratching the earth on a
little hill, to make a great discovery. An oracle from Delphi had bidden Athens
recover the bones of Theseus, but none knew where they were, save that Theseus
had died in Scyros ; and here in the little hill a great skeleton was found
with a sword and a brazen spear. With all possible pomp Cimon brought Theseus
back to his city after his four hundred years of absence, and won great
goodwill thereby. So that, as posterity recorded, the people at the next
Dionysia gave to him and his fellow-generals the decision as to the prize for
Tragedy. They awarded it, not to Aeschylus, but to the younger poet Sophocles;
and the older man took it hardly, and left Athens soon after, never to return.3
This belongs to the year 468.
Perhaps
the story is true in factit is certainly true in symbol. Sophocles, not
Aeschylus, is the great Athenian poet. The questions that troubled Aeschylus,
and the answers he
1 Plato, Phaedrus,
269 e, 270. a Plut. Pericles, 6. 8 Plut. Cimon, 8.
found to
them, went beyond the common thinking—too far beyond it.1 Sophocles
they could understand—at least they could think they understood him, as men a
generation or two ago found Browning obscure and Tennyson lucid. “ Inimitable,
impeccable, unpopular,” Sophocles has been called,2 but he was not
unpopular with his contemporaries. Such a play as the Trachiniae, beautiful as
Deianira is, would not have satisfied either Aeschylus or Euripides. Athens
made Sophocles a general, to be the colleague of Pericles in 440, in the war
against Samos, and Ion in his Travels tells of the lighter side of the life of
the generals at the siege as he witnessed it. " But as for political
affairs, he was neither very wise nor very effective, but just an average good
Athenian.” 3 The Samian expedition was a wicked one—as bad as the
Melian—and Sophocles made no protest, wrote no Troades. He stands nearer the
common people than Euripides, and in his last play, the Oedipus Coloneus, he
gives them, at a time when Athenian prospects grew dimmer, the comfort once
more of an old tradition—that the grave of Oedipus in Attic ground is to form a
perpetual safeguard for Attica against foreign invaders. Perhaps this must not
be pressed, as Euripides alludes to a similar legend of another hero ; but it
fits in curiously with the deed of Cimon and his poet’s first victory.
Delphi had
been forgiven by the Greeks for its rallying to the Persian, but the defection
was not forgotten, and the oracle’s power for mischief was in some degree
weakened. But other oracles, and other scenes of holy games, occupied men. The
festival, said Strabo of the Delos of a later day, is “ rather a merchants’
affair ” 4—they all were this, though they had in. earlier days a
higher significance. The clearer minds of Greece had not Pindar’s enthusiasm
for athletics and athletes—Xenophanes and Euripides denounced them, but they
had some flavour of religious association about them still.
Perhaps
the most real religions of Greece—in our modem sense—were Orphism and the
Eleusinian Mysteries, both cults of initiation and purification, secret and
awful, in which a
1 Cf. Meyer, Forsch.
ii. 258 ff.
2 Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry, 145.
3 Ion, ap. Athen. 603. * Strabo, 486.
hidden
knowledge of another life, a life of woe or of happiness, was imparted, and the
clue given by which the better path might be found. What happened was that men
and women were i put into frames of mind and had emotions, Aristotle said.1
" Quacks and prophets,” says Plato,2 “ go to rich men’s doors
and persuade them that they have power from the gods, by means of sacrifices
and chants, to cure any wrong deed of their own or their ancestors in a course
of pleasures and feasts,” as if they could “rid us of trouble over there; but
if we have not sacrificed, terrible things await us.” Pericles himself died
with an amulet hung round his neck by his womenfolk.3 Foreign gods
began to follow their worshippers to Athens and to gather adherents among
Athenians —the Phrygian Mother of the gods, Sabazios, Bendis, Ammon, and the
like.
It has
been remarked that in the famous Funeral Speech of Pericles there is no
reference to the piety of the Athenians, whether Pericles made such a reference
or did not. But evidence is forthcoming in the historians. Anaxagoras was
threatened with impeachment for impiety ; but, said posterity, Pericles
smuggled him out of the city somehow, The same charge was brought against
Aspasia by Hermippos the comic poet.4 The terror and cruelty of the
Athenians, waked by the mutilation of the Hermae, is another evidence of their
religious attitude, and the career and failure of Nicias illustrates it
vividly. But the crowning stroke of the century was the hemlock-cup given to
Socrates.
Yet for
all this it was the age of enlightenment, when the human mind seems to have
moved with the greatest power and clearness and the highest consciousness of
its power. If we sum up all that Greece has meant to the world, and then
analyse it, we shall find that, with the sole exception of Homer, every Greek
writer of the highest rank was living sooner or later at some stage of his
career in Athens in the fifth century—and found it in the main congenial. In
every sphere of Greek life the zenith seems to be attained by these
1 Cf. Aristotle, Frag., ed. Heitz, p. 40, quoted
by Synesius, Bio, p. 48.
2 Plato, Rep. ii. 364A-365A. * Plut. Pericles, 38.
4 Plut. Pericles, 32.
men. In
short, this is the time when, above all, new impulses quickened poetry, art,
architecture, history, philosophy, and music. It was of the very essence of the
Periclean conception of Democracy that it should be so—what a German scholar1
calls die Ausbildung und Geltendmachung der Individuality— when each individual
should achieve his maximum of development and to the utmost of that maximum be
available and operative for the community. But this has brought us to the
consideration of Athenian Democracy.
It is no
copy, says Pericles, made from the constitutions of neighbours ; rather it is a
model—“ in a word, I would say that our whole state is an education of Greece.”2
Three points stand out in his claim, which, without sticking too closely to his
actual words, we may consider.
First of
all, then, in Athens ■n-oXts and ttoX/tij? stand nearest in meaning. “
The state is in the hands not, of the few, but of the many.” Lydia, Egypt,
Persia, and the barbarian tribes of the North might have kings or chieftains—
The
enormous rule of many made for one;
Sparta
belonged to a small handful of families, who were maintained by fifteen times
their number of serfs, against whom every Spartan institution was a part of one
huge system of safeguard. Thessaly was a country of noble families, Boeotia had
oligarchies. In every case, as in so many countries to-day, the land and the
people belonged to the ruler. The civil servant and the policeman and the
tax-collector — who in modem democracies play so large a part—were not the
state in Athens. The tacit theory, that a good citizen’s function is to pay his
taxes punctually and move on when a policeman tells him, is never quite
eliminated from the British mind; nor the other equally malign feeling that to
be a real citizen in a sense worth reckoning one must own land if possible—at
any rate “ have a stake in the country ”—and hold the great traditional
opinions, especially in Church matters. Indeed it may be said that “ citizen ”
is in England a lowly word— that wakes in the mind the picture of a futile
paterfamilias writing a dull letter to the local newspaper and signing it Pro
Bono Publico ; it stands on a level with Ratepayer.
1 Nestle,
Euripides, p. 194. * Thuc. ii. 41, 1,
But to the
Athenian the word had another and a more glorious connotation. It stood with
its analogue—polis and polites are an equation. The citizen jis.Jiie~-£tate, in
a most amazing way. The policeman is a slave, a Scythian, whom anybody might
have bought at the auction, if the man deputed by the state’s authority had not
gone a drachma or two higher. Civil servants hardly existed, and the nearest
approach to them that Athenians knew they signally despised. No boy was bom of
free parents but might be as much a citizen as any other—might lead the
Ecclesia, be stratigos, ambassador, anything that anyone else was. In spite of
families whose names recur, Athenian history is full of new names. And there
was equality in the law courts—Equal Law and Equal Speech are two names for
Greek Democracy; and, as the Persian in Herodotus says, " the very name is
so beautiful.” 1 The earth is not the lord’s, nor justice the bought
right of the rich. Judges are not made of party hacks. Judge and jury were the
state—the citizen again, grouped in hundreds or thousands as might be; and any
man had access to them. Wherever English, democracy is most conspicuously a
sham, Athenian democracy was real. No registration laws were made, drafted and
designed, to jockey the citizen out of his rights. And the natural result
followed. The Athenian was pleased with his state. Solon, in Mr. Zimmem’s
admirable phrase, associated the idea of kindness with the state; and then, as
Pericles put it, the citizens fell in love with Athens.
In the
second place, Athenian Democracy, as we saw, asked the utmost of every
citizen—not merely in blood and money, as the modem state does of us all, nor
voluntary service on some bench of county gentry or board of guardians, but in
service of every kind—in blood, in money, in brain, in skill of hand, in
clearness of intellect, in beauty of word and tone, in dedication to every
public interest. In everything he must take part.
“ Alone
among men we consider him who takes no share in these matters not quiet or
unambitious, but useless.” 2
So Pericles says. One of his successors in high place in Athens saw fit to
pronounce a eulogy on Stupidity, something in the modem style—on the advantages
of dullness and not thinking
1
Herodotus, iii. 8o. a Thuc. ii. 40,
2.
oneself
cleverer than the laws.1 Pericles praises his people for their open
eyes and quick minds—“ We can judge the issue, at any rate, if we cannot
ourselves strike out the plan ; and we do not hold that discussion spoils
action—on the contrary, we hold that the want of that sense of things which
comes by discussion before actual action is the greater danger. It is, in fact,
our distinguishing mark that the same men will calculate the risk and take it;
while elsewhere ignorance gives courage, and calculation brings fear. Surely
those must be the bravest in spirit, who, with the clearest realization of what
is terrible and what is pleasant, will yet not turn away from danger.” 2
And,
lastly, there is the steady humanization of life in Athens. " They toil
on,” [says the Corinthian speaker,3 " with troubles and dangers
all the days of their lives, and least of all men have any enjoyment of what
they have, because they will always be getting, because they have no idea of a
festival but to do what occasion requires, but count easy tranquillity as much
a misfortune as toilsome occupation. So that if one said in a word that they
were born never to have rest themselves, nor to let others have it, he would
speak aright.” Not at all, says Pericles; no city has so many recreations for
the human spirit, so many annual contests and sacrifices, nor so many pleasures
in private life. It cannot be better put than in the famous sentence : “ We
love beauty without being extravagant, and we love wisdom without being soft.”
Five or
six years after Pericles delivered this speech, an opponent wrote a small
pamphlet on Athenian Democracy in the year 424. It is a very remarkable piece
of writing, though neither the writer’s name nor his exact object is known. It
looks as if, an oligarch in sympathies himself, he were writing for others of
the same convictions, for men who hated Democracy as much as he did, but who
did not so fully realize the Athenian situation. Did he mean to dissuade them
from action ?
“ About
the constitution of the Athenians,” he begins— “ that they have chosen this
kind of constitution, I do not praise them, because in so doing they chose that
the blackguards
1 Thuc.
iii. 37 ; Cleon’s speech. See further in Chapter III. pp. 79,80.
a Thuc, ii.
40, 2, 3. 8 Thyc. i,
70,
should be
better off than the decent people. For that I do not praise them ; but, since
once it seemed good to them, I will show that they really manage things well
for the preservation of their constitution, and are adroit in their other
arrangements, where to other Greeks they seem to be making mistakes.”
To this
thought he recurs after some pages—“ I forgive Democracy to the Demos ; anybody
may be forgiven for doing well by himself ” (2, 20). He does not praise this
Democracy, but he thinks they act wisely and well from their own point of view,
which is to keep the form of government they prefer. " In every country,”
he says (1, 5), “ the best element is hostile to Democracy ”—it has education
and insight; the demos is full of ignorance, disorder, and general
blackguardliness—the common effect of poverty and the pursuits which it
involves. If then the decent people spoke in the Ecclesia, it would be in their
own interests and not advantageous to the democrats; so now any blackguardly
fellow can get up and say what he thinks will suit him and his like (1, 6)—they
know well enough that his ignorance and goodwill taken together will help them
more than “ the worth and wisdom and dislike of the decent man.” It means bad
government, but it means also the continuance of Democracy, and they prefer
that. Similarly when they deal with allied cities, they deliberately favour the
worse part of the population ; and where they have not done so, it has been a
mistake (3, 10, ix). They make the rich pay heavily in tragic choruses,
gymnasiarchies, trierarchies—and they have plenty of festivals—too many, in
fact, and the business of the law courts is congested. But then the demos does
well on it—wrestling-grounds, public baths, and so forth in plenty—and the
rabble has all the good of them, for the rich have their own and do not care to
use the public ones.
In Athens,
he says, a slave will not make way for you in the street, and you cannot punch
him for it, for you never can be sure that he is not a free Athenian. For the
free citizens go as shabbily dressed, and “ they are not a bit better in
feature ” (1, 10). In Sparta things are different—they were indeed. But in
Athens there is free speech for slave and metic. Why ? Because the city needs
the metics on account of the multitude of trades and of the navy (1,12). The
sea-power of Athens he discusses with insight—the advantage of ruling islands,
of
controlling commerce, of managing the law business of all the subjects ; and it
is after all the masses who row and steer the warships, and these make the Empire
and secure the commercial supremacy of Athens, and with it the wealth of the
city and the imports. Of course if Athens were an island— perhaps he is
referring to a doctrine Pericles used to enforce— the Athenians would be immune
from every attack ; but they are not an island, and the country folk and the
rich get the brunt of every invader, while " the demos, very well knowing
that they will bum and cut down nothing that belongs to it, lives at ease ”
(2,14).
There,
then, stands Athenian Democracy. Many things might be thought of to improve it,
but they would not be of much use, as long as it remained a Democracy'; and
there is no chance of altering that. There axe not enough malcontents. And
there he ends.
It does
not take very close reading of these two accounts of Athenian Democracy to see
hints of the uglier aspects which the sense of power in a nation may take. The
power of the human spirit over the material world may prove the emancipation
of the mind, or, on the opposite side, it may lead to its final enslavement to
the material. What will this new power over land and sea mean ? Hermippos and
the Athenian oligarch suggest it may mean luxury—things to eat and carpets,
beside raw materials for ship-building and house-building. Athenian luxury
would seem a poor thing indeed in modem England or America ; the limited range
in diet and drink, the sheer discomfort in household arrangements, even among
the rich, would be intolerable to our middle and upper classes. We forget the
lower classes in such reckonings, as the Athenians overlooked the slave in the
mines. Nicias leased his mining- slaves to a contractor, stipulating to receive
an obol a day per slave, and the same number to be returned to him when the
contract expired—they could not possibly be the same men.1 The
growing appeal of Comfort is conspicuous in Athenian history—better feeding,
less drudgery, less risk, are what men want. One way to obtain it is to limit
the number of children, and this in ancient Athens was effected after the
children were bom. This is evident in many ways. Aristophanes, for 1
Xen. de vectig. 4, 14.
instance,
in the parabasis of the Clouds, where the chorus- leader speaks on the poet’s
behalf, uses a metaphor drawn from the practice. He was very young when he
brought out his first comedy—“ I was still a virgin, and it was not permitted
me to bear a child, so I exposed it, and another girl found it and took it up,
and you (the audience) nurtured it nobly and educated it.” 1 A great
many of the comedies in a later Athenian day depend for their plot on the
exposure of girl- babies by well-to-do parents. In Plato’s ideal state “ the
issue of inferior parents, and all imperfect children that are bom to others,
will be concealed, as is fitting, in some mysterious and unknown hiding-place ”
2—a euphemism, says Dr. Adam, for infanticide. " As for the
exposure and rearing of children,” says Aristotle, " let there be a law
that no deformed child shall live ; but where there are too many (for in our
state population has a limit), when couples have children in excess, and the
state of feeling is averse to the exposure of offspring, let abortion be
procured before sense and life have begun.” 3 When philosophers and
framers of ideal constitutions accept such practices on eugenic grounds, ordinary
people will use them for reasons with less scientific nonsense about them.
The state
itself may be intoxicated with its own sense of power. The utter absence of
moral considerations in the speeches of public men, as given by Thucydides, is
one sign of this. The Melian affair is the standard instance—the aggression by
Athens was unprovoked, and when the place surrendered the Athenians killed all
the men they took and sold the women and children as slaves. This was not out
of the way in Greek warfare, but in the discussion between the Athenian envoys
and the Melian magistrates some things are said with terrible explicitness. “
Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their
nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to
make this law, or to act upon it when made; ... so, as far as the gods are
concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear the worse.” 4 We
learn from Plutarch that Alcibiades, though not here named by Thucydides, was
largely responsible
1 Aristophanes, Nub. 530. * Plato, Rep. 460c.
3 Aristotle, Pol.
vii. 16, 15, p. 13356 (trans. Jowett).
* Thuc. v. 105. See also Chapter III. p.
75, for further discussion.
for the
affair of Melos, but when we go back to Pericles himself this is what we find.
" You cannot renounce your empire, even if in the panic of the moment some
inert spirit is for playing the honest man.” 1 The triple innuendo
is not accident—fear —slackness—and the exquisite sense of right and wrong they
together produce. In Thucydides it is curiously interesting to mark how the
great Periclean watchwords are caught up by Cleon.2 When Diodotus
opposes Cleon’s policy of killing the Mitylenaeans, he does so, not on moral
grounds, but for expediency—to spare would be the wiser policy. To such a
point does the sense of power bring a nation.
Lastly in
the sphere of thought, this same sense of power shows, the same decline—here
into a hard, quick, shallow rationalism. If sophist was an honourable term in
the fifth century, it did not acquire its later connotation by accident. One
example will do. “ This very night,” says Socrates, “ before ever it was dawn,
Hippocrates, son of Apollodorus and brother of Phason, fell to beating my door
with his stick very loudly; and when some one opened, in he charged at a rush,
and called out aloud, ‘ Socrates ! are you awake or asleep ? ’ I knew his voice
and, ‘ Hullo ! Hippocrates ! ’ I cried, ‘ is there any bad news ? ’ ‘No news at
all but good news,’ said he. ‘ Good,’ said I. ' What is it, and why have you
come at this time of day ? ’ ‘ Protagoras has come,’ said he, and he came and
stood by me. ' Just now ? ’ said I, ‘ and you have just heard ? ’ ' No, by the
gods,’ he said, ‘ in the evening.’ Then he felt for the bed and sat down by my
feet, and, ‘ Yes, in the evening,’ he said, ‘ getting here very late from
Oinoe.’ ” The young man wants Socrates to speak for him to the great teacher.
In the morning they go to the house where he is staying and with some
difficulty get in. Protagoras was walking in the long vestibule with some
friends and bdiind was a “ chorus ”—mostly foreigners " whom Protagoras
gathers from every city, through which he passes, charming them with his voice
like Orpheus.” " And I was particularly
1 Thuc. ii. 63 (Jowett). Professor Gilbert Murray
translates it— “ is hankering after righteousness ”—in his fine introductory
essay to his translations of Hippolytus and The Bacchae.
2 See Chapter III. p. 74, on the assonances
between Pericles and Cleon, in Thucydides.
amused,”
says Socrates, “ to watch this chorus—how careful they were never to get in his
way—how, whenever he turned, they divided decently and in order this side and
that, and fell in behind.”
And what
had he to tell these eager disciples ? Tlavt<ov
fierpov avdpto'iro';1—the relativity of knowledge, a
certain swift and impulsive Pragmatism perhaps—grammar—and, “ in respect to the
gods, I am unable to know either that they are or are not.”
What these
successive sophists did may be best seen in the Callicles whom Plato draws with
such skill in the Gorgias— an eager, quick, splendid figure, full of ideas with
which after some centuries Nietzsche has come forward again. " It is only
by custom and convention that doing wrong is more disgraceful ; by nature what
is worse is more disgraceful—suffering wrong, to wit. This suffering, this
submission to wrong, is not a man’s part—it’s a slave’s, who had better die
than live— whoever he is who cannot help himself against wrong and insult,
himself and those he cares about. The law makers, to be sure, are the weak and
the many. It is with a view to themselves and their own interest that they
frame their laws and bestow praise and blame, to frighten those who are more
powerful, and who might take advantage of them, into not taking advantage of
them ; so they tell them that self-seeking is disgraceful and unjust,” and so
forth.2 In fact, Melos in daily life.
Callicles
is not alone. There is Critias, the friend of Socrates, whose account of the
origin of the gods Sextus Empiricus preserved for us. Life, he says, was full
of disorder, so at last men made laws to punish it; but the laws could not see
in the dark; and then some shrewd and witty man invented gods who could see in
the dark—could with the mind see and hear, think, and mark all said and done
among men. It was a pleasant and a helpful device—“ with a false reason
covering truth.” The gods would dwell, where thunder and lightning might lead
men to expect them; and so “ he quenched lawlessness with laws.”
The sense
of power is a great thing for a nation or for a man. But it seems that
something else is needed as well—some other principle on which life can rest.
That men of Athens realized
1 See
Chapter IX. p. 279. 2
Plato, Gorg. 483B.
this also
and set themselves to find some new foundation for society, to study human life
till they should find in it what does in fact keep it from the utter
dissolution threatened by the unchartered freedom of the new schools; and that
they did find a truth in human life and human society deeper and stronger than
the weapons of sophistry and man’s baser instincts could uproot or destroy—is
part of the glory of this wonderful century.
THUCYDIDES
IT is
difficult to think of any great book that has permanently held the interest of
mankind without some element of autobiography. To reach the heart, as Goethe
said, a book must come from the heart; and that is autobiography at once. It
may be that the writer frankly takes us into his confidence like Herodotus and
Horace among the ancients, or Montaigne and Charles Lamb in modem times; though
even the frankest of authors has something he keeps to himself. On the other
hand, there is the other type—the man who sinks himself and his affairs
deliberately and of purpose ; and yet, in his case too, his own experience of
life will be written in every sentence, whether we can read it or not. An
outlook is implied in every judgment upon life—in every judgment upon an
individual man or his chance act; and an outlook, if we can see or feel what it
is, reveals a personality. The great writer may hide himself, he may do his
utmost to make his writing (in our modem phrase) objective, but his very
reticence only adds to his impression. It is only .makers of lexicons and
manuals who achieve the objective, and such works die or never live.
" The
War, of which Thucydides, son of Olorus, wrote the history,” has never failed
to interest mankind, so momentous the issues, so vivid and so various the force
of the writer. T3ut~perhaps he never guessed how profound would be the interest,
quite apart from the story, which his readers would feel in the great character
that moves through the great events and makes them live, that looks into life
so profoundly, that feels so intensely, and, using a style so restrained, so
artificed and so cold, can yet inflame the reader with a throbbing love of
Athens, despite all the faults and the crimes which he so relentlessly lays
baxe.
All that
we really know of the man, he tells us himself— tells us to authenticate his
work and to explain how it came to be what it is—baffling the curiosity he
provokes. That his name would live he must have known ; he cannot but have felt
what he was doing when he wrote his own name and his father’s and the name of
his city into a work that was to be “ a possession for ever ” ; and he was
content to leave the matter there. The ancients tell us one thing and another
about him, long afterwards—some of their information being trivial and wrong,
some of it significant if we could be sine of it. But, when all is added up and
weighed, the biography is a short one.
His
father’s name was Olorus, he tells us, and in the next chapter (iv. 105, 1) he
adds in his curious way, that " Brasidas learnt that Thucydides had rights
of working the mines in that region of Thrace, and from that had influence
among the chief men of the mainland.” Plutarch says that Olorus had his own
name from an ancestor,1 and modem scholars have made the easy guess
that he called his son after the statesman, Pericles’ rival, the son of
Melesias. The ancestor Olorus, if we can rely on him, was a Thracian prince, it
appears, or a chief, if prince is too large or too modern a term. Plutarch adds
that father and son were connected with the family of Cimon, son of Miltiades,
that the mines were gold-mines at Scapte Hyle, that the historian was murdered
there, and his body brought to Athens and buried with the.house of Cimon,
alongside Elpinice, Cimon’s famous sister; but he remarks that they belonged to
different demes. The family of Miltiades, since the days of Pisistratus, had
had Thracian and princely connexions, but scholars are divided as to whether or
not to accept the kinship of the historian with the great house.2
With the acceptance of it comes a further question as to his
1 Cimon, 4.
Herodotus, vi. 93, says the Thracian father-in-law of Miltiades was called
Olorus. The historian’s grandfather may have given his son a fancy name, as
Periander of Corinth called his son Psammetichos. Cimon himself, as his
political opponents noted, gave his sons foreign names and fancy ones, after
the states for which he was proxenos—viz. Lacedaimonios, Thessalos, and Eleios.
a Busolt
doubts it; Grote, v. 275 n., and Hermann Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, p. 105,
accept it. It seems probable enough, if not quite proven.
attitude
to Pericles, which we shall have to discuss. The rider that “ Thucydides’ Greek
is at best good Thracian ”1 need not perhaps occupy us very long.
That his
youth and education were essentially Athenian is plain to read on every page of
his work. All the main impulses and interests of Athens are there—rhetoric,
tragedy, philosophy, empire, autonomy, and political theory. He owes his
education to sophists, poets, philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen—to Athens.
JToXt? avSpa hihacncei.2 He embodies in himself what has been called
the unity or integrity„of Jthe gige of perirlgg His early manhood must have
fallen in the days when Pericles was at the very height of his power, for when
the Peloponnesian War began, he was “of an age to take it in and understand
it,” 3 and he expected it to be a great war and of unique
importance.4 What is more, after a very few years he was actually
elected general. When the plague came to Athens in 430, Thucydides was there
and took it and recovered. He had already his lifelong passion for accurate
detail—it was probably bom in him; and, sick as he was, he carefully noted his
symptoms, and left in writing the most famous description of a disease that
antiquity has given us. More interesting still, for our present purpose, is the
consideration of his election as general for the year 424.
Human
nature, he suggests—and Goethe says it too-cis- apt to-be, much the same in all
ages, and a political election campaign must have had many "features in
his day which are not unfamiliar in our own. There were ten generals to be
elected annually to serve for a year, and the records, incomplete as they are,
suffice to show that more often than not both parties carried seats on the
board. Both parties, it is clear, must have selected their candidates with
care; and that party management was very much the same then as now is evident
from the occurrence of “ deals ” or “ saw-offs ” of the most modern kind.5
We may therefore ask how Thucy-
1 Quoted by
Mr. Grundy.
a Further
discussion of this phrase of Simonides in Chapter VI. p. 167.
® Thuc. V.
26, I, eirefyav de St a 7T iivtos
avrov, aifrOavofjievos re ffl . • •
* Thuc. i. 1, 1, first sentence. In i.
21. ?, he notes that we always think the present war the greatest—till it is
over.
* e.g. the ostracism of Hyperbolus, Hut.
Nicias, 11 ; Alcib. 13. ,
dides came
to be on a " ticket,” and on which “ ticket ” he was.1 Then as
now many factors would contribute to a man’s selection—distinction in war,
gifts of speech, availability. In 441 the poet Sophocles was elected general
neither for renown in battle nor political eloquence, but because in that year
he had produced the Antigone.a It was not till the days of the
decline of Athens that the Greeks drew or felt the English distinction between
men of genius and practical people, and a Eubulus was preferred to Demosthenes.
But in 425 Cleon would hardly have tolerated a picturesque candidate, and his
opponents could not have afforded to risk one. In any case, Thucydides was not
a poet of Panhellenic fame.
It seems
generally accepted that Thucydides was a candidate of the Moderates, the party
that preferred peace, and, if possible, some kind of friendly understanding
with Sparta. A very serious juncture in the fortunes of Athens had come, and
the election for 424 was bound to be of the utmost moment —peace or war.3
Cleon was at the height of his power, the successful leader of the war-party.
In the elections for 425 he and his had suffered, but the brilliant affair of
Sphacteria and the arrival of the Spartan prisoners in Athens within the twenty
days—following the failure of Nicias’ clever move about the generalship—had altered
everything. There would be no more talk of peace—Spartan embassies might come,
but they could go home with nothing done—the Athenians " desired more,” as
the historian says,4 and more they got. Cleon took in hand the
matter of the tribute of the allies, and doubled it. The opposition co-operated
with the allies in the matter, Antiphon (Thucydides’ friend) wrote speeches for
the Lindians
1 In these
paragraphs I have followed the common view. If the question is asked. How do we
know that Thucydides was not of Cleon’s party to start with, and that his
dislike of Cleon is not the outcome of the exile that followed the command at
Amphipolis ?—the answer is that for such a view there is no evidence at all; it
would be pure guesswork. The reconstruction given above has admittedly
conjectural elements, but it seems to fit in with what we know.
* On Sophocles as general, see fragment
of Ion (in Athenaeus, xiii. 603E), who speaks of the poet himself, saying that
Pericles had said he knew how to write poetry, but was no strategist.
a See
Beloch, Attische Politik, 37-42.
* Thuc. iv. 21, 2 ; an echo of the phrase
in Isocrates, de Pace, 7, when in 355 b.c. he is arguing for Peace and against
Empire.
and the
Samothracians, and the well-to-do grumbled as ever yet at the cost of war and
of democratic government. But Cleon had his way, and to clinch his power he
raised the pay for service in the Ecclesia from two obols to three.
Aristophanes might attack this in his Knights (424 B.C.), but the extra obol
had attractions for poor voters in a time of war prices.
The peace
party would need to look well to it if they were to make any impression on the
power of Cleon. Why they should have selected Thucydides, we do not
know—whether his wealth, or his interests in Thrace, or kinship with the family
of Cimon, decided it, or some proof given of political or military gifts,
distinction won or foreshadowed in some campaign, or speech of appeal in the
Ecclesia—he does not explain. He only incidentally records that he was general
for the year 424. We know also that the party carried its leader, Nicias, and
two others, Autocles and Nicostratos—four at any rate out of the ten.
It would
hardly have been human if Thucydides had not felt some satisfaction at the
election. But it was to be the ruin of his career at once, if in the long run
the foundation of a greater and more lasting fame than fell to many a
successful strategos. “ It befell me to be in exile from my country,” he wrote,
“ for twenty years after the generalship at Amphipolis ” (v. 26, 5). The story
needs no re-telling. Brasidas was too quick for the Athenian general in charge
of the fleet, and the city was lost. It stood on the river Strymon, commanding
the river-way into the interior and the road along the coast; it was a centre,
too, from which Athens had a part of the timber supply on which her fleet
depended1 and some part also of her revenues. It was for Athens’
enemies at once a brilliant triumph, and a military, political, and commercial
gain of the utmost significance. It promised the subject allies of Athens that
freedom which Sparta had held out to them in 432 B.C.; and though she was soon
to abandon her promise quite ruthlessly, still, as long as Brasidas lived,
there was no predicting the outcome.
So it
befell Thucydides to be in exile. It is interesting to note how modem
historians have debated his case—was he guilty or not guilty ? Grote definitely
holds “ the positive
1 Thuc. iv.
108.
verdict of
guilty fully merited.” 1 Thirlwall brings Thucydides in not
guilty—" human prudence and activity could not have accomplished more than
Thucydides did under the same circumstances.”2 The Germans, it
appears, are similarly divided. Eduard Meyer clears the air with a verdict of
his own—“ the way in which moderns, quite in Cleon’s manner, tell the ancient
generals what they should have done is most desperately naive.”3 The
fact surely is that we are not in possession of evidence enough to warrant any
decision. It may suffice to see what Thucydides says about it.
At first
sight, it appears that he says nothing—neither confesses to guilt, nor offers
defence. He does not even say who proposed the decree of his exile. Antiquity
guessed that it was Cleon, which is Jikely enough, unless the great man put up
a follower to do it, as sometimes happened in old days and happens still.
Hence, by a conclusion, as easy as the guess on which it rests, came the
feeling which is always present when Thucydides writes of Cleon.4
But before we embark on the share of Cleon in the affair, for which we have no
evidence at all, we had better be done with the case of Thucydides. All that we
actually have to rest on is a number of judgments upon military matters, which
taken together suggest an explanation.
First of
all, then, there is the famous judgment upon Cleon’s engagement to bring the
Spartans on Sphacteria prisoners to Athens within twenty days. It was “ mad
”—the talk of a madman—/uavttoST??. So Thucydides describes it in spite of the
fact that Cleon made good his word.5 “ No sentence,” says Grote, “
throughout the whole of Thucydides astonishes me so much.” 6 And
yet, within fifteen years or so, Anytos sailed with a fleet to relieve Pylos,
the very place, and was held up off Cape Malea by winds, and the Spartans
re-took it (410 B.C.).7 Similarly, when Constantinople fell to the
Turks in 1453, a relieving fleet was at no great distance—at Tenedos, just
outside the Dardanelles—and there it stayed, wind-bound for weeks. Landsmen are
at a loss in criticizing the conduct
1 Grote, vi. 191 fl. 2 Thirlwall, ch. xxiii.
8 Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iv. § 599. * Life, by
Marcellinus, 46.
6 Thuc. iv. 39. 6 Grote, vi. 127.
7 Diod. Sic. xiii. 64 ; that at least was the
received explanation.
of fleets
and admirals ; they neither know what a ship can do nor what it cannot—and both
are surprising. Who but a maniac would undertake to control the winds round
Cape Malea for twenty days ?
Again and
again, in the Speeches, Thucydides reiterates how incalculable a thing war is.
" Consider,” say the Athenians in the First Book, “ the vast influence of
accident in war. ... As it continues, it generally becomes an affair of chances
” (i. 78, 1, 2). ‘‘War of all things,” say the Corinthians, " proceeds
least upon set rules ” (i. 122). “ Remember,” says Nicias toward the end at
Syracuse, “ the accidents in wars, and hope that chance may be with us ” (vii.
6i, 3). So apparently thought the Duke of Wellington, who told Creevey on the
day after Waterloo that it was “ a damned near-run thing—the nearest thing he
had ever seen.” So thought not the Athenians.1 In 424 they banished
and fined the generals who had left Sicily as a result of the congress of
Gela—sent home by the allies who had called them in, and wanted them now no
more. “ So thoroughly had the present prosperity persuaded the citizens that
nothing could withstand them, and that they could achieve what was possible and
what was impracticable alike, whether with ample equipment or inadequate,
indifferently.” With these strong words Thucydides leaves the fortunes of
Eurymedon and his colleagues— words that students have been quick to apply to
his own case.2
For twenty
years Thucydides was in exile. It has been conjectured that it was not an
ordinary form of exile, but one which compelled him to avoid all contact with
Athenians for fear of arrest—a condemnation for treachery—so completely is he
excluded from Athenian information.3 Even if this suggestion goes
too far, exile had not for an ancient Greek the alleviations of to-day. He was
everywhere uncomfortable, everywhere more or less liable to injustice and
ill-usage— Athens perhaps excepted. And there was moreover within
1A
sharp-witted but thoughtless democracy ” is the happy phrase of Mr. Lamb, Clio
Enthroned, p. 164.
2 Thuc. iv. 65. Cf. also iii. 115, the case of
Laches, parodied by Aristophanes in the Wasps; and Plut. Nicias, 6, that of
Paches, who committed suicide in the court.
3 Grundy, Thuc. p. 35.
him a
passion for his native place that would drive him to strange lengths. Pericles
had bidden his fellow-citizens be lovers of Athens—ipaaral, his term, is not
our quiet and natural word, but a word of passion, blind, unreasoning, and
wild, the passion of a young man for a woman ; and epa><s again is the
word Thucydides uses, and Plutarch after him, to describe the mad infatuation
that fell on the Athenians to go to Syracuse. Such a passion for the native
land it was that induced Greeks, not in a single case, but in many, to inflict
on their country any wound, any disaster, any shame, if only they might live at
home, and be exiles no more. What matter if instead of being great the city was
small now, free no longer, but a vassal to Sparta, or Athens, or Persia—the exile
was home again.1 It is not to be thought that Thucydides would have
paid such a price to live in Athens, but we have to realize how men hated exile
and longed~for home, and the familiar scene, with all the associations of
friendship and childhood, of family grave and local cult—and safety. One chance
of return Thucydides had, when in 411 the Four Hundred became masters of the
city. There was hope then for an exile, but “ they did not recall the exiles
because of Alcibiades ” (viii. 70).
He seems
to have spent his years, at any rate partly, in travel among the scenes of
action of the war. Pylos, modem travellers tell us, he did not see 2—not
even Thomas Arnold’s geological changes will reconcile them to his account of
the place ; it is not the work of a man who saw it. How should he see it, while
his countrymen held it ? Plataea he never saw either—what interest had it for
an Athenian before the siege, or how, again, could he visit it after the siege
? But he seems to have a personal knowledge of the regions of Demosthenes’
famous campaign in Aetolia, and of the topography ol Syracuse.3
Sparta, it appears, he visited. To Italy he hardly
1 Hie terrarum mihi praeter omnes angulus ridet
(Horace, Odes, ii. 6,13). Cf. the proverb ckijtj 2v\o<tS>vtos tipvxapiti,
Strabo, 638 ; Herodotus, iii. 149.
a Cf.
Grundy, Thuc. p. 25.
8 Freeman,
Hist, of Sicily, iii. p. 595 : “ To my mind the signs that he had gone over
every inch of the ground of the Syracusan siege are beyond all gainsaying. . .
. The oftener I read his text, the oftener I step out the ground, the more
thoroughly do I feel that the two fit
went—his
use of the name is remarked as covering only a small part of the land, and he
confuses Etruscans and Campanians. The outlying regions of the world which
Herodotus travelled with such delight, he let alone—Egypt, Asia Minor, and the
East. But his account of Macedon seems to imply knowledge, and gratitude has
been traced in the language he uses of Archelaus.1 Macedon was near
and not too Athenian.
One
curious if doubtful relic of a residence at the court of Archelaus survives in
the four-lined stanza, which the ancients say Thucydides wrote to commemorate
Euripides who died at that court, far from his country, but a voluntary exile.
Greece is
thy monument, Euripides,
In Macedon
laid, where thou didst end thy days ;
Thy
country Athens, veriest Greece of Greece;
The Muse
thy joy, and everywhere thy praise.2
The utmost
that we can say about the epitaph is that it is ascribed in a number of places
to Thucydides, though such ascriptions are easy and tempting to certain types
of mind. That the sentiment of the third line is that of Thucydides, we need
only turn to the great Funeral Speech of Pericles to see. There is no Greece
but Athens after all. If the rivals of Athens did not admit this in the
historian’s day, all Greece and all the world felt it in time.
Meantime
the years of exile dragged on, not without their influence on Thucydides. He
wrote, he travelled, he watched men and events,3 he thought, he
developed his gnarled and involved style and pursued his inquiries with a
deepening sense of the value of accuracy and precision—to a«pt/3es— in
knowledge and in speech. His banishment, as he said,
into one
another in the minutest detail.” Mr. W. E. Heitland (Journal of Philology,
xxiii. p 68) doubts whether Thucydides ever visited Syracuse—this after ‘‘ a
hard week’s work on the ground ” in 1883. Grundy, Croiset, and others side with
Freeman.
1 Thuc. ii. 100.
2 A nth. Pal. vii. 45 :
fivrjfia
pep ‘F'Was ana<r Evpmibov' d(Trta 8’ i<r\e 1 yrj Ma/ced/av' fj yap
8c'£aro rep pa {3ioV irarpis 8' **EAXado? *EAAas *Adrjvar irKeiara 8e Movcratp
Ttpyjras, in rroAASv Kal tov tnaivov e^ei.
8 Lamb,
Clio Enthroned, pp. 35-38, remarks his attention to trade and its effects on
cities and civilization.
threw him
among the Peloponnesians and gave him a chance to understand somewhat more of
them in quiet.1 He learnt and took pains to write something of their
military system and its efficiency.2 Incidentally he rebukes an
author whom he does not name for speaking of the Pitanates lochos—a regiment
with a local name. Herodotus ought to have known there was no such thing—“ so
careless is the inquiry for truth with many men, and they are more apt to turn
to what lies ready to hand.” 3 But the Spartans, as he says,
preferred to make a secret of their constitution and of all they did.4
They had no ambition, it seems, to be “ the education of Greece,” and when
foreigners learnt too much they put them over the frontier.*
But exile
must have had results of more significance than mere opportunities of
information. What effect had it on the man’s mind, on his whole nature ? Here
we can only make guesses, as we have so little knowledge of him before he was
banished. Yet a thoughtful man, cut off from all that is dear and familiar,
does not spend his days moving about from one strange scene to another without
penetrating deeper into the realities of life. He gets outside the parish,
outside the island, beyond the conventions, the traditions, and the common
values, as year after year he sees the cities of many men and learns their
mind. Solitude drives him into reflection, and intensifies a native severity of
thought. He comes back to Athens a stranger, a man forgotten, to a changed
city. The native land is never the same after
1 v. 26, 5. * v. 66, 67.
3 i. 20, 3, a chapter in which he picks out three
famous errors—the Athenian tyrannicides and the Spartan king’s two votes being
the other subjects of his criticism. Ovras draAai'Trajpos—the phrase has often
come to my mind as I have listened to talk about the great European War.
* v. 68.
61 cannot
help wondering also whether Thucydides had any contact with Alcibiades during
the years they were both in exile ; note how he knows what Alcibiades did in
Sparta, and who were his friends and his enemies there, and how he advised
Endios, vi. 88-93 ; vii. 18 ; viii. 6, 12 ; in and about Asia, viii. 14—17, 26
; at the court of Tissaphernes, and what advice he gave him, viii. 45 > 4-6,
52> S®> * an<^ the sentence in viii. 70, recording
that the exiles were not recalled " because of Alcibiades.”
years
abroad. Caesar came back to Rome after eight years in Gaul a new man, free as
he had not been before, in virtue of new thoughts and new experiences, with a
quicker and surer instinct to base himself on the real and the ultimate. Why
has Thucydides so very little to say of Athenian politics ? Of Cleon he speaks,
but Hyperbolus — a sentence suffices to chronicle the death" of the
wretched creature (/toyOripbv Sfvdpairov), as if in life he did not count, but
his death were a sign of the times, a manifesto, to be noted ;1 and
yet the vigour with which Aristophanes attacks Hyperbolus suggests that the
poet thought he mattered. Did the ebb and flow, the storms and passions, of
party life in Athens matter—any of it, all of it ? Once he had been in the
thick of it—chosen to be on a " ticket ”—but how little it all meant! When
policies have to be discussed in the History, it is “ the Athenians ” who do
this or that, who “ speak as follows.”2 But in each case there was a
meeting of the ecclesia, a debate, points made, advantages scored, a vote
taken, a policy carried and a policy lost, reputations risen and fallen. Was
there ? How little it signifies after ten, fifteen, twenty years of absence! Strange
thoughts grow
About the
life before I lived this life.
What a
contrast between the living pictures Aristophanes gives of it, and the
indifference of Thucydides ! "All is done well,” says the king leaving
Troy, in Euripides’ play,
Cl TL
T(£>vh' *X€L
“ if ought
of it all is well.” After all, what happens in the assembly or anywhere else
only matters as it takes one into the human mind ; and exile gives leisure to
track out some of what Dr. Johnson called the mind’s anfractuosities.
On the
other hand it is often true that a man never knows his country and his people
till he sees them from without as well as from within, from a distance as well
as at close quarters —till he is so detached in life and thought that his heart
will not confuse his head. What did Athens mean ? Let a man
1 Thuc. viii. 73, 3 ; a passage which suggests
personal contempt.
2 Dionysius, de Thuc. 14, 15, § 842, cannot make
out the principle on which Thucydides elects to give a speech on one occasion
and not on another.
try the
brawling sensual democracy of Syracuse—or Sparta and its machine-made life—or
Macedon, where a brilliant usurper is forcing civilization on clans and
cantons—or Thrace among the gold mines, even if they are his own. What would
anybody—any man of years and mind—want to live in Thessaly for ? asks Socrates
in the Crito.1
No, Athens after all, deduct what you like, what you must, it is the place; and
we shall see why in a little.
At last
the long war was over—as significant in its issues as Thucydides had divined
from the beginning that it would be— a disaster for all Greece in its long
course, for “ war takes away the easy supply of daily wants and is a violent
teacher ” 2— a manifold disaster in its outcome. Athenian democracy
was overthrown, and the tyranny of the Thirty took its place. The exiles
returned—no modem Englishman can readily feel what that sentence implies.3
Pausanias long after tells us that there was a vote for the recall of
Thucydides proposed by a man Oenobios, but he adds that he (apparently Thucydides)
" was murdered on his way back, and there is a monument to him not far
from the Melitid gate.” 4 There is confusion here, since it is
evident that Thucydides lived to see his country again—saw it in its
humiliation, stripped of the great walls, for he proves a point as to their
swift building in Themistocles' times, from their foundations "of all
sorts of stories,” visible to-day—stelae from graves, stones wrought and
unwrought, such as chanced to be handy.6 A strange picture—the old
exile home again going to the razed walls to test the accuracy of a point in
history.
He lived a
few more years, busied as for so long with his History, and writing now, as
some critics acutely suggest, some of its most impressive parts. From certain
small
1 Plato,
Crito, 53D-54A.
1 Thuc. iii. 82, 2.
Professor Cramb, in his Germany and England, renders or paraphrases /3iaior
dtSacncaXos as “ stern disciplinarian.” If this is right, we shall have to
revise our view of the historian’s opinion of Cleon ; jStatoVaros tSjv irokvcajv
(iii. 36) has not hitherto been considered praise. On the advantage of wealth
as contributing to morals, see old Cephalos in Plato, Rep. i. 331B. ,
8 Xen.
Hellenica, ii. 2, 23, and ii. 3, 15, Critias 7rpo7renjf rjv eVt t6 iroWovs
airoKTeivftv, are Kai <j}vyav viro tov drjfiov.
* Pausanias, i. 23, 11. * Thuc. i. 93.
indications,1
mostly silences, it is held that his death probably fell in or about the year
399—where, we cannot guess. The ancient story as to his being murdered, with
its variants as to place, may rest merely on the fact of his work being
unfinished —or it may be true ; there is no telling. Marcellinus states that
some said the Eighth Book “ was a bastard,” either from his daughter’s hand or
Xenophon’s, but “ it was not in feminine nature to imitate such gifts and such
skill,” and the book " all but shouts ” (fiovov ov%i fioa) that Thucydides
wrote it, though some more exquisite critics (toi<s ^apt,e<TTepoi<s)
think that he only roughed it out and did not give it the finish that he would
have wished.2 In any case, the life was over before the work was
done, for it is clear that his purpose was to tell the story of the whole war.
We have
now to turn to the man’s life-work, and, without analysing it or pausing to
discuss it in any detail, to use it to learn something of the man himself; and
we may begin with thj^Athenian and his people.
/ As we
saw before, Thucydides is Athenian through and through—in education, in spirit,
in feeling, in heart, whatever detachment years and loneliness and exile may
have given him. But to be Athenian did not connote approval of all that Athenians
were and did. The gift of self-criticism was not denied to the most gifted
people of antiquity, and the worst that we know of Athens comes, like the best,
from her sons— a fact that perplexed simple natures in a less complicated age
of Greece. Dionysius of Halicarnassus—“ ce bon Denys d’Halicarnasse,” as
Boissier called him—is quite definite on this point and one or two others.
A
historian’s first task, his chief task, says Dionysius,3 is to
choose a theme noble and acceptable to those who shall read it; but Thucydides
writes of a war neither noble nor
1 Some of them are very trifling. Most people
would haxdly find, or feel, any reference to the trial of Socrates in the
statement as to Antiphon’s defence, viii. 68, 2. This was a suggestion of
Classen.
2 Some modern critics have
the same view; they consider the absence of speeches a sign of interrupted
work. The last broken sentence may either be evidence of an abrupt end of his
labours, or of an accident to his MS. !
3 Letter to Pompeius, ch. 3, pp. 767-769, 774.
Contrast Lucian, Quomodo Historia, 38, 51.
fortunate,
a war that had better never have happened at all, or at least would be better
forgotten. He made his beginning at the very moment when things began to go ill
with the Greek world ; which, as a Greek and an Athenian, he ought not to have
done—a man too of the first rank, whom the Athenians had honoured with the
generalship and other things ; and he did it with such obvious malice, that
though he might have found causes elsewhere, he attached the blame for the war
to his own city. His disposition was stubborn and bitter, and he had a grudge
against his country, because of his exile. He emphasizes her failures with
great precision —here the critic uses the historian’s own adverb, xal fiaka
aiepi/SS)?—and what went to her mind, he either does not mention at all or as
if by constraint.
So wrote
Dionysius, himself a historian in many books ; but, as with Plutarch, so in his
case we have to note that Greek subjects of the Roman Empire lacked something
needful for the intelligence of Greeks of more spacious days. Still he raises
some questions, and to solve them we must go to Thucydides himself. How did he
feel toward his people and their government and their ideals in the long run ?
Nicias, as
we have seen, was his party leader—curious as it is to write it—and it was on
the " ticket " of Nicias that he was elected general. For Cleon there
can be no doubt that he had a great dislike or distaste. We need not say with
the ancients that it was because Cleon got him banished ; the man, with his
maniacal brags, with his reckless, headlong violence in speech, in policy, and
in fight, was antipathetic— and so was the whole school of them, the "
dynasty of dealers,” as Aristophanes called them—the men who would have war at
any price, who refused again and again to have peace when it could have been
had with triumph and empire, and yet again when it was needed to heal the
country and could still have been had with honour, and finally when no sane man
could have dreamed there was any other hope even of a national existence. Quite
apart from the vulgarity of mind that the dynasty of dealers showed, clever
leaders and able financiers as some of them undoubtedly were, they never
realized the actual world in which they lived. It is a fine stroke when
Thucydides sets in Cleon’s mouth the complaint
against
idialogues, as Napoleon called them, men, who, in Cleon’s phrase, " seek
something else, so to speak, than the conditions under which we live.”1
What else did all the Cleons and Cleophons do—living on hopes and teaching
their fellow-citizens to count everything possible " whether feasible or
impracticable, with proper outfit or deficient, indifferently ” ?
Many views
have been held about Thucydides’ own political leanings. Some have put together
his supposed connexion with the house of Cimon and the great picture that he
draws of Pericles, and have deduced a change of camp—the colossal genius of
Pericles detached him from his hereditary loyalties. There is no one who has given
a more brilliant presentment of all that we associate with Pericles, and yet as
we pass on from his speeches to Cleon’s we find phrases we have met
before—strange assonances and echoes of Pericles himself. How do they come
there ? Did Cleon quote Pericles when he addressed the Assembly ? He had been
Pericles’ opponent on the extreme Left, out-demagoguing him as a clever
extremist, not yet entrusted with responsibility, so easily may. He might very
well have borrowed his language in later days— and how curious that it should
be so! Much has been said of Thucydidean irony, but “ irony ’’ is a doubtful
word at best; it tells us too much or too little. But if ever a historical work
was wrought all over, till every hint of assonance or turn of phrase seems to
the reader to be meant, to be deliberate and conscious, it is Thucydides’
History, above all in its speeches. How curious then that Cleon slips so
naturally into the language of his great predecessor for all the contrasts
patent between them ! Is Cleon the heir of Pericles—heir to his policy and to
his language ? Is the massacre of the Mitylenaeans the natural outcome of the
magnificence, imperial and Panhellenic, of Pericles ? In Athens, it is the
boast of Pericles, life is more human, more neighbourly, kinder, richer, than
elsewhere. " Do not be misled,” shouted Cleon, slapping his thigh,* “ by
those three things most hostile to an empire—by pity, by beautiful language, by
sweet reasonableness.”3 They stand very far apart; and
1 Thuc. iii. 38, 7. a
Plut. Nicias, 8.
5 Thuc. iii. 40, 2—inieUeia is the word; I give
Matthew Arnold’s rendering of it, in another connexion.
yet they
stand together—“ You hold your empire as a tyranny.”
Thucydides
nowhere says tflat he is opposed to the Athenian Empire—he very rarely
expresses any moral judgment, so rarely that some critics hold to-day that he
never made any ; but it is impossible to read Cleon on Mitylene, or to follow
the discussion between the Athenian and the Meilian delegates, without a surge
of feeling within oneself. Is it conceivable that a man could write them
stony-hearted as some critics suggest ? It is not thinkable.
".As
for the gods, we expect to have quite as much of their favour as you,” say the
Athenians; “for we are not doing or claiming anything which goes beyond common
opinion about divine or men’s desires about human things. For of the gods we
believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can
rule they will. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first who have
acted upon it; we did but inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time, and we
know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we
do. So much for the gods ; we have told you why we expect to stand as high in
their good opinion as you.” 1
There are
points here which must be reserved for abater moment, but for the present we
may remark that no access to the cynicism of the speaker seems possible.
Whether he actually said so much, or whether Thucydides interpreted him so, he
represented the temper of the imperial people. “ The place was closely
invested, and there was treachery among the citizens themselves. So the Melians
were induced to surrender at discretion. The Athenians thereupon put to death
all who were of military age, and made slaves of the women and children. They
then colonized the island, sending thither five hundred settlers of their own.”
And in the next sentences we learn that the Athenians, after conquering Melos,
conceived the hope and the desire of conquering Sicily; and the story moves on
to the Sicilian expedition.
It is
remarked that Thucydides offers no comment on the right or wrong of such an
action, nor again in the earlier passage where the Plataeans plead for life
before the stony- 1 Thuc. v. 105 (Jowett’s translation).
faced
Spartans who will put them to death whatever they say. The Spartans of course
made no speech about it. It is the way men act and have acted from before
Agamemnon down to our own day. God, hope, humanity, right and wrong— all irrelevant;
Odysseus acted so in Euripides’ play1 and had no bad end. Callicles
talks so in the Gorgias and talks sense, for Socrates did come to the hemlock.
Diodotus, whoever he was, who makes the speech against Cleon’s demand to treat
the Mitylenaeans in the same way, drags in neither gods nor justice ; the
argument for mercy to beaten subjects or victims is expediency.
On the
other side we have one or two things to set. When the Thracians, the neighbours
of the historian, dashed into Mycalessos, “ they cut down all whom they
met—women, children, beasts of burden, every living thing they saw. For the
Thracians, when they dare, can be as bloody as the worst barbarians. There in
Mycalessos . : . they even fell upon a boys’ school, the largest in the place,
which the children had just entered, and massacred them every one. . . .
Considering the size of the city, no calamity more deplorable occurred during
the war.” 2 After all it was not very unlike Melos, but for the
suddenness. This is perhaps the nearest the historian comes to a judgment on
any such acts, unless the description of stasis at Corcyra contain some more
personal feeling. Yet it is not merely that a modem reader feels somehow that
a great historian cannot be quite callous; there is surely evidence as to his
own mind in the pleas of the victims. A man who really had no moral feeling
about the methods of Athenian imperialism could never have produced such
effects upon the human spirit—he would not have lingered over such matters, he
would have taken them as a matter of course, he would not have called attention
to them and brought out their hatefulness.3 Ancient critics
understood him better than some of us to-day; they recognized his extraordinary
powers of pathos, his gift for appeal to feeling, and, if Dionysius’ notion
that he wished to rouse ill-will against
1 See
Chapter V. p. 159. 2
Thuc. vii. 29, 30.
8 See Girard, Thucydide, pp. 234-238: "L’idee du
droit se degage toute seule du spectacle des faits, de la lutte des passions
qui les pro- duisent, des debats contradictoires auxquels ils donnent lieu.”
his
country, to vent malice on her, is absurd, it still bears witness to the fact
that Thucydides does bring out the hateful wrong that Athens did to mankind for
the sake of empire. That he does it with a wonderful reserve is a matter to
which we must return. .
Meanwhile
Thucydides makes it clear to those who can feel—not of course to others, for
there is no evidence that he looked for a Thracian public—that he did not
approve of the imperialism of Cleon and Alcibiades—nor of Pericles, after all.
Yet he shows fairly enough how the empire itself arose out of service done. The
“ Athenians ” who happened to be at Sparta tell the story of how the Spartans
refused to lead Greece against Persia, and " out of the work itself we
were compelled ” 1 to take the vacant leadership. That is true, and
it was necessary, as history shows by the time we reach Antalkidas. The same
language is held by Euphemos at Camarina,2 but he has a tinge of a
later day, which suggests that the Imperialism of 416 was not quite the
national patriotism of 479.
So much
for Imperial Democracy abroad, and we have seen that he does not admire its
leaders at home. That from time to time he drops such a phrase as this—“ as a
crowd will ” 3—proves little. Even the most convinced Democrats
recognize that a sovereign people can make mistakes, and bad ones. Herodotus *
and Abraham Lincoln agree that “ you can fool all the people some of the time.”
If we are to talk of ideal constitutions or governments in a world, where they
seem never to have existed or never to have been recognized by those who lived
under them, and to ask what was the historian’s ideal, Thucydides makes it
plain that he did not admire tyranny or monarchy—the tyrants were small in
outlook and kept Greece paralysed ; 8 and his description of the
oligarchy of the Four Hundred in Athens brings out forcibly how oppressive and
how impossible it was. It succeeded just
1 Thuc. i. 75, 3. 2 Thuc. vi. 82, 83.
8 e.g. in
the case of Pericles, ii. 65, 14; cf. iv. 28, 3 ; vi. 63, 2 ; viii. i, 4. See
the very interesting and suggestive section in Lamb, Clio Enthroned, ch iii. §
3.
* Herodotus,
V. 97, jroXAoir yap oik€ elvat
eujrereoTepoi/ Sia/3aXAeii/ r) eva.
8 Thuc. i.
17.
so long as
nobody quite knew what it was, or whether he was safe with his neighbour ; but
it fell as soon as men saw it would use the sword on the citizens and make
surrender to the nation’s enemy. No, democracy was the only stable government
that Athens could have.
All the
same—we may call it doctrinaire or pedantic—he shows a weakness for a moderate
democracy, which is interesting. Mr. R. A. Neil has discussed the political
use in Greece of moral terms.1 Sdxfrpwv is one of them, with the
verb and the noun derived from it. " Moral sense in politics ” marked
Sparta and Chios, and prosperity along with it.2 Pindar in a more
lyric way had said the same df Corinth two generations before—“ There abides
the spirit of law (Evvo/ita) and her sister, Justice, sure foundation of
cities, and Peace) one at heart with them, stewards of wealth for men, golden
daughters of Themis of good counsel.” 3 The poet meant oligarchy
more or less. The historian describes the movement in Athens, out of which the
Four Hundred came, as one toward “ good order ” (evranreiv); and, later on, in
a terribly involved sentence, which Dionysius picked out as an example of his
tricks with grammar,4 he tells us that once the subject cities
received “ moral sense ” and freedom of action —i.e. had oligarchies set up in
them by Pisander—they preferred " straight freedom ” (r-qv avmcpw;
ekevdepiav) to the “ skin-deep good order ” of Athens airo r<2v ’Adrjvalw vitovKov ewo/u'a?6).
However, oligarchy was not to be in Athens, and recourse was had to another
scheme, something in the direction or after the style of the Five Thousand who
had so far existed in talk only. What exactly this constitution was, he does
not say, but he does say that " during its early days it was the best
constitution which the Athenians ever enjoyed within my memory. Oligarchy and
Democracy were duly attempered. And thus after the miserable state into which
she had fallen, the city was again able to raise
1 Appendix to his edition of the Knights.
2 Thuc. viii. 24, 4. 3 Pindar, Olympian, 13, 1-10.
4 Dionysius, Letter to Ammaeus, p. 800:
civo/ilas, he says, would in an ordinary author have been accusative. The MSS.,
Jowett says, read mVoi/o/n'ar, and he suggests Dionysius may have made a slip
of memory, which does not seem probable.
6 Thuc.
viii. 64, 5.
her head.”
1 Whatever it was, this “ constitution of Thera- menes ’ ’ did not
last beyond a few months. It is only interesting in two ways—first, that it
could not maintain itself as a substitute for real Democracy, and secondly,
that even so it won the praise of Thucydides who in this marked way prefers it
to the rule of Pericles himself—though perhaps he would add, if we could ask
him, that he only meant that it was preferable on paper. He would hardly “ seek
something different, so to say, from the conditions under which we live ” ; but
perhaps there is a streak of the doctrinaire in every reflective student of
politics, especially in those who are not actually engaged in them. Real
constitutions are never quite ideal; like our clothes they keep wearing out,
and wear out unevenly, and it is best for a people when its constitution will
admit of halfconscious adjustment, instinctive accommodation to new
circumstances, when it is something like that flux which Heraclitus saw in all
human and other affairs.
But
constitutions, actual or projected, do not sum up the life of a people, and it
was not because of a constitution that Thucydides was interested in Athens. We
may waive— though we ought not to forget—the natural human ties of home, and
friendship, and association. The Athenian character interested the Athenian
citizen—it was so quick, so penetrative, so engaging, so full of life and fire
and imagination. The Corinthian speaker addressing the Spartans contrasts the
two national temperaments : they are quick to conceive the plan and quick to
carry it out—you originate nothing ; they will take risks of the most reckless
(yes, but, says Pericles elsewhere, they calculate those risks in cold blood
and then face them light-heartedly)—you are strong, but act feebly; they are
impetuous—you dilatory; they are always abroad, and you for ever at home ; in a
word, they were born neither to have peace themselves, nor to allow other men
to have it either.2 The pair of portraits is admirable—better than
any Corinthian ever offered to Peloponnesian allies at Sparta.
The other
side is given in a speech made by an Athenian at Athens. “ We forget that a
state in which the laws, though imperfect, are unalterable, is better off than
one in which the laws are good but powerless. Dulness and modesty [afiaOia 1
Thuc. viii. 97. ‘ Thuc. i. 70.
fiera
<rm<\>poavvq<;) are a more useful combination than cleverness and
licence ; and the more simple sort generally make better citizens than the more
acute (£vveTa>repov<s), for the latter desire to be thought wiser than
the laws . . . and their folly generally ends in the ruin of their country. ...
In such rhetorical contests the city gives away the prizes to others while she
takes the risk upon herself. . . . You go to a discussion as spectators, and
take your facts on hearsay—the easiest dupes of new-fangled arguments, the
slaves of every new paradox, you despise what is familiar.” 1 The
speaker really has a good case, and he gets a lot of support. King Archidamus
in the same vein sounds the praise of Sparta, “ because we are not so highly
educated as to have learnt to despise the laws.”2 Aristophanes later
on makes Aeschylus complain in The Frogs of the effect of this Athenian habit
of mind, whose high priest was Euripides :
The
disorder has spread to the fleet and the crew ;
The
service is ruined and ruined by you—
With prate
and debate in a mutinous state ;
Whereas in
my day 'twas a different way ;
Nothing
they said and knew nothing to say,
But to
call for their porridge, and cry, " Pull away.” 8
What Plato
has to say of " the democratic man ” we shall see later on.4
The same thought reappears for ever. J. A. Froude in our own day has it. “ John
Mill called English Conservatives the stupid party. Well, stupidity in its
place is not always a bad thing. I have a high respect for Conservatism.® . .
. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine are generally nonsense.” 6
So Cleon has after all a good many highly respectable people to support the
ideas, from which he proceeds to plead for the massacre of the Mitylenaeans.
But what
does Thucydides mean by it all ? In the Funeral Speech, which Pericles delivers
over those fallen in the first year of the war, there is a glowing eulogy of
Athenian character and of that essential freedom of all Athenian ways which
gives the individual an unexampled charter to think, to speak, and
1 Thuc.
iii. 37, 38, with some omissions and compressions.
3 Thuc. i. 84. *
Aristophanes, Frogs, 1070 (Frere).
* See Chapter IX. p. 298. 6
’AfiaSia fiera (ra<j>po<rvvrjs, no doubt.
’ Erasmus,
lect. viii. p. 147.
to act as
his own inmost nature prompts, and as the world in its variety and its wonder
calls. “ We have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting too,
whereas other men arecourageous from ignorance, but hesitate uponreflection.1
. . . To sum up, I say that Athens is the education of Greece, and that the
individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting
himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and
grace.” 2 Once again, there is a certain dim correspondence between
the utterances of Pericles and Cleon ; they are describing the same temperament.
The strength and the weakness of a human character spring in general from the
same root. The Athenian had in truth the gifts and graces that Pericles extols,
and was in consequence exposed to the criticism of Cleon, just as the artistic
temperament with all its charm and insight is, in our common experience, a
fatal endowment unless it is reinforced with the shopkeeper virtues of ordinary
sense and industry and punctuality—virtues which, by the way, the Athenian
never credited to shopkeeper or tradesman. Mr. Zimmem speaks of Thucydides’ “
usual gentle irony playing round the confident sentences in which Pericles
glorifies the Athenian amateur.” 3 That same irony surely played
round the speech of Cleon—what a censor of Athenian character, this man who
represented Athenian impressionism at its worst, who traded on it, and who led
Athens into the path of ruin, setting the pace for his posterity of
impressionist and impulsive ignorance !
Once again
we have reached one of the deepest things in Thucydides’ own character—his
subtle power of combining depth of feeling with clearness of insight and
controlling it with a self-restraint almost unexampled in literature. He
analyses the national mind ; nothing escapes him; it is all set down with
relentless precision—casual readers, yes, and careful readers have again
remarked on his coldness, his detachment, the clear, keen intellect unclouded
by likes and dislikes, by feelings or sympathies, and they have admired or
disliked it. They are wrong. Thucydides is greater than they think.
1 Thuc. ii.
40, 3 (Jowett). s Thuc.
ii. 41, 1 (Jowett).
* Greek Commonwealth, p. 293. Professor
Bury also speaks of “ a certain veiled irony ” here, but he, I think, is
sometimes a shade too apt to find irony.
6
The warm
sympathies are there. Passion, admiration, intensity of feeling are not
inconsistent in the greatest natures with insight and truth and restraint; they
work together, and it is their co-operation that makes the strange greatness of
the man. He loves Athens, but that does not stay his hand nor shake his touch.
He says no word to safeguard a Dionysius from supposing him resentful and
angry; if a man cannot read what bums on every page, if he cannot see what is
not in ink, nor in mere written words—then he can read the book and opine what
he pleases. It was not written for him— <f)tovavTa crvveTOLcriv. And if he
asks evidence for what is said here, let him explain why it is impossible to
read the story and not be passionately for Athens—Athens right or wrong ; how
is it that the Seventh Book takes one into the same region of feeling and
suffering that Euripides does with his Trojan Women, and yet the Athenians are
in the wrong throughout the whole of the Sicilian expedition ?
“ Others,
who saw their ships worsted, cried and shrieked aloud, and were by the sight
alone more utterly unnerved than the defeated combatants themselves. Others
again, who had fixed their gaze on some part of the struggle which was undecided,
were in a state of excitement still more terrible ; they kept swaying their
bodies to and fro in an agony of hope and fear as the stubborn conflict went on
and on ; for at every instant they were all but saved or all but lost. And
while the strife hung in the balance you might hear in the Athenian army at
once lamentation, shouting, cries of victory or defeat, and all the various
sounds which are wrung from a great host in extremity of danger. Not less
agonizing were the feelings of those on board. At length the Syracusans and
their allies ...”1
It is of
this Seventh Book that Plutarch speaks when he refers to “ those narratives in
which Thucydides, excelling even himself in pathos, in vividness, and in
variety, has told his story in a way that defies imitation.” 2 What
has given him this power ? Why could not a Timaeus do it for all his trying, as
Plutarch half asks ? It was the supreme struggle of Thucydides’ country with
life and death as the issue—and she lost. It took ten more years of protracted
misery to finish her, but
1 Thuc. vii. 71 (Jowett). 2 Plut. Nicias, 1.
the day in
the harbour of Syracuse was her ruin—and the man felt it and has made every
reader feel it. Athens fell, and when Thucydides wrote the great Epitaphios of
Pericles, it was not merely a funeral speech over the dead of the first year,
but a last great eulogy over a fallen people. It has been compared with the
speech of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—a shorter speech, spoken while the
Civil War still continued, by the chief of a great nation, which " under
God ” had “ a new birth of freedom.” The comparison is a just one ; there is
the same note in both speeches. Lincoln saw his country triumph ; not so
Thucydides:
Infdix I
utcunque fereni ea facta nepotes,
Vincet
amor patriae.
We now
come to the actual book he wrote, and we must for the present try to use it
neither as a source from which to learn events, nor as an objective thing in
itself—if there is such a thing—but to study it as the organic offspring of a
great nature, an integer, an artistic whole, and to proceed from a recognition
of its salient points to the study of the mind and heart that produced it.
The first
thing that stands out is, that Thucydides from the very start foresaw that the
war would be above all others significant for the Greek world and so for
mankind. He " began at once on its commencement ” ;1 he "
lived through the whole of it,” 2 and he “ has written it,
everything in order as it occurred, by summers and winters, till the
Lacedaemonians and their allies ended the empire of the Athenians and took the
Long Walls and the Peiraieus. In all, the war lasted twenty- seven years.” 3
And he adds that the Peace of Nicias, as posterity called it, did not really
produce a state of peace ; before it and after it the war was one war. Modern
critics have battled as to the point at which he realized this himself—7
did he compose an " Archidamian War ” down to that Peace of Nicias, and
then write a “ Syracusan Expedition ” as a separate and independent work, and
eventually unite the two histories by the slight structure of the Fifth Book,
and continue with the Eighth—a third scheme ? Historians have done such things—
Clarendon, for instance—but there are difficulties in supposing that Thucydides
did. Is not his prelude in book i. rather
1 Thuc. i.
1,1. 3 Thuc. v. 26, 5. 3 Thuc. v. 26, 1.
too large
and significant for a war ending so inconclusively as that supposed to end with
the Peace of Nicias ? Do not his whole treatment of the war-issues in book i.,
and his judgment on Pericles as contrasted with his successors in book ii.,
imply the full and final war of tw'enty-seven years ? Was there interval enough
for “ The Syracusan Expedition ” to be written (and published ?) after research
on the actual spot before it was clear that the original Peloponnesian War was
in full course again ? Does the whole work really show signs of a
reconstruction of plan ?1 In any case, we have to allow fundamental
revision on the basis of the conception of one war.
That he
kept a diary, made collections, interviewed and cross-examined witnesses, and
visited such scenes of action as were important and were accessible, is clear.
Indeed, he says as much : “Of the events of the war I have not ventured to
speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own ; I
have described nothing but what I either saw myself or learned from others of
whom I made the most careful and particular inquiry. The task was a laborious
one, because eye-witnesses of the same occurrences gave different accounts of
them, as they remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the
other.” 2 It is easy to suggest that it was this long investigation
that brought home to Thucydides the carelessness of men in general as to fact,
and their readiness to accept whatever comes first to hand.3 His
tone is severe, and he means it to be severe; why should men be so inaccurate ?
One recalls Dr. Johnson's vexation with the poor lady who never, when he tried
to examine her, would be categorical, but was always “ wiggle-waggle.” So
careful was Thucydides of fact that a German scholar has collected a long list
of the places where he says he was unable to learn.4 In one place he
refrains from giving a figure, for “ it would seem incredible when compared
with the size of the city.” 8 Some eleven times he gives what he was
told, with the caution that it is
1 The
emphasis on oSe o iroKcpos, used sometimes of the Archidamian, at other times
of the whole war, is overdone. The critics seem to forget how easily phrases
slip out.
8 Thuc. i.
22 (Jowett). 8 Thuc. i. 20.
* Busolt, Gr. Gesch.
iii. 653. 6 Thuc. iii.
113,6.
only what
he was told. His exactitude as to numbers is remarked—they are not like those
of the rhetorical historians; in large figures he gives thousands and hundreds
only—units only in the case of Athens or where exact knowledge was possible.1
His care as to chronology marks an epoch in the writing of history. Eclipses
and earthquakes are carefully noted; men date by them so much.2 The
war began in the fifteenth year of the Thirty Years’ Peace, " when Chrysis
the high-priestess of Argos was in the forty-eighth year of her priesthood,
Aenesias being ephor at Sparta, and at Athens Pythodorus having two months of
his archonship to run.” * He expected that his history would not please—it
would be too exact and bare; 4 and his expectation was right.
Dionysius complains that he is ‘ ‘ obscure and hard to foliow. Many events, of
course, occur in the same summer or winter in different places, and he leaves
the first set of affairs half done and takes another set in hand. It is only
natural that we flounder, and follow the story with some annoyance, when our
attention is distracted in this way.” 6 There is truth in the
complaint; the story of events in outlying regions is very hard to follow ; but
anyone who has worked with the Hellenica of Xenophon 6 (if one may
criticize an old friend) will be grateful for the rigid scheme to which
Thucydides sticks so grimly and conscientiously. The ideal of to s
involves sacrifices for both writer and reader, but it repays them.
In all
this Thucydides has a definite and avowed purpose. " If he who desires to
have before his eyes a true picture of the events which have happened (r&v
re yevo/iivmv to o-a$e? crKoireiv), and of the like events which may be
expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things, shall pronounce what
I have written to be useful, then I shall be satisfied. My history is written
as a possession for ever, rather than as a prize-performance to hear for the
moment.” 7 In other words
1 Peter,
Wahrheit u. Kunst, 117.
! Cf. Thuc.
i. 128, tov jieyav aeurfiov.
* Thuc. ii. 2. * Thuc. i. 22, 4. 6
Letter to Pompeius, p. 773.
6 A year
gets mislaid somehow between 411 and 406 ; did Alcibiades return to Athens in
408 or 407 ? A good deal turns on it.
’ Thuc. i.
22. Is there not just a hint of the didactic, or even of the pedantic, in the
claim—as also, e.g., in his diction, and his corrections of Herodotus ?
he is
writing, as we might say in the language of to-day, for men who take history
seriously, not as a pastime or something vaguely interesting, but as a
rendering of fact and experience that shall illuminate human nature. History is
not for Thucydides, as Aristotle contemptuously suggested, " just what
Alcibiades did ” ;1 Alcibiades had a deeper significance— what he
was went to shape the whole mind of Athens to great issues, and any Hellene who
wishes to understand the world in which he lives must understand the mind of
Athens in the war-time, and Alcibiades supplies perhaps more than one key to
that. But if Alcibiades is to give the reader a clue and not merely to delay or
distract him, there must be some thought- out principle in the presentation;
and that brings us to the method of Thucydides.
We have
seen how exigent his conscience was as to fact; but facts do not make a
history. However scientific a historian may aim at being, or may plume himself
on being, he is amenable to other canons than those of the man of science. He
comes closer to the human mind, and his task is (in a sense) to introduce mind
to mind. He must know his “ period ” (as we call it) and know it intimately, if
he is to interpret it to another; but he must not do it in a mere series of
generalizations, for that leads at once to error and to vagueness. He has
after all to present men and women to his readers, and in action, thinking,
speaking, doing things, influencing one another ; and this means other
faculties than those of scientific research. He must in a word be an artist—he
must emphasize, omit, combine, he must speak at once to mind and heart, to
intellect and feeling. These are the first conditions of literary presentment,
if he is to make history effective for the purposes set before him. If he is
content to be an annalist, to accumulate detail, or if he prefers to leave all
in the workshop, it is another matter. Every faculty that makes literature must
be his, if his work is to live ; and if it does not live it will not avail much
for any purpose.
Limitation
is his first law. A German critic has remarked that Thucydides is great in omission
;2 and he is. There is no end to the omissions; the things are
numberless that he
1 Aristotle, Poetics, g, 1451 b.
a Muller-Striibing—“ gross im Verschweigen.” .
could have
told us, that we should have liked to know, that we might have expected him to
tell us. Greek art he passes by—trade, commerce, adventure, exploration,
poetry, philosophy. Who would guess from his pages that any day he heard
Pericles speak, he might have met Sophocles in the street, and Euripides and
Socrates and Pheidias ?—yes, and Aristophanes still a mere lad might have
passed him too. It is perfectly clear that they all had their share of
influence upon him,1 but he does not allude to contemporary
literature.2 Homer, the Homeric hymns, Hesiod, he mentions, but not
his fellow-citizens. He omits finance—even that reassessment of the tribute,
rediscovered by modems in inscriptions, which bulks so big for economic
students of history.3 Mr. Bury is probably right in saying that “
economic factors did not play anything like the same part in the ancient world,
and, if ancient historians considerably underrated them, we may easily fall
into the error of overrating them.” 1 Thucydides ignores all sorts
of things that interest us ; he simplifies, as M. Girard says, with a hardihood
unmatched.5 For one thing he is writing the history of a war, not of
a race, nor of a city. It is also true that while he omits certain aspects of
Athenian life, which are deeply interesting to us, now and again, as in
Pericles’ Funeral Speech, it is clear to those familiar with them that he is
glancing at art and literature. But he does it with a purpose of his own.
The same
canon of limitation applies, as we have seen, to the human factors in the war.
Hyperbolus, we saw, is only mentioned because his murder was a sort of
manifesto. Cleon was a decisive influence in the war ; so he is drawn with care
and precision—and perhaps with the one hint of personal feeling in the eight
books : “ The Athenians laughed at his light talk; but serious people (men of
common sense, tow
1 Cf: the statement of Mr. B. B. Rogers,
translation of Acharnians, pp. xxx-xxxii: "■ I believe
many statements in Thucydides are due to his recollection of the comedies of
Aristophanes.” See also Lamb, Clio Enthroned, pp. 26-28, for attractive
suggestions as to the influence of poetry upon Thucydides.
2 The Atthis of Hellanicos (i. 97) is an
exception which makes the statement above more striking.
8 Hicks and
Hill, Greek Inscr., No. 64.
4 Ancient Greek Historians, p. 92. *Thucydide, p. 204.
a-mfpotri)
were not displeased, for they reckoned that they would get one or other of two
advantages—they would either be rid of Cleon, which they rather hoped, or, if
they were mistaken in their expectations, they would take the Spartans
prisoners,”1 It looks like personal feeling; and yet it
is history. Men did hope to be rid of Cleon, and for a perfectly serious and
good reason, as appeared when he fell at Amphipolis; he was the real obstacle
to peace. . When the obstacle was removed, peace was made. Then we can
understand the o-d><f>pove<;; and we shall have to understand
Cleon—obviously; so Thucydides draws him in his own way, lets him make a
speech, and gives us the full value of his maniac boast and the success that
made common people think him infallible and invincible. In a similar way,
Alcibiades’ chariots and horses and luxury and general expensiveness, his blatant
self-assertion, and some touches even of his phrase, are set out in full in the
history. There were other sumptuous and magnificent young men in Athens, as
Aristophanes and others let us see, but they did not matter. Alcibiades did
matter—only too much. “ In the end his wild courses went far to ruin the
Athenian state. For the people feared the extremes to which he carried his
lawless self-indulgence, and the far-reaching purposes which animated him in
all his actions. They thought he was aiming at a tyranny, and set themselves
against him. And therefore, although his talents as a military commander were
unrivalled, they entrusted the administration of the war to others, because
they personally objected to his private life ; and so they speedily shipwrecked
the state.” 8 So in the case of Pericles, long as he waits before he
mentions him, the historian lingers over him, and lets us feel the full effect
exerted upon his fellow- citizens by this great personality. Here was a man—not
quite perhaps of Thucydides’ own party—who could have saved the state ; at
least, men felt it would have been saved, if they had not in folly abandoned
the principles he laid down for the conduct of the war. The forceful
personality is always a real factor—real as the great plague, or the Syracusan
disaster, or the Persian alliance. So far Thucy-
1 Thuc. iv.
28, 5.
1 Thuc. vi.
15 (Jowett). Cf. Xen. Hellenica, i. 4, 12-5, 16; Plut. Alcib. 34.
dides may
be cited to support Carlyle’s doctrine of the Hero.
The remark
is often made that Thucydides offers no moral judgments on men or actions—a
remark which we have already discussed—but all his praise, or comment, turns on
capacity, aperrj, virtu, as Professor Bury and Professor Murray translate him.
Screws —“ strength of nature ”—the forceful character—the gift or gifts in
virtue of which a man may move men or read a situation, in a word, may really “
do ” something—this endowment, whatever it is, Thucydides emphasizes, for it
makes a man a telling factor. Cleon had it, violent and absurd as he was—so had
Pericles and Antiphon —above all, Themistocles.1 Here “ was a man
whose natural force (c^ucrew? ia-^uv) was unmistakable; this was the quality
for which he was distinguished above other men; from his own native acuteness
(ohceiq yap £we<m), and without study either before or at the time, he was
the ablest judge (KpaTierro<j yvcofioov) of the course to be pursued in a
sudden emergency, and could best divine what was likely to happen in the
remotest future. ... In a word, Themistocles, by natural power of mind
(^vcrera? fiev Svvdfiei) and with the least preparation, was of all men the
best able to extemporize the right thing to be done.” Xenophon’s heroes, like
Xenophon himself, turn to soothsayer and priest for omens and divine guidance.
Thucydides is aware that men do so—that they do it a great deal;2
yet history is made by the men with force of mind; and he confines himself, in
dealing with men, to that. His readers will be put in possession of the facts,
and shall judge of moral questions for themselves.
Mr.
Cornford notices that Thucydides has nothing to do with such conceptions as “
political factors,” “ relations of forces,” “ universal forces,” and so on, and
suggests that their importation into modern study has not been all to the good.
The use of abstract nouns in history is something we apparently owe to
political science. The abstract nouns of
1 Thuc. i.
138, 3 (Jowett). The antithetic coupling of superlatives is a characteristic
mannerism. Cf. Forbes, Thuc. bk. i. Intr. p. xxiii, who gives a series of
striking instances of ‘‘ greatest ” events, etc.
a Cf. Mr.
Lamb’s remark on the weak spot in Nicias’ character, ™ Toioira, Thuc. vii. 50,
4 (Clio Enthroned, p. 75).
Thucydides
would make a poor and rather odd list for a modem1—many of them
would be neuter participles with the article prefixed. But we must not quite
class him with Carlyle in the matter of heroes—despite the strong likeness
between the “ hero ” and the “ man of natural force.” There are, as we all
know, in national and international questions, floating ideas put about no one
knows how, alarms as to what may happen, opinions as to courses to
pursue—drift-thought that tells in the long ran, which a historian cannot well
neglect, for it goes very often to shape a national resolve or leads the way to
some great change. There was “ talk of a dictatorship ” in Rome for a good
while before Caesar became the world’s master. Now gather up the vague “
political factors,” current impressions, impulses, calculations, and there is an
aggregate of contributions to every political situation, which has to be
represented, if the reader is really to be in possession of what he needs. A
modem historian manages it by discussion, fortified by the quotation of popular
catchwords and watchwords, phrases from the speeches, dispatches, newspaper
articles, census reports, stock exchange news, letters, biographies, and so
forth, of the day; and if he does it well, he can carry his reader far into the
life and thought of the period and the moment. It is obvious that an ancient
historian had none of these paper aids, and yet the life that pulses through
them to-day was not wanting then. He could not very well quote what did not
exist, and yet he had to do something equivalent. Thucydides cut the knot by
writing speeches himself, in which he set out the considerations and factors
which would come into play at each significant juncture. In the same chapter,2
already quoted, in which he tells us of his care to see, to learn, and to
examine witnesses in order to be sure as to what really occurred, he tells us
as explicitly that the speeches stand on another footing altogether.
"As
to the speeches which were made either before or during the war, it was hard
for me, and for others who reported them to me, to recollect the exact words. I
have therefore
1
Dionysius, in the Letter to Ammaeus, has some interesting observations on his
peculiar tricks with nouns and genders, e.g. vi. 24, ro jSouM- fievov for
rfjv fiov\r)<Tiv.
* Thuc. i. 22, 1.
put into
the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to the occasion, expressed as I
thought he would be likely to express them, while at the same time I
endeavoured, as nearly as I could, to give the general purport of what was
actually said.”
Nothing
could be more explicit. The method has the advantage of enabling him to
simplify—he can sweep away irrelevant and trifling figures and keep his stage
clear for the people who really matter. It allows him to touch the real place
of speech in Greek life, while his readers escape the irrelevant floods of
Athenian loquacity. He “ speaks things,” as Cromwell said. His speeches
represent real factors, real issues, the reflections that would really occur to
thoughtful men. The method again allows him to give a situation or a national
character from more points of view than one,1 and to do it all while
he keeps himself and his own opinions in the background. Of course he is not
really absent from the speaker's iema on any occasion, nor is the modern
historian with his woof and web of quotations and impressions ; but the device
of Thucydides takes us, or seems to take us—it is psychologically for us much
the same thing—right into the actual scene. Imagination—in Coleridge’s sense of
the word —is an essential in the writing or reading of history, and Thucydides’
method of using the speech is a stimulus to imagination, not less effective for
being an unobtrusive stimulus. Here it is plain that the historian learnt some
of his craft from the tragic poet.
Modem
critics have tried to classify the speeches in different ways. Mr. Grundy draws
a line at the exile, and groups the earlier speeches as those which Thucydides
may have heard, and those which he probably or almost certainly did not hear ;
while of the speeches after the exile, unless he heard Alcibiades at Sparta, it
is practically certain he heard none whatever.® Mr. pomford has another
grouping, which is suggestive.8 There are realistic speeches, he
says, like that of the ephor; 4
1 Thus
there are three pictures of the Spartan character in bk. i., in three speeches,
cc. 71, 80, 86.
* Grundy, Thucydides and his Age, p. 19.
3 Thucydides Mythistoricus, p. 149 f. See also
Lamb, Clio Enthroned, p. 183.
* Thuc. i. 86. One might add vi. 18. 3,
where the scholiast remarks it is Kwr ’AXki/3ki8i7i<—in his vein.
idealistic,
the great Funeral Oration above all; a class " in which sketches of
national character are introduced indirectly,” like the Corinthian’s picture of
the Athenian nature, " with some strain upon dramatic probability,” shading
off into a class “ where irony is openly employed in the tragic manner ” —e.g.
the Mitylenaean speech of Cleon; and lastly a group " still further
removed from realism,” and virtually “ but one degree below the lyric plane
”—of which the Spartan speech as to Pylos and luck is an example. Such
groupings have their value ; but the main thing is to keep the mind clear as to
the historian’s purpose, by a medium avowedly artificial, to bring the reader
to grips with what is undoubtedly real. Mr. Comford would say it was not real,
but Thucydides clearly believed that it was. The speeches were perhaps not made
at all—Busolt holds, however, that every one of them rests on some foundation
of a speech actually delivered ;1—everybody agrees that they could
not have been given in the form in which we have them, for the Spartan
speeches, for instance, are far outside the Spartan range, and in any case no
conceivable popular audience would have listened to speakers so involved and
obscure,2 as Thucydides, ex-politician, must have known at least as
well as we do. Yet Eduard Meyer hits the mark when he calls them “ den
eigentlichen Lebensnerv ” of his work.3 Perhaps with some hesitation
as to the superlative adjective (if conscience works with memory 4)
one might sum the matter up by borrowing the lines of Critias on another great
inventor:
—TovcrSe
rovs Xoyavs Xeyrav 8i8a.yiw.Ttov rjdiorav tlar/yrjuaro yjffvdci KaXvy/ras tfjt/
aikrjdfiav Xoyo>.6
1 Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii. p. 672.
s Let the
reader just think for a moment of Phormio’s speech to his sailors.
s E. Meyer,
Forsch. ii. p. 380.
* Some readers may be glad to know that
Cratippus, his contemporary, 6 <rvvaKfid<ras avrw Ka\ ra jrapaketfpdepra
vrr’ airov avvayayav
(whatever
that exactly means), wrote, av pivav rats npd^a-iv avrcts (viz. the speeches)
epwoSctiv yeytvijtrdcu Xeyoji/, aXXa rals aKovovrnv axtypas ftvak
Cratippus added that Thucydides realized this himself, and that that is why
there are no speeches in bk. viii. So Dionysius of Halicarnassus, de Thucydide,
ch. r6, p. 847.
6 A p. Sext
Empir. adv. Math. ix.. 54.
It has
long been observed what an influence Tragedy had upon Thucydides. Indeed, again
and again it is hard not to use the terms of Tragedy in discussing his work.
Like the tragic poet he refrains from comment and lets the situation draw out
the comment for itself. Xenophon is more Homeric—vyirios, cries Homer of this
man and the other, and Xenophon pauses to remark, for instance, on the shocking
impiety in the Corinthian revolution.1 Mr. Comford, however,
suggests that, consciously borrowing the outward form of Tragedy, Thucydides
took unconsciously the further step, and fell in with its inward form and
principle of design—that, in short, he wrote his history “ to the tune of ”
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.* With amazing ingenuity he traces an analogy as far as
the end of book vii.—luck, hybris, peripeteia, and all; and then comes the
Eighth Book, which is “ outside the tragedy ” somewhat. “ From this, point
onwards,” says Mr. Comford, “ he has little interest in his task; the Eighth
Book is a mere continuation on the old chronological plan, unfinished, dull,
and spiritless. The historian patiently continued his record ; but he seems to
grope his way like a man without a clue.” 8 A strange judgment in
view of the clear prospect Thucydides holds out from the beginning of writing
the whole war down to 404, and of his premature statement that it is written.4
A theory which requires us to find the narrative of the Four Hundred “ dull and
spiritless ” needs some reconsideration.
Jowett
thought better of the Eighth Book. “ The love of truth, the power of thought,
the absence of moral approbation or disapprobation, the irony, the perception
of character,6 the moderation of statement, the general excellence,
no less than the mechanical arrangement into summers and winters, and the
minutiae of language and phraseology, ‘ cry aloud,’ in the words of
Marcellinus, that the Eighth Book is the composition of Thucydides.” The
sentence sums up well many of the characteristics of the historian, with some
of which we have
1 Iliad,
xii. 113; xvi. 46, 686, etc., and Hellenica, iv. 4, 3.
•Matthew
Arnold spoke of a history of English literature being !! written to
the tune of 1 Rule BritanniaA”
3 Thucydides Mythistoricus, 244. 4 Thuc. v. 26.
s Dionysius
thought Thucydides weak in this point, Mhos, at least
as
compared with Herodotus, but allowed him better in pathos.
already
dealt—inevitably, for wherever one touches Thucydides, the whole man is
involved.1 The ancients laid stress on his vividness and his pathos.
No more need be said for the moment of the latter. But let the reader run over
in his mind such scenes as the opening of the war, the coming of the Ambraciot
herald, the building of the fort at Pylos, the sailing of the great fleet for
Syracuse, Epipolae,2 the Terror in Athens, the fort of Eetioneia,
and the whole story of the Four Hundred, and let him realize that in most of
these instances the historian was not there at the time, and he will have a new
sense of the power of the man. He went to one and another of the places
afterwards, and, as Longinus says, he “ makes his account no longer a narrative
but a living action ” (ivaywviov Trpayfia). The best hyperboles, Longinus says
a few pages later, are those which are not noticed. “ This happens when they
are uttered in an outburst of strong feeling, and in harmony with a certain
grandeur in the crisis described, as where Thucydides is speaking of the men
perishing in Sicily. ‘ For the Syracusans,’ he says, ‘ came down and butchered
them, especially those in the river, and the water was at once spoiled, but
they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, even
fighting to have it.’ That blood and mud were drunk together, and yet were
things to be fought for, becomes credible in the intensity of the feeling and
in the crisis.” 3
It was
thus the ancients read Thucydides, sensible of his power of mind, his austere
grandeur, his restrained pathos. They, like ourselves, had to wrestle with his
style and his grammar, his plurals and genders, his racking of every known
construction, the tricks of phrase he learnt from Gorgias, the * awful guesses
in which he involved his readers (Sva-eUaa-ra rot? W0W019), his diction
"figurative, obsolete, archaized, and strange.” 4 They
wondered, like some of the modems, whether he were an atheist, and made guesses
as to the school in which he learnt his atheism—was it that of Anaxagoras ? 6 But
IGiraxd, Thucydide, 221 : Quelque pen que l’on touche
au livre de Thuc. on l’y entrevoit lui-meme.” —
a Thuc. ii.
7, 8 ; iii. 113 ; iv. 4 ; vi. 27 ; vii. 97 ff.
* Longinus, 25 and 38.
* Dionysius, Lettef to A.vnmaeus, 790, ttjv t po7T iktjv kai yXatTTTffxaTiK^v #cai
airripxaiaifiEVTjv
Kai £eviji> Xe£ii>.
6 Marceliinus, Life, 22.
is he an
atheist ? ?7He never says, one way or the other. He remarks at once how much
men are moved by the thought of the gods and how little. Seer and prophet and
omen abounded when the Sicilian fleet sailed ; and when the- disaster came, men
were angry with the prophets who misled them.1 Men appeal to the
thought of the gods in distress, and their enemies brush the appeal aside. The
Eumolpidai and Heralds, who had put the curse on Alcibiades, “ called heaven
and earth to witness that the city must never restore a man who had been
banished for profaning the mysteries.” 2 The city did recall him ;
the curse was taken off; and Alcibiades celebrated the mysteries with his
troops. But the strangest case was that of Nicias—“ least deserving of all
Greeks in my time to come to such misfortune, for l[ie lived in the practice of
every virtue.” Professor Bury deflects the participle (vevopio-ftejniv) from
practice to virtue—" every conventional virtue ”—and finds not encomium
but malice in the sentence. I do not think so.3 The man is deeper
and greater than such a mood at such a moment. Yes, Nicias was pious, even
superstitious, but he failed in “ strength of nature ”—he was not strong enough
nor clear enough—perhaps it was due at the last to his kidney disease—perhaps
there was always the weakness of cautious self-protection about him.
But, after
all, opinions about the gods—or about anything —are not Thucydides’ immediate
affair. This is what happened, and may happen again ; if the reader wishes to
have a true picture of it, here it is ; the picture shall speak for itself.
Thucydides an Athenian fecit.
1 Thuc. viii. . i. a Thuc. viii. 53.
3 I find Mr. Lamb is also against the idea of
irony—" are we to take it as ironical, and not merely a remark on the ways
of the universe, when we read that the plague was most deadly to those who had
any pretensions to virtue—StetjideipovTo, ko'i
paKiora o! aperijs ti
/xErairoiov/xcvot (ii. 51, 5) ? ” {Clio Enthroned, p. 74).
“ "T
N those old happy days ” is the phrase of Demos- *1 thenes as he looks back
over eighty years to the time
A. when
his country ruled an empire and ruled herself and her own citizens, when the
assaults of her enemies had broken down and she had not yet wantonly ruined
herself in the Sicilian expedition.1 It is in human nature to
idealize the past—when Prometheus made the first man, he slaked his clay2
ilvith the water of Lethe, it seems, and we forget in the long run what it
pains us to remember. “ In those old happy days ” Aristophanes was impressed
with the degeneracy of his contemporaries, when he thought of the men who had
fought at Marathon. And yet for us who read Athenian literature, those days do
represent the very midsummer of Greek genius. The glory passed away; the war,
that was to safeguard it, proved the occasion of its undoing. The Athenians “
did all that Pericles told them not to do ” ; his successors, “ each one
struggling to be first himself, were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of
affairs to the whim of the people ” ; it was not that they were unequal to the
tasks they undertook, but that they should never have undertaken them at all,
or, undertaking them, they should have kept their minds to them ; so " in
the end they were overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their
own internal dissensions.” 3 We have seen something of the wonder of
the age of Pericles; we have now to look at the city he left—its policies, its
government, its people, and its general life.
Our
concern is with a nation in war-time, and this compels
1 Meidias, 143.
2 Pausanias saw some of this clay preserved as a
relic (x. 4, 4), but the water of Lethe is the fancy of a much later
mythographer.
3 Thuc. ii. 65.
us to
consider more closely the whole question of the Peloponnesian War. How came it
about that Athens and Sparta fought so long and that they fought at all ? To
us, war is essentially an exceptional condition, disorganizing life in every
country in any way concerned with either belligerent power. Steamships and
electric telegraphs and international loans have made the whole modem world
acutely and quickly sensitive to what happens in any part of the earth, and it
is difficult to think ourselves away from these basal factors of human life as
we know it. The Peloponnesian War vitally affected the whole economics of all
Greece and altered the conditions on which men and cities should live, and, in
the insensible way in which such things come, it changed the very axioms of
political thought. Yet the men who made the war in the first instance did so to
prevent change.
The
central figure in the whole discussion as to the war and its origin is
Pericles. Some part of this eminence he owes to his fellow-countryman,
Aristophanes. This is not begging the question. There were, no doubt; statesmen
in the other cities, but we hardly know their names—a few names at Sparta, none
at all in Corinth,1 or if we do know them we forget them quite
easily. Pericles made the war, says Aristophanes ; and so says Plutarch long
after in his biography, relying on Aristophanes and on others less famous. “
All the same,” he says, " embassies were sent, and sent again, to Athens;
and the Spartan king, Archidamos, did his best to bring most of the grievances
to a friendly settlement and to pacify the allies ; so that it looks as if the
war would not have come upon the Athenians, if they had been persuaded to
rescind the Megarian decree and be reconciled with the Megarians. It was
Pericles who offered the strongest opposition to this, and who egged on the
people to stand to their quarrel with Megara, so he alone had the blame of the
war. ... He seems to have had in his mind some secret and private grievance
against the Megarians.” a Before long Plutarch, as was inevitable,
refers to <rthe famous and hackneyed lines of Aristophanes,” and
then, like a loyal Greek of his period, edges away from them.
1 Unless
one counts the filibuster, Timolaos, of Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 2. 3
* Plut. Pericles, 29, 5 ; 30, 2.
7
“ What the
original cause was, it is not easy to learn; but for the decree not being
rescinded all alike blame Pericles.” Then he hazards another suggestion,
offered by antiquity— the prosecution of Pheidias, followed by his death in
prison and his alleged poisoning by some agent of Pericles, who feared his
revelations—a whole tissue of scandal which we need not consider. Pheidias was
prosecuted, to annoy Pericles, but another ancient writer says he died in Elis,
where he made the great statue of Olympian Zeus. After Pheidias, then Aspasia
and Anaxagoras, and their troubles—and then “ in fear of being tried himself,
he availed himself of the war, which was lingering and smouldering, and he blew
it into a blaze—in the hope that in this way he would scatter the charges
brought against him and dissipate his unpopularity ; for, when the city came to
be involved in great affairs and great dangers, she would trust herself to him
alone, because of his reputation and his ability.” And then Plutarch sheers
away again— “ the grounds for his refusing to let the people give way to the
Spartans are alleged, but the truth is uncertain.” Plutarch does not like these
suggestions—he never liked anything that reflected on the glory of the ancient
Greeks, as his dislike of Herodotus shows—but he found them in his books, and
was uneasy at omitting them. His Life of Pericles is indeed one of his most
significant works—most valuable as a collection of evidence, and delightful
reading, but not a coherent or intelligible portraiture of a statesman.
Plutarch
at all events has preserved for us a fair mass of contemporary or
semi-posthumous gossip against Pericles, and he has made the inevitable
reference to Aristophanes. In 425 B.C. the young poet produced The Acharnians,
which is still one of the pleasantest and most attractive of his plays. It is a
plea for peace, like so many of his comedies of the wartime. The hero,
Dikaiopolis, has to plead for his life against the Achamian elders, who are
enraged with the Peloponnesians because of their ravaged lands—and the
scoundrel has made peace on his account with the national enemy, and this is
what he says :
The
Lacedaemonians I detest entirely;
And may
Poseidon, Lord of Taenarum,
Shake all
their houses down about their ears ;
For I,
like you, have had my vines cut down.
But after
all—for none but friends are here—
Why the
Laconians do we blame for this ?
For men of
ours, I do not say the State,
Remember
this, I do not say the State,
• But worthless fellows of a worthless stamp,
Ill-coined,
ill-minted, spurious little chaps,
Kept on
denouncing Megara’s little coats.
And if a
cucumber or hare they saw,
Or
sucking-pig, or garlic, or lump-salt,
All were
Megarian, and were sold off-hand.
Still
these were trifles and our country's way,
But some
young tipsy cottabus-players went And stole from Megara-town the fair Simaetha.
Then the
Megarians, garlicked with the smart,
Stole, in
return, two of Aspasia’s hussies.
From these
three Wantons o’er the Hellenic race Burst forth the first beginnings of the
War.
For then,
in wrath, the Olympian Pericles Thundered and lightened, and confounded Hellas,
Enacting laws which ran like drinking-songs.
That the
Megarians presently depart
From earth
and sea, the mainland and the mart.
Then the
Megarians, slowly famishing,
Besought
their Spartan friends to get the Law Of the Three Wantons cancelled and
withdrawn.
And oft
they asked us and we yielded not.
Then
followed instantly the clash of shields.1
Aristophanes
is explicit,. as a comic poet should be. He is not weighing evidence, nor
writing for the encyclopaedias of posterity. His business is to discredit the
war and make it look trifling, and if there were other causes for it—well, it
was seven years ago, and the festival of Dionysos needs no history lecture ; it
had other aims. So that if we do not get history from the poet, what right had
we ever to expect it ? The French critics are quite right who cite Aristophanes
as one of the striking examples of the power great writers have of paralysing
critics and obscuring facts.2 Indeed, there is an attractive
suggestion that in the story of the Three Wantons Aristophanes is parodying the
opening of the history of Herodotus. The decree he gently adapts—misquotes
would
1 Aristophanes, Ach. 509-539, the translation of
Mr. B. B. Rogers.
’ Langlois
and Seignobos, Intr. to Study of History, p. 171.
be too
hard a word—to a famous drinking-catch of Timocreon of Rhodes :1
Blind
Plutus ! would nor earth,
Nor sea,
nor mainland might behold thee !
But
Tartarus, void of mirth.
And
Acheron’s dismal stream enfold thee !
For all
the ills there be,
Blind
Plutus, come from thee !
Now
suppose all he says is true—that Simaetha was stolen, and two other girls
stolen in requital, and that Aspasia told Pericles—what an absurd account of a
great war’s origin! " Exactly,” Aristophanes might say, “ so you begin to
suspect humour in a comedy! Admirable! ” The suggestion that Aspasia kept
hetairai is matched by the statement, made a little above and constantly
repeated, that the mother of Euripides was a greengrocer. The only really
relevant facts seem to be that there were custom-house quarrels with Megara,
followed by a decree excluding the Megarians from—something, and then a war,
and vines cut down.2 To the decree we shall return.
Four years
later, Aristophanes in another play explained why Peace had vanished, and how
she was to come back. Hermes himself tells the story to Trygaios, the beetle
hero, and to the chorus :
Hermes. Pheidias
began the mischief, having come to grief and shame,
Pericles
was next in order, fearing he might share the blame,
Dreading
much your hasty temper, and your savage bulldog ways,
So before
misfortune reached him, he contrived a flame to raise,
By his
Megara-enactment setting all the world ablaze. . . .
There was
none to stay the tumult; Peace in silence disappeared.
Trygaios.
By Apollo, I had never heard these simple facts narrated.
No, nor
knew she was so closely to our Pheidias related.
Chorus.
No, nor I, till just this moment: that is why she looks so fair.
Goodness
me ! how many things escape our notice, I declare.*
1 If this is rendered a little freely, and
epithets added, “ it seemed inhuman somehow,” as Plutarch says, not to rhym6 a
catch.
2 Cf. Andocides, 3, 8, 8ia Meyapias
ir6KefO)<ravTii.
8
Aristophanes, Peace, 608-618 (B. B. Rogers).
How many
things do escape our notice! How many years was it since Pheidias met his
troubles—would it be
twelve, or
fifteen, or ? However, the play is
getting on, and
no one
would wish to miss it just to calculate a date. Modern scholars cannot quite be
sure of the exact date of Pheidias’ trial, and it is hardly necessary that they
should be. Here is an entirely new account of the war. " I never heard of
it before.” " Nor I.”
However,
the suggestion has been taken up quite seriously. Pericles, according to Julius
Beloch (to whom students of history are indebted for much that is better), saw
the storm coming and made war to turn it in another direction. Cleon and the
extreme Left (if one may borrow a useful form of political speech from the
French assembly) had begun their attacks—on the outposts so far, Pheidias,
Anaxagoras, etc. Pericles saw his danger; so, when the Corcyraean alliance was
offered, involving war as it did, he secured that it was accepted; and then he
worked steadily for a breach, seizing first the opportunity offered by the
Poteidaian affair, and then standing out about the Megarian decree. The war was
sure to come at some time, Beloch holds ; that it came precisely when it did,
was the work of Pericles. The moment was not a favourable one ; one-third of
the available forces were away in Thrace, and every year of peace would be an
inestimable gain for Athens and for Greece. Pericles knew all this—and chose
war, because it suited him, convinced, of course, that Athens would win,
because she could outlast her enemies. But the best issue to the war could only
be a dull peace or the status quo.1 Beloch further holds, or held, that Pericles mismanaged
the wax itself. He might have held the passes of the Geraneia range, though,
with the Boeotians in his rear, this might have involved great risk. He might
further have attempted a bold offensive, supported by a democratic propaganda
in the Peloponnesus and Boeotia. It would have been a venture, but, as
Alcibiades saw later on, it was the only way to victory. Pericles’ war-policy
required a more glittering success than it got, and when the plague came on
top of a dull and uninspired war, the storm broke, as Thucydides tells us.
1 Beloch, Gr. Gesch. (ed. i), i. pp. 515-518.
These
views are not generally accepted. The conduct of the war was indeed dull and
wearing, but nothing else was possible. The sea was the Athenian element, and
Pericles, as Beloch sees, could not count on his land forces beating the
Spartan and Boeotian hoplites in the field. It was the Spartan strategy to
force such a battle,1 and the hot-heads in Athens wished it.
Pericles refused it altogether—even Plataea was allowed to fall.2
Nor does the suggestion of a democratic propaganda seem a very good one. The
connexion with democratic Argos, advocated by Alcibiades and carried through by
him, had never really helped Athens, and did not now. Democratic plots in
Megara and Boeotia were tried in the first ten years of the war, as readers of
Thucydides remember, but they miscarried.3 Pericles’ war-policy was
to be, as Thucydides represents it, an inglorious one ; it was to lay a great
sacrifice on the country population, and to strain to the utmost the nation's
confidence in its leader.4
It is on
Pericles' conduct of the war that another brilliant theory is shipwrecked. Mr.
Comford maintains that Pericles was pushed from behind into the war, by people
who had other aims than his. " Sicily was in view from the first. Not in
Pericles’ view. . . . 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.” These people were the trading interests down in the Peiraieus,
and Thucydides never saw through their game ; so to him " the Sicilian
enterprise was an irrelevant diversion.” 8 The
1 Grundy,
Thuc. p. 333, says the forcing of such a battle was practically their whole
design.
1 If the open country of Attica was in any case
to be abandoned to Spartan raids, there could have been little use in holding a
fortress at the foot of one of the passes. Hence Plataea was not of real
military significance to the war plans of Athens. It meant more to Thebes.
a Thuc. iy.
66-74, 89-101.
* Cf. Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii. p. 819.
8
Thucydides Mythistoricus, pp. 38, 51. Residents in Cambridge who heard it are
not likely to forget Dr. Verrall’s brilliant lecture on The Birds in 1908, in
which he suggested that the play was an attack on “ Palestinian religion.” A
great Cambridge scholar has wickedly suggested that Dr. VerralPs theory and Mr.
Cornford’s may be readily combined—of course, the war was contrived in that
synagogue down in the Peiraieus.
drawback
is that there is nothing in the first fifteen years of the war that is
inconsistent with the account given by Thucydides of Pericles’ motives. There
were people who dreamed of conquering Sicily and conquering Carthage—so
Aristophanes joked of Hyperbolus in 424 b.c.,1
and Plutarch says the dream goes back to Pericles’ own day; but, after all,
Thucydides’ story is clear and consistent and intelligible.
Athens was
offered the alliance with Corcyra, a power so far neutral. If she refused, the
balance of power would at once be upset by Corinth becoming mistress of the
Corcyraean fleet. She accepted, and herself upset the balance of power; for now
the Corinthians and their allies were at a disadvantage. Pericles must have
foreseen this, and preferred that, if the balance were to be upset, the
advantage should fall to Athens. The Corinthians were now in a difficult
position—Athens on the gulf on the eastern side, Corcyra controlling the
sea-route on the west. With desperate efforts Corinth got Sparta to move, and
the war was made. Seven years before, at the time of the siege of Samos,
440-439 B.C., Corinth had intervened and stopped Peloponnesian aid being sent
to the Samians. Once again Corinth was the decisive factor, and this time for
war; and Corinth was as little enthusiastic as Sparta about the rights of
Megara.
War then
was voted by the allies in the autumn of 432. As military operations could not
begin before the next spring, the winter was spent in diplomacy, not to secure
peace, but to discredit Athens with the Greek world at large, and Pericles with
the Athenians. Various demands were made, relating to Potidaea, Aegina, the
maternal connexions of Pericles, above all the Megarian decree,2 and
finally a message in two sentences : " The Lacedaemonians desire to
maintain peace,
‘Aristophanes,
Knights, 1303.
* The stress laid on this for their own
purposes by the Spartans and their allies impressed the Athenian mind—the
popular mind that did not go deeply into things. Cf. Bury, Ancient Greek
Historians, pp. 95-99 ; Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii. 817. Mr. E. M. Walker quotes a
saying of Greville’s that the secrets of cabinets are known only to the man in
the street. In our days the Opposition newspapers always seem to know them
best. The autumn and winter of 1914-15 gave many illustrations of how readily
the popular mind will believe things and how independent it can be of evidence.
and peace
there may be if you will restore independence to the Hellenes.” There were some
two hundred and fifty city communities comprised in the Athenian Empire. The
demand was a clever one—a much better stroke than the Megarian, and of far
wider appeal.1 How little it meant was seen in 421, when Sparta made
peace and forgot the autonomy of all Greeks, and again after 404, when "
the first day of Greek freedom ”2 opened a period of
disillusionment. For the present, however, as Thucydides says, " the
feeling of mankind was strongly on the side of the Lacedaemonians ; for they
professed to be the liberators of Hellas. Cities and individuals were eager to
assist them to the utmost, both by word and deed. ... For the general
indignation against the Athenians was intense; some were longing to be
delivered from them, others fearful of falling under their sway.” 3
Pericles
was prepared. He recognized the twofold weakness of the enemy, who lacked ships
and sailors, for one thing, and, for another, money.1 He also saw
their strength, and resolved to have no battle on land. Certain principles
Thucydides represents him to have emphasized—no surrender to the Peloponnesians
; * the abandonment of the land, but “ keep a watch over the city and the sea,”
as if Athens were in fact an island;6 no new acquisition of empire ;7
and a firm hand on the allies.8
His plan
of action we have already seen. He saw that the twin-fortress of Athens and the
Peiraieus could not be taken, nor even menaced, from the land. The Spartans and
their allies had in the past been notoriously weak in siege operations, and
even in this war the small inland town of Plataea was their one success.
'.Meanwhile men live by bread, and Athens held the wheat-route from the Black
Sea. To secure the western grain trade embassies were sent to the islands near
the Peloponnese—Corcyra, Cephallenia, Acarnania, and Zacynthus, with the aim of
" completely surrounding the Peloponnese with war.”9
Accordingly we find in the
1 This demand was obviously not so available an
explanation of the war for the peace party ; they could not push peace at this
cost. The Megarian, decree was a better subject for their emphasis.
2 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 23. 3 Thuc. ii. 8.
1 Thuc.i.
142, 6, andi. 141, 5. 6 Thuc.
i. 140, 1.
• Thuc. i. 143, 5 ; cf. ii. 62. 7 Thuc. i. 144, 1.
8 Thuc. ii. 13 ; cf. ii. 63. • Thuc. ii. 7.
early
years of the^war, where there is any policy beyond mere raiding and endurance,
that the active operations of both parties centre about the Corinthian gulf. To
maintain an effective blockade even with steamships is hard ; it was very
difficult for the Athenians,1 but by 429 they compelled the
Peloponnesian allies to take action in the gulf, with the result that Phormio
won two brilliant victories for Athens. As to Attica, Pericles refused to allow
a battle at all, or even for a while a meeting of the Assembly. Cleon flung
himself at him ; the comic poets wrote songs and devised taunts against him;
but nothing moved him. The first year of the war, if inglorious, still was not
unsatisfactory. The enemy had cut down trees in Attica; the fleet of Athens had
made raids on the Peloponnesus ; and Athens could keep it up longer.
As we have
already had to glance more than once at the Peloponnesian programme, it need
not keep us so long. Thucydides, in a series of speeches, lets us see a good
deal of the Spartan character—the slowness of thought—the general preference
for ignorance of the world outside—the inertia that “ let the Mede come from
the ends of the earth before they were ready,” that disappoints the hopes of
all who count on Spartan help—“ the old-time ways,” quite out of date by now,
if the Corinthian speaker is to be trusted. King Archidamos was against
immediate war—he saw what it meant, and how unprepared they were ;2
but the vote went against him, “ not to allow the Athenians to become greater.”
3
Archidamos
was right. They had neither fleet nor men to match the Athenians ; and whatever
might be said before or after the event about borrowing the treasures of Delphi
and outbidding the Athenians with higher pay for their foreign sailors, there
was little attempt at this till after Syracuse.4 Even then, crippled
as she was, Athens from time to time swept the Peloponnesian fleet off the sea,
till it is plain, from
1 To
blockade the long coastline of the Peloponnesus, with all its headlands and
bays, and the winds and currents that play rounc} them, and to do it without a
friendly port at all near, was a very difficult task for a fleet of sailing
ships, which could carry little water and were not designed for long periods on
the open sea ; compare complaints of Apollodorus, c. Polycl, 22, 23, on the
hardships of riding at anchor in storm. See Chapter X. p. 331.
s Thuc. i.
80-85. 3 Thuc i. 86. * Thuc. i. 121, 3.
Cyrus’
caution to Lysander,1 that the Persians grew tired of paying for
fleets to be built and lost. Archidamos saw, according to Thucydides, that it
was useless to ravage Attica, so long as the Athenian food supply came by sea.2
Twenty- three years later his son and successor Agis saw from Deceleia the
swarms of wheat ships running into the Peiraieus, and said it was no use to cut
off the Athenians from the land, if they could also not cut them off from the
source of that sea-borne wheat.8 It was not till Lysander had
achieved this, that Athens fell. But it was out of the question in 432. The
only real chance lay in some fatal Athenian blunder, as Pericles said.
Archidamos
was an old man. He had been king of Sparta when the great earthquake shook down
every house but five, when crags fell from Taygetus, and great chasms opened in
the earth, when the Helots sprang into revolt, and when he himself saved the
Spartan nation by sounding " To arms ! ” so that when the Helots came to
plunder the wrecked five villages, the men of Sparta were armed and in battle
order, waiting for them.4 The fight with the Helots for Messenia had
been long and difficult. The old man knew where Sparta stood, and how she
stood—a handful of Spartiates amid a hostile population, fewer than at the time
of the great revolt, perhaps one in sixteen; and the Helots were “ a fierce and
not a docile race.” “ The Helots,” wrote Aristotle, “ have often attacked the
Laconians, for they are always on the look out as it were for any disaster that
may befall them.” * “ Most of the Spartan institutions have at all times been
designed to secure them against the Helots.” 6 In spite of
Plutarch’s fine phrase about Sparta preferring law-abiding citizens to the rule
over all Greece, it was probably the Helot peril that dictated her abandonment
of the headship of Greece after the Persian War.7 Even now she was
not safe, and victory over Athens, involving rule over the Greek world, might
be as dangerous as defeat.
1 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 1, 14. 2 Thuc. i. 81.
3 Xen.
Hellenica, i. 1, 35. * Plut. Cimon,
16.
6 Aristotle, Politics, ii. 9, § 2, p.
1269 a.
• Thuc. iv. 80. There is, of course, a variant
translation, which has strong support—perhaps more among grammarians than
historians.
7 See Chapter II. p. 47.
Thus the
unimaginative conservative habit and the vivid sense of ever-present danger at
home combined to make Sparta " more shy of war than any othei: state of
importance—except England in the nineteenth century.” 1
But
Corinth had turned the scale, and it was to be war. Athens was growing too
strong, and Sparta had been brought to see it at last. Some modem historians
hold that Athens had been stronger in 446 than she was in 432, but an analysis
of her position confirms Thucydides. At the early date she held more, it is
true, but her hold was precarious, as the year 446 proved. Land-possessions
were a danger to her. But now she was rid of them and held an empire everywhere
accessible to her fleet—an empire, of islands actual or virtual, divided into
fragments by the sea, which the Athenian fleet ruled.2 And the
alliance with the great maritime island- power of the West promised still
further aggrandizement. So Sparta Vent to war. “ At that time the youth of the
Peloponnesus and the youth of Athens were numerous ; and their inexperience
made them eager for war.” 3 “ At that time ”— the words suggest the
contrast which the historian lived to see ; the numbers were thinned; the
experience of war was grim, and the spirit and enthusiasm flagged before the
end.
“ Neither
side meant anything small,” Thucydides says. Yet we have seen how unprepared
Sparta and her allies were. They put, Plutarch says, an army of sixty thousand
men into Attica, to ravage it. They tried to secure command of the Western
waters and to break the Athenian blockade, not very successfully. They
destroyed Plataea, making a great siege of a small town. But their fleet was
poor, miscellaneous, and ill-manned; and, as for improving it, “ War,” said
King Archidamos,4 “ is a matter of finance ; and we have no money in
our common chest, and we are not very ready at paying it out of our private
stores.” A broken inscription, inaccurately copied, survives to tell of
contributions to the war-funds, but
1 So Eduard Meyer, some years before 1914.
2 The Athenian Oligarch’s Ath. Rep. 2, 2. A
rather different view from that given above, in Grundy, Thuc. p. 323 f.
3 Thuc. ii. 8, 1.
4 Thuc. i. 83, 2, and 80, 4. Aristotle
noted the same thing about Sparta, a century later, Pol. ii. 9, 36, p. 12716:
“They are bad at paying eisphora (war-tax).”
the only
contributors whose names are legible are the Melians and two private persons.1
The Spartan plan for the war was invasion, with the war-cry of " Greek freedom.”
2
The
war-cry was a good one, and “ they expected within a few years to destroy the
Athenian Empire.” 3 All Greece was excited, and, as we have seen, “
the feeling of mankind was strongly on the Spartan side.” 4 The
Athenian allies, as Athens knew not less well than Sparta, wished to be independent—this
passion was the greatest danger of Athens, the chief hope of Sparta. It was
emphasized by the Corinthian speaker.6 Before the war began,
Mitylenaean envoys had been asking Spartan aid for a revolt against Athens.6
The speech which Thucydides attributes to the later Mitylenaean embassy at
Sparta in 428 sets out what the allies felt. But really no further evidence is
necessary, when we remember how, on the failure of the Sicilian expedition,
when the Athenian fleet ceased to be, " all Hellas was stirred . . . but
none showed more alacrity than the subjects of the Athenians, who were
everywhere willing even beyond their power to revolt,”7 and did
revolt. The Greek, says Mr. Grundy,8 “ sought for the least common
measure in life, the smallest form of association in which he could realize
his individualism to the fullest extent which was, humanly speaking, possible.”
The cities wished to be, as a Spartan phrase puts it, avrovofioi aal
avToiroXie? rav avroiv e%ovTe$—make their own laws, be each a city to itself,
have each their own land.9 To this verb avra- vo/i&aQai, so much
in the air, so much on the lips of Spartan envoys, Pericles in 432 added an
adverbial clause which hit off the actual situation there and then in the
Peloponnese, and what actually befell when the Athenian Empire came to pieces
—it was rots Aa/ceSaifiovioi'; i7nrr]Betco<s, an “ autonomy in the interests
of Lacedaemon.”10 So it proved, as the Greeks were to learn from
harmost and satrap, and more still when
1 C.I.G.
1511. Hicks, Manual No. 43 (not in second edition).
a Thuc. i.
139. 3 Thuc. v. 14, 3.
4 Thuc. ii. 8. 6 Thuc. i. 122.
* Thuc. iii. 2, 1. Cf. Aristophanes,
Peace, 619, when the cities saw you start snarling at one another, for fear of
tribute they began to bribe the Laconian leaders.
7 Thuc. viii. 2. 8
Thucydides and his Age, p. 171.
* Treaty in Thuc. v. 79. 10 Thuc. i. 144, 2.
Antalkidas brought down his Peace from the King in 387. But that was
still a long way off. Meanwhile, if the island cities were to be free from
Athens, a navy was needed to put the Athenian fleet out of action, and it did
not exist; so the war- cry remained a fine phrase. It is significant that
Brasidas used it with effect in 424,1 though Sparta was, as he must
have known, on the point of dropping " the liberation of all the Greeks ”
for good and all,2 and had already proposed to Athens a joint
control of the Greek world.®
The whole Spartan war-policy failed. The invasions of Attica merely
proved the signal strength of the twin-fortress with command of the • sea.
Sparta came out of the war humbled, and did not regain credit till the
blundering cunning of Alcibiades had involved Athens in the Argive alliance and
the defeat at Mantineia.4 Even then it needed that to the folly of
the Syracusan expedition there should be added the Spartan fortification of
Deceleia, the general revolt of the Athenian allies, and the steady subsidies
of Persia—yes, and the final imbecility of the Athenian generals at Aegospotami
as the crowning touch—before the power of Athens was broken.
There were, it appears, throughout the whole struggle a war-party and a
peace-party in Sparta, but it is in general hard to follow their relations. In
Athens it is otherwise, for here life was more articulate. We have seen
something of the grounds and policy of Pericles in making war, and we may now
pass over to the other party as we come to know it in the years after his
death—the party that struggled for peace against the class created, more or less,
by Pericles himself, which owed its very livelihood to the arts of war and
empire.
If we may borrow once more the French terms, and group the Athenians as
Right, Left, and Centre, the Peace party will range in the main from the
Extreme Right to the Right Centre. Three or four distinct classes are to be
recognized within the group. There are, first of all, the country people.
" The demos,” says the bitter oligarch, " knows quite well that the
enemy will bum nothing that belongs to it, nor cut down any tree of its owning,
so it lives free from fear ; ” they store their
1 Thuc. iv. 85. 2
The truce of spring, 423.
8 Thuc.
iv. 20, 4. * Thuc. v. 75, 3.
own goods on islands, and can afford to look on at the ravaging of
Attica, for they know that, if they take pity on Attica, they will pay for it
in the loss of advantages of their own ; and he does not exactly blame
Demos—Demos knows how to look after himself.1 What the country
people had to suffer is set out with great vigour by Aristophanes ; they formed
the kernel of the troops, and they had too much of it. He blames the taxiarchs
for injustice in calling out men to serve :
Making up the lists unfairly, striking out and putting down Names at
random. 'Tis to-morrow that the soldiers leave the town; One poor wretch has
brought no victuals, for he knew not he must go. Till he on Pandion’s statue
spied the list and found ’twas so, Reading there his name inserted; off he
scuds with aspect wry.
This is how they treat the farmers.*
Farms suffered, homes were burnt, trees were cut down, and trees meant
vines and olives. The olive does not bear a full crop for sixteen or eighteen
years, and it is at its best between forty and sixty.3 As olive oil
and wine were the two agricultural staples of Attica, the felling of such trees
meant poverty for a lifetime to their owners. Plato in his Republic forbade the
practice of cutting down the trees of Hellenic enemies,4 but, as
Cicero suggested, this world was not after all Plato’s Republic.5
Thucydides, as well as Aristophanes, dwells on the furious indignation of the
Achamians in particular at the devastation of their deme—“ they were in their
own estimation no small part of the state,” he says, a little unkindly.
Along with the country people stood the well-to-do classes, at one, in
the main, on the peace question, but not a homogeneous group. " It is the
better classes, oi SvvarmTaroi t5>v iroktT&v, on whom the heaviest
burdens are apt to fall,” says Thucydides* They had to outfit triremes and sail
on them as trierarchs, and they had to pay the eisphotra, the war tax levied on
property—and all in addition to the liturgies of peace, the outfit of choruses,
feasts, etc.7 Every democracy
1 Athenian
Oligarch, Ath. Rep. 2, 14-20. Cf. Chapter II. pp. 53—55.
* Aristophanes, Peace, 1179
f.
* I owe this and much else
to Mr. Zimmern’s admirable book, The Greek Commonwealth.
4 Plato,
Rep. v. 471. 5 To Atticus, ii. x, 8. * Thuc. viii. 48, 1.
’ See further Chapter X. pp. 329-332.
is sooner or later familiar with the bitter cry of the wealthy taxpayer,
but in Athens taxation had some look of being really unfair.1 Some
of the well-to-do were oligarchs, in principle— though, really, oligarch and
aristocrat are vague terms ; they believed at least in a limited democracy, and
the day came when they tried it—a democracy of so many thousand at most, all
qualified to serve the state in arms.* Some went much further, and were “
Spartan-mad,” i\aica>vo(idvovv:
Long-haired, half-starved, unwashed, Socratified,
With scytales in their hands.’
‘‘What I hear,” says Socrates in the Gorgias,* “is this, that Pericles
has made the Athenians lazy and cowardly and talkative and greedy, by
establishing first the system of fees.”
" You hear all that,” rejoins Callicles, ‘‘from the gentry with the
broken ears ”—for boxing was a Laconism of the day. They formed themselves into
clubs, ‘‘with a view to offices and lawsuits.” 5 We cannot exactly
say that they took the oath used by their like in some cities, according to
Aristotle:
" I will be hostile to the people (demos) and plan it all the ill I
can ” ; but they were ready enough to negotiate with Sparta, not merely from
patriotism like a Nicias, but with treacherous intent, as appeared in the
affairs of the Four Hundred and the Thirty. The " young men ” of those
sinister times were more or less of this school, and to some extent the
knights.8 ,
These elements formed the permanent strength of the party against war.
Beside them there would be the medley of people who turn elections and, in our
country, especially by- elections—the moderates, and the opportunists, the
anti-war democrats, and all the people who vote on side-issues, and love to be
on the safe side, the winning side. There were also some with really wider and
larger ideas, forerunners of Isocrates and a later day, men with Panhellenic
sentiments, whose ideas found
1 Cf. the
Athenian Oligarch’s Ath. Rep. and Xen. Symp. 4, 30.
2 Thuc. viii.
97, 1.
8 Aristophanes, Birds, 1281.
« Gorg. 515 e.
6 Cf. Thuc. viii. $4, 3, with Aristophanes,
Lysistrata, 577.
• The veavlarKOL; Thuc. viii. 69, 4.
Cf. also Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 23.
See p. 187, note.
a voice from time to time, as in the Peace of Aristophanes, where the
hero addresses his prayer to Peace :
When our fightings are stayed, and our tumults allayed,
We will hail thee a Lady for ever :
And O put an end to the whispers of doubt,
Those wonderful clever Ingenious suspicions we bandy about;
And solder and glue the Hellenes anew With the old-fashioned true Elixir
of love and attemper our mind With thoughts of each other more genial and kind.1
The same idea, carried to a further point, reappears in the Lysistrata.2 Using a simile from wool, the poet pleads for mingling
All in one basket of unity,
Citizens, visitors, strangers and sojourners,
All the entire undivided community.
Yes, and the cities also, colonies as they originally were of Athens, and
weaving all into one web, for a cloak for Demos. But Demos was not shrewd
enough to take the hint, or perhaps it came too late; or, again, people whose
ambition was to be autopolitai, citizens of themselves, might not have wished
to be woven into a cloak for Demos.
Meantime Demos had other fancies in apparel. " Being bare,” says
Trygaios in the Peace, Demos took up Hyperbolus to gird himself with :
You see, he deals in lamps : before he came
We all were groping in the dark, but now
His lamps may give our council-board some light.*
It was to the successors of Pericles that Thucydides attributed the
downfall of Athens. They were the products of the Athenian(theory of
Democracy, as developed by Pericles.
The theory presupposed the Athenian people meeting in assembly to discuss
national business. But the Athenians
1 Aristophanes, Peace, 991-998—a prayer as chimerical
then as a similar one to-day for Europe would be according to some people. But,
. if history has lessons for us—let us think them out. a
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 580-586.
8 Aristophanes, Peace, 685-692.
never so met. Many of them were far too busy at the Peiraieus to go up to
the city, or were away on outlying farms throughout Attica. Many must always
have been out of the country on trading voyages, and constantly large numbers
on naval and military expeditions. The Demos never really met—only some section
of the community. But, as Aristotle said, there are people of an inferior type,
because their life is inferior, since there is no room for moral excellence in
any of their employments—mechanics, traders, and labourers. People of this
class can readily come to the Assembly, because they are continually moving
about in the city and in the agora. The Assembly ought not to meet when the
country people cannot come. So thought Aristotle,1 but it did meet.
It seems to have been only as a rule at elections that the voters of outlying
districts took the trouble to make themselves felt.
When the Assembly met, it was to transact business with a minimum of laws
of procedure and a maximum of freedom to act. As everybody knows who has served
on a committee, a permanent chairman or secretary becomes an autocrat, and the
Athenian democracy avoided any such danger, though at some cost. As the Persian
said, in Herodotus’ story, the Demos comes tumbling and pushing into business,
without any sense, just like a stream in spate.8 There is some truth
in this, for a Greek demos knew none of the checks which we suppose to be as
natural as democracy itself. There was obviously no representative system;
worse still, there was no ministry, no cabinet, no selected and tested group of
men of experience jointly responsible as a body for advice or action. The Generals
were, it is true, a board, but usually a divided board. Foreign affairs would
have to be discussed, and there was nothing approaching a foreign office, just
as there was no diplomatic service. Embassies were sent ad hoc, as we say, and
in the fourth century travelling actors were sometimes available; but as a rule
the Ecclesia would have to depend on its own knowledge of foreign conditions
and situations, acquired in travel or trade, or picked up somehow.3
When moreover we remember the passions of
1 Aristotle, Politics, vi. 4, 13, p. 1319a. 2
Herodotus, iii. 81.
3 A very curious
illustration is the story of the arrival of the bad news from Syracuse,
preserved for us by Plutarch, Nicias, 30. Booker Washington, in his Up from
Slavery, alludes to the curious ways in
a Greek people—“ every multitude,” said Polybius, “ is fickle and full of
lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent passion,”1 and
Thucydides preserves stories enough of Athens to confirm the statement, even if
he did put the other side in Pericles’ speech—we can begin to realize the want
of unity of mind, the want of responsibility, that marked the Ecclesia. The
government of Athens, says Eduard Meyer, was really an anarchy down to Eubulus.
Nobody was responsible for advising the nation ; anybody could speak ; nobody
need. If a man did speak, if he moved a motion and it was carried, and mischief
came of it, he was liable to suifer for it; hence silence had a ready excuse
and came naturally sometimes. Here is an illustration from Demosthenes, the
story of what happened when Philip suddenly took Elateia, and established
himself south of Thermopylae.2
“ It was evening, and one had come to the Prytaneis with the news that
Elateia had been taken. Upon this they rose from supper without delay ; some of
them drove the occupants out of the booths in the market-place, and set fire to
the wicker-work ; others sent for the generals and summoned the trumpeter; and
the city was full of commotion. On the morrow, at break of day, the Prytaneis
summoned the Council to the Council-Chamber, while you made your way to the
Assembly ; and before the Council had transacted its business and passed its
draft-resolution, the whole people was seated on the hillside (on the Pnyx).
And now, when the Council had reported the intelligence which they had
received, and had brought forward the messenger, and he had made his statement,
the herald proceeded to ask, ' Who wishes to speak ? ’ But no one came forward;
and though the herald repeated the question many times, still no one rose,
though all the generals were present, and all the orators, and the voice of
their country was calling for some one to speak for her deliverance.”
And yet for twenty-seven years this Ecclesia managed the
which negroes throughout the South picked up war news and emancipation
rumours, ahead of the white people.
1 Polybius, vi. 56. ■.
a Demosthenes, de Corona, 169, 170
(Pickard-Cambridge). The firing of the wicker-work may be an alarm signal.
Peloponnesian War, and for many more years it had managed and still did
manage the complicated business of an empire of two hundred and fifty cities,
and did it all so well, that, but for a number of signal follies that a man
might count on his fingers, the war would have been successfully ended and the empire
kept. Alcibiades, speaking to the Spartans, declines to discuss Democracy—“
about admitted folly, there is nothing new to be said.” 1 Yet there
must have been somewhere in that Assembly an amazing amount of sheer sense,
business capacity, insight, and intelligence—not to speak of real knowledge of
the actual conditions of the Greek world. From 478 to 405 it was the ruling
force in the Greek world, and drove the Persian king out and kept him out. The
Funeral Speech of Pericles must represent history pretty faithfully after all.
Alcibiades tells the Spartans that it is evil demagogues who lead the people
astray, but that again is a statement that will bear investigation.
Cleon is of course the most famous of all the demagogues, thanks to
Thucydides and Aristophanes, and we have already given him a good deal of
attention. Aristophanes describes himself in two plays as a sort of Herakles
who faced the monster, for the safety of Athens and the islands, but in the
description of Cleon as monster, perhaps the voice only is authentic—“ the
voice of a cataract, mother of destruction.” No doubt the flatterers of Cleon
are also taken from life. But Cleon was a significant figure in history, and,
apart from his politics, his personality is interesting. Plutarch, with the
Athenaion Politeia behind him, tells us that Cleon “ first did away with the
decorum of the bema, and, in speaking to the people, would shout and pull off
his mantle, and slap his thigh, and pace up and down as he talked; it was he
who taught the politicians that cheapness and contempt for decency that soon
after ruined everything.” 2 Once he made the Ecclesia adjourn after
waiting long for him—because he was busy, he had had a sacrifice and was
entertaining strangers ; and the Athenians laughed and adjourned.3
Aristophanes says they listened to him Every single man agape,
Most like to mussels cooking on the coals.4
1 Thuc. vi. 89, 6. 2 Plut. Nicias, 8, 3 ; 'Ad. noX.
28, 3.
8 Plut. Nicias, 7, 5. ‘
Aristophanes, Babylonians Frag. 68.
There was force and character about the man—violence, Thucydides said—a
fine strong Jingo accent—there were no impossibilities with him ; the generals
could do it if they liked —he could, if he were in their place ; and so on.
And, as we know, he did it—once. Of course he was accused of taking bribes;1
perhaps he did. The Greek conscience was not very nice about the matter. He
\yas reckless, ignorant, and ill-informed, and this was where he made his
mistakes. He has the credit of being no friend to philosophy and the refinement
of life, but he was not at all a worse citizen or worse man than many of the
most brilliant of the new school. But he was vulgar, and that was unpardonable.
More serious still was his insistence on war, which made him a danger to his
country. On the other hand, he must have had a real gift for finance,2
like his successor a decade later, the fatal Cleophon, another hopeless
advocate of war to the last, when every sane mind could see it was as
disastrous as it was impossible, The most fatal figure of all who stood on the
bema was no lamp-seller or tanner or lyre-maker, but the brilliant Aldbiades.
Eduard Meyer sums up his amazing youth, by saying that from boyhood up he
looked on himself as the Crown Prince of Athens. He #tood in a peculiarly close
relation to Pericles as his ward, and perhaps there is no recorded incident of
a most varied career more characteristic than the conversation (recorded or
most happily imagined by Xenophon) in which the pupil of Socrates leads on the
old statesman to discuss law and its nature. The youth plays Socrates to the
life, and at last Pericles ends the discussion by saying: “ At your age we used
to be clever too, in such questions. It was just such matters we used to handle
and practise our wits on, as you seem to be doing.” “ How I wish,” the youth
rejoined, with a crowning Alcibiadism,3 “ I could have known you
when you were at your cleverest, Pericles! ” 4 He fascinated his
countrymen with his brilliance and his audacity and clever-
1 Aristophanes,
A ch. 5 ; Knights, 834.
2 Finance was
the perpetual problem of Greek democracies. See Beloch, Gr. Gesch. ii. 25 ; see
also Mr. Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth, p. 208, on the “ incredible poverty ”
of Greek cities.
3 Cf. scholiast
on Thuc. vi. 18, where he says that certain phrases are kot 'AXKij3ia8r]v.
* Xen. Mem. i. 2, 46.
ness,1 and alienated them. The popular leaders disliked him,
for he outshone them altogether, and they worked for his ruin, and effected it
twice, and each time the consequences to Athens were immediately and
desperately unhappy. But in spite of their leaders, the people could not get
him out of their minds.
“ I dare say,” says Nicias, addressing the Athenians, " there may be
some young man here who is delighted at holding a command, and the more so
because he is too young for his post; and he, regarding only his own interest,
may recommend you to sail [to Sicily]; he may be one who is much admired for
his stud of horses, and wants to make something out of his command which will
maintain him in his extravagance.” 2 And so forth, about the
colleague already elected to co-operate with him on the great expedition. The
young man was ready with a reply.3
" Those doings of mine for which I am so much cried out against are
an honour to myself and to my ancestors, and a solid advantage to my country.
In consequence of the distinguished manner in which I represented the State at
Olympia, the other Hellenes formed an idea of our power which even exceeded the
reality, although they had previously imagined that we were exhausted by war. I
sent into the lists seven chariots—no other private man ever did the like ; I
was victor, and also won the second and fourth prize ; and I ordered everything
in a style worthy of my victory. The general sentiment honours such magnificence
; and the energy which is shown by it creates an impression of power. At home,
again, whenever I gain 6clat by providing choruses, or by the performance of
some other public duty, although the citizens are naturally jealous of me, to
strangers these acts of munificence are a new argument of our strength. There
is some use in the folly of a man who at his own cost benefits not only
himself, but the State.”
The weak point in Alcibiades was that he was charlatan as well as genius
; an element of make-believe can be traced through his whole career. He was not
so sure a guide as he aimed at appearing ; he did not, for instance, take
enough
1 Plutarch on
his cleverness in adapting himself to his environment ■“ with quicker changes than a chamaeleon ” (Alcib. 23).
2 Thuc,
vi. 12 (Jowett). 3 Thuc. vi.
16 (Jowett).
trouble to understand the real relations among the Peloponnesian powers,
and so he involved his country in the Argive alliance and the defeat at
Mantineia in 418—with exactly the result he was working to avoid, the
restoration of Spartan prestige. The Greeks pferhaps were less sensitive about
lying than we suppose we are, so that the series of tricks by which he carried
through his disastrous ideas in this case might not have injured his repute at
home.1 Similar adroitness was credited to Themistocles, to Pericles,
and to Nicias himself, in dealing with the Spartans. If Thucydides is right in
his statement that Alcibiades dreamed he might be conqueror not only of
Syracuse but of Carthage,2 it is a further indication of impulse and
fancy outrunning insight, though, to be fair to him, he was not the only Greek
of his day to play with the dream of conquering Carthage,3 nor was
he the last. With Sicilian statesmen and adventurers it was no dream, but a
business, and one in which, after putting forth all their powers, all alike
failed. There may have been generous Panhellenic sentiment in the thought, but
it should never have come within the range of practical politics in Athens—it
was chimerical, however desirable. Plutarch expands the dream of Alcibiades to
include Libya with Carthage, and then Italy, and finally the Pelo- ponnese.4
The perplexing episode of the mutilation of the Hermae gave the democrat
leaders their chance. The evidence against Alcibiades was absurd, except for a
people in panic, but it worked out in his ruin. How he " showed them he
was still alive ” is familiar—in Sparta and in Sardis, the same brilliant
figure captivating dull Spartan royalty and the adroit Tissa- phernes himself,
and again in each case waking suspicion. After that came further triumphs—the
launching first and then the wrecking of the oligarchy of the Four Hundred—and
the crowning service which he did his country in the moment of
1 Plutarch, it
is true, says nobody praised his method, but it was a great achievement to
split the Peloponnese (Alcib. 15).
2 Thuc. vi.
15,2.
“ Cf. Aristophanes, Knights, 1303. Hyperbolus also dreamed of it. Plut.
Pericles, 20, 3, says some did, even in Pericles’ time.
4 Plut. Alcib. 17 ; probably it is parody that has
come down somehow from contemporary enemies of Alcibiades ; of these there
were plenty.
her supreme division against herself. The sailors at Samos would have
sailed for the Peiraieus and added civil war to war with Sparta and Syracuse
and the revolted allies. “ Then Alcibiades appears to have done as eminent a
service to the state as any man ever did. For if the Athenians at Samos in
their excitement had been allowed to sail against their fellow-citizens, the
enemy would instantly have obtained possession of Ionia and the Hellespont
"—and the Hellespont, as was seen seven years later, was vital; it meant
the daily bread of all Athens. " This he prevented, and at that moment no
one else could have restrained the multitude ; but he did restrain them.” 1
So he regained a great deal of his old hold on the Athenians, but the old
suspicions did not even yet die—his enemies saw to that. Did he, or did he not,
wish to be tyrant ?2 Did his friendship with Tissaphemes point to
such a desire? The slight defeat, inflicted on his pilot Antiochus by Lysander,
in an engagement forbidden by Alcibiades himself, was used to secure his
deposition, and he retired to a voluntary exile in a castle he held at
Bisanthe, a place better known in our days as Rodosto3 (Spring 407).
Two years later it was Still a question with the Athenians, what to do or
to think about Alcibiades. In the Frogs, produced at the Lenaea 405,
Aristophanes represents Dionysus, still wavering as to whether he will bring
back Euripides from the dead, as he first meant, or Aeschylus, and finally
asking both as to the best policy for Athens.4
Dionysos. I’ll take whichever seems the best adviser. Advise me first of
Alcibiades,
Whose birth gives travail still to mother Athens.
Pluto. What is her disposition towards him ?
Dionysos. Well,
" She loves and hates and longs still to possess.”
I want the views of both upon that question !
'Thuc. viii. 86, 4, 5 (Jowett’s translation), reading ■n-pSrros, as
Hude also does, against Mr. Stuart Jones’ npwrov in the Oxford text. irpwrov
hardly seems like a judgment of Thucydides at all—too epigrammatic and,
besides, doubtful. (
a Thuc. vi. 15, 4, surely referring to this stage of
afEairs.
8 Xen.
Hellenica, i. 5, 10-17.
* Aristophanes, Frogs, 1420-1434,
Professor Murray’s translation, with the last line from Mr. B. B. Rogers.
Euripides. Out on the burgher, who to serve the state
Is slow, but swift to do her deadly hate,
With much wit for himself, and none for her.
Dionysos. Good, by Poseidon, that!—And what say you ?
Aeschylus. No lion’s whelp within thy precincts raise ;
But, if it be there, bend thee to its ways !
Dionysos. By Zeus the Saviour, still I can’t decide,
One is so clever and so clear the other !
So the city is left in travail. He had done Athens deadly harm when in
exile in Sparta ; and yet, lion’s whelp as he was, who else could save Athens ?
Yes, but—:— So there it hung.
One more service he did Athens, but in vain. He warned the generals
before Aegospotami of their danger, and was snubbed for his pains. Then came
the downfall of the Thirty. Alcibiades no longer felt secure even in Rodosto,
and resolved, like a second Themistocles, to go to the gates of the Great King.
But if Dionysos and Demos could not make up their minds about him, Critias did
; and he told Lysander Athens would never settle down under an oligarchy while
Alcibiades lived. So one night in a Phrygian village the house was fired over
his head. Alert to the last, he saw what it meant, flung his goods to the
flames, and sallied out, sword in hand, to die fighting, but the barbarians
preferred to shoot him down from a safe distance. The dead body, Timandra, the
hetaim who was travelling with him, buried with all the honour she could give
it—a last witness to his charm.1
Even so the man’s story was not finished. The debate still went on—a sort
of King Charles the First’s head question— and he pervades the literature.
Lysias reviles him ;2 Xenophon defends Socrates against the charge
of being too intimate with him ;3 Plato draws him again and again in
the Socratic circle, and perhaps sketches the “ Democratic man ” from him4
—a child of impulse, every pleasure a free and equal citizen in a many-sided
character, beautiful, various, unsteady, a whole " bazar ” of notions and fancies
and ideas, to one thing constant never; and Aristotle, as we have seen, says
history
1 Plut. Alcib. 37-39. 2
Lysias, xiv.
3 Xen. Mem. i. 2, 12-18, 24-39.
1 So Steinhart cited by Adam, ap. Rep. viii. 561c. On
the democratic man, see further, Chapter IX. p. 298.
deals with particulars—such as “ what Alcibiades did or had done to him.”
1
So far we have been dealing with policies and politicians —always
fascinating themes ; but in ancient history as in modern history there is
always the same danger of forgetting how small a part of life is really covered
by politics. History may be written too much from the Pnyx as from St.
Stephen’s, from inscriptions as from documents. We have to remember that
throughout this long period, the twenty-seven years of the Peloponnesian War,
life went on in Athens as far as it could on its usual lines—birth, marriage,
and death, the ritual of temple and festival, and the Black Sea trade never
stopped. " Of all men,” said Demosthenes, “ we use the most imported
wheat,” 8 and it came from the Black Sea. The price of fish rose and
fell—a too frequent subject among the fragments of the Comic poets ; Boeotian
poultry and eels from Copais were scarce and dear, and wonderfully welcome when
they did come.3 Strangers came and went — merchants, travellers,
sophists, envoys, from anywhere and everywhere—islanders to have their
law-suits decided and to pay their tribute, Sicilians to teach the Athenians
how to speak and write Greek, astronomers like Meton, Persian envoys, real ones
4 and, if we dare believe Aristophanes, sham ones too, and, what is more,
Persian refugees.6 The Great King, if Aristophanes is right, took a
close interest in Athens, for he wished to know two things : which of the
belligerents was more powerful on the sea,
And next, which the wonderful Poet has got, as its stern and unsparing
adviser ;
For those who are lashed by his satire, he said, must surely be better
and wiser.6
War-time brought with it of course special interests and excitements. The
makers of weapons and armour a^e conspicuous in Aristophanes’ play, The Peace,
as opponents of
1 Aristotle, Poetics, g, 3, p. 14516.
a Dem. de Cor. 87. Cf. Lept. 32, where he says
400,000 bushels a year from King Leucon’s country.
“Aristophanes, Ach. 885 ; Peace, 1003 ; Lysistrata, 35.
4 Thuc. iv. 50. 6
Herodotus, iii. 80, Zopyros.
6 Aristophanes, Ach. 648.
reconciliation—their occupation would be gone. It must have been a very
considerable occupation at all times in Athens, and especially during the war.
Old Cephalos, of Plato’s Republic, who was glad he had been rich, because
riches save a man from so much sin,1 had a shield-factory (his son
Lysias tells us) in which he employed one hundred and twenty slaves,2
and he and his made money,—“ We served in every form of choregia, and many a
war tax we paid,”—lived orderly lives, and ransomed many Athenians from the
enemy. The number of fleets launched and of ships lost implies a very great
shipbuilding industry in the Peiraieus, and a correspondingly large import of
lumber from Macedonia,3 and perhaps elsewhere.4
Of the sailing of a fleet we have two descriptions from this period.
Thucydides tells us, in memorable chapters,6 how the great
expedition set sail for Sicily. " Early in the morning of the day
appointed, the Athenians and such of their allies as had already joined them
went down to the Peiraieus and began to man the ships. The entire population of
Athens accompanied them, citizens and strangers alike. The citizens came to
take farewell, one of an acquaintance, another of a kinsman, another of a son;
the crowd as they passed along were full of hope and full of tears; hope of
conquering Sicily, tears because they doubted whether they would ever see their
friends again, when they thought of the long voyage on which they were sending
them. At the moment of parting, the danger was nearer; and terrors which had
never occurred to them when they were voting the expedition now entered into
their souls. Nevertheless their spirits revived at the sight of the armament in
all its strength and of the abundant provision which they had made. The
strangers and the rest of the multitude came out of curiosity, desiring to
witness an enterprise of which the greatness exceeded belief.” The trierarchs,
he goes on to say, had rivalled one another in the pains they had taken to make
their ships beautiful and effective. “ Men were quite amazed at the boldness of
the scheme and the magnificence of the spectacle.” " When the ships were
manned
1 Plato, Rep. i. 328d6. 2 Lysias, c. Eratosth., 17-19.
’ Thuc. iv. 108.
4 Perhaps Mount Ida; cf. Xen. Hellenica, i. 1, 25.
6 Thuc. vi. cc. 30-32 (Jowett).
and everything required for the voyage had been placed on board, silence
was proclaimed by the sound of a 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 whole fleet accompanying him. On every deck
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.” That is a
worthy description of a great moment in a nation’s history, and it brings to us
that suggestion of Tragedy which lies so near when we read Thucydides. But many
fleets sailed sooner or later, some to come back eminently victorious ; and the
conditions of the dockyard and the Peiraieus generally are given from another
point of view by Aristophanes, and his picture deserves study no less :
Ye would have launched three hundred'ships of war,
And all the City had at once been full Of shouting troops, of fuss with
trierarchs,
Of paying wages, gilding Pallases,
Of rations measured, roaring colonnades,
Of wineskins, oarloops, bargaining for casks,
Of nets of onions, olives, garlic-heads,
Of chaplets, pilchards, flute-girls, and black eyes.
And all the Arsenal had rung with noise Of oar-spars planed, pegs
hammered, oarloops fitted,
Of boatswains’ calls, and flutes, and trills, and whistles.1
Now and again we come on a personal note in our records, which gives us a
closer look at what happened at these times. In a speech made by Lysias for
some one whose name is lofet, the speaker emphasizes what a fine piece of work
he made of his ship when he was trierarch in 408 (or 407) at the time of
Alcibiades’ sailing. “ I will offer you a convincing proof of this. For, in the
first place, I would have given a great deal not to have him sailing with me,
for he was no friend of mine, nor a kinsman, nor of my tribe ; but Alcibiades
chose to sail on my ship. And yet I think you know that, as general and able to
do what he pleased, he would not have embarked on 1 Aristophanes,
Ach. 544-554 (B. B. Rogers).
any ship but the best sailer, when he was going to risk his own life.” i
The ships of Athens from time to time raided the Pelo- ponnese, as
Thucydides mentions,2 but there is no record of what impression the
damage done made on the Peloponnesians. It must have been severe, and terrible
too in its suddenness, but they " lacked a sacred bard.” It is
Aristophanes alone who gives them such sympathy as they get.3 The islanders
bribed the chief men of Sparta, who
Greedily embraced the war.
But from this their own advantage ruin to their farmers came;
For from hence the eager galleys sailing forth with vengeful aim,
Swallowed up the figs of people who were not, perchance, to blame.
No doubt the sailors and soldiers made something of. the booty; but it is
not likely that this availed much to console the Attic farmer, lamenting "
the dusky figtree I had loved and nurtured so,” now felled by Peloponnesian
invaders.
One feature of an expedition sailing and war undertaken was the
oracle-teller with his book,4 the seer (fiavTi<;), and the whole
tribe of prophets. They were liable to error, as we find from Thucydides, and
as the Athenians found, when the Syracusan expedition failed, and they vented
some of their anger on the oracle-tellers.5 They were very busy
" chanting oracles ” when the war began; 6 and when the
invasion of Attica took place and all the Athenians stood about in groups in
the streets, disputing whether to go out and fight or to forbear, the
soothsayer was there with “ oracles of the most different kinds.” 7
When the plague came, it established the reading \ot/ios as against Xi/io? in a
well-known oracle.8 Nicias kept the breed in house and camp, though
the prophet who gave the last fatal word for a delay of a lunar month, we
learn, was not his familiar friend Stilbides, who really “ took away much of
his superstition,” but another.9 Finally, in one play of
Aristophanes’ and another the oracle-teller comes in, an absurd figure,
reciting silly and awful oracles in hexameter
1 Lysias, xxi. 6. 2
Thuc. ii. 25, 56 ; iii. 7, 16 ; iv. 54.
* Aristophanes, Peace, 624.
4 Aristophanes, Birds, 960 if., with
Ad/3e 7-0 fiijSXiov as a refrain.
6 Thuc.
viii. 1. • Thuc. ii. 8. 7 Thuc. ii. 21. 8 Thuc. ii. 54.
9 Plut.
Nicias, 23, 5 ; Stilbides had died.
verse, and getting little out of it but ridicule. Yes, the trade was full
of impostors ; but who could tell but that at last he might find a prophet who
really knew ?1 That hope seems a permanent weakness of mankind.
Quite apart from individuals, the state also as a whole was guided from
time to time by oracles. In the winter of 426, Thucydides says, the Athenians
" by command of an oracle purified the island of Delos.” * Pisistratus, a
hundred or more years before, had “ purified ” it so far as it lay within sight
of the temple. Now the Athenians removed from the graves all the dead they
could find—Thucydides may have been there, or he may owe his information to
another, but he tells us that the arms found with the dead, and the mode in
which they were buried, made it clear that more than half of them were Carians.3
That, however, was archaeology, and a private interest of the historian’s; it
was piety that moved Athens to action. To keep the island pure for the future,
it was ordained “ that none should die or give birth to a child there, but that
the inhabitants when they were near the time of either should be carried across
to Rheneia,” 4 an island close by. After the purification the
Athenians celebrated the Delian games, which were held every four years; and
Thucydides again turns to archaeology and quotes the Homeric hymn to Apollo to
prove the ancient Ionian festival there, and the musical contests, in which
Homer had taken part, as the poet says himself—
The blind old man from Chios’ rocky isle.
All that had been left of the festival had been the choruses, sent with
sacrifices by the Athenians and the islanders; but now the games were restored
in full, and horse-races added.
Plutarch tells us that Nicias took special pains about these religious
observances at Delos. When the ships with the choruses arrived, the people used
to crowd down to the wharves
1 See the account of Hippias, Chapter I. p. 34.
1 Thuc. iii. 104, on Delos. See J. Irving Manatt,
Aegaean Days, p. 196 fi.; on Delos and Rheneia, and the spacious and secure
harbour between them ; and H. F. Tozer, Islands of the Aegaean, ch. i.
3 Thuc. i. 8.
4 A
modern Japanese parallel may be interesting. " Until recently births and deaths
were prohibited on the sacred island of Itsukushima in the Inland Sea ” (W. G.
Aston, Shinto, p. 251).
and call on them to sing ; and they would come ashore, robing and
crowning themselves, and singing, in no order at all. Nicias, however, landed
his chorus and offerings and everything on Rheneia, and brought a bridge
ready-made, gilded and painted and hung with curtains; and then at dawn he
marched his procession over the bridge in order, singing as they stepped. He
set up a bronze palm-tree in the god’s honour, and bought a farm for 10,000
drachmas,, whose revenues were to yield an annual banquet for the Delians, at
which they were to pray to the gods for " many blessings for Nicias.” 1
Even so the Athenians were not quite satisfied, and in 422 they cleared the
Delians out altogether, and Phamaces, the satrap of Daskyleion, gave them a
refuge at Adramyttium.2 A Delian inscription of about 403 is taken
to be a decree of the Spartans reinstating the Delians in possession of their
own temple and temple treasure,3 just as the Melians and Aeginetans,
as many as could be found, were given back their own lands.4
Afterwards it is clear that Athens recovered and kept Delos—perhaps by 377
B.C.*
Delos was not the only centre of religion and festival. Alcibiades, as we
have seen him boast, took care that Athens should be heard of at Olympia in
416. In 420 Lichas, a Spartan honourably known in the history of the period,6
had won the chariot race with a chariot entered in the name of the Boeotian
state, and when he had crowned his victorious driver, he had been struck by the
officers, to the consternation of everybody.7 But in 416 the glory
all redounded to Athens. What is more curious, Euripides wrote a triumphal ode
for the event, which Plutarch quotes to show (against Thucydides) that the
third chariot of Alcibiades came in third in the race and not fourth.8
There is something to be said for Plutarch’s canon that small things are often
more illuminative than great.9
Beside the old ancestral gods of Delos and Olympia, new gods altogether
begin in this period to be conspicuous in
1 Plut. Nicias,
3, 4-6.
JThuc. v. 1. For Pharnaces and his Greek interests,
see Chapter VII. p. 210.
* Hicks and Hill, No. 83. 4 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 9.
s Hicks and Hill, No. 104. • See Chapter VI. p. 169.
7 Thuc.
v. 50. 8 Plut. Alcib. 11.
* Plut.
Alexander, 1.
Athens. All sorts of strangers were settling there and bringing their cults with
them—some coming as slaves, some as traders. For instance, in 411, in the
Lysistrata Aristophanes makes the Proboulos refer to a strange occurrence of
five years before, which posterity remembered1—
Has then the women’s wantonness blazed out,
Their constant timbrels and Sabazioses,
And that Adonis-dirge upon the roof,
Which once I heard in full Assembly-time,
’Twas when Demostratus (beshrew him) moved To sail to Sicily; and from
the roof A woman, dancing, shrieked Woe, woe, Adorns!
And he proposed to enrol Zacynthian hoplites;
And she upon the roof, the maudlin woman,
Cried Wail, Adonis! yet he forced it through.
Sabazios was a Phrygian god,2 and Adonis came from Syria,
probably with Cyprus as a half-way house.3 Asclepios also was moved
from Epidauros to Athens, though without losing his ancient abode, and
inscriptions testify to clubs organized in his honour, and their members,
orgeones.
But while these universal gods with orgiastic rites begin to appear
beside the local cults, which they were to overshadow and to obscure, far more
characteristic of Athens are still those festivals of Dionysus, with which were
associated the plays, Tragedies and Comedies, which men will never cease to
read. Sabazios is long gone and Adonis with him, but Oedipus at Colonos and The
Birds still live. I do not wish here to speak of them as literature, but rather
to remark the circumstances of their production. Athens was at war—had been at
war for years, and had suffered terribly in loss of life and wealth and spirit.
Sophocles was an old man. When he was between fifty and sixty, Athens had made
him a General, and he had commanded with Pericles at the siege of Samos, as we
have seen. Nearly thirty years later in 413, some hold that Athens turned
1 Plut. Nicias,
12, 13 ; and Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 389.
2 Cf.
Aristophanes, Birds (year 415), 873, Sabazios and the Great Mother.
* Aristophanes, Peace, 420.
See Beloch, Gr. Gesch. ii. pp. 4, 5, on the incoming of foreign cults ; and W.
S. Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, 217.
to him again for political service and made him a Proboulos, in that
endeavour for “ sense, economy, and' good order” which ended in the affair of
the Four Hundred—“wickedness” ; the poet admitted that, “but there was nothing
better to do.”1 Perhaps even then he was working at his Oedipus—an
extraordinary poem for so old a man, one would say, if Euripides had not almost
at the same time produced his Bacchae.
That is the amazing thing—" I will not cease to wed Grace and the
Muse—happiest of unions. Be it not mine to live without the Muse, but ever be
garlands mine. Old indeed is the singer, but yet of Memory he sings ” :
€Tt toi
ycpav aoidos tccXaSet Mvafioavvav.2
And that is true of them both, of Sophocles and Euripides —true up to the
very end, and this in a community dragging desperately on with its death
struggle. Athens has leisure of mind for masterpieces of art, and what is
more—though it is difficult to put it into words and avoid the appearance of
nonsense—Athens has still the corporate vitality that makes such masterpieces
possible. She produced, it is true, no new Tragic poets of much account; yet
the old ones and she had still in common the energy of mind and abundance of
life on which a national poetry depends. When the two old men died and Agathon
went away to Macedon, the change was felt. There were “ thousands and thousands
of youngsters making tragedies,”—whole “ Museums of swallows,”—but none with
vitality for more than one play at best.3 Dionysos had to descend
into Hell again, this time not for Semele, but for Euripides ; and he does it
in the Frogs*
Once again the Frogs is another astounding illustration
1 Aristotle,
Rhetoric, iii. 18, 6, p. 1419a. Sir Richard Jebb in a note to his translation
says it was another Sophocles. It may have been, of course—we know of another
in Thucydides sent to Sicily (iii. 115) and exiled (iv. 65)—but I am not sure. For
the Probouloi, see Chapter VI. p. 186.
2 Eur.
Hercules Furens (rather after 424 B.C.), 673. Memory is not quite our plain
English faculty, but the Memory of the Greek myth, who was Mother to all the
Muses. Cf. Aesch. Prom. V. 461, and Plato, Theaetetus, 191D. .
8 Aristophanes, Frogs, 89 fi. * More upon this in
Chapter V.
of Athenian life and character. It was produced at the Lenaea of 405,
between the last two great battles—Arginusae, with its horrible sequel of the
trial of the generals, and Aegospotami—produced for a public festival, and its
theme is literary criticism, the comparative merits of two great Tragic poets.
There never was such a people ; they gave Aristophanes the prize—once more one
remarks with wonder the amazing leisure of mind and resilience of character of
this strange race.
Aristophanes is in many things a typical Athenian—or at least so it must
seem to modems who read ordinary Athenian life in his plays and know that
Athens valued him above all her comic poets, not merely as she came to value
Euripides, for she crowned and crowned him again while he lived. From what we
can make out from the fragments of other poets, the lines for Comedy were laid
down by tradition, and food and drink and the fhallos were inherent in the
scheme ; and, just as the chorus was an essential part both of Tragedy and
Comedy, they could not be left out. But there is little indication that
Aristophanes wanted to leave them out, so riotously and triumphantly do his wit
and his humour play about them. He stood with his people here. If it is urged
that his plots are generally slight, and that the structure of his plays is
generally the same, with the same type of opening scene and the same dependence
toward the end on mere episode, some part of this may be due to tradition.1
At the same time, if genius be an infinite capacity for taking pains, genius is
very apt to shirk unnecessary pains; and if, like Shakespeare, it can borrow a
plot, or, like Aristophanes, do without one, it will. A stranger feature in the
Aristophanic play is the general absence of characters. Dikaiopolis, most of us
would feel, could change places with Trygaios, or any other virtuous patriot of
ordinary appetites ; either of them owes all he has to the poet—of wit and
invention and love of ease—and is little more than a mask. The Cleon, the
Euripides, the Socrates, and the Lamachus of the plays are frankly caricatures,
hardly intended to be characters at all. Of psychology there is a minimum—no
Aguecheek, no Shylock; villains, knaves,
1 Of this we
might be more sure if we had the comedies of other poets of his day intact.
9
fools, absurdities, plenty of them, and all highly coloured and superbly
funny. The women of the plays are few, and slighter than the men, and where
they are not absurd, the interest is simply phallic ; even in a serious play
like the Lysistmta the heroine makes no disguises about her strongest suit—her
only one, it might be said. As a politician, Aristophanes is
outrageously—gloriously—partisan ; and if anything is wanted to complete the
comedy of his politics, it is supplied by historians, ancient and modem, who
have taken them seriously. One could imagine his enjoyment at such a discovery,
if certain historians have had any circulation in the Elysian fields.
There is no writer of the period who so successfully takes us into family
life of a kind1—cookery, tastes in dishes, the handiness of wife and
daughter and Thracian slave-girl, domestic implements and incidents.2
Above all, nowhere else do we touch the country life of Attica at all so
nearly—outdoor and indoor ; take, for instance, the famous picture of the wet
day and its relaxations in the Peace.3 But the pleasure of man and woman with nature as a background is a
familiar theme in antiquity ; it is not so often that a poet has much attention
for nature, when man and woman are away. Euripides had it, and so had
Aristophanes, as the bird-lyrics show:
Come hither any bird with plumage like my own ;
Come hither ye that batten on the acres newly sown,
On the acres by the farmer neatly sown ;
And the myriad tribes that feed on the barley and the seed,
The tribes that lightly fly, giving out a gentle cry ;
And ye who round the clod, in the furrow-riven sod,
With voices sweet and low, twitter flitter to and fro,
Singing tio, tio, tio, tiotinx;
And ye who in the gardens a pleasant harvest glean,
Lurking in the branches of the ivy ever green ;
And ye who top the mountains with gay and airy flight;
And ye who in the olive and the arbutus delight;
Come hither one and all, come flying to our call,
Trioto,
triotd, totobrinx.*
1 Another kind
we shall see in Chapter XI.
2 Aristophanes,
Ach. 241-278.
3 Aristophanes, Peace,
1127-1171. Cf. on this scene Countess Martinengo Cesaresco, Outdoor Life in
Greek and Roman Poets (a charming book), ch. ii. ; and Livingstone, Greek
Genius, p. 129.
4 Aristophanes,
Birds, 229 (B. B. Rogers).
It is not every farmer even to-day who is friendly to the birds. Perhaps
it was this flippancy about the loss of good grain that induced the audience to
give the play only the second prize. I think it is only in Virgil in antiquity
that we find such whole-hearted sympathy with birds and mice and other
depredators who prey on the farmer—and both the poets loved the farmer too.
" He of old," writes Marcus Aurelius, “ says, ‘ Dear City of
Cecrops!' and thou, wilt not thou say, ‘ O dear City of Zeus ’ ? ”1
It is Aristophanes he is quoting, and one of his earliest plays, though where
Marcus read the Babylonians it is hard to guess, or why the phrase stayed in
his mind. " Dear City of Cecrops” represents the poet’s attitude. He made
fun of his fellow-countrymen—they expected it and wanted it, and he did it. He
abused their leaders—and it looks as if they rather enjoyed it2—a
trait of Athenian character worth remembering, for it was not shared by the
Spartans, and the time came when Athens felt she could do without politics in
Comedy.3 Their prevailing politics the poet never liked— war and
empire and the ill-usage of other Greeks were repulsive to him. His is one of
the friendliest voices we hear in Athens for the allies and all the Hellenes.
It is a curious thing that one of Aristophanes’ deepest antipathies gives
us a clue to the real culture of his audience. How was it that he was able to
quote so much of Euripides— to parody word and scene from him—and not miss fire
? Take it in conjunction with Plutarch’s story of the Athenian prisoners in
Sicily singing Euripides’ lyrics,4 and a good deal is achieved to
vindicate against some modem critics the general high culture of the Athenian
people.
But, for all the amenities of life, the long war told on the national
temper. The losses of life by war and plague, and by the Sicilian expedition,
were enormous—“ of many who went out, few came home.” 5 “ What have
you women to
'Marcus Aurelius, iv. 23.
2 Grote (viii.
131) suggests the democracy was strong enough to tolerate unfriendly tongues.
E. Meyer, iv. § 560, holds that the people rather liked having their leaders ■■ chafled ”—even despised them.
8 Cf. speech of Critias, ap. Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 34.
4 Plut. Nicias, 29, 2. Cf. Chapter V. p. 140.
6 Thuc.
vii., last chapter.
do with war ? ” asks the Proboulos of Lysistrata, and she rejoins :
She. Nothing to do with it ? wretch that you axe !
We are the people who feel it the keenliest,
Doubly on us the affliction is cast;
Where are the sons that we sent to your battle-fields ?
He. Silence ! a truce to the ills that are past.
What consolation Pericles’ speech had for mothers of fallen sons may be
wondered.
For those who lived, the war made everything more difficult. The country
people crowded into the city and lived where they could, “ for eight years
together, in tubs and turrets and crannies.” 1 The Peloponnesian
invasions steadily impoverished them, and living was always a struggle in a
Greek city. Pay for service in the law courts, in the Ecclesia, on the ships,
was necessary for poor freemen who had to compete with slave labour; and the
numbers of slaves in Athens must have been enormous—all to be fed, too.
Cephalos, as we saw, had one hundred and twenty at the end of the war. If the
pressure of slave on freeman was perhaps lightened, when the Spartans fortified
Deceleia and more than twenty thousand slaves, mostly artisans, ran away,
others suffered heavily by the loss of this living property. Cattle and sheep
were taken by the enemy, and all sorts of plunder. One very curious and
interesting fact comes from the Greek history' lately found at Oxyrhynchus.2.
“ The Thebans made a great stride forward to all-round prosperity {eviaifioviav
oXoKXr/pov) immediately the war began ; ” for in the first place the menace of
Athens led to the removal of population from many small and unwalled places
into Thebes, and so doubled Thebes, which, after the occupation of Deceleia, “
did much better, for they bought cheap the slaves and the other plunder of the
war, and living so near they shifted over to themselves all the movable
property (KaTaa-nev^v) of Attica, down to the timber and tiles of the houses.
At that time the land of the Athenians was in a better state than any in
Greece, for it had suffered little in the raids, and had been developed and
worked by the Athenians to such an extent that ...” and here the papyrus fails
us.
1 Aristophanes, Knights (year 424), 793. 2
Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12, 3.
Hitherto the com route had been from Byzantium, along the north coast of
the Propontis, out of the Dardanelles, picking up the islands (always essential
to Athens) Imbros, Lemnos, and Scyros, to Euboea, then across the island and
over the Euripos, and by laud from Oropus through Attica to Athens. That way
was now blocked by the Deceleian garrison, and the ships had to round Sunium
with constant risk (after the destruction of the Athenian fleet) from
privateers and pirates.1 The cost of everything rose, and at the
same time coin and the precious metals in any form became scarcer and scarcer,
till at last temple treasures and votive offerings had to be minted, and so
Athens had her first gold coinage, “ using the Victories for the war.” 2
Taxation, liturgies, trierarchies—there was no end to it.
With the enemy so near there was garrison duty night and day, and the
habit of carrying weapons, which had long been dropped in Athens,3
began again perforce.4 Aristophanes makes fun of it—or at least
Lysistrata does to the Proboulos : 6
Lysistrata. Now in the market you see them like Corybants jangling about
with their armour of mail.
Fiercely they stalk in the midst of the crockery, sternly parade by the
cabbage and kail.
Proboulos. Right, for a soldier should always be soldierly !
Lysistrata. Troth, ’tis a mighty ridiculous jest,
Watching them haggle for shrimps in the market-place, grimly accoutred
with shield and with crest.
Stratyllis. Lately I witnessed a captain of cavalry, proudly the while on
his charger he sat,
Witnessed him, soldierly, buying an omelet, stowing it all in his cavalry
hat.
Comes, like a Tereus, a Thracian irregular, shaking his dart and his
target to boot;
Ofi runs a shop-girl, appalled at the sight of him, down he sits,
soldierly, gobbles her fruit.
The contrast with the usual peaceful unconcern of Athenian life is
signal.®
War is “ a violent teacher,” as Thucydides said,7 and these
1 Thuc. vii. 27, 28. 2 Aristophanes,
Frogs, 720 ; C.I.A. i. 140.
8 Thuc. i. 6. 1
Thuc. vii. 28.
6 Aristophanes,
Lysistrata, 557-564 (B. B. Rogers).
* Cf. Demosthenes, Midias,
221.
7 Thuc. iii. 82,
2. See Chapter III. p. 71.
were some of its lessons. It is not surprising that the Athenian temper
grew sharper, that the avroBhi\ Tpo7ro?, the “ bite- at-sight habit,” 1 grew more and more nervous and irritable. There was no mercy for
generals who failed—Laches, Paches, Eurymedon, or Thucydides. Nicias was afraid
to come back beaten from Syracuse, though to bring away what he could of the
beaten forces and fleet was the only patriotism. The generals after Arginusae
are an even more outstanding illustration.
One bad example the Peloponnesians set, which caused great irritation and
was copied. Early in the war they began capturing trading vessels, o\«aSe9, and
killing the traders, whether Athenians, or Athenian allies, or neutrals.2 The Samian delegates told one'Spartan admiral “ he had an ill manner of
liberating Hellas, if he put to death men who were not his enemies, and were
not lifting a hand against him, but were allies of Athens from necessity.” 3 Then came reprisals in kind. The Mitylene massacre was indeed
countermanded, but Melos was andrapodized, the adult men killed, the women and
children sold oft to dealers for the slave-markets and iropveia of the
Mediterranean.4 The Aeginetans,
expelled from their island, and settling in the Thyreatis, were raided, and the
captives taken to Athens and killed there “ for the hatred they had always had
to them from of old.” 6 Finally before Aegospotami it was resolved to cut the right hand off
every man captured on a Peloponnesian trireme—he should row no more.6 To his credit the general, Adeimantos, spoke against it. Of two
triremes, a Corinthian and an Andrian, which they took, they drove the crews
over a precipice.
Then came the final blow, and the memory with it of the precedents they
had set. Let Xenophon, who grew up in the Athens of the war, and must have been
there, tell us what he saw.
1 Aristophanes, Peace, 607. 2 Thuc. ii.
67. 8 Thuc. iii. 32.
4 Thuc.
v. 116. This killing and enslaving of a whole city is discussed by Plato and
deprecated in the case of Greek against Greek ; Greek against barbarian is
another story—they are natural enemies, and war between them is not a-rda-is,
as between Greeks who are by nature friends. Rep. 469B-470C. To understand what
it meant, the modern reader had better look up the treatment of Chios by the
Turks in 1822.
6 Thuc. iv. 57, 4. *
Xen. Hellenica, ii. 1, 31, 32.
" It was night when the Paralos vessel came, and the disaster was
told in Athens; and wailing came up from Peiraieus between the Long Walls to
the city, every man telling the next. So that, that night, no man slept,
wailing not only for the lost but still more for themselves, thinking they must
themselves suffer what they had done to the Melians, who were colonists of the
Spartans, when they took them by siege, and to the people of Histiaea, of
Scione, of Torone, of Aegina, and many others of the Greeks.” All through the
siege of Athens, as Xenophon shows us, this thought came back again and
again—that Athens must suffer what she had inflicted on the little cities.1
She did not suffer it; but let us ask ourselves how and why it is that we
forgive her all the wrong she made others suffer, and do not forgive those who
even thought of inflicting as much on her again.
1 The story is taken up in Chapter VI. p. 189.
EURIPIDES
BIOGRAPHY is never an easy task—least of all when its subject is a poet.
With care we may track him down, till we can account for almost every month of
his life — with date and place exactly given — and then when we have found him
where impressions must have come most vividly, he tells us that all the time he
was thinking of something else—he had
A strangeness in the mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour Nor for that place.
And we discover that amid what would most have impressed us, he was
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
But when our subject is a poet of the ancient world, we are less likely
to make a true biography. Yet the ancient poet lived a life—lived it among men
at a certain time and in a certain place; and whatever strange seas of thought
he voyaged through, sometimes we know the port from which he started and can
guess the haven which he tried to make, and sometimes, if we know contemporary
history, we can divine how it was that this or that came to be marked so emphatically
upon his chart.
Euripides, men said, was born on the very day of the battle of Salamis,
and on the island of Salamis—on the day which marks the beginning of a new era
for all Greeks, and he of all men most definitely belongs to the new age. On
Salamis he lived as a man for a good deal of his time, we are told; and perhaps
he grew up there. What is that makes a childhood ? What was it to grow up on a
little estate that perhaps lay near the scene of the great fight ? When he
looked bagk, did he remember wrecks of Phoenician galleys, dropping slowly to
pieces upon the beach—strange trophies, cups of Eastern
workmanship, swords and armour of no pattern Greeks ever saw again, kept
in the houses of the Salaminians—each with its story ? 1 Do we
realize how often memory is three generations deep, and what this means to an
imaginative child ? Was he told tales of the great war ? He must have heard
them— of Marathon and Hippias, and Pisistratus. And there would be slaves in
the houses round about—who came on the great Armada from the utmost ends of the
earth, and were taken by the victorious Greeks and sold ; and the boy made
friends with them, men and women, and they told him what it was to be sold in a
strange land—hither or thither, where they did not know—Sparta, Sicily,.
Athens—the gods only knew, and perhaps they did not care.
Who am I that I sit Here at a Greek king’s door.
Yea, in the dust of it ?
A slave that men drive before,
A woman that hath no home,
Weeping alone for her dead ;
A low and bruised head,
And the glory struck therefrom.2
Such stories, and worse ones, told in a foreigner’s halting Greek 3
to a sensitive child formed the reverse of the glorious tales of victory he
learnt from parents and kinsmen, from the freemen and the conquerors. Grown people
know that
things like this must be In every famous victory,
but the child asks, Why ? and when he is told to be silent, he asks
himself the question ; and if Nature has planned a poet in him, the unanswered
question may never cease to work. Such things must have lain at the door for
the open eyes of the Greek child, Euripides, and they haunted his life.
Then came boyhood and books, and the choice of a life. Legend says he
wished to be a painter—a strange choice.
1 If evidence is
needed, Pericles speaks (Thuc. ii. 13, 4) of a-KvXa M^dirca kcu et ti
Totovrorpoirov; and the inventories of the treasures in the Parthenon between
422 and 418 b.c. (Hicks and Hill,
Greek Inscr., No. 66) include six aK.iva.Kai rrcpl-^pvaoi, Persian swords. Cf.
Herodotus, vii. 190; viii. 8,96; ix. 80.
3 Troades, 138
(Professor Gilbert Murray).
3 Aristophanes
shows us how foreign slaves stumbled in Greek.
“ No youth of parts,” says Plutarch, “ because he saw the Zeus of
Olympia, would wish therefore to be a Pheidias.” 1 Euripides came of
a good family—cr^oBpa evyev&v—and in spite of his lifelong interest in the
arts, he never became painter or sculptor. He never took to public life, like
Sophocles ; he never was called to command on the deck of a trireme nor to draft
a constitution for his country; he was not wanted. When he served as a soldier,
for he probably had to serve in his turn, unless luck sent him to Egypt or
Cyprus, it was probably against Greeks he had tq fight. If he served in Egypt
by any chance, it was an awful lesson he learnt of the meaning of war.2
But this is all conjecture. There was war enough for him to see, and prisoners
of war on sale in the slave- market, where he could see what has always been
seen in slave- markets. He seems to have gone back to private life—to his
books. Athenaeus 3 names him among some half-dozen men of the days
before the Pergamene kings, who were famous for their great libraries, and two
of these were tyrants in their time. A hundred years after his death it was
said that his favourite study was a cave on the island of Salamis that fronted
the sea; “ from which cause also he draws the greater part of his similes from
the sea.” 4 That is natural enough, and what a picture it suggests
of the man, with the worn face that we know and remember from the portrait
busts, reading his philosophers in the quiet place, till tired and perplexed he
lays down his book and looks at the sea and the birds. Those glimpses of the
sea and of the birds come back in his poetry, till one can almost smell the sea
and watch the birds. To this we must return.
A poet in the fifth century, deeply read in the books of the
philosophers, full of the sense of the beauty and wonder of the world, sea and
land, perplexed too by human life— where else could he find that opening for
the expression of himself that Tragedy gave ? No other mode of poetry offered
1 Pericles, 2.
2 In the
Athenian expedition that failed, 459-454 B.C.
8 Athenaeus, i. p. 3. For a contemporary library, see
Xen. Mem. iv. 2, I, the young Euthydemos ypa/i/iaTa 1roXXa ovveiXeypivov
7TOLT]TO>V te Kal (ro(f)i<rrSiv to>v evtSoMfioaTaTav.
1 Aulys Gellius
quotes the story from Philochorus, N.A. xv. 20, 5. Cf. Vita, 59 fi.
such scope for the utterance of the strange conflict that the sentient
spirit knows in such times :
Now believing,
Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed With impulse, motive, right and
wrong, the ground Of obligation, what the rule and whence The sanction.
There is so much that seems sound and true, and in sheer contrast and
opposition stands as much. The spirit is tom this way and that in the war of
good with good, and right with right. And the feeling grows and deepens that if
all this could but find expression, matters would be helped forward—as if once
the problem were fairly stated, the solution would be something nearer. It was
in some such mood, one would suppose, that Goethe said that man is not bom to
solve the problem of the universe but to find out wherein it consists.
So to Tragedy Euripides turned, and from 455 when he was some twenty-five
years of age till his death in 406, he spent his life in writing plays for the
festivals of Athens. Sometimes, it is more than likely, his plays were not
presented. Five times in these years he was awarded the prize, which often fell
to Sophocles. Other and lesser men eclipsed him —■ in 415 “ Xenocles, whoever
he may have been,” as an ancient writer puts it, produced a play that won the prize against
the Troades. Other things he wrote, we are told—an ode for Alcibiades when three of his chariots were “ placed ” at
Olympia in 4161— an epitaph for the Athenians who fell at Syracuse.2
But he was not popular in a general sense—he was attacked furiously by
Aristophanes, and he felt the ill will of his fellow-citizens, and at last left
Athens, as Aeschylus did sixty years before, never to return. He went to the
court of King Archelaos of Macedon, and there at seventy he wrote the Bacchae,
the play of all his plays where men find most the note of freedom and
escape—escape from the sea and its storms, the haven reached and toils ended.
So indeed it proved. Two years later he died and was buried in the strange land
of refuge (406).3
Yet his life had not been one without friendship and recognition. The
invitation of King Archelaos was one proof
1 Plut. Alcib.
ii. Cf. Chapter IV. p. 117.
2 Plut. Nicias, 17. 3 Cf. Chapter III. p. 68.
of this. But other proof was forthcoming in a strange quarter, for when
the Syracusan expedition c^me to its horrible end and “ of the many who went
forth few returned home,”1 of these survivors “ no small number,” we
read, “ greeted Euripides with warmth, and told, some, how, when enslaved, they
had been set free for teaching all they knew of his poetry, and others, how, as
they wandered about after the battle, they were given food and water for
singing his songs.” 2
Mahy such, he said,
Rteturning home; to Athens, sought him out,
The old bard in the solitary house,
And thanked him ere they went to sacrifice.8
It is a remarkable testimony to the wide appeal of Euripides to the Greek
world at large, and it may serve to explain the extraordinary vigour with which
Aristophanes assailed him. For it suggests a fairly close acquaintance of the
Athenian people in general with his plays, even if they did not give him
prizes, and a good deal of verbal memory of his dramas. It also explains how
Aristophanes can parody him so much and yet hope to reach his audience with his
misquotations. .
In three plays which survive Aristophanes has introduced Euripides as a
character and always in the same spirit. Through the whole of his criticism may
be felt a hatred that is not less real for being tinged by fascination. For
Aristophanes was himself attacked on the stage “ for mocking Euripides and then
imitating him.” 4 It is not admiration, but he cannot keep his mind
off him. Standing with the middle class and farmer party, a conservative in
grain as became a young gentleman of parts, he mistrusted the whole democratic
movement of the day — the downgrade tendencies in art, philosophy, politics,
and religion; and he saw clearly enough that the cause was one and the same,
the spirit of criticism. The leaders in this disruption of society were
obviously Euripides and Socrates ; the Cleons and sausage-sellers stood on a
lower plane. So to Euripides and Socrates he devoted himself. He was shrewd
enough to see that to meet them on their own ground would be to concede the
whole position. Criticism, if met by argument, would have secured its own
1 Thuc. vii.
end. 2 Plut. Nicias, 29, 2.
* Balaustion’s Adventure. *
Schol. Plato, p. 330 (Bekker) A.
ends. He would attack from ground of his own choosing and drive them off
the field. This is the weakness of his polemic, that he does not attempt, and
does not intend, to assail his enemy’s centre. Every kind of flank movement—
witty, vicious, shameful—he will try ; and if he cannot laugh them out of a
hearing and perhaps out of Athens, it will be a pity. But controversy is never
successful in the long run, unless the enemy’s centre is broken. Aristophanes
succeeded with his contemporaries, with those, at least, who preferred “ the
unexamined life,” with those who still prefer it; but the forward movement of
the human mind is not to be held up by banter, even if it is banter of genius.
Aristophanes began with Euripides’ books and his mother. The Tragic poet
got his ideas out of other men’s books—to an audience that read little the
charge of “ bookishness ” would appeal; and his mother sold vegetables. What
lies behind, this charge we do not know, but the joke never grew stale, and it
receives many forms, some of them witty. This style of abuse and the number of
years over which it was spread suggest that if in the Thesmophoriazusae (of 411
B.C.) Aristophanes had no vilification for the wife of Euripides, either to
quote or to invent, the mean tales of a later day may be dismissed.
When Aristophanes fairly comes to Euripides himself, his criticism turns
upon his art and his philosophy—proper subjects for criticism in any case. As
for his art, Euripides was spoiling Tragedy ; the legends he chose for
treatment were better left to be forgotten, and his methods of treating them
were aesthetically ridiculous. Hero and demigod come upon his stage in rags and
tatters ; they talk out of books, about anything, whether suited to the tragic
stage or not—and they talk at such length, too, in their long debates ; they
use language that is modem, subtle, and trifling, nothing like the diction of
Aeschylus—quibbling, hair-splitting jargoners, one and all of them. His plays
cannot go of themselves ; they need a prologue of explanation, always
constructed on the same humdrum lines, and beginning with the same type of
sentence. He always attacks women—as if he needed to; as if honest women didn’t
go home and drink hemlock for very shame at his plays. Lastly, the music is all
modem and
undignified. Perhaps the happiest stroke in all this is the choric ode in
the Frogs, where " Aeschylus ” burlesques the Euripidean style in a song
of stolen poultry—awful with Night, dark-gleaming, and the soul-less soul of a
dead phantom, a thing to be expiated, and then the terrible discovery that the
bird is gone, and Nymph and scullery-maid, and the Cretans, Ida’s children and
Dictynna, are all invoked in passionate phrase with duplicated words and
trilled syllables to find and bring back the lost bird.
On Art, Euripides was liable to attack, as Aristophanes saw, for he
occupied a half-way position. The tragic mode was old—the type of legend to be
treated was fixed, the chorus was an established necessity, and each had become
an embarrassment to the poet. He needed more freedom and he might not have it.
The ideas and the outlook on life were new, and not easy to adapt to the old
framework, but it had to be done. The much parodied prologue was an attempt to
relieve things. The chorus was a terrible difficulty—a dozen or fifteen persons
always present, to overhear every secret on which the plot turns and not to
reveal them. It must be owned that Euripides, tied to this necessity, turned
it after all to good purpose. Such odes as those in the Hippolytus (1. 731) and
the Troades (1. 794) have a wonderful psychological effect, placed as they are,
in varying the emotional pitch1—on the variation of which so much in
a play depends—and in giving the mind and heart of reader and spectator at
least a hint of where the clue is to be found which shall lead to peace.
When Aristophanes attacked Euripides’ philosophy, he was at once on safer
ground and less secure. It was safer because he had his audience more entirely
with him—they understood and they approved. But the criticism is essentially
external, and there it breaks down. Aristophanes charges Euripides with
teaching atheism, sophistry, and immorality. Zeus is driven out and Aether
takes his place. The prayer of Euripides in the Frogs is not to the gods men
know and recognize, like the honourable and dignified address which Aeschylus
makes
11 borrow Mr. A. C. Bradley’s phrase from
one of those discussions of Shakespeare, which I have found more helpful for
the understanding of Greek drama than much which has been written directly
about it.
to Demeter; they are gods of a " brand-new coinage,” " private
gods ” :
Aether whereon I batten ! Vocal chords !
Reason, and nostrils swift to scent and sneer,
Grant that I duly probe each word I hear.1
Why Earth should be a legitimate deity and Aether not, it would be hard
to say, if Air had not been playing a large part in contemporary speculations
as to the nature of the soul and of God. But to come to human life and conduct,
all this emphasis on Phaedras and Stheneboias could only mean immorality ; and
a famous line in the Hippolytus definitely taught perjury and justified
it—" the tongue has sworn : the mind remains unsworn.” The last few lines
of the trial scene between Aeschylus and Euripides may stand as an example of
the whole. The god Dionysos, at whose festival the tragedies were played, has
gone down into Hades to fetch up Euripides, but in a succession of parodies
things go otherwise.
Dion. My tongue hath sworn ; but I’ll choose Aeschylus.
Eur. What have you done, you traitor ?
Dion. I ? I’ve judged
That Aeschylus gets the prize. Why shouldn’t I ?
Eur. Canst meet mine eyes, fresh from thy deed of shame ?
Dion. What is shame, that the . . . Theatre deems no shame ?
Eur. Hard heart! You mean to leave your old friend dead ?
Dion. Who knoweth if to live is but to die ?
If breath is bread, and sleep a woolly lie ? 2
And that is the end of Euripides. Who knows if life be not death ? Let
him stay dead.
Tragedy was the work of Euripides, but as Plato said Tragedy and Comedy
came from the same hand, and the man who made the one could make the other.3
The Tragic poet had Satyric dramas on which to show what he could do with a
lighter touch. Till lately but one Satyric drama survived, so that to
generalize or to particularize from it is dangerous. But if the style and
manner of the Cyclops are partlytraditional, none the less it is true that
Euripides here saw his chance and
1 Frogs, 892
(Professor Murray’s translation). Ibtarais deols is the phrase preceding.
2 Professor
Murray’s translation. I have italicized the quotations.
8 Plato,
Symposium, 223 c, d.
took it. In this play Odysseus—not the malign figure of Tragedy, but a
nobler Odysseus nearer the Homeric—is confronted with Cyclops, Silenus, and
Satyr, who, it appears, have every taste and instinct of the average hero of an
Aristophanic comedy. They are frankly sensual, thoroughly gluttonous, rank
cowards, cruel and superstitious; and their outlook on life is that which Plato
drew in Callicles in the Gorgias—the spirit that made the Melian massacre, and
many other shameful deeds. The humour is grim.
Hatred led Aristophanes to lay his finger on the two mainsprings of the
thought of Euripides—if so mechanical a metaphor may be used of thought—passion
and question. As we study the man with the closer attention of those who love
him, we find here as elsewhere that passion and question are not to be severed.
They act and react upon each other, and it is perhaps passion that calls
question into being.
Wer nie sein Brod xnit Tranen ass,
Wer nie die kummervoile Nachte Auf seinem Bette
weinend sass,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Machte.
Whatever it be with philosophers, with poets philosophy is the child of
pain. They feel
The heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world,
and feeling it they are more apt to get aright the first elements of the
problem.
’Tis not the calm and tranquil breast That sees and reads the problem
true,
They only know on whom ’t has prest,
Too hard to hope to solve it too.
“ I
So Goethe and two of our own great poets tell us, and it is true of the
rest. Of Euripides, Nestle says that “ passionate feeling is the ultimate
source of all his criticism.” 1
“ There is great confusion,” says his Orestes, “ among things divine,
yes, and mortal affairs too.” 2 It is the complaint we remember that
Hamlet made. There is a want of certainty, where most of all certainty should
be, about the gods and all that concerns them.3
1 Nestle, Euripides, p. 26. 2 Iph. Taur. 572. 8 Eur. H.F. 62.
O Zeus ! what shall I say ?
that thou seest men ?
Or that they hold this doctrine all in vain,
And Chance rules everything among mankind ? 1
What is one to say ? Euripides went to his books—in a passion to know the
truth ; and there he found many things written, and much that interested him,
for it came back into his mind at moments when we should not have expected it,
and finds expression from the lips of the characters in his plays. They too
have a speculative habit—and this in a higher degree than we should be apt to
think in our current judgments of ordinary people. But perhaps Euripides is
nearer the truth—and ordinary people do touch the deep questions under stress
of pain. Much then that was in the books breaks out—curiously, as some would
say; naturally, as others would have it—from the lips of men and women in the
plays. Most of all the last word in the books—for the saying of Xenophanes—
So/cos S’
€7Tl Tra<Tl TeTVKTdl—
that guess-work is over all, seems terribly like the conclusion of the
whole matter. And yet it cannot be ; there must be ^ruth, and it must be found
somehow. Euripides will not be satisfied to guess; he must know. Meantime he
seems to sway this way and that—that is, if we follow the plan of Aristophanes
and take every dramatic utterance in any play as the poet’s own, which is bad
criticism as a rule. Here it is more tolerable, one feels. If the character,
says this or the other thing, the poet has felt it at some time. We reach the
conclusion that Euripides is not a man with a system or a dogma. His heart has
been the battle-ground of many thoughts, and his very face in the portrait bust
shows it. Like such men, he is full of contradictions—he loves to question, and
is weary of it and longs for certainty. But it cannot be found ; so we will
give up the quest; yes, let us give it up—which means, we will go on with it.
Philosophers with their guesses stand on this side ; and on the other
side are priests and mystics with their certainties. Shall it be rationalism or
mysticism ? But rationalism leaves so much unexplained, and mysticism frankly
leaves the facts behind ; and no system yet manages, however it is, to ' 1 Eur. Hec. 488.
catch the real smell and sound and colour of the sea, for instance. There
it is, on the beach below, and the sea-birds are busy over it, and everywhere
in the rocks above him is the noise of the broods in the nests. Has not the sea
something to say ? But the philosophers have their eyes on elements and causes,
and the mystics with their eyes shut are preaching abstinence from flesh and a
number of abstract notions. Then there is life and its confusions—what heals
them? Not “conjecture that is over all.” Can it be the mystics have something
to say here ? ■
“ Surely,” the chorus sings in the Hippolytus?- “ surely with power do
the thoughts of the gods, when they come into my heart, take away sorrow; but
gvveo-iv Si tiv iXiriSt icevdav
—[let us leave the Greek untranslated for a moment]—I faint, as I look on the
chances that fall to men and on the deeds they do ; it is confusion, all, and
life passes away for men, full of wandering and change for ever.”
It is the old problem as to action and consequence. Good should come to
the good, and evil to the evil, if the gods are just; but it does not happen
so,—at least so far as we see,— and the heart sinks within a man. But let us
look at the untranslated phrase, which is rather obscure—“concealing some
(riva) understanding with hope ” might be a clumsy literal translation. One
wonders what he means. I cannot help thinking it is something like this. There
is understanding of a sort, which goes to a certain point, which sees things so
far clearly enough—even too clearly; things fall amiss, perplexingly;
understanding gives out, and we are left stranded; and then hope suggests
another way of it. But is it possible that hope is only a coloured glass, after
all, which confuses what understanding shows us so plainly—that it is merely a
form of wishing things to be other than they are ? What right has wishing to
impose its fancies on the facts of understanding ? Ah ! but it does ; and then
the poet looks at the facts again, and they are hard and unintelligible still.
Whether this rendering of the passage is sound or not, it seems to me to
represent the attitude of Euripides to life. There stand the facts, and the
whole heart cries out for—it hardly knows
1 Hippolytus, 1103-1110. Professor Murray’s
translation of the phrase left in Greek I cannot believe to be right.
what; for a life beyond the grave, perhaps, where things shall be mended,
where at least severed kindred and parted friends may meet—for gods who care
for men. The mystics held out hopes of both ; they trafficked in hopes. And
Euripides saw painfully that hope is after all—hope. Thus far the facts take
him; hope suggests one more step, but he will go no further than he sees the
facts go. His heart feels the wrench —the pull of things beyond the line, but
at the line he stops. That is characteristic. It is the struggle of the great,
deep, sentient, human-hearted poet with his own awful, irresistible logic ; and
because it is such a struggle that appears in all his work, he remains the poet
of all time, for in every age the old struggle goes on between what the
understanding categorically says is and what the heart insists must be.
Aristophanes declares roundly that Euripides in his tragedies taught men
and women that there are no gods. It would be fairer to say that Bellerophon in
anguish cries out that there are none. For when we turn to the plays we find
plenty of gods and goddesses in them ; and yet Aristophanes is in a sense
right. Professor Verrall’s well-known books would suggest that Euripides can
have thought of little but polemic against, the gods. This I do not at all
believe. Yet there is criticism of a most penetrative character. Throughout
antiquity from Plato to the Christian apologists we find that the main source
of criticism of the traditional gods was moral feeling. Already in Homer the
heroes, mortal men as they are, stand on a higher moral plane than the gods;
and while a moral progress is marked in the thinking of the Greek world, the
gods of popular tradition never caught up with the better and purer natures of
actual men. They were left behind; and when men thought of them they conceived
them to be actuated by motives beneath those of the purer spirits among their
fellows—by love of power, lust, spite, and the sheer fancy to use their
half-omnipotence in an arbitrary way. Against this view thinkers had long been
in revolt, and if it was atheism in Euripides to let one of his characters cry:
If gods do deeds of shame, the less gods they !
then something must be said of Aeschylus and Pindar, who were careful to
reject legends which told of ill-deeds done by
gods1—legends which none the less lived on as before. The
outlook of Euripides is different. He will not mend, but end the legends ; and
he does it in a way of his own.
Euripides presents the traditional gods very much as tradition gave them.
The usages and conventions of the Attic stage lent themselves to this. But by
setting the old gods with their old instincts and their old deeds in a new
milieu, and above all by letting them utter in words the impulses that moved
them to do those deeds, he effected a tacit criticism of the most significant.
The new milieu is that of human suffering; and anything more irrelevant to
these old gods, especially with their new and Euripidean frankness, could not
be conceived. Here they speak and act—doing no more than tradition said. Athena
wrecked the Greek fleet on its voyage from Troy. So in the Troades she
discusses her motives and her plans with Poseidon, and he accepts all. Now,
taken in themselves, the motives are pitiful and devilish, and the plans mean
death to hundreds of innocent creatures—and one of these gods actually pictures
these people lying drowned all along the shore of Euboea. That is tradition—not
innovation at all; it all happened so, and if the gods discussed it, it must
have been in this way. But to conceive of them discussing it at all was
innovation—still more so, to conceive of them doing it while full in front of
them and beneath them Queen Hecuba lay in the dust, a widow, a captive, a
slave. Of course everybody knew her story ; only one had not thought of these
things together—the spite of Athena, the cold-blooded stupidity of Poseidon,
and the misery of Hecuba. Certain ideas depend on our thinking in compartments;
and the removal of the dividing wall is criticism.
Or take another case. Greek legend was full of demigod heroes, splendid
figures of romance and adventure, sons in each case of a mortal woman and a
god. Here is an instance which shows how Pindar handled such a tale.2
“ But Euadne beneath a thicket’s shade put from her her silver pitcher
and her girdle of scarlet web, and she brought forth a boy in whom was the
spirit of God. By her side the gold-haired god set kindly Eleithuia and the
Fates, and from
1 Cf. Chapter II. p. 42.
! Pindar, Olympian, 6, 39-44, 53-56 ; Iamos as if
from lov.
her womb in easy travail came forth Iamos to the light.” She left him
there, and then her husband came from Delphi and asked for the child, for the
god himself had told him it was the son of Phoebus and should be a prophet. But
none knew, “ though he was now five days bom. For he was hidden among rushes in
an impenetrable brake, his tender body all suffused with golden and deep purple
gleams of pansy-flowers ; wherefore his mother prophesied that by this holy
name of immortality he should be called throughout all time.”
What a beautiful picture Pindar makes of it—lovely words, and colours
gleaming. And what a squalid story it was! In the Ion Euripides tells the same
story of the same god and another woman, Creusa of Athens. Creusa is the
teller, twice, once in the third person to Ion—how a woman, one of her friends
(it is herself, of course), lay with a god, with PhJebus, and bore him a child
; and her father never knew ; and she exposed it, and it disappeared—perhaps
the wild beasts destroyed it—she never knew; though she came again and searched
the place over and over, she found no clue; it was gone.1 Later on
she tells it in the first person ; she had not consented, she says, but Apollo
had his way; and then “ I bore him a child ” ; and “ he is dead, exposed to the
beasts.’' “ Dead ? ” says her listener, “ and the false Apollo (o /ea/eo?)
never helped ? " “He did not help ...” “ Who exposed the child ? ” “I did
it, in the darkness, wrapped in swaddling clothes." “ But how couldst thou
bear to leave thy child in the cave ? ” “ If thou hadst seen the baby reach his
hands to me ... I thought the god would save his own son.” 2
O Athens, what thy cliff hath
seen !
It saw the ravished maiden’s pang,
The babe she bore to Phoebus there Cast to the talon and the fang,
There, on the same insulting scene !
Of any born 'Twixt god and man none ever sang,
None ever told but tales forlorn.
O Athens, what thy cliff hath
seen ! 3
So sings the chorus, and at the play’s end Apollo sends Athena to put all
right—he would not come himself, said the sister
1 Ion, 330-352. 2
Ion, 940-960 (abridged).
3 Ion, 500-508
(Dr. Verrall’s translation, or paraphrase rather).
goddess, “ lest there should be reproach for what is past.” 1
It is always the same with the traditional gods—they are not touched by moral considerations
; they have no regard for human feeling ; they are beyond good and evil. And
the sacrifices and the offerings, the temples and the ceremonies and the
festivals— My heart, my heart crieth, O Lord Zeus on high,
Were they all to thee as nothing, thou throndd in the sky, Throned in the
fire-cloud, where a City, near to die,
Passeth in the wind and the flare ? 2
It is the question of a captive Trojan woman in the Troades, and another
answers :
Dear one, O husband mine,
Thou in the dim dominions Driftest with waterless lips Unburied ; and me
the ships Shall bear o’er the bitter brine, j
Storm-birds upon angry pinions,
Where the towers of the Giants shine O’er Argos cloudily,
And the riders ride by the sea.8
Again, the same question : does human suffering touch the gods in their
happiness ? If it does not, are they gods ?
Ah !• but! said the Orphic teachers, this is to look at things from
outside ; the gods may be known better and understood. So to the Orphics
Euripides listened, and we can gather his conclusion from one or two allusions.
They practised abstinence. " Go now,” cries the angry Theseus to his son,
“ go and boast, and with thy life-less food, juggle with thy meats; have
Orpheus for thy king, and revel, honouring the smoke of many books ; for thou
art taken ! Such I bid all men flee ; for they hunt with words of awe, and
foulness is in their thoughts.” 4 The Satyrs in the den of the
Cyclops will not help Odysseus to twirl the flaming stake into the giant’s one
eye—" but I know a charm of Orpheus, a very good one, whereby the brand of
itself shall go to his skull and fire the one-eyed son of earth.”5 “
Much have I dealt with the Muses,” sings the chorus in the Alcestis, “ and
soared on high, and many a reason have I handled, but nought stronger than
1 Ion, 1557. 2
Troades, 1076 f. (Murray).
3 Troades,
1081 f. (Murray). 1 Eur.
Hippolytus, 952-957.
6 Eur.
Cyclops, 646.
Necessity have I found, neither potion in Thracian tablets, that
sweet-voiced Orpheus wrote, nor amongst all that Phoebus gave to the sons of
Asclepios.” There is no cure for death ; Orphism alters no facts, and it
reveals none.
What, then, is the view of Euripides—if he has one—if he has several ? Is
it possible that the gods of his plays—of some of his plays—are not merely figments
of a foolish past, but symbols somehow of something that works in Nature ?
Aphrodite, in the Hippolytus, what is she ? A cruel fiend- goddess—or the dark
inexplicable force of passion that wrecks men and women upon one another in
this world, the good turned to evil, the great principle that makes homes and
happiness turned astray and crashing through human lives to no purpose ? Does
she represent a force of nature, or a law of nature ? Artemis in the same play
is more easily dealt with—she is the mystic’s goddess, heard, but never seen,
only known by a sweetness and a fragrance ; and she leaves him in the hour of
disaster to face ruin alone—she will not save him, Euripides says ; and when
death comes on him, and he is " near this evil,” she must go ; she must
not let her face be defiled with the breath of death. Such are the gods of the
mystics, he seems to say. But blind brute forces of nature do not help us much.
Does he go further ?
He seems at times to lean to a doctrine associated with the name of
Diogenes of Apollonia, who lived in Athens in his days—a doctrine that Air is
the universal substance or being. “ By means of air,” says Diogenes, “ all are
steered, and over all air has power. For this very thing seems to me to be God,
and I believe that it reaches to everything and disposes everything and is
present in everything ; ” and elsewhere he calls the air within us, that is,
our reason, “ a little part of God.”1 Something very like this comes
several times in Euripides :
Seest thou the boundless aether there on high,
That folds the earth around with dewy arms ?
This deem thou Zeus, this reckon one with God.’
1 Cf. Adam, Vitality of Platonism, p. 44, from which
I borrow the translation. The fragments of Diogenes are in Diels,
Vorsohratiker, No. 51, and in Ritter and Preller, Nos. 164, 169. a
Eur. Frag. 941 ; translated by A. S. Way.
and in a lyric passage :
Thee, self-begotten, who in aether rolled Ceaselessly round, by mystic
links dost bind The nature of all things, whom veils enfold Of light, of dark
night, flecked with gleams of gold,
Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end.1
But it is to a passage in the TroadeS that scholars are apt to turn to
find a fuller confession of faith. It is spoken by Hecuba when she learns that
Menelaus will kill Helen, and so Troy will be avenged. There are editors who
have cried out on the anachronism and general unlikeliness of Hecuba uttering
so profoundly philosophical a prayer. Indeed, Menelaus, who is not very bright,
notices as much—he thinks it a strange,, prayer; and the editors remark that
she does not explain it to him. Why should she ? He had had no lesson of pain
to enable him to understand her—a commonplace successful man.
0 stay of earth, who hast
thy seat on earth,
Whoe’er thou art, ill-guessed and hard to know,
Zeus, whether Nature’s law, or mind of man,
1 pray to thee ; for on a noiseless
path
All mortal things by justice thou dost guide.2 .
The " stay of earth ” may be the air on which earth rests, with
which the “ mind of man ” may be identical, for Diogenes and doubtless
Euripides were influenced by Anaxagoras; but let us remember that we are
dealing with a great poet. If Zeus is aether, and if (as we shall shortly see)
the human soul is also aether, we have a great kinship established. In any case
earth needs a spiritual stay as well as air beneath it to uphold it, and so he
conceives Zeus—the great Reality on whom earth and all its affairs rest—the
great Reality visible in his creation ; his seat is on earth. And what is he ?
He is hard to guess at, hard to know—our common experience; but whether the
great Law that is the force driving the vast whole, or of one substance with
the human heart and mind— for vov<s is not the one without the other—one
thing stands out: His rule is Justice; to Justice he guides all things,
noiseless as‘his path may be. “There is no speech nor language, their voice is
not heard.” Something is reached here 1 Eur. Frag. 593 ; translated
by A. S. Way. 2 Troades, 884-888.
for the human soul—there is Justice in God. True, Hecuba’s hope of seeing
justice is quenched very soon—poor Hecuba ! but the poet sees further, and
deeper, and in the long run, in pain and prosperity, or in spite of them, God’s
Justice is done. Justice is of the essence of things in a cosmos—it is “ the
Weltgeist, the World-Reason, immanent in the World, active in the spiritual and
moral sphere as in the material—it lives and moves in the feeling and thinking
and acting of every man, and in the infinite and imperishable universe
(Weltall).” 1 It is a deeper doctrine than the Orphics taught of a
god who measured things by their rituals.
The passage we have been studying hints at the conception of the nature
of the soul to which Euripides leaned. We have to remember that for the ancient
world the modern antithesis of spirit and matter hardly existed. The Stoic
conceived of the soul as material though subtle. St. Augustine tells us how
hard he found it to think of God as spirit; when he tried to think of God, he
somehow thought of infinite but infinitely subtle matter. So that it is not
strange if Euripides thought of the soul as aether—many Greeks of his day did.
The epitaph on the Athenians who fell at Poteidaia in 432 contains the lines:
aWrjp
fiefi (j)(TV^as vtteSe^o'trro cm/iara rSvde' UoTeiSalas I TrvXas eXii6ev,z
and in the Helena Euripides says much the same :
Albeit the mind Of the dead live not, deathless consciousness Still hath
it, when in deathless aether merged.3
This seems to suggest that there is no personal immortality. Nearly every
one in his day, who believed in this and thought much about it, associated
personal immortality with the transmigration of souls; but it has been remarked
that, though familiar with this teaching of Pythagoras, Euripides is not
seriously interested in metempsychosis. His own attitude is seen in the lyric,
rather curiously given to Phaedra’s nurse :
1 Nestle, Euripides, 146.
‘ Hicks
and Hill, Manual, No. 54 ; Arnold on Thuc. i. 63.
8 Helena,
1014 (A. S. Way, altered by Dr. Adam).
But if any far-off state there be Dearer than life to mortality;
The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof,
And mist is under and mist above.
And so we are sick for life, and cling On earth to this nameless and
shining thing.
For other life is a fountain sealed,
And the deeps below us are unrevealed,
And we drift on legends forever.1
The great phrase is Si aireipoavvriv aXkov /3iotov, and it recurs in a
fragment of another play—“ For life we know, but through inexperience of death
every man fears to leave the light of the sun.” All is dark beyond—the "
non-demonstration of the things below earth ” means no knowledge. The heart may
yearn, but once more the understanding says No. And yet he turns almost
wistfully to one Orphic doctrine, in the famous line which Aristophanes
parodied:
Who knoweth if to live is but to die ?
Tis olbev
el t6 £rjv fiiv cart Kardavtiv.
It is the doctrine of which Plato makes so much—the equation of soma and
sima, the body the soul’s temporary grave. But who knows ?
Meantime to express the common feelings of men, relative to death, he
uses their common language—what else is there for dramatist or thinker to do ?
And behind the language once more stand the facts, and to the facts he goes—
fieivov
yap ovbev r&v dvayKaiav (SpOTcns 8 —
nothing that is inevitable is strange or terrible.
Whether wouldst thou I tell thee soft smooth lies,
Or rough gaunt truths ? Speak, it is thine to choose.8
The man who asks such a question has chosen for himself.
Back to the facts Euripides goes—the facts which a poet finds—living
sentient facts that vibrate and strike harmonics in the human soul. "
Every man of genius in a sense begins anew,” it has been said, even if it is
equally true that he uses all who have gone before him; and Euripides starts
anew, with the simple elemental experiences—of pain and
1 Hippolytus,
191-197 (Professor Murray’s translation), bvtripares.
* Frag. 757. *
Frag. 1036.
beauty ; and in neither case will half-knowledge serve, for
reconciliation is his business—the business of all poets. Poetry has twin roots
in joy and pain—and God knows if they are not the same thing.
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Euripides will drink the bitter cup to the dregs, as his Herakles does—
I am full fraught with ills—no stowing more,1
and Herakles thinks he will kill himself; but at this hour there is a
friend at his side, Theseus, full of love and friendship, full of respect for
the hero whom he sees in the time of weakness, and of gratitude for old
memories. And if pain is one of the foundation facts of life, friendship is
another—let us remember that. So Euripides sees ; and the mood of Herakles
changes—he will not shuffle out of life :
But this it was I pondered, though woe-whelmed—
“ Take heed lest thou be taxed with cowardice Somehow in leaving thus the
light of day ! ”
For whoso cannot make a stand against
These same misfortunes, neither could withstand
A mere man’s dart, oppose death, strength to strength.
Therefore unto thy city I will go
And have the grace of thy ten thousand gifts.
There ! I have tasted of ten thousand toils As truly—never waived a
single one,
Nor let these runnings drop from out my eyes !
Nor ever thought it would have come to this—
That I from out my eyes do drop tears ! Well!
At present, as it seems, one bows to fate.
So be it! a
The poet takes the same stand. Greek thought had always its tinge of
melancholy, and he does not escape—and he does not try to escape. He will not
blink the evil facts; he studies them ; he is reproached with having portrayed
the pathological on the stage,3 so close does he keep to the evil
fact. His standpoint is not the religious one of Aeschylus and Sophocles—it is
as if he felt this would mean some
1 H.F. 1245
(Browning’s translation).
2 H.F. 1347-1358
(Browning).
3 There is no
doubt that he did. Cf. Frogs, 1081, and the constant taunts of Aristophanes,
obscuring of the facts, hope once more darkening understanding—and his
reconciliation must be a deeper one. So without the consolations of these two
great poets, he grapples with pain and evil, and escapes no wound they can deal
him. “ A hidden harmony is better than an obvious,” said Heraclitus a century
before,1 and that hidden harmony Euripides will have. He does not
quite find it, but there were certain things that made for it which he did
find, and which remain.
If he became, as he did, the chief poet after Homer of his race, it was
in some measure because in him they could find a consolation, not elsewhere to
be had. Here was a man who based himself on fact, and, unlike so many philosophers,
was not steeled against pain, but deeply read in it— what did it mean for
people who growingly felt the pain of life ?
Wir heissen euch hoffen !
That Virgil found him so congenial is no slight evidence of the power of
this wonderful spirit. Every question that men ask, it has been said, Euripides
raises—doubt, shame, pain, and the whole gamut—and yet he has something to say.
And what he had to say shall end our present study.
In the first place we may note again how Greece had tasted the sense of
power—trebly, in her victory over the world, in her great national struggle
against Persia, and in the sphere of thought; and then how another generation,
drunk with this same sense of power, abused its power and turned the human
spirit’s victory over the material world to wrong ends and fell into
materialism ; how freedom from Persia and rule of the sea bred a new
temptation, and Athens was infected with the contagion of a hard and selfish
imperialism, while the teachers of thought became sophists and rhetoricians and
trained the young in the glib graces of speech and rationalism. Against all
this decline the poet reacted—he knew the world too deeply to think the shallow
thoughts of the day.
Where men looked to material success and saw the value of comfort and
prosperity, he came forward boldly and asserted the spiritual basis of life.
The problem in Plato’s Republic— the first problem—is to show that
righteousness without reward is enough and is not made better by reward—that we
may
1 Heraclitus, Frag. 47 (Bywater), apfioviq a^avfjs
<j>avepijs Kpdaaiov.
praise “ the thing itself ” irrespective of reward of good or ill, as men
judge such things. Euripides does not put the matter quite in the same way ; a
poet does not exactly summarize his “ lessons,” and if we try to summarize them
we shall be sure to miss some of them. But the trend of thought that is waked
by a play is a poet’s contribution to a man’s growth. Here I turn to the play
which has most influenced me myself. I read it, almost by accident, in 1903,
and “ discovered ” it—or, rather, it discovered me—found me out and made me
ashamed. I had been standing too near the Athenians—the Athenians of Melos and
Syracuse, and this play shown in 415, between Melos and Syracuse, one might say,
came home to me ; and I knew I was wrong. I have learnt other things from it
since.
There are those who find the Troades a characterless play. It certainly
has little plot—a series of episodes, all accentuating one thing—the problem of
pain. Troy is taken—at the end of the play we see the flames shoot up and hear
the walls fall. Meantime the business in hand before the Greeks embark is being
done. The captive women—the queen and princesses among them—are being allotted
to their new owners ; Polyxena is offered as a sacrifice at the grave of
Achilles ; little Astyanax is killed. One after another the stages of this Via
Dolorosa are reached. One figure stands out—the aged queen Hecuba. She has been
lying in the dust, and is, we may suppose, a woebegone spectacle enough ; she
aches in sinew and limb ; and her heart is struck through with grief after
grief. Everything falls upon her; she bears the troubles of all and she feels
all. But —and this point is sometimes overlooked—miserable as she is herself, the
most unhappy of the group, she is the minister of hope to the sad women around
her. A great spirit, and wonderfully tender, she is still capable of great
action. Forget Hector, she says to Andromache ; forget my son (it is a mother
who speaks).
, Honour thou
The new lord that is set above thee now And make of thine own gentle
piety A prize to win his heart. So shalt thou be A strength to them that love
us, and—God knows,
It may be—rear this babe among his foes,
My Hector’s child, to manhood and great aid For Ilion.1
1 Troades, 692-698 (Murray’s translation).
Throughout she strives to turn each sufferer’s thoughts away from her own
griefs—to get her to look at others—to universalize her sorrow (if we may use
such a phrase); and here she sets her own motive before Andromache—the service
of those who love us—
evcfypavcts
(pt\ovs.
Contrasted in the play with Hecuba—silently contrasted— are Menelaus and
Athena—one of the world’s successful men and a victorious goddess. The goddess,
as we have seen, is in a sense the very negation of all that a thoughtful mind
could call God. Menelaus is simply successful—a nothing crowned with prosperity
and victory by the aid of others. He has—and Hecuba is ; which means most ?
Which is best ? Longinus, the finest of ancient critics, asks his reader
whether, allowing that Homer blunders and Apollonius never slips, would you
rather be Apollonius or Homer ?1 Suppose we borrow his question, and
ask, whether, allowing Menelaus to have all that an ordinary mind would ask in
the way of success and prosperity and Hecuba to be stript of everything that
makes life even tolerable, which would you rather be—Menelaus or Hecuba ? The
poet does not ask this; the reader asks it of himself. Would he—could he—wish
to be Menelaus, to have all that heart could dream, and to be—Menelaus ? Never
! We choose
Hecuba—misery, slavery, shame and all; because-------------- Because
Euripides is right; the basis of life is spiritual, and, without talking
about it, he has made us feel it. Callicles in the Gorgias and the Cyclops in
the play can put the arguments on the other side ; but we have felt—and the
case is settled ; we choose the deeper view. There are problems still to
solve—the why of pain, and so forth—but instinctively we feel somehow that pain
has made the difference—some of the difference—between Hecuba and Menelaus ; in
any case we know now that there are things worth buying at the cost of pain.
Here as in other instances Euripides shows us that life is spirit.
This was running all against the prevailing currents of thought in
Athens. Empire was the word ; and Pericles and Cleon after him had the
practical man’s irony for the idealists who felt things were wrong—"
seeking something else, so to
1 Longinus, 33, 4.
say, than the terms on which we live.”1 There is no renouncing
empire, " even if in the panic of the moment and through slackness any of
you fancies playing the honest man.” 2 So men are led to vote that
Mitylenaeans and Melians shall be killed, and the wives and children of them
sold into slavery. It is a clear straight vote given on intellectual
conviction, unharassed by emotion or afterthought or imagination; the Empire
requires it.
It was in the year after the Melian affair that Euripides put the Troades
on the stage. We have seen how Hecuba comforts Andromache with the thought that
her little Astyanax may grow up and re-build Troy. It seems that the wise
Odysseus was a little ahead of her there ; for, as she ceases to speak,
Talthybius the herald enters. Odysseus had addressed the Greeks, much as Cleon
or Pericles might have ; did they want a third siege of Troy—another ten years
of it ? No ! Then what about Hector’s son ? A baby ! yes, but he will grow up
;—then—but it is horrible ;—then are you for “ playing the honest man ” ? What
are the three things that militate against empire ? “ Pity and fine language
and generosity to the fallen.” 3 So the vote is carried, and
Talthybius is sent (all against his own will) to fetch the baby and to explain
to his mother that he is to be flung from the wall and killed. We watch her as
she listens, as she speaks to her baby for the last time, and we hear her as
she gives him up. Those who can may read the scene aloud.
Things like this we know must be In every famous victory.
“ Teach your other allies by a striking example.” 4
An English critic, when the Troades was given in London in April 1905,
wrote : “ It is nothing to us that a strong party in Athens deplored the
sacking of Melos. We cannot sympathize with the political agitations of ancient
Athens. We have no right to apply the lessons of Euripides to our own
circumstances.” Have we not ? Then let us apply them to Athenian circumstances.
1 Cleon, Thuc. iii. 38, 7. a Pericles, Thuc. ii. 63.
* Cleon, Thuc. iii. 40. Cf.
Chapter III. p. 74.
4 Cleon,
Thuc. iii. 40.
Men were talking of “ the State, the State ”—of her greatness and her
beauty—how every man must be her " lover ” —of her empire, and her
imperial destinies. And here rises Euripides and suggests the question : “
Suppose, after all, the whole thing, your State and your Empire and all—is a
lie ? A sheer lie, however many of you unite to tell it—a contradiction of the
deepest things and the truest and the most permanent in the universe. A story
of a day—told to win you glory and position and cheap food at the cost of
others ; it means the negation of the truth of husband and wife, the truth of
mother and child—the truths of life, the truths told in the tears and love and
pain that go with every human relation. A lie written black across every
instinct of humanity. Look well to it; you lie ! ”
Like Tolstoy, and in a minor degree Thoreau, Euripides gives the eternal
challenge to all our conventions of state and policy and national existence.
God—or, if you like, Nature— the ultimate author of it all—made fathers and
mothers and little children, and homes and toys, and work and happiness; and
you invent great words, and for their sakes burn the home, and kill the father,
sell the mother for a slave and a concubine, and dash the children against the
stones. " Oh!
daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed---------------------- ”
He asserts humanity against statesmen and economists and civil servants
and all who hold that God made some people who do not really matter, whoever
made them. He turns to woman and slave—the classes men despised and made tools
of—and he drew them so that those who would see should see that they are human.
Slavery, polygamy, concubinage, war—all the great accepted conventions, and the
wonderful reasons that clever and rhetorical people can always find for what is
wrong—reasons the more wonderful and convincing for the wrong, the more
obviously wrong it is— he showed them for what they are, things that war
against the soul. He goes back to Nature against all the conventions, but not
as a sophist; to the Real facts, to Humanity. No wonder the Athenians gave the
prize that year to " Xenocles, whoever he may have been.”
Lastly, in an age of talk and rhetoric and sophistry, when there was a
reason for everything and as good a reason against
everything, Euripides took refuge in the things for which no reasons are
given. Men may argue about right and wrong, if they matter—in any case about
sea-power; Euripides turned to the sea itself. Nobody argued about it, or about
the green earth, the birds or the trees—he was safe there ; he could have them
to himself; they did not matter. He took refuge in Poetry—no opiate to dull the
sense of life, but life itself, grasped and realized to the utmost, known and
felt. In his lyrics, over and over again, we escape with him and find ourselves
set free from policies and arguments and theories of the state, among the
primeval and eternal truths :
In the elm-woods and the oaken,
There where Orpheus harped of old,
And the trees awoke and knew him.
And the wild things gathered to him,
As he sang amid the broken Glens his music manifold ;
Blessed Land of Pierie ! 1
There are birds—the Comic poets have much to say of little birds and
their uses ; but Euripides does not think of their uses—he considers the
birds—the little ones that nest in the cliffs above his cave,2 the
greater birds that migrate, that come with the spring from the South and go
again when winter follows.
On wings through air Would we fly,
As the Libyan birds in line, .
Leaving the rain and the wintry sky,
Follow the sign,
Their chief’s shrill note; and the wild-bird train For the land of
harvest that knows not rain,
Flies, and we hear the cry.
O long-necked birds in the
night.
Where the clouds scud on as ye go. .
Where the Pleiads reach their zenith height And Orion’s fires glow—
Tidings we bid you bring To Eurotas—words of joy,
News, news of their king—
He cometh, he cometh, their king,
Conqueror home from Troy.9
1 Bacchae, 560-565 (Murray’s translation).
a Cf. Hippolytus, 732 f. 8 Helena, 1479-1493.
Such things he studies; he has them to himself, “ and impulses of deeper
birth have come to him in solitude.” The simple natural things—birds and trees,
women and children, when men will let them alone—the happy, natural relations
—there is peace in these things. But still there is the world of men, and his
lyrics lead Us back to it. Can we take our new-found peace back with us ?
In Salamis, filled with the foaming Of billows and murmur of bees,
Old Telamon stayed from his roaming,
Long ago, on a throne of the seas ;
Looking out on the hills olive-laden,
Enchanted where first from the earth The grey-gleaming fruit of the
Maiden Athena had birth ;
A soft grey crown for a city Beloved, a City of Light:
Yet he rested not there, nor had pity,
But went forth in his might,
Where Heracles wandered, the lonely Bow-bearer, and lent him his hands
For the wrecking of one land only,
Of Ilion, Ilion only.
Most hated of lands ! 1
Once more joy and pain—the twin roots of Poetry—the twofold training of
man—two sides to the one avenue to Truth. Euripides has not told us all there
is to know nor solved all the problems; but he has felt them, and he knows the
path to knowledge. There are other poets—poets of Greece and of our own
lands—but not many who have read so clearly our trouble or grasped so well the
value of Joy and Pain.
1 Troades, 794-806 (Murray’s translation).
ONE day, we are told—it would be somewhere about the middle of the
Peloponnesian War—Socrates met in a narrow lane a lad of the upper classes, a
lad of spirit and pleasant appearance. He put up his staff, and, blocking the
way so, he asked the lad where one commodity and another was to be had. The boy
told him, and then came a harder question : Where do men become kaloi kdgathoi
? When the boy said he did not know, " Then come with me and learn,” said
the old man. “ And after that,” concludes the story, “ he was a pupil of
Socrates.” 1
The question is in a way the sign of a new, age. The phrase employed was
on the whole a new one, for though Thucydides has it twice, he brings out that
it is a colloquialism.2 But the colloquialism had a future, cant
term as it was. Literally it meant " beautiful and good ” ; 3
but the Greeks, like other people, used moral terms in a social and political
sense, and it came to mean something very like “ gentleman,” though perhaps
with the implication of a little more culture than our word carries. What was
the education of a gentleman ? Where and how were gentlemen made ?
A change had come over Athens—slowly, but at last perceptibly. The
intellectual upheaval of the age of Pericles was not to be undone. Still “ that
native Attic trick is blooming, that ‘ What do you really mean ? ’ ” 1 There is still the scrutiny of inherited belief with all its unsettling
effects. “ Do you
1 Diogenes
Laertius, ii. 6, 2, §48, alSr/fiav kcu
eveifteo-raTos els virepPoXrjv.
a Thuc. iv. 40, 2 ; viii. 48, 6. Also Herodotus, ii.
143 ; see Chapter I. p. 25.
* See below,
p. 172. .
‘Aristophanes, Clouds, 1173, roCro rovirix&piov arenas eiravOet, to Vi \eyeic <rv.
' 163 '
not remark, I said, how great is the evil that dialectic has introduced ?
What evil ? he said. The students of the art are filled with lawlessness. . .
1. When the questioning spirit asks what is fair or honourable, and the man
answers as the legislator has taught him, and then arguments many and diverse
refute his words, until he is driven into believing that nothing is honourable
any more than dishonourable, or just and good any more than the reverse, and so
of all the notions which he most valued, do you think that he will still honour
and obey them as before ? ” 1 There is a danger, Plato says— and he
had been proved right—in young men getting too early the taste for dialectic.
Some one asks in a play of Euripides:
Tt §’
altrxpov rjv [iff Tol(rt Xptop*v0ls $0K7]!
a thought best rendered perhaps in Hamlet’s sentence: " There’s
nothing good or bad but our thinking makes it so.” It raises—and half suggests
an answer to—the great question of the relations between convention, law,
tradition—all those inherited forms of belief and practice grouped under the
conception of Nomos—and the greater conception of Nature. Once such a question
has been raised, it must be settled—not with a half-answer but decisively.
Meanwhile every man, it seemed, could think as he pleased and decide for
himself, for there was no other standard than himself—he was the measure of all
things.2 Right and wrong were just what you made them, just what you
wanted—so the Melians found, so Callicles insisted—there was nothing else in
practice or theory. But was there not ?
It might be convenient for the democracy to use this theory in
international relations, but it was another thing at home. It bred a new type
of man, and not a type that a democracy needs. Tyrants Greek states had known
of old— men who frankly aimed at self-aggrandizement and achieved it; but
therej.had never been any moral sanction for their act. The new type seemed to
have a sanction—the sanction of intellect. So the new education came to
this—that the trained intellect was discharged of all duty to the State ; it
was anti-democratic beyond anything the world had yet seen;
1 Plato, Rep.
537E, 538D, 539B (Jowett’s translation).
2 The view of
Protagoras set forth in Plato, Theaet. 152A,
it abolished society. And yet there was no way of going back. Thought had
been set in motion, and till it was satisfied with reason it could not be
stilled. When the issue is to know or not to know, youth at least will insist
on knowing, at whatever cost; and in that resolve lies the hope of the future.
In the meantime, there were signs of reaction. The quick turns of
self-applauding intellects did not exhaust all there was to be known—perhaps
they were too quick. The trick of the conjurer does not alter the laws of
nature, the conditions under which we live ; however brilliant he is at sleight
of hand, he does not alter anything that is fundamental, whether he makes our
shillings vanish or our sense of right and wrong. The period with which we have
now to deal shows at once the full effects of the sophistic movement at its
zenith, and then it is past its zenith. The new generation shows the outcome of
the new enlightenment and of that deeper questioning, which sought either by
quiet sense or reasoned endeavour to find a permanent foundation for life.
Euripides represents the age, but he was already an old man, and while Athens
never let go what he had given her, the generation that grew up in his last
twenty years strikes a different note in literature. He taught them to feel;
and in the feelings which he taught them to recognize they began to surmise
there was solution for the questions he asked—they move to the view that human
life matters somehow, that force and individual cleverness are not all, that
elusive as it is there is reason in all human relations.
In this period ideas are struck out in education which long held sway in
the ancient world, and which hold sway still. There is a beginning made,
hesitantly it is true, of scientific research or at least inquiry. Culture
becomes a deliberate ideal. Philosophy reaches a new plane altogether. And in
the meantime everybody was free to educate his son as he pleased.1
Mathematics and Astronomy were beginning to claim attention, but there
was disagreement as to their value. Aristophanes made great game of
them—Socrates hoisted high to
'Plato, Alcib. i. 122B, oi8evl fieKa. Cf. Aristotle, Ethics, x. 9, 13, p.
1180a; in most cities no system, but every man, like the Cyclops, is lawgiver
for his children and his wife.
tread the air and look down on the sun,1 mingling his subtle
thought with the kindred air, and Meton coming with rods to land-survey the air
for the birds, and mete it out by acres,2 are figures of comedy,
even if they have an element of history. For, though it has been recently
suggested that perhaps at the time of the production of the Clouds Socrates had
an interest in Physics which he afterwards lost, it is generally agreed on the
evidence of Plato and Xenophon that he did not care for Astronomy and kindred
studies. When he was young, Socrates says in the Phaedo,3 he had a
great passion for such subjects, and he read the books of Anaxagoras with
enthusiasm, till he found that the writer made no use of Mind at all, and that
his causes after all were air and aether and water—that he confused cause with
means. Xenophon, always anxious to prove his teacher practical, says that
Socrates emphasized the value of Astronomy so far as it bore on navigation, but
that he deprecated worry about the distances and periods of the stars.4
Plutarch shows us, in the story of Nicias’ failure in Sicily, how disastrous
the popular suspicion of scientific Astronomy could be ; for it was Anaxagoras,
he says, who first, with more clearness and courage than any other man, wrote
an explanation of lunar eclipses, but it was a secret book ohly circulated
among friends, and Nicias was at the mercy of an ignorant soothsayer.6
Geometry Socrates tolerated to the extent to which it could be used in
land-surveying.
Grammar and Rhetoric were subjects against which there could be no
theological suspicion, and while the former could be criticized as dealing in
words not things, and the latter as tending to dishonesty, both gained a
permanent place in Greek education, which in course of time became a
predominant place. Their great champion in the fourth century was Isocrates,
who was at this very time receiving that careful education, which (he tells us)
his father gave him, and winning more distinction among his fellow-students
than he had, if we could believe him, later on among his fellow-citizens.® He
thought indeed that Geometry and Astronomy had their value up to a certain
point—like Dialectic—for they kept the young out of mischief and were in
measure a useful sort of training, but
1 Clouds,
225. * Birds, 99$. 3 Phaedo, 96A ff.
1 Mem. iv. 7, 4-6. 6 Plut.
Nicias, 23, 2-4. ■ Isocrates, Antid. 161.
not a real preparation for life.1 Real culture he defined as a
union of savoir-faire, gaiety, and moderation, with mastery of pleasure and
misfortune, and the ability to carry success 2— a definition much
like Horace’s.
Far more significant, however, was the education which the young Athenian
got without noticing it. Long ago Simonides had written, 7ro\t? avBpa SiSaaicei
— the city teacheth a man—a sentence of more meanings than one.3
Athens was an education for Greece, Pericles said.4 Plato later on
insisted that it is the Many themselves that are the real sophists—the
so-called sophists only give back to the Many their own original opinions.6
The ephebeia of later days* a system of state training and drilling for youths
from eighteen to twenty, did not yet exist, it would seem ;\8 so
they could begin to join in national life at once as men. Indeed they began
still earlier, and were taken by their fathers to the law- courts and the
theatres.7 Aristophanes produced his first play—or got another to
produce it for him—when he was about twenty-three ; and some years before he
was thirty, he wrote his brilliant comedy on modem education, the Clouds, in
which, " quite unconscious of the debt he owes to the conditions he
derides, he sets his face stubbornly toward the past.” 8 Twenty
years later he flouts the stripling boys— Tragedians by the myriad, who can
chatter A furlong faster than Euripides—
whole choirs of swallows, who as a rule are only capable of One tragedy
each 9—though he is not as grateful for this as he might be. The
Athenian drama, with its inspiration and its wonder, was no small factor in
education. Politics, we know, were talked incessantly and everywhere in Athens,
and elections were annual, and impeachment scarcely less often. The small
houses and the warm dry climate made life
1 Isocrates,
Panath. 26-28—“ up to a certain point ” ; so Callicles too held about
Philosophy (Gorg. 484c); so the natural Englishman about most things, according
to Walter Bagehot.
2 Isocrates,
Panath. 30, 31.
3 Simonides,
Frag. 67 (109), in Plut. an seni resp. c. 1.
* Thuc. ii. 41, 1. 6 Plato, Rep. 492a.
* See A. A. Bryant’s
delightful study of Boyhood in Athens in^- Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology, xviii. pp. 79-88.
7 Ibid.
p. 98. 8 Ibid. p. 93. # Aristophanes, Frogs, 89.
in the open air the inevitable thing—for men at least. So that without
going outside the streets of a not very large town, and with the aid of
occasional days at the Peiraieus, an Athenian boy picked up unconsciously a
good deal of political and literary culture. What he learnt at the play was
reinforced by music lessons 1 and a good deal more dancing than we
might have expected. All these things go, as Socrates ironically says, to show
how much the modems excel the ancients in wisdom.2
Side by side with intellectual training something must be said of
athletics. In the fifth century they had at once risen and declined in
importance. Mr. Kenneth Freeman remarked that the preference given to
conversation over exercise was a feature of the age.3 The reason was
that athletics had become too specialized and therefore too important for
amateurs. When Socrates, in Xenophon’s Symposium, proposes to take dancing
lessons, it is not, like long-distance runners, to have stout legs and thin
shoulders, or like boxers, to have stout shoulders and thin legs, but to be
evenly developed.4 The athlete was trained for his particular event
with the passion and the consecration of a religion. To “ eat like a wrestler ”
was a proverb.6 The habit of body of Greek athletes was, according
to Plato, rather a sleepy sort of thing and dangerous to health ; they slept
away their lives and were liable to serious illnesses from slight departures
from their regimen.6 In particular Plato derides a certain Herodicus
of Selymbria,
1 Generally the
lyre. Alcibiades refused altogether to learn to play the flute (Plut. Alcib.
2).
a Plato, Hippias Major, p. 283A.
a Schools of Hellas. A digression may be forgiven in
a note. I am struck with the fact, which older men emphasize, of how very
modern is the present-day systematization of athletics in the Universities.
Forty years ago, or fifty, men walked in the afternoons— walked a great deal,
saw the country round Cambridge—and talked as they went, and their talk was
discussion. I am also told by those, who remember those days, what education
there was in it; and I can believe them. At any rate they had Socrates on their
side, and in fact all Greek thinkers of note down to Porphyry. Porphyry grouped
athletes with the stupid classes, including, alas ! soldiers and business men.
4 Symp.
2, 17. 6 Aristophanes,
Peace, 33, ioa-nep vdKaurrtjs.
• Plato, Rep. iii. 404A.
who had a “ system ” of his own for training—he mixed medicine and
gymnastic, and tortured first himself and then the rest of the world by the invention
of lingering death.1 Ordinary people could not contend with
professionals, and let athletics alone, except as spectators.
The fact was, there was a considerable shifting of interest. Xenophanes
long ago had said that athletics were overdone— a view which drew on him the
censure of Sir Richard Jebb, who as a good conservative Member of Parliament
compared him with modem faddists. This even faddists might forgive to an
enthusiast for Pindar ; but the sober mind of Greece moved to the opinion of
Xenophanes; and life and politics and literature and philosophy grew so
absorbing that athletes and athletics yielded place to nobler interests.
Pericles made the Athenians talkers, said Socrates to tease Callicles.2
That was inevitable. A man who manages a big departmental store has to do more
talking than his father did who was a small farmer. Commerce and the control of
a great empire involve speech and plenty of it; and the Athenians enjoyed it.
The gloomy Athenian Oligarch, writing in 424, says the Demos has done away with
those who practise gymnastic or music here.8 None the less the great
athletes were popular heroes—to see if not to imitate ; and significance
attached to the great Games, as the fame of the Spartan Lichas and the
extraordinary outfit of chariots by Alcibiades prove.
It may be, as some hold, that the reaction against athletics went too
far—at least, athletics considered as training. In his Clouds Aristophanes,
aged seven-and-twenty, like a healthy undergraduate emphasizes the importance
of the old training and the general weedy, sappy, dirty look of Socrates’
hangers- on in the Thinking-Shop—like the Laconian prisoners from Pylos ;—they
were not allowed to be in the open air very much, it is explained.4
The Just Argument, appearing in person on the stage, tells of the old days when
modesty was in fashion, when boys held their tongues and went to school,—and
learnt
1 Rep. iii.
406A.
2 Plato, Gorg.
515E. The irony of this is splendid; some people
fancied it was Socrates who had taught people to chatter; there was
a play of Aristophanes about it.
8 Oligarch’s
Aih. Rep. 1, 13. * Aristophanes, Clouds, 186, 198.
the real old music there, not the “ turn, trill, tweedle-trash ” of
to-day,—when they knew good manners and practised them at home, and went to the
gymnasia and grew ruddy of cheek and sound of limb, broad-shouldered, strong,
silent men— instead of the narrow-chested, thief-faced, swindling jargoners
bred nowadays by Socrates and his like. This, of course, was one of the crimes
of Socrates for the poet.
The friends of Socrates told another tale, for Xenophon sets forth a
conversation he had with a youth in bad condition, who excused himself on the
ground that he was just an t’StwT???, not a professional, and the sage warned
him at once of the risks for himself and the State in case of war, and, in any
case, of the mental and moral consequences of a neglected body— “ even where
the use of the body might seem slightest—in thinking, who does not know that
many come to great grief for want of bodily health ? ” 1 The old man
himself, like Dr. Johnson in this as in much else, was a model of sound condition
and muscular strength and endurance. Bodily training was one thing, athletic
eminence another. The athlete was useless as a soldier—he was not adaptable,
either for the variety of duty or of diet that a military campaign made
necessary. Some generations later the State undertook the task of giving and
enforcing the training thought desirable, but in the days of Pericles and in
the war-time that followed his death men were left to bring up their sons as
they pleased, or as their sons pleased.
It is of interest perhaps to note in passing how with scarcely a break in
its history the general scheme of Athenian education has come down to our own
day. The half-rhetorical, half- literary training which Isocrates gave, and
which he valued so highly, became the standard of Greek culture. Centuries
after Christ we find Greeks all over their half of the Roman Empire with hardly
another ideal. The Romans themselves adopted it; it lived through the Middle
Ages and received new life at the Renaissance ; and it was only in the last
fifty years that Science—not precisely the sciences so much debated by Socrates
and his contemporaries—gained a real foothold in general education. Isocrates
was essentially a shallow and
1 Mem. iii. 12, 1-8. See the whole chapter. Even
if the voice is the voice of Xenophon, it is significant as evidence.
thin nature, and it is easy to understand the modem reaction against his
conceptions of culture; but we may yet have to own that Socrates' preference of
men over stars and triangles may cut deeper than we have thought, and to admit
sorrowfully that we have given Natural Science too large a place in our scheme
of education—that it does not educate the young quite so much as we thought it
would with its emphasis on observation and its close reasoning, perhaps because
after all the proper study of mankind is man. " Forgive me, my dear sir,”
said Socrates, “ but I am so fond of learning. And fields, you know, and trees
refuse to teach me anything, but men in the city will.”1 It is a
shocking sentiment, which loyalty to Wordsworth bids us reject at once, and we
do reject it;—and yet, one-sided as it is, it is true too.
We left Socrates with the lad in the lane, face to face with the
difficult question of how, or where, a gentleman could be trained ; and we must
return to them. The story, of course, may be a mere legend or even a pure
invention, like Washington and the hatchet; but it is perhaps just as likely to
be true as false. The boy was Xenophon, the son of Gryllos; and, whether or not
his acquaintance with Socrates began in this charming way, he was a friend of
Socrates; the ideal of the kalos Mgathos was what Gryllos clearly set before
his son, and Xenophon himself, a generation later, set it before his twin boys
in the country home at Scillus. There are one or two other anecdotes of
Xenophon’s youth, of less historical value. We are told that Socrates saved his
life at the battle of Delium,® but this involves so many chronological
difficulties, and there is so easy an ex, planation in a confusion of
tradition, that the tale is rejected. The battle was in 424. The dates of
Xenophon’s life point to 431, or some year very near it, as the year of his
birth. It is also said—and M. Croiset believes it is likely to be true—that
Xenophon was for a while a prisoner of war in Thebes.3 He certainly
describes Proxenos the Theban as a friend of old days, when he joined him in
Cyrus’ army; and he as certainly disliked Thebes and Thebans, and the absence
of Epameinondas from his pages is very conspicuous. Philip of Macedon, it is
1 Plato, Phaed. 230D.
2 Strabo, c. 403. Diogenes Laertius, ii. 5, 7, §
22.
3 Philostratus is the authority ; Croiset,
Xenophon, p. 16.
said, owed some of his hatred of Thebes to his residence there as a
hostage. But there were many reasons why Xenophon and other people should
dislike Thebes quite apart from any captivity there.1 If he was at
Thebes, it is suggested that he may have met there Prodicos of Ceos, whom he
has immortalized by making Socrates quote his Choice of Herakles.2
But after all Athens was the home of Xenophon’s boyhood, and there he
grew up. It might be said that he is not altogether a typical Athenian—he is
quieter a great deal than the Athenian we are taught to see in Comedy or in the
speeches of the orators, and he is not the ideal citizen sketched by Pericles
in the Funeral Speech—not so amazingly alert and electric. He belongs to
another social group—quiet, thoughtful, sound, and conservative; and in the
end, like other greater men, he has seen so much of the world, Hellenic and
non-Hellenic, that Athens is no longer all the world to him, and conservative
as he is, he is already reaching out to a new Greek world altogether. But he
begins as an Athenian kalos kdgathos.
“
Beautiful and good ”—each of the words had a variety of suggestion—physical3 and moral beauty, the sense of honour, good birth,
good connexions, sound thinking, sound character —and the combined phrase came
to have a political meaning, like gentleman and noble in English. The allies,
says Phrynichos, in Thucydides’ Eighth Book, will want to be free from Athens
altogether—they will not care about “ the so-called kaloi kdgathoi; they will
say they are the persons who suggested crimes to the popular mind, who
provided the means for their execution, and who reaped the fruits themselves.” 4
Jowett translates the phrase " the so-called nobility,” Crawley " the
so-called better classes.” Yet when Xenophon describes Ischomachus in one of
his later books, hfe makes Socrates say that Ischomachus was one of those who
are justly entitled to “ that great name (to
<refj,v6v
Svo/xa) kalos kdgathos ” 6—
The grand
old name of gentleman—
1 Cf. Hellenica, ii. 2, 19. 2 Mem. ii. 1, 21-34.
3 Socrates, in the Oecon. 6, 16, says physical
beauty is not all that
is
involved; people of physical beauty he often found to be knaves
in their
soul.
* Thuc. viii. 48, 6. 6 Xen. Oecon. ch. 6, 12, 14
; and ch. 7.
and the picture he draws is that of a man indeed worthy of the name, even
if he does lean a little to the heavier implication of the term ire/iro?.1
Xenophon came of this class—that is clear on every page he writes ; and long
before Socrates asked him the question, the matter of the education proper for
a kalos kdgathos had been in the mind of his father.
The whole family atmosphere was clearly conservative— ideas, traditions,
friendships, associations. “ The city teaches the man ”—but at home, it would
seem, there was another influence. We have only to think of Thucydides and
Euripides in connexion with Xenophon to feel how far away he stands from their
outlook on life. Of course he has not at all so strong and original an
intellect as either of them, but quite apart from that he approaches life from
another angle. For instance, compare the attitude of Thucydides to religion—the
contrast that Euripides suggests would be too violent. Thucydides lays stress,
as we have seen, on a powerful natural endowment, natural force (fyvcrem ;2 Xenophon, of course, knows the
forceful character when he meets him, but in all his books he makes it
clear that a man’s position is stronger and his head clearer, if he will use
such means as he can to supplement himself with the knowledge of what the
gods’ will is and to secure their support and inspiration.3 He
sacrifices perpetually, he consults the oracle, he has a mantis at his side, he
watches for omens—all this, though the most practical and business-like of men.
He will “ keep his powder dry ”—that runs through the Anabasis—but he thinks it
worth while to “ trust God.” Thucydides would have given both “ God ” and “ trust
” a very different meaning, if he had been asked to use the expression. The
detachment of Thucydides in recording men’s use of oracle, temple, festival,
and the like, and their violation of such things, is notorious. Xenophon was
frankly shocked, and owns it, at the butchery in Corinth—on a feast day—at
altars—before the images of the gods—the men who did it were “ most im-
1 See the dialogue of Hippolytus with the
huntsman (who brings out this sense of a-efivos) in Euripides’ Hippolytus.
2 See Bruns, Lit. Portrat, p. 412, on this
controversy as to force of natural endowment, and the remark of Socrates on the
question of Themistocles’ natural gifts, Mem. iv. 2, 2.
* On this whole matter (see Mem. i. 4), a
chapter, where, if Socrates is the speaker, he carries his pupil with him.
pious,” “utterly without law in their thoughts,” it was “profanation.” 1
Grote remarks that the Argives would be comparatively unimpressed by
solemnities peculiar to Corinth; Xenophon feels that they should have been
impressed. Eduard Meyer says downright that the restoration (in 404) aimed at
calling fear of God and pious custom back to life, but that instead of the old
naive piety there came a formalist religiosity, which Xenophon shows us,
Xenophon the typical representative of the reaction in literature.2
The criticism seems coloured by some suggestion of memories of the reaction in
Europe after the French Revolution—the artificial and unholy piety of the
pupils of the Jesuits and the Holy Alliance. A good deal depends on outlook.
Dr. Johnson’s acts of devotion seemed absurd to Horace Walpole and
superstitious to William Cowper; yet they were honest conviction and lifelong.
It is surely fairer criticism to suggest that Xenophon represents not a
reaction but an outlook and an attitude that had never passed away. None the
less, it all strikes a reader oddly who comes upon it after studying Herodotus
and Thucydides, and recalls that Herodotus was dead before Xenophon was bom.
After all, the conservative mind is a problem we still have with us. Xenophon
is a natural conservative, by instinct and training, but a true one with no
archaizing fancies, no make-believe, and no self-conscious cult of reaction. So
much is obvious, and it surely makes it certain that he is not acting a part in
his religion, either to impress us or to amuse or cheat himself.
He believes in the gods, in Providence, in divine care for men ; and he
quotes—or represents—Socrates as maintaining that the unwritten laws everywhere
observed are not of man’s contrivance but of the gods’ making.8 That
is clearly Xenophon’s own view, by the time he had seen a good deal of human
life in and out of the Greek world; and it would seem to go back, too, to his
early days. The great political ideal of kaloi kdgathoi for the nation was what
they called sophrosyne—sometimes a mere euphemism for oligarchy, but more
properly a spirit of self-control, almost the English instinct of “ not going
too far.” Plato fervently preached it for states and individuals in his
Republic. It was the ideal
1
Hellenica, iv. 4, 3. 2 E.
Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 882.
* Mem. iv. 4, 19.
that a decent man held up before his boy; it was the key-note of
Xenophon’s conduct throughout life—it is “ dyed in the wool.” Sound morals and
sound, if perhaps slow, thinking are the marks of the man and of his class. He
draws himself in Ischomachus, to whom we shall have to return, and suggests his
own training as well as his ideals in the picture. Thucydides might have
classed him with Nicias “ for a life ordered by a conventional virtue ”—with
the suggestion of malice that Professor Bury finds in the phrase, if that be
the translation —or more simply and naturally " for his exact attention to
every duty ” ;1 and, malice or none, Xenophon might have accepted
the description and the classing.
In later life it is clear he had great love of the country. Possibly from
the Peace of Nicias (421), or even earlier, till the occupation of Deceleia
(413) he lived in the country house, or on the farm, of his family.2
In the books that he writes about Socrates it has been remarked that like Plato
he creates Socrates something after his own image—with an interest in things
Persian and military and agricultural that went beyond that felt perhaps by the
actual Socrates. Town- bred men do take to country life, but the satisfaction
which Xenophon appears to have found in it goes, I think, beyond the
city-dweller’s of his age. He is as keen about it as any countryman on
Aristophanes’ stage, and a good deal less urban in his ideas of life than some
of them.
Vlf-his 'youth was spent largely in the country, it might help to account
for his slight interest in two of the chief preoccupations of Athens, politics
and the drama. He is far removed from the Periclean democrat; when his own
tastes appear, he shows an interest in Monarchy, a preference for it, that is
almost a prophecy of the later Greece. Cyrus and Agesilaos are his heroes—no
Athenian statesman, scarcely even Thrasybulus. Democracy, as he knew it in Elis
or Corinth, he did not care for, and he was little in Athens after
1 Thuc. vii. 86, 5.
“Diogenes
Laertius, ii. 6, 1, §48, at all events, says Xenophon, belonged to the deme
Erchia; and that was a country deme, on the eastward side of Pentelicos,
perhaps seventeen or eighteen miles from Athens (Dakyns’ translation, vol. i.
p. Ixxiii). Isocrates belonged to the same deme (Jebb, Attic Orators, ii. p.
432).
404. He is, of course, more soldier than politician, and the ideal
household which he sketches under the name of Ischomachus has an order and an
efficiency almost military —the husband is commander-in-chief, the wife is
trained to be an able second in command, and everything has to be as orderly as
it was on the Phoenician ship, down to the boots, as we shall see. Democracy
was another story—slapdash improvisation at best, muddling through, and
declining very swiftly in chaos, panic, and injustice. It may be that he was
not among the boys who were bred in politics. Nor does it appear that he took
much interest in drama. One of the speakers in the Memorabilia mentions
Sophocles as a man he admires for his tragedy,1 but there is little
trace in Xenophon’s books of any great influence exerted upon himself by
tragedy or even of interest in it. Mr. Dakyns speaks of the dramatizing and
development of his characters, Shakespeare-wise,2 but on the whole
it is more the outcome of his native instinct for story-telling. Socrates
chaffs Critobulus in the Oeconomicus for his readiness to rise at cock-crow and
trudge off to see a comedy,3 and Xenophon has more than one
reference to the attack made on Socrates in the Clouds;4 and there,
I think, it ends. Dialogue could be learnt in another school—the pupil of
Socrates need not go to the stage for that.
There is in Xenophon’s Symposium a pleasing character called Niceratos.
When the question goes round, " On what do you most pride yourself ? ” and
it comes to his turn, he has an answer ready that amazes us. “ My father,” he
says, “ in his pains to make me a good man, compelled me to learn the whole of Homer’s
poems, and so it comes about that even now I can repeat the Iliad and the
Odyssey by heart.” “ But you haven’t forgotten,” interjects Antisthenes the
Cynic, “ that all the rhapsodes know these poems too ? ” “ How could I have,
when I listen to them nearly every day ? ”
1 Mem. i. 4, 3.
2 Notes to translation of Cyrop. (Everyman
edition), p. 78. He also finds in the death of Pantheia “ Euripidean ” touches
throughout {ibid. p. 249).
a Oecon. 3,
5.
4 Oecon. 11, 3 ; and Symp. 6, 6, where
the Syracusan meaning to be rude raises the question of the flea’s jump.
“ Then do you know any sillier breed than the rhapsodes ? ” “ No, by
Zeus,” said Niceratos, “ I don’t think I do.”1
It is interesting to find the rhapsodes still a flourishing profession in
a day when Euripides is expelling Homer from his traditional post of teacher of
all Greece—“ much,” says Eduard Meyer, “ as among Germans Goethe has replaced
the Bible.” 2 Still more interesting is it to come on a man like the
father of Niceratos in such an age. “ He called Simonides a bad poet and ran
down Aeschylus,” says a man in the Clouds 3—so modern can people be
; and here is an Athenian citizen who makes his son learn all Homer by heart,
word for word—whose scheme of culture is Homer. There are many worse systems of
education, duller and less educative. One guesses that in the house of Gryllos
Homer kept his old place,4 and that the young Xenophon, if he could
not repeat the whole of the poems word for word, had his Homer by heart in
another way. Grote, at any rate, found the Homeric note in the Anabasis—"
in the true Homeric vein and in something like Homeric language.” 5
Dakyns remarks on his old Attic words and inflexions. He had Homer at his
finger-ends, like Plato, and unlike Plato he had no quarrel with the poet.
Others of the old poets he quotes—Hesiod, Theognis, and Epicharmus ; and he
makes Simonides of Ceos a speaker in his dialogue the Hiero. It all points to a
sound, quiet education in old-time literature, and the reader may recall what
Charles Lamb has to say of the benefits he and his sister drew from the
accident v that put them in the way of seventeenth-century and not
eighteenth-century literature.
The outdoor life of the young Xenophon is written in his books, but he
had other scenes than the streets. Twice over he gives us an account of
hare-hunting—once from the lips of Socrates, whom we should not have guessed to
be so expert, and once with even more spirit and vividness from the didactic
1 Symp. iii. 5, 6. Cf. Mem. iv. 2, 10 ; and the
inimitable description of the rhapsode in Plato’s Ion, with his graces and
poses and artistic temperament.
2 E.
Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 902. 3 Clouds,
1361-8.
4 In Mem. iv. 2, 10, Euthydemos has a
complete copy of Homer. It is pleasant to read of Alcibiades hitting a teacher
who had no Homer ; he was not always so judicious (Plut. Alcib. 2).
5 Grote, History, viii. 379.
Cambyses, the father of Cyrus—and Cambyses, it would appear, knew all
about bird-snaring too, and how to do it on a winter’s night.1 The
joy of the boy Cyrus at the sight, of the horse which his grandfather has
provided for his first riding lessons may be a reminiscence of Xenophon’s own
boyhood2—“ he was more than delighted at learning to ride” (hnreveiv
/juavdavrnv inrepi^aipev). In horses Xenophon remained interested to the end.
As to formal athletics,, he seems to have cared very little for them. He lived
for years a very few miles from Olympia, and he hardly mentions the
place—certainly without any trace of that interest which always appears when he
feels it.
It was a boyhood ideal in many ways—Hqmer and the open country-side, the
soundest of training in great literature, md the constant stimulus to
observation, the constant variety, of a boy’s life on farm and mountain-side—a
wise and quiet father (though he has indeed no occasion to speak of him, and so
much, is deduction)—and an early training in religion and Sophrosyne. And then
Athens and Socrates, and his first experiences of a soldier’s life.
To discuss Socrates at length and the inter-relations of the historic
Socrates with the Platonic, the Xenophontine and the Aristotelian Socrates,
would take us too far from the matter in hand. That his own pupils would know
him better than a man in the following generation, most people would be willing
to admit. But the more closely their works are studied, the plainer it becomes
that neither Plato nor Xenophon has felt it necessary to confine himself to
literal history. In Plato’s later works it is notorious that “ Socrates ” is
less and less like the Athenian who taught Plato. Similarly, whatever his
purpose when he began to write, it is clear that Xenophon from time to time
treats Socrates in much the same way, and credits him with interests and
conversations which the real Socrates never had. " If Cyrus had lived,”
says Socrates to Critobulus ; and the very words proclaim that here we have
parted company with history. But this is in the Oeconomicus; yet the
conversation with the younger Pericles in the Third
1 Mem. iii. 11, 8 ; Cyrop. i. 6, 39-40.
2 Cyrop. i. 3, 3. On the wild life of Attica see
Mrs. R. C. Bosanquet, Days in Attica, p. 305.
Book of the Memorabilia—with Socrates as military adviser, citing Mysian
and Pisidian parallels—is a warning that we must not take what we read too
literally. Dichtung und Wahrheit is the key-note here as in Plato. Xenophon, it
is well said, is not a Greek Boswell.1 The Memorabilia have not the
solid historical structure of the Life of Johnson, nor, it must be added, its
amazing skill and perennial charm. They are a contribution of great value to
our knowledge of Socrates, and yet rather in their general impression than in their
detail. Here it must suffice to deal with the general significance of the man
as a quickening force, an influence for the deepening of life in his own
generation and for many that followed.
“ He was always in the public eye,” writes Xenophon, " for he used
to go early in the morning to the public walks and the gymnasia; and when the
market was full, he was conspicuous there, and for the rest of the day he was
always where he would meet most people. And he was generally talking.” 2
He was easily recognized. Plato, using Alcibiades as a speaker—a name that
would allow a certain freedom and vigour of speech, kut 'A\Ki/3id8r)v, as a
scholiast on Thucydides put it, and also because the friendship between
Socrates and Alcibiades was only too notorious—describes how like Seilenos
Socrates looked, but how he too was a god within.3 He was generally
talking, and there were always people ready to listen, for the conversation was
very apt to take unexpected turns. Men spoke of his irony—his playful way of
pretending not to know, and of pursuing inquiries and suggesting difficulties
and new points of view, till no one was quite sure where pretence left off and
earnest began. “ Chaerephon, is Socrates serious in all this, or only joking ?
” “If you are serious and what you say is really true, the life of all of us
must be fairly upside down.” 4 And it was so amusing, too, for
anybody not actually engaged in the argument; 6 the most trifling
admission might disconcert the opponent, and common sense itself might be a disastrous
ally. “You have the oddest way, Socrates, of twisting arguments every now and
then, and getting them topsy-turvy.” 6 He could make
1 J. T.
Forbes, Socrates, p. 107. 2
Xen. Mem. i. 1, 10.
3 Plato, Symp. 215A. 1 Plato, Gorg. 481 b, c.
6 Plato,
Apol. 33C, eon yap ovk arj8is. 6
Gorg. 5 HA. ,
a man look unexpectedly foolish ; and yet, while he turned him inside
out, it was all done in good temper and with good breeding—maddeningly so—and
he was never dogmatic ; he would suggest this or that, throw out an idea, and
take your mind upon it; but you must be very careful how you answer. And then
new aspects of the thing would emerge—this or that must be reconsidered; the
suggestion, which Socrates has dropped with half an apology for mentioning the
notion, involves—it is so difficult to say quite what it involves. “ Somehow or
other, Socrates, there seems to me to be truth in what you say. But I feel like
most people ; I don’t quite believe you.”1 He gave a constant
stimulus to thought—" the unexamined life,” he said, “ was really
un-live-able for a human being.” 2 “ God has sent me,” so Plato
represents him as saying in the Apology,3 “ to attack the city, as
if it were a great and noble horse, to use a quaint simile, which was rather
sluggish from its size, and which needed to be aroused by a gadfly: and I think
that I am the gadfly that God has sent to the city to attack it; for I never
cease from settling upon you, as it were, from every point, and rousing, and
exhorting, and reproaching each man of you all day long.” The part of gadfly
which he had to play made him unpopular—“ the more I read about him,” wrote
Macaulay, “ the less I wonder they poisoned him.” 4
The fascination of Socrates is described by Alcibiades in the Symposium.B “ My
heart leaps within me and my eyes rain tears when I hear his words. And I
observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I have heard Pericles
and other great orators, and I thought they spoke well, but I never had any
similar feeling; my soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the
thought of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas [lie means Socrates] has
often brought me to such a pass that I have felt as if I could hardly endure
the life which I am leading. He makes me admit that with great needs of my own,
I neglect my self while I am busy with the affairs of the Athenians. He is the
only person who has ever made me ashamed—and you might not think it was in my
nature to feel shame before any one, but I feel it before him
1 Gorg. 513c. 2 Plato, Apol. 38A.
3 Plato, Apol. 30E (F. J. Church). 1
Life of Macaulay, ii. 436.
6 Plato,
Symp. 215E and following, somewhat abridged.
and him alone. For I know I cannot answer him or say I ought not to do as
he bids. So I run away. Often I should be glad to see him gone and no more
among men ; but if that happened, I know I should be more troubled than ever.”
Both Plato and Xenophon emphasize again and again the kindness he showed to
young men—how interested he was in them, what a delightful companion he was and
how wise a friend. Like Samuel Johnson, he “ loved the young dogs of this age,”
and was ready " to come and have a frolick with them.”1 He
talked with them, read with them,2 made fun of them, inspired them,
and made life a new and a richer thing for them.
Of his influence on the thought of Greece through his pupils of a more
philosophic type, I have not to speak. Xenophon was essentially not of the
speculative habit—indeed, as a French critic suggests, it is only his love of
Socrates that leads him to put a little philosophy in one of his books.3
Even so it was to some purpose ; for we are told that a century later a young
man, lean, long and dusky, came from a Phoenician town in Cyprus with a cargo
of purple to the Peiraieus ; that he went up to Athens, and sat down in a
bookshop, and picked up the Second Book of the Memorabilia and read it with
such pleasure that he asked the bookseller where such men could be found ; that
Crates passed and the bookseller said, “ Follow him ” ; and so Zeno was
enlisted in the study of philosophy, to the lasting good of the ancient world.4
Of all schools the Stoic was the most practical, and in his book Xenophon lays
all the stress on the practical worth of Socrates’ teaching—its bearing on
life, its steady trend to self-government and to respect for other men and for
the State.
Summing up briefly what Socrates did for Xenophon and others of his
build, and leaving Plato and Antisthenes and their sort on one side, we may say
that Socrates set them thinking—that his “ gadfly ” quality came in here and
made it impossible for them to live a wholly " unexamined ” life. He
taught them self-criticism and he insisted on knowledge. " Did you go
yourself and examine this, or how do you know ? ”
1 Boswell, Life of Johnson (ed. Birkbeck Hill),
i. p. 445.
2 Mem. i. 6, 14. 3 Croiset, Xenophon, p. 94.
* Diogenes Laertius, vii.
1, 1-3.
he asks Glaucon.1 “ Oh, I guess,” said he. “ Very well,”
rejoined Socrates, “ about this matter also—when we are no longer guessing, but
actually know—shall we defer discussion till then ? ” “ Perhaps it would be
better,” said Glaucon. “ Euthydemos,” 3 said Socrates, “ were you ever at Delphi ? ” “Yes, certainly; twice.” “
Did you notice the inscription somewhere in the temple, ‘ Know Thyself ’ ? ”
Yes, he had seen it. Had he paid any attention to it, or really tried to get a
good look at himself to see what he was ? No, he hadn’t; he thought he knew
already. And Socrates has his text, and makes the young man realize how much
self-examination means ; and after that Euthydemos “ realized that he would
never be a man worth while, unless he consorted with Socrates ; so he never
left him except when necessary, and he used to imitate him too in some ways.
And when Socrates saw how he felt, with the minimum of worry and the utmost
simplicity and clearness he used to initiate him into what he held most needful
to know and to do.” 3
Above all he laid the emphasis on things human; he could not understand
how people would discuss “ the nature of all things,”—the “ cosmos, as the
sophists call it,”—and the laws that govern the heavenly bodies—and the One and
Many and the Flux, and so on. For himself he preferred themes that bore on
human life—what is piety or impiety ? beauty ? ugliness ? right and wrong ?
sofihrosyne ? madness ? a state, a citizen, rule or a ruler of men ? 4
His influence made many desire virtue, and he held out hopes to them, that, if
they would take heed to themselves, they would be kaloi kdgathoi— he never
promised to teach them that, but he was conspicuously one himself, and so he
led them to hope that by copying him they might become so.B He made
good citizens of them, he emphasized respect for the city’s law, he taught them
how to be good friends, to be kind and pure and pious. So says Xenophon in
passage after passage, in plain language which anybody could understand ; and
Plato in his richer and wonderful way says the same. And the significance of
this was very great, for it was a reply to the sophistic upset of all decency,
loyalty, and society. He was laying foundations
1 Mem. iii. 6, io-ii. 2 Mem. iv. 2, 24. 3 Mem. iv. 2, 4°*
4 Mem. i.
1, ii,- 16. 6 Mem. i.
2, 2.
anew on which human life might rest, and laying them for ever, for now
they should rest, not on tradition unexamined, but on knowledge, thorough,
deep-going, and proven. Like Kant, as Eduard Meyer suggests,—like Goethe, as
Carlyle emphasizes,—he overcame scepticism by going through with it, by
criticism. And he knew the strength of the sophists* position ; he knew the
impulse of desire, so he owned, and had only overcome it by battle.1
Perhaps the greater the teacher, the more divergence there will be among
his pupils, as one and the other seizes and emphasizes different aspects of
truth which he himself has held together in some synthesis thought-out or
instinctive. There were among Socrates’ followers those who were led to as
thoroughgoing an individualism as the ancient world ever saw. His emphasis on
knowledge meant the individual— not quite as the sophists had taught, but still
it was a fair deduction from “ Know Thyself.” The stress which Socrates laid on
ethical knowledge—even virtue without knowledge of itself was hardly virtue at
all for him—required that every man should consciously direct and organize his
own life by his own light of reason. The corrective lay in that reference of
life to the divine will which, Xenophon again and again insists, was his
constant teaching—the use of divination and sacrifice. “ KaSSvvap.iv S’
epSeiv—there is no better motto,” he used to say, referring to the line of
Hesiod :
Ka.8dbva.fitv
6* epbciv Up' adavdroKTt Seolfn—
* Give all thou canst in sacrifice to
heaven.2 Xenophon seems to harp upon this string with a purpose, and
it is easy to see that he had in mind the accusation of impiety which had
brought his death on Socrates. The First Book of the Memorabilia is very much a
defence against the charges of Anytos and Meletos and the popular beliefs on
which they rested. Yet the same note of reference to the divine is sounded in
Plato’s Apology .said there remains the famous “divine sign.”3
1 Cicero, Tusc. Disput. iv. 37, 80, Cum ilia (sc.
vitia) sibi insita, sed ratione a se dejecta diceret.
2 Mem. i. 3, 2, quoting Hesiod, Works and Days,
336. I hope the Wordsworthian echo helps out the sense.
* See E. Caird, Evolution of Theology, i.
72 ; J. Adam, Gifford Lectures, p. 322 ; J. T. Forbes, Socrates, p. 22 3, an
interesting discussion of modern explanations.
In the present state of psychological knowledge—or inquiry, perhaps, it
should be called—he would be a bold man who would dogmatize on the nature of
this “ sign,” to Saifjioviov. Plutarch and Apuleius knew
perfectly well what it was ; but their knowledge is outworn. But it. may
certainly be said that the credit of Socrates’ “ sign,” whatever its precise
nature, never stood higher. It will not now be so readily put down to delusion
or imposture as once. If a more or less English word is any help in such a
case, a word with suggestion rather than definite or precise signification,
that word would be intuition;—but until we know more about intuition, we had
better use the word only tentatively; and it was so, we might expect, that
Socrates used his neuter adjective, half turned into substantive by the
definite article. In any case, man was not for Socrates “ mere man,” and his
pupil perhaps was not merely translating for himself—it is most likely that he
was honestly quoting—when he drove home the lesson of divination and sacrifice
on the lines laid down by the State and . by Greek belief generally.1
As for the old myths, which Pindar toned down and Aeschylus
re-interpreted and which Euripides so relentlessly re-stated in the old terms
with the terrible contrast of a new setting—it would seem that teacher and
pupil let them drop. Piety lay in rite and faith and obedience, not in old
tales.2 What Euripides would have said to Plato’s new myths was
written a generation earlier in the Hippolytus—myths take us nowhere—
ftv6ois S'
aXXcos (j)€p6fX€<T6a.*
The fact that this signal movement back to religion followed the age of
questioning is worth study, for it was not a blind reaction at all, nor a
semi-political matter as in 1815.
In other ways the influence of Socrates upon Xenophon must have been
considerable. Socrates was a critic of Democracy—a believer in the expert. He
was given to praising Sparta and Crete as well-governed.4 It was
made a point
1 Mem. i. 3, 1, vopa iroKeus, as the Pythian priestess
also taught.
2 Oracles perhaps did not regain quite their old
place. Xenophon’s description of Diopeithes as paXa xp^o-jioKoyos avfjp
(Hellenica, iii. 3, 3) is curious. The paka is a surprise.
3 Hippolytus, 197. 4 Plato, Crito, 52E.
against him1 that he taught his friends to despise the established
laws by insisting that it was folly for the city to choose its rulers or
archons by lot—nobody would wish to sail upon a ship where the pilot was drawn
by lot, or to employ a carpenter so chosen, or even a flute player; such
language was bound to set the young up to despise the constitution. Here the
accuser touched a live issue—a great many people had at one time or other
played with the idea of abolishing lot—it had been attempted, and it was a
recognized method of subverting Democracy. Xenophon, as we have seen, belonged
perhaps to a family whose sympathies were only doubtfully popular; and his
teacher’s views appealed to him, as we can see in the supposed discussion of
Socrates with the younger Pericles where the Areopagus is praised—" can
you name any similar body trying cases and doing other business with more
honour, legality, dignity, or justice ? ”2 Why, asks Socrates in
another chapter, should you be afraid to speak before cobblers and carpenters and
coppersmiths, when you can discuss things without nervousness before the first
men of the city ? 3 This question, we read, was addressed to
Charmides, a relative of Plato and of Critias, to encourage him to embark on
political life. This Charmides did, and he lost his life fighting to the last
to prevent the return of Thrasybulus and the democrats. It almost looks like a
change of plan between Books I and III of the Memorabilia, for such a chapter
was hardly likely to clear the memory of Socrates with readers among the group
of Anytos. For Anytos, though better known as the accuser of Socrates, was one
of Thrasybulus’ patriot band.4
One of the hardest things to do when we study Socrates’ relations with
his pupils, or the Greek drama in the hands of Sophocles, Euripides, and
Aristophanes, is to remember steadily that Athens was engaged in the most
dreadful of her wars all the time. If Xenophon talked with Socrates or listened
to him whenever he got the chance, it is certain that he must have done some kind
of military service every summer of the last ten years of the Peloponnesian
War, unless the story is true that he was for a time a prisoner in Thebes.
Where he served and in what battlep he fought, it would be vain to try
1 Mem. i.
2, 9. 2 Mem. iii. 5, 20. 8 Mem. iii. 7, 6.
* For Anytos and his attitude to
Socrates, see Chapter IX. p. 276.
to guess. Perhaps if the tradition be true that he was in the knights, he
may have been occupied with cavalry work in Attica itself. Cavalry at all
events was throughout life his chief military interest.
In 411 Athens was subjected to the futile and bloody revolution
associated with the name of the Four Hundred. It was the reflex of the Athenian
catastrophe in Sicily in 413— there must be retrenchment of expenses in the city,
some steadier and more responsible system of government than that of snap votes
in the Ecclesia and random oratory. After the manner of a democracy, says
Thucydides,1 they were very amenable to discipline while their
fright lasted. Probouloi were appointed—a council of ten elder men to advise
and guide. The device was a familiar oligarchic one, used in Dorian cities, and
described by Aristotle in after years as definitely “ not democratic.” 2
Among them were Hagnon, father of Theramenes, and perhaps Sophocles.3
We need not follow the agonizing struggle—wonderfully successful—to get a fleet
launched and manned and to maintain the war against Sparta ; nor need we go
into the details of the oligarchic plot, planned with one set of notions and
carried through for another. Two things stand out. The people of Athens
disliked the new plan from the outset—a modified democracy (/w) tod avTov
TpoTrov SvjfioKpaTovfievois) had a suspicious sound; but it was a case of
duress—can you carry on the war without the help of the King of the Persians ?
The other thing is the amount of preparation, if we may so call it, for the
change. The pamphlet of the Athenian Oligarch of the year 424, handed down to
us among Xenophon’s works, shows what would have been wished but was so far
impossible in the judgment of that very acute observer. Clubs and groups of
persons dissatisfied with the constitution had grown up and organized
themselves as the war went on—" for the management of trials and
elections.” 4 The " constitution of
1 Thuc.
viii. 1. 2 Aristotle,
Pol. iv. 12, 8 ; vi. 5, 13.
3 Lysias, 12, c. Erat. § 65. See p. 128.
4 Thuc. viii. 53; Aristophanes,
Lysistrata, 577. Isocrates, Paneg. 79, gives the clubs in retrospect a high
patriotic colour. E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iv. §696, gives a list of men of
note who favoured a modified democracy. Plato, Theaet. 17 3D, adds dinner and
twhjrpillfs to the political interests of these clubs.
our fathers ” was the catchword, iraTpios ttd\ire£a, democracy as Solon
and Cleisthenes had conceived it, before the radical innovations of those fifty
years of commerce and maritime empire and rule by an unbridled ecclesia had
brought the land to war and ruin—democracy with an Areopagus to guide and
discipline it—a democracy of men with a stake in the country, men who could
provide their own arms for its service, and no more state pay for the citizen
functions of legislation and administration of justice. The abolition of state
pay meant unmistakably the exclusion of the poorer classes, the constituents
of the Cleons and Hyperboluses. All this was in the air, and the dreadful
blunder of the Sicilian Expedition and its appalling failure won adherents for
the idea who might never otherwise have considered it.
Whether Gryllos and his son Xenophon took any part in the change of
constitution one way or the other, we do not know. Gryllos, of course, may have
been dead for all we can tell. It is not impossible that the young Xenophon,
with his small attachment to democracy, may have favoured the movement—may have
taken a hand in it. He was about twenty years old, and, tradition says, a
knight. Thucydides twice speaks of the services of a body of “ young men
"— almost using it as a technical term. There is a curious question in one
place as to the text—as it stands it reads “ a hundred and twenty Hellenic
youth ('EXkTjves veaviatcoi) whose services they [the conspirators] used for
any act of violence they had in hand.” 1 Hellenes is the doubtful
word, but hardly a word that anyone but the historian himself would have
thought of inserting ; but what does it mean ? Does it mean the youths were not
Scythian bowmen, police and the like ?—a dull suggestion ; or were the Hellenic
Youth, like the Young Turks of to-day, and Young England of Disraeli’s days, a
political party, actual or half-actual and half-ideal ? When the tumult takes
place which ends in the demolition of the fort of Eetioneia and the overthrow
of the Four Hundred in favour of Theramenes and the “ Five Thousand,” one of
the figures on the scene mentioned by Thucydides is Aristarchos. Thucy
1 Thuc.
viii. 69, 4 ; xel9ovpy*~lv is a euphemism of grim
associations. Neavio-Koi in Aristophanes, Knights, 730, on which see R. A. Neil’s
note.
dides does not often mention men idly or by accident, and he adds that
Aristarchos had “ certain young knights ” with him (t«v
I’Kireccv veav(cncot).1 The anger
of Theramenes at the destruction of the fort was recognized as diplomatic, and
it soon ended in the popular movement for the " Five Thousand “ but
Aristarchos and the opponents were angry in earnest,” though to no purpose.
Aristarchos is a sinister figure ; for, some days later, when he and his
confederates had to fly, he did his country a final disservice in betraying
Oinoe to the Boeotians.2 On this occasion he had with him “ certain
archers —of the most barbarian kind ” ; and what superlative barbarians they
were, Thracian or Scythian or whatever more barbarous there was, we are left to
guess. The young men (veavia-Koi) reappear with short swords at that meeting of
the Thirty in council in 404, which ended in the killing of Theramenes,3
and once more it is believed they were knights,— for knights were at all events
in the service of the Thirty against Thrasybulus,4—unless we are
content to render it merely as cavalry, though what other cavalry the Thirty
could have it is hard to see. Eduard Meyer remarks that Xenophon records the
events and especially the feeling and procedure of the knights with the
liveliest recollection.6 Grote recognizes a certain sympathy in
Xenophon as historian, but neither he nor Beloch quite says that Xenophon
served in the knights for the Thirty.
That the knights were throughout of the oligarchic party— of the party at
least opposed to extreme democracy and in favour of its modification—is
intelligible and is established. That Xenophon served among them is a
conjecture—possible enough, but a conjecture still. That he sympathized with
the ideal of modified democracy—if democracy there must be—is very likely. But
as to his part in the events of 411, even as to his presence in Attica at
all—we have absolutely no evidence whatever. The oligarchy of 404 is another
matter,
1 Thuc.
viii. 92.
a Thuc.
viii. 98. Aristarchos, somehow or other, was brought to trial for this
betrayal, and, it was remembered, was given the full advantage of the laws in
self-defence on the occasion (Xen. Hellenica, i. 7, 28).
3 Xen.
Hellenica, ii. 3, 23. 4
Xen. Hellenica, ii. 4, 10.
6 E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 757.
for our knowledge of it is chiefly drawn from Xenophon himself, and his
account of it is one of the most vivid sections of his Hellenica—so vivid,
that, forgetting how brilliantly Thucydides can describe scenes which he never
saw, at Plataea or Pylos, our critics are certain that Xenophon was in Athens,
or in Attica somewhere, throughout the whole stormy time.
Xenophon in ever memorable words describes the arrival in Athens of the
news of the crowning disaster of Aegospotami —the night when no man slept. Such
an experience, and all the dreadful events between that night and the final
peacemaking of the parties in Athens on the expulsion of the Thirty, could not
but affect the mind and spirit of a man gifted with any feeling at all. The
long fight against famine, when the com trade route was finally held by the
enemy—the anxiety as to what the conquerors would do with the captive city and
people—the dragging negotiations of Theramenes—the humiliation—the loss of
empire, walls, and even docks—the Thirty tyrants, and the killing of fifteen
hundred people by them—experiences of this kind write themselves down in
character. Life becomes another thing, and the man who looks out on it is
changed for ever.
Sparta did not andraftodize Athens—kill the grown men and sell the women
and children and blot out the city; but her decision had to be waited for.
Lysander was capable of anything, and the Thebans and Corinthians urged it, men
said.1 One wonders if any in those days of waiting remembered
Euripides’ Trojan Women, and how it was given on the stage in 415, and read it
again with a new understanding. Athens was spared, and historians have written
of the nobility and magnanimity of Sparta. Eduard Meyer suggests that the fact
that Athens was the centre of the spiritual life of Greece may have weighed ;
but Sparta rarely showed any sign of caring for anything of the kind.2
More weight would be attached by the Spartans to the problem of what to do with
1
Hellenica, ii. 2, 19. Cf. the treatment of Acragas in 406 by the Carthaginians
(Diod. Sic. xiii. 89, 90)—a city of 200,000 people.
* Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 20, says the
Spartans refused to destroy a city “ that had done good service in the greatest
dangers that had ever come on Greece.” So Andocides, i. 142. When one recalls
Lichas, Callicratidas, and King Pausanias, it becomes more credible that Sparta
was in some degree amenable to such considerations.
Attica and the great haven if Athens were deleted. Perhaps it was not hard
to understand the Theban desire to see this done, and " to leave the land
for the grazing of sheep like the Crisaean plain.” If Thebes did not gain the
vacant territory, would it be Corinth—or Megara ? In any case, it could not be
incorporated in Laconia. Fewest questions would be raised, and fewest dangers
incurred, if Athens were left—left crippled, helpless, and enslaved under
domestic tyrants. And here we reach the story of the Thirty.
Till the discovery of the Aristotelian Athenian Constitution, Xenophon’s
narrative went unchallenged, supported as it was in most particulars by the
almost contemporary speeches of Lysias and the references of Isocrates,
Athenians all and “ of years to remark what happened.” But the new book has
another version of the events, and perhaps its novelty or the glitter of
Aristotle’s name dazzled for a while a number of historians. It is very far
from being a satisfactory piece of historical work. Not to leave the period
which concerns us, the “ constitution of Draco ” was seen from the first to be
an absurdity and probably the product of some pen of 411 or 404. The narrative
of the Four Hundred contradicted Thucydides on the question, a crucial one :
were or were not the Five Thousand really constituted before the Four Hundred
fell ? Aristotle, if it be he, says they were ; Thucydides that they were not.
Aristotle details the procedure, with such care that a German scholar could
hold that “ no transformation was ever so legally done ” ; but, as Eduard
Meyer saw,1 Aristotle omitted the real aspects of the revolution to
depend on acta, or on the editor of acta.2 And then, after saying, in chapter 30, that the Five Thousand were
chosen, in chapter 32 he adds that it was " only in word ”—i.e. they were
chosen, only they really weren’t. Meyer’s vindication of Thucydides is
generally accepted.3 When we come to the Thirty, we find history
still more thoroughly re-written. The order of events familiar to us in
Xenophon’s pages was this :—1st: the introduction of a garrison of seven hundred
1 E. Meyer, Forsch. ii. pp. 406-436.
3 “As false as a
bulletin,” we are told, was a proverb of Napoleon’s time.
3 Even by Mr. E.
M. Walker, Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, p. 114.
men under the Spartan Callibios, followed by wholesale killing of
opponents and the disarming of the people ; 2nd : the remonstrance of
Theramenes and his violent end, followed by more massacre, and the flight of
citizens till refugees filled Megara and Thebes; 3rd : the occupation of Phyle
by Thrasybulus. The new book inverts the order, and gives :— 1st : the return
of Thrasybulus ; 2nd : the death of Theramenes ; 3rd : the disarming of the
people, heightened savagery, and the garrison.1 On what authority,
for Aristotle was not yet bom ? That would appear to have been some book or
pamphlet, written apparently to vindicate Theramenes. Whether it is the
judgment of Aristotle himself, or merely transcribed, the Constitution picks
out as the best of Athenian politicians, " after the old (or ancient) ones
”—a curiously careless phrase—Nicias, Thucydides the son of Melesias, and
Theramenes. The author of this selection knows the slander against Theramenes
as wrecker of every constitution—but, no ! he says, Theramenes really tried to
keep each constitution in turn away from the course of injustice ; he showed
the aptitude of an ideal good citizen to live under any constitution, and it
was his resistance to illegality that won him ill will.2 It might
fairly be asked, whether anyone would guess from the Constitution that
Theramenes had been, as we know he was, one of the Thirty at all.3
It is not till we' read the speeches of Lysias against Eratosthenes and
Agoratos that we realize the furious hatred men felt for Theramenes; and then,
as we put together one or two remarks of Thucydides with the enthusiastic
praise of Aristotle’s anonymous authority, we begin to see what lies behind.
Thucydides says that Theramenes was capable in speech and judgment; 4
and he gives, as we have seen, a remarkable eulogy to -the fugitive
constitution labelled
1 The order
of Xenophon is accepted by E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v■ §
749. and by Beloch, Gy. Gesch. ii. p. 116.
SA6. HoX.
28, 5.
s And while
we are asking questions, why does the author omit to state that Critias also
was one of the Thirty ? Is it deference to the school of Socrates ?
* Thuc. viii. 68, 4. Cf. Aristophanes,
Frogs, 967 ff., where Euripides is made to claim him with pride as a pupil,
"a man who can always get out of a mess.”
nowadays with that statesman’s name.1 Theramenes represented
the party of modified democracy—of the impossible; and Aristotle is following
the lead of one of his adherents, who, perhaps some time after the events,
wrote an account of them which, in the unobtrusive way of a good party
pamphlet, readjusted facts, and, by this simple form of appeal to history,
cleared the fame of the great man associated with the ideal of ancestral or
modified democracy. The Spartan garrison, he would have us think, was really
fetched in after the death of Theramenes, so that he was not responsible for
it, nor for the debt of a hundred talents to Sparta incurred by those who hired
it and left by them for the democracy of the restoration to repay. The killing
of Theramenes thus almost becomes a reply to the occupation of Phyle, a death
for the People.
Now let the reader look at the speeches of Lysias, a contemporary, a
resident, and a man ruined by the Thirty. Lysias, it is true, is angry and
eager for revenge, which it would seem the court did not give him—but he is
addressing men who had lived through the actual events, only two or three years
away; men open to insinuations, but as well aware as himself of the actual
course of events. The situation precludes major falsifications, and it gives
the real atmosphere,
Then turn to Xenophon. Xenophon, as a historian, is admittedly careless,
and he will omit things when he so pleases. He does like the Spartans and he
does not like the Thebans, and omissions due to both feelings can be charged
against him. But the more I read him, and the more I study what is made of his
work by the scholars who have given to it the closest care and scrutiny, the
more convinced I am that there is no ground for accusing him of deliberate
falsification. Wrong impressions his carelessness will produce, and sometimes
his party feeling ; but in the latter case most often the thing corrects
itself. To come then to Theramenes, and to suppose for the moment that Xenophon
wishes to mislead us—in which direction will it be ? Is he likely to falsify
history out of sympathy with the party of Lysias, with the more furious end of
the extreme democrats ? Or with the moderates, whose spokesman supplied
Aristotle’s information ? We have seen that, if we can at all divine what his
party 1 Thuc.
viii. 97, 2. See Chapter III. p. 78.
politics were, he leaned to this side himself. But his story, as we have
it, clashes with the moderate’s version. Then he blundered and foigot ? One
would have thought it impossible to read the clear, vivid narrative, thrilling
with the spirit of the eyewitness, and suggest such a thing. Does he or does he
not make a hero of Theramenes ? Or does he nothing extenuate nor set down aught
in malice ? He quite openly shows Theramenes’ connexion with Lysander—his long
delay in the Spartan camp, while the siege of Athens dragged on for three
interminable months of famine 1—his part in the tragic surrender to
Sparta—and he definitely names him among the Thirty. He does not attack him in
the envenomed spirit of Lysias for his share in the establishment of the
Thirty ; and, by the time Theramenes is killed, he leaves the reader with a
friendly feeling for the man—a feeling shared, it is clear, by many
contemporaries who felt there was something in the death at least that. was
loyal and patriotic, that in a sense redeemed the life. Many felt this, as we
can see ; for Lysias protests fiercely against the notion that Theramenes died
for the Athenians. It is very hard to find partisanship in the story told by
Xenophon, or slovenliness. It makes the impression of the record of a candid
and honourable witness, on whose mind were deeply and indelibly engraved the
actual events of the most awful days in his country's history.2
There are things a man cannot live through and forget.
It must have been with curious feelings that the pupil of Socrates found
that the ruling spirit of the Thirty was another member of the school.
Alcibiades had had his day, and now Cri- tias ruled, pupil but hardly follower
of Socrates.® Poet, thinker, orator, and adventurer, this man had been
banished, thanks to Cleophon, who, it is said, had enough culture to quote a
telling line of Solon against him, written for his ancestor long ago :
elireficva
1 Kpvriji §(ui6orpl\i irarpbg anoveiv—
Bid
Critias of the yellow hair obey his sire.*
1 Read
Xenophon’s account of it, Hellenica, ii. 2, 21.
1 E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 749, holds it
unthinkable that Xenophon, who was an eyewitness and in the Knights, could
have falsely set the calling in of the garrison before the death of Theramenes.
* See Mem. i. 1 and 2. * Aristotle, Rhetoric, i. 1375.
An aristocrat in exile, he had employed himself in a rebellion of serfs
against the rulers of Thessaly. He had come back with the exile’s usual idea of
vengeance,1 but perhaps already Cleophon had been hustled out of the
world by a judicial murder. But, for all his brain and energy, he was an
impossible ruler, and he had as his colleague the most brilliant politician
after Alcibiades of the decade—Theramenes, the adroitest of allmoderates, the
" buskin ” that fitted all parties, who always played for his own hand and
always saw the moment to change sides successfully, a natural traitor.2
Theramenes saw that the violence of Critias was doing no good—it was not sense
to kill men whom the demos regarded, at least if they did the kaloi kdgathoi no
harm ; even an oligarchy needed some kind of partners ; and so he became
suspect. The populace was disarmed and the garrison was got in ; the rulers
were free to kill more victims, and they began to include the metics, the
resident aliens of the commercial community—which was folly, as Theramenes
saw, and he said so. So they resolved to be rid of him, and they had him
killed, as Critias planned, but it cost a good deal. He made a defence that was
remembered ; he fought for his life, and was dragged shouting across the
agora—everybody saw and knew—and then with the hemlock his gaiety of spirit
triumphed, and he died with a jest that went down to posterity as a signal
exhibition of character and as a fulfilled prophecy. Critias, beside writing of
the origin of the gods, had written a poem on the familiar game Kottabos ; so
Theramenes, when he had drunk off the cup, jerked out the last drops, with the
gay challenge : “ For Critias let this be, for Critias the noble ! ”—“ I know
well,” wrote Xenophon at this point; " that such sayings are scarcely
worth recording, but I count it an admirable trait in the man, that, with death
so near, neither his sense nor his humour deserted him.” 3 All
Athens, we may be sure, heard the tale at once, and thought it over.
And then came news indeed—Thrasybulus had occupied Phyle,4 an
old hill fort on one of the two significant passes over
1 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3, 15. Cf. Diod. Sic. xiii.
92 (end), in what spirit the Syracusan exiles would come back—for killings and
confiscations.
* See speech of Critias, Hellenica, ii.
3, 24-34.
8 Xen.
Hellenica, ii. 3, 56.
4 See J. P. Mahaffy, Rambles and Studies
in Greece, ch. viii.
the mountains between Attica and Boeotia, between Parnes and Cithaeron.
He was a democrat leader, who had refused a place in the Thirty, and now he
came with a band of the refugees from Thebes. Here I would quote with pleasure
from Mrs. R. C. Bosanquet’s charming book, Days in Attica.
" As
a post of observation its position is unequalled. No boats could slip across
the Saronic Gulf, no force of Athenians muster in the plain, no band attempt
the passes of Hymettus, but the watchman at Phyle would see the lowering of the
sail or the light glinting on the spears of moving men. The whole of the
Cephissian plain from Phalerum to Pentelicus lies in view, clear as an
illuminated missal, in spite of the well of air, two thousand five hundred feet
in depth, that swims between. Athens can be seen, but it looks only a group of
infinitesimal dots and lines. Without the aid of opera-glasses I have made out
the dark rectangular outline of the Acropolis, the lighter pyramidal form of
the Parthenon, and the white gleaming houses of the town. The Bay of Salamis is
clear, though Piraeus is hidden behind hills. 'What a fine move of Thrasy-
bulus to come up to this eyrie and wait for the moment when he could sweep
eagle-like on his prey, to deliver the city from the tyrants! ”
For the Garibaldi-like story that follows—the fight in the snowstorm, the
surprise of the guards of the Thirty, the seizure of the Peiraieus, the victory
of Munychia, the gallant death of the prophet, the fall of Critias, and all the
shifting movements of Thirty and Ten, the City and Peiraieus parties, the
coming of the Spartans again, and the overriding of Lysander by King
Pausanias—let the reader go to Xenophon himself and read with feeling and
intelligence—and then say where Xenophon's sympathies lay, whether they are not
where his own must lie. When did he write the story ? Many guesses have been
made, but the indications are not enough to leave us sure. It does not matter
greatly. What concerns us is that here is a tale of heroes, and Xenophon has
that native instinct for heroism that makes the telling of it a joy to him, and
leaves a story that cannot die. .
The man has lived through a great deal. From the open- air pleasures and
interests of the country deme, he has come to Athens and learnt to love
Socrates, and found in his friendship
a stimulus that shaped life for him ; he has served his country in
battle, he has felt with her in her fall and gone through the night of anguish
with her;1 he has seen how far astray the most cultured and
brilliant of men can go, how hopeless any government is that does not carry
the people with it, that neglects the fundamental ancient distinction between
right and wrong; he has given up the idea of modified democracy, ancestral
constitutions, and other notions of the study and the clique; he has seen
heroism again in its simplest and manliest forms, and the great spectacle of a
people reunited ; and he ends his' tale for the time being with the quiet and
significant words— “ So they swore oaths that they would remember no evil, and
to this day they live together in one state, and Demos abides by his oaths.”
One question remains, if anyone care to ask it. Among the exiles who came
back in 404 was an old man, who had not seen Athens for twenty years—a man with
perhaps a dash of foreign accent, pedantic a little, something of an archaist,
a moderate in politics, in thought and mind and utterance a man of the old
regime, busy still with a history at which he had been working for years, but
which he had not finished. Legend says that Xenophon rescued that history or
part of it from destruction; he certainly wrote an ending for it—a piece of
work in which his natural gifts are battling, whether he knew it or not, with a
great influence.2 How came he under that influence ? Was it one of
style only, or did Xenophon meet Thucydides ?
11 cannot make anything of the remark of
Hemardinquer, La CyropSdie, p. io, that “ Xenophon est sec dans les Hellenica
sur la ruine d’AthSnes et presque joyeux.”
2 See Bruns, Lit. Portrdt, pp. 38 ff.
PERSIA
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass Stamps o’er his Head, but
cannot break his Sleep.
SO runs, in its familiar English garb, the stanza of one of the great
mediaeval poets of Persia. And in one of those courts Mr. E. G. Browne copied
down a similar reflection, written there in 1791-2 : “ Where,” asked the
writer, in Arabic verse, “ are the proud monarchs of yore ? They multiplied
treasures which endured not, neither did they endure.” 1 The two
moralists between them bring out how transitory is fame. Takht-i-Jamshid
(Throne of Jamshid) is the modem name of Persepolis,2 and Jamshid,
it would appear, is a mere hero of legend.3 Bahram, that great
Hunter, was a king of the Sasanian house that held Persia for four centuries (a.d. 226-651) and fought with the
Roman Empire till the deluge of Islam came and swept them away.4 The
great builder of Persepolis was Darius, and yet it would seem that he and Cyrus
and the whole Achaemenian dynasty have passed from the national memory and imagination.
What the West knows of them it has learnt for itself from their monuments and
from what their enemies, the Greeks, told of them. Of all
1 E. G. Browne, A Year amongst the Persians, p.
254.
2 E. G. Browne, Literary History of Persia, p.
112.
3 Jam-shid or Jam is the Yima of the Avesta, and
Yama of the Hindu mythology. He is a demigod, belonging to a period before
Indians and Persians separated.
4 Bahram is, I think, the Varanes V (a.d. 420-440) of the dictionaries, “
surnamed Gour, or the Wild Ass, on account of his passion for the chase of that
animal ”—a passion which Xenophon, at least, would forgive to a king (cf. Anab.
i. 5, 2; Cyrop. viii. 1, 36. Cf. Chapter VIII. p. 246).
the world-empires before Rome’s, that of the Achaemenians was most significaht
for mankind, and in more ways than one. Our present task is Greek history, but
Greek history at the period under review is not to be understood apart from the
Persian Empire.
Persia has contributed to the progress of mankind both t by what she has done and by what she failed to do. The Persian tried to
conquer the Greek and failed, and by the attempt and the failure brought out
the grandeur of Hellas and gave the Hellen a glad self-consciousness, in the
strength of which those triumphs were won which the world associates with the
Greek name, and which have done so much to make the world. Even such an
involuntary contribution to history is enough to entitle Persia to a more
sympathetic study than she usually receives. They were no common foes who called
into being all that Greece had of genius and power. In spirit, in courage, in
character, the best of the Greeks recognized the Persians to be their peers.
But in positive achievement the Persian also set new ideals before
mankind—ideals to which indeed he did not himself attain, but which he left to
Macedonian and Roman—ideals for the world’s good government with the utmost of
unity and cohesion combined with the largest possible freedom for the
development of race and individual within the larger organism. An Indo-European
people with great gifts, which in some degree they still keep, the Persians
break upon the West with a series of surprises. In antiquity they first
conceived and constructed a world- empire that should last. Then for six
centuries they are governed by foreigners, Macedonian and Parthian, but they
rise again to a new national life, only too significant for the West. In the
Middle Ages they produce the only Oriental poets who have much influenced the
thought and literature of the European peoples. In religion their story is as
interesting. In their early day we see rise among them one of the world’s great
prophets, Zoroaster. It is now no longer held proven that he is among those who
definitely contributed to the development of Israel’s religion,1
but, as we can see in Plutarch, his ideas spread far in the ancient world ; and
to this day his own faith lives and remains of interest to those who care to
1 J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 321.
know what the human mind can do in seeking after God. Mam (a.d. 215/6-273/6) and his religion
are another manifestation of Persian interest in religious thought, and St.
Augustine is a witness to the wiHe influence of a thinker who tried to
reconcile Christ and Zoroaster. Islam itself suffered change when it reached
Persia;1 and the nineteenth century saw once more in B&busm and
Bahaiism the vitality of the Persian mind. So far as history is yet unfolded,
no other Eastern people, apart from the Jews, has meant so much to the West or
has taken so large a part in shaping the civilization and the thought of
mankind.
When the Persians first appear as newcomers in the West, we recognize in
them a sound and healthy primitive people. They have won ascendancy over the
Medes ; and Croesus, King of Lydia, so Herodotus tells us, is preparing to
attack them. To him comes the wise Sandanis. " O King,” said Sandanis, “
thou makest ready to take the field against men of this sort; men who wear
trowsers of leather, and the rest of their clothing is of leather; and they
eat, not what they would, but what they have, for their land is rough. Moreover,
they use not wine, but drink water; they have no figs to eat, nor anything else
that is good.” 2 They are a people from a harbourless land of
mountain and desert, but (in spite of Sandanis) not without fertile areas,
which in time they turned to good account. Pliny gives us lists of their trees
and fruits,3 and the peach to this day, in spite of the vagaries of
European spellings, carries its origin in its very name—the " Persian ”
fruit. For, mountaineers as they were, the Persians loved gardens — kings and
satraps in later days vied with one another in the beauty of their gardens and
their “ paradises.” 4 The height and build of the Persians, men and
women, impressed the Greeks. " Their names,” says Herodotus, " are
like their bodily shape and their magnificence ; ” and Xeno-
1 See E. G. Browne, A Year amongst the Persians,
ch. vi.; R. A. Nicholson, Mystics of Islam, p. 8, urges that Sufism is not
essentially Persian. See also T. W. Arnold, Preaching of Islam2, p.
211.
2 Herodotus, i. 71.
3 Pliny, N.H. xii.
3 ; xv. 13, 14 ; 22 ; xix. 3, etc. Cf. G. Rawlin- son, Ancient
Monarchies*, vol. iii. 139.
4 See notes of How and Wells on
Herodotus, vii. 5 ; and evidence there cited.
phon tells his fellow-soldiers that he fears, if they consort with “ the
tall and beautiful women and maidens of the Medes and Persians,” they may, like
the lotus-eaters, forget the homeward journey.1 That the Persian
troops were among the world’s best fighting men was evident from the victories
of Cyrus and Darius; at Plataea itself in 479 B.C., so far as “spirit and
valour ” went, they were not inferior to the Spartans ; and it would seem that
to the end, though badly armed, badly organized, and badly led, the Persian
soldier showed no degeneracy in personal courage.2 The Greeks
remarked the decency and the courtesy of their manners,3 and
Alexander the Great found among them a tone, a charm, and a dignity which
neither Greek nor Macedonian possessed. There is apt to be in monarchical and
episcopal societies a habit of manners which a republic does not always
produce, and to emperors and people of position it is very attractive,
especially when enhanced by contrast.
" They teach their boys,” says Herodotus,4 “ from five
years old to twenty, three things only—to ride the horse, to shoot with the
bow, and to speak the truth.” The epigram is not to be forced ; writing and
reading as part of Persian education are implied already by the inscriptions of
Cyrus, and still more by those of Darius. Darius, indeed, it has been remarked,
in his most famous inscription at Behistun lays great emphasis on truth and
falsehood. “ Lying they reckon the greatest of shame.” 6 Riding may
not have been—and probably was not—an accomplishment of the race in their
mountain days, and Xenophon attributes the development of
1
Herodotus, i. 139 ; Xen. Anab. iii. 2, 25. Cf. How and Wells on the story of
Phye, Herodotus, i. 60: “ This passage is very significant for Greek stature:
this ‘ daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair,’ was only
about 5 feet 10 inches.” The Persian names fascinated Aeschylus; cf. Persae,
21, 302, 959, for lists of them. A similar turn of mind is seen in the
geographical references of his Prometheus.
4 MaSpero, Passing of the Empires, p.
806.
8 Seethe
curious data of Herodotus, i. 133, 134; Xen. Cyrop. i. 2,16 ; v. 2, 17 ; viii.
1, 42. The passages rather suggest the Greek want of dignity which the Romans
noticed. The Persian habit of kissing one’s friends on lips (Herodotus, i. 134
; Xen. Ages. 5,4; Cyrop. i. 4, 27).
1 Herodotus, i. 136.
6 Herodotus, i. 138 ; note also his
addition, “ and debt next to it,” and the reason given that a debtor is bound
to lie a little.
cavalry to the reasoned judgment of Cyrus the Great.1 The
description which he gives of that great conqueror’s boyhood is perhaps more
the ideal of the historian than an actual transcript from Persian life ; but
in any case it contains features which we know to be historical, and it is
certainly the most delightful picture of boyhood in the classics. It may be
noted that Xenophon emphasizes the Persian practice of educating boys of noble
birth “ at the gates of the king ”2 or of the satrap, and of
training them in “ justice ” ; and he describes a discipline which was not
unlike the Spartan, but with perhaps a good deal more hunting and more emphasis
on truth.
Persian religion clearly interested Herodotus, but as he did not speak
the language, there remain in his account of it some gaps and some confusions.3
Xenophon seems to have taken little interest in learning what the Persian
religion really was. He represents Cyrus as uniformly religious, but in rather
a Greek way—his Cyrus is pious as he himself is. Probably, like most Greeks and
Romans, he assumed that the religion of other races would be essentially like
his own, but with different names. From the sacred books of the old Persians we
can supplement and correct what the Greeks tell us.4 It results that
Zoroaster was a real and historical man and a prophet, who died by violence
towards the age of eighty, about 583 B.C. ; and the spread of his teaching from
Bactria (Balkh), where he made his first great convert in King Vishtashpa
(Hystaspes), can be .traced over Persia. Strabo in a later day reveals its
dissemination outside Persia, but the modem Parsis are emigrants who went to
India to escape Muslim persecution, not a survival of a converted Indian
community. In the popular mind Zoroastrianism is connected with the conflict of
Ormuzd (Ahuramazda) and
1 Cyrop. iv. 3, 8 ; and he adds that to this day
no Persian of rank will be seen on foot, § 23. Against this may be set the fact
that Cyrus was sculptured on foot, and the Kings were represented on the darics
kneeling to draw the bow.
2 Xen. Anab. i. 9, 3. 1 Herodotus, i. 131 ; iii. 16.
1 See A. V. Williams Jackson, Zoroaster the Prophet
of Ancient Iran, a book accepted by the learned in Persian ; J. H. Moulton’s
Early Zoroastrianism ; and E. G. Browne, Literary History of Persia (p. 30),
and A Year amongst the Persians, ch. xiii., xiv.
Ahriman, with the Magians, with strange customs in marriage and the
disposal of the dead. That there is confusion here, and has been from the days
of Herodotus, is clear. What appears to be the case is that the Magians were
really not Persian at all, but an aboriginal tribe of earlier inhabitants lingering
in the land and slowly imposing their religion and its customs upon the
Persians themselves.1 Zoroaster was an Iranian, and in many striking
points his faith and the practices and superstitions of the Magians were in
conflict. Zoroaster knows no magic,2 no astrology,3 no
images,4 and— unless in a very modified sense of the word—no
temples. No religious buildings are found among the ruins of Pasargadae or
Persepolis.6 The Magian left the dead to be tom by birds and dogs, a
very primitive trait—and this usage was at last imposed on the Zoroastrian
religion, as the Persian dakhmas and the Bombay “ towers of silence ” witness ;
but the earlier Zoroastrian buried his dead, and the tombs of his kings stand
to this day. “ For all the profundity of Zarathushtra’s thinking ... he was
intensely alive to the practical realities of life ; and there was a singular
absence of the mystical element in his teaching. A little more of it might
perhaps have helped his religion to secure a much larger part in human history.
A more conspicuous absence is that of asceticism, which cuts him off strikingly
from spiritual kinship with India.” * Tradition states that Zoroaster was
thrice married, and had several sons and daughters, and that the three wives
survived him 7—Herodotus, we may recall, remarked polygamy among the
Persians and their pride in large families of sons. The marriage of very near
relations seems Magian rather than Zoroastrian, and does not survive among the
Parsis.
1 See J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 193,
and Essays and Studies presented to William Ridgeway, pp. 249-260.
2 Moulton, ibid. p. 160. 3 Moulton, ibid. p. 237.
4 Moulton, ibid. p. 391.
6 But
Darius (at Behistun) speaks of restoring places of worship which the Magians
had destroyed—i.e. altars on mountain heights (Justi, in Geiger und Kuhn, p.
427).
6 Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 146.
7 Williams Jackson, Zoroaster, p. 20; see also E.
G. Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia, p. 161, on the contrast here with Mani.
At the centre of Zoroaster’s religion stands the supremacy of
Ahuramazda—“ a great god is Ahuramazda, who hath created this earth, who hath
created that heaven, who hath created man, who created gladness of man ” ; so
runs the inscription of Darius,1 and the Avesta speaks in the same
style. " They count it unlawful,” says Herodotus,2 “ to set up
images and shrines and altars, and such as do they charge with folly, I think,
because they do not hold the gods to be in the image of man, as do the Greeks.
Their wont is to ascend to the tops of the mountains and do sacrifice to Zeus,
calling the whole circle of the sky Zeus. They sacrifice also to the sun and
the moon and earth and fire and water and winds. To these alone they sacrifice
from of old, but they have learnt also to sacrifice to Ourania, having learnt
it from the Assyrians and Arabs. The Assyrians call Aphrodite Mylitta, the
Arabs Alilat,3 and the Persians Mitra.* The sacrifice of the
Persians to the gods mentioned is this. They neither make altars nor light
fire, when they would sacrifice. They use no libation, nor flute, nor garlands,
nor meal;” and Herodotus goes on to describe the sacrifice of the ox, the
prayer " for good for all the Persians and for the King,” and the presence
of the Magian " chanting a theogony,” for “ without a Magian it is not
their custom to do sacrifice.”
Herodotus shows already the foreign influences at work— he remarks, a
little later, that of all men the Persians are most ready to accept foreign
customs. One gathers that, as China to-day has three religions of very
different origins more or less fused and supplementing one another, so the
Persian in time found little difficulty in accommodating the faith of Zoroaster
with the practices of the Magians and the unclean goddesses of the Semites.
Cyrus was perhaps not a Zoroastrian at all; his Elamite ancestors had probably
long worshipped
1 At Persepolis ; and similarly at Ganj Namah
near Hamadan (Williams Jackson, Persia, Past and Present, p. 172).
‘Herodotus,
i. 131 f.
’ The
Al-L&t of Muhammad’s heathen opponents.
4 That Mithras was not a feminine god
was long ago noted. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, pp. 238, 400, discusses the
blunder and its origin, connecting it with the pairing of Mithras and Anahita,
and calling it a " helpful mistake.”
Babylonian gods.1 Darius, however, is thought to have been
definitely and decisively Zoroastrian—“ a man for whom religion was obviously a
very real experience ” 2—he mentions no other gods beside Ahuramazda
in his inscriptions. In Egypt, as king he repaired certain temples, but the one
that he built at the oasis of Kharga he dedicated to Amen-Ra, the god of the
luckless monotheist Amen-hotep IV. A hymn of fifty lines, placed in the mouth
of the eight great primeval gods—and a very remarkable hymn—proclaims the
greatness of Amen-Ra ; ‘‘no god begot him, what god is like unto him ? ” It is
suggested that Darius found so many attributes shared by Amen-Ra and Ahuramazda
that he felt the hymn would honour both, if they were two and not one.® Xerxes,
and his queen Amestris, fell into ways abhorrent to Zoroaster,4
though he repeats in a formal inscription the phrases of his father about
Ahuramazda.® Artaxerxes II lapsed further and set up images of Anahita, and
used her name in his inscriptions—“ By the grace of Ahuramazda, Anahita, and Mithra,
I built this palace. May Ahuramazda, Anahita, and Mithra protect me ! ” 8
It is interesting to find that the greatest of the Achae-
menians—greatest in outlook, genius, and achievement—was so definitely
monotheistic, while his successors, sons of the harem in every sense, declined
to idolatry. What the common people and the nobles did, all the time, we can
only guess. It was in all probability from them that Herodotus gained his
knowledge, and if it is confused, here at least his informants were probably no
less confused.7 The last broken sentence of
1 On this point Professor E. G. Browne writes to
me : " I don’t think it has been satisfactorily proved that the
Achaemenians were Zoro- astrians. The fact that they called God Ahura Mazda
proves nothing; the pagan Arabs recognized Allah Ta'dld (God Most High), but
this did not make them Muhammadans.”
2 J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 44.
8 See E. A.
Wallis Budge, History of Egypt, vol. vii. pp. 66-69.
* J. H. Moulton, 'Early
Zoroastrianism,-pp. 57, 129; Herodotus, vii. x 14.
6 Curzon, Persia, ii. 156. See later, p.
228.
6 Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 77.
Berosus, ap. Clem. Alex. Protr. 5, 65, an interesting section on Persian
religion. The inscription is at Susa.
’ They
bore names, many of which pointed to the old gods (Meyer, Gesch. iii. § 78).
Thucydides tells how Tissaphemes went to Ephesus and sacrificed to
Artemis.
Of the influence of foreign nations on a people so brilliant and lively
of mind as the Persians we need little evidence. Herodotus attests it in their
practice, chiefly noting the evil they learnt from their neighbours.1
He also speaks of their adoption of the Median dress in peace and the Egyptian
corslet in war.2 Modem archaeologists remark the influence
successively of Assyria, Lycia, Egypt, and Greece in their art and architecture.3
The result was a hybrid style, which lasted till the Achaemenian dynasty fell
and then disappeared.
The founder of the Persian Empire was Cyrus. Xenophon emphasizes the
greatness of the man ; he details the races he ruled, peoples of many
languages, the vast expanse of his kingdom (so vast that it would tax a man’s
endurance merely to travel over it from the palace that was its centre), the
terror of Cyrus’ name that went with the charm of it, and the reliance on his
wisdom ; and he insists that such a man deserves study.4 He was the
founder ; and to the end part of the ritual of the Persian king’s installation
was the donning of the robe of Cyrus.5 The ruins of his city still
stand at Pasar- gadai—a city never finished.8 His tomb is there, a
rectangular roofed chamber of white stone, of extraordinary solidity, on a
square platform approached by steep and lofty steps.7 Alexander the
Great visited it and was angry that his generals should plunder it, and he
repaired the injuries they had done.8 Not very far away stands a
monument, a pillar, with a sculptured figure. The features show a man of
Iranian origin, with a face of a European type, the head bald or shaven on top,
the hair short and matted, and the beard slightly curled.
‘Herodotus,
i. 133.
* Herodotus, i. 135. For the Median
dress, cf. Xen. Cyrop. i. 3, 2 ; viii. 1, 40; 3, 1 ; 8, 8.
* Curzon, Persia, ii. pp. 189-193 ;
Babelon, Manual, pp. 148, 149, 150, 157.
* Xen. Cyrop. i. 1, 5. 6 Plut. Art ax. 3.
* Williams Jackson, Persia, ch. xix.
’ E. G.
Browne, Year, 241 ; Curzon, Persia, ii. 75 ff.; Babelon, Manual, p. 160. It is
called to-day “ the Mosque of the Mother of Solomon.” Justi (in Geiger und
Kuhn), p. 421, on its Asiatic-Greek style, as found in Lycia.
8 Arrian,
Anab. v. 29,4-11; Strabo, 730.
But the ornament is all foreign—over his head is a triple disk as over an
Egyptian god ; he has wings like the genii of Assyria or Chaldaea, with
well-marked feathers ; his robe has an Assyrian fringe ; in his hand is a
statuette in Egyptian style. A short Persian inscription states : “I am Cyrus
the King, the Achaemenian.” 1 • But for our purposes Darius is of
more importance. If Cyrus was the conqueror, it was Darius who organized the
Empire, who made it formidable and significant, and gave it such stability as
it kept for nearly two hundred years. It is agreed among students of antiquity
that his extraordinary enlightenment, his moderation, his practical wisdom, and
the width of his interests distinguish him among the conquerors and rulers of
the East. At Behistun, on the side of a rugged crag, “ of Gibraltar-like
impressiveness,” 2 at a height of three hundred feet above the
plain, there is still to be read the inscription, in which, in about four
hundred lines of old Persian in a beautiful cuneiform, Darius records how he
won his throne and recaptured his Empire, “ all by grace of Ahuramazda,” and he
mentions the provinces name by name.
“ Saith Darius the King: When Ahuramazda saw this earth . . . then did He
entrust it to me, He made me King, I am King, by the grace of Ahuramazda have I
set it in right order, what I commanded them that was carried out, as was my
will. If thou thinkest, ‘ How many were the lands which King Darius ruled ? ’
then behold this picture ; they bear my throne, thereby thou mayst know them.
Then shalt thou know that the spears of the men of Persia reach afar; then
shalt thou know that the Persian waged war far from Persia.
“ Saith Darius the King: What I have done, that did I all by the grace of
Ahuramazda : Ahuramazda vouchsafed me help till I completed the work. May
Ahuramazda protect me from . . . and my House and these lands! For this do I
pray Ahuramazda : may Ahuramazda vouchsafe me this!
1 Babelon, Manual, p. 160 ; A. V. Williams
Jackson, Persia, Past and Present, p. 281.
2 A. V. Williams Jackson, Persia, Past and
Present, pp. 177-187. Englishmen may feel a legitimate pride in the fact that
Sir Henry Rawlinson first gave this inscription to the world.
“ O man! This is Ahuramazda’s command to thee: Think no evil; abandon not
the right path ; sin not.” 1
Persepolis, forty miles south of Pasargadae and forty north of Shiraz, is
the new capital that Darius founded and Xerxes finished. Five miles away from
the Takht-i-Jamshid and its palaces, cut into the face of a long high bluff, is
the grave of Darius. The carving on the rock represents the fa9ade of an
Achaemenian palace. It is identified by two trilingual inscriptions of sixty
lines. Beside it in the cliff’s face are the graves of Xerxes and two others of
the Kings, and a little to one side below it is a later monument, well placed—a
finely-rendered bas-relief representing the surrender of the Roman Emperor
Valerian to Shapur, the Sasanian king, in a.d.
260, the proudest achievement of that dynasty.2
It remains for us to see what this king did—” Darius the great King, the King
of kings, King of lands peopled by all races, for long King of this great
earth, the son of Visht&sp, the Achaemenian, a Persian, son of a Persian,
an Aryan of Aryan descent.”
The problem before Darius was a difficult one. He had seen the Empire
fall to pieces in the troublous time of Gaumata the Magian who lied to the
people and said, “lam Bardiya the son of Cyrus.” Darius had overthrown the
usurper and he had reconquered the lost provinces ; but was it possible to keep
them, to knit them together, and to secure his House against the disruption of
the Empire whenever a new King ascended the throne—the common fate of Oriental
monarchies ? The Empire reached far, and it included civilized nations like the
Egyptians and the Asiatic Greeks and savages like the Mossynoeci; it even
touched India. Customs, languages, religions, governments of every kind it
comprised—a bewildering and confused congeries of all sorts of races in every
stage of culture.3 What could be done to unite it ? Its variety was,
it is true, in one way a source of strength to the Persian
1 E. G.
Browne, Lit. Hist, of Persia, p. 94.
* A. V. Williams Jackson, Persia, 296-305
; Curzon, Persia, ii. 120; E. G. Browne, Lit. Hist. Persia, p. 151.
s Asia
Minor seems even then to have been what it is to-day—the home of races, broken
to fragments, and the fragments mixed, the races too distinct and too involved
either to coalesce or to separate.
rulers, for peoples so alien to each other might he trusted never to make
common cause against the throne with any real prospect of success ; the
distances were too great,1 and the differences too vital.2
But there was weakness in the variety, for the Persian nation stood alone among
its subjects, and however well it governed, it remained a foreign power to
which there could be no loyalty. Egypt, for instance, was well governed under
Darius; it had peace, and with peace, as always in Egypt, when taxation is not
ruinous, prosperity; but Egypt never liked the Persian. The Egyptian did not
want good government by the foreigner; and the repeated rebellions of Egypt go
far to explain the ineffectiveness and the decline of -Persian power.
The great work of Darius was organization.3 The Empire was
divided into satrapies, the number of which varied from time to time. Over each
was a satrap, who with certain limitations had a place and a task like that of
the King himself. Generally at first, and later on almost without exception,
the satraps were Persians, and frequently men of families connected with the
King’s own.4 Among the duties of the satrap, the levying of tribute
and the forwarding of it to the King came first. Under Cyrus and Cambyses there
had been no regular tribute ; now it was organized on a definite basis and the satrap
was responsible.6 Administration and justice were in the hands of
the satrap, and by his side stood two independent officers of the crown, a
royal secretary and a military commander; under him there sometimes were
subordinate governors (iW/s^ot).6 At least, it was so
1 Cf. Xen. Anab. i. 5, 9.
* Meyer, Gesch. iii. 5 56, notes also
that Assyrian conquerors and invading tribes (Cimmerians and Scythians, cf.
Herodotus, i. 6,15,105 ; Strabo, 627) by wearing down the nations had made the
Persian’s task easier.
8 Grundy,
Great Persian War, p. 41.
* See notes of How and Wells on
Herodotus, iii. 89 f. Satraps and satrapies existed before Darius.
■ Note the
demand of Darius II for the arrears of tribute of the Ionian cities as soon as
the Athenian disaster at Syracuse was known. The demand was sent to the
satraps.
* The word satrap (khshatrapivan) made
its way slowly in Greek literature. Herodotus says vnapxos; the satrapy he
calls vo/iis, only twice using aarpanrjirj, and then explaining it by ipxy.
Aeschylus has neither term; Thucydides traTpaireia, but not o-aTpdnrjs. Xeno-
in theory ; for in practice in a great empire with no telegraphs many
things are done and have to be done which do not square with theory. It was
designed that satrap and secretary and military commander should be independent
of one another, even a little hostile to one another, and all in consequence
more loyal to the Great King and more dependent on him.1 A similar
plan was adopted by Louis XIV in Canada, where governor, bishop, and intendant
divided responsibility and reported upon one another to the King. But
practically everything that a satrap was supposed not to do, satraps sooner or
later did. Of course it may be that the Greeks over-systematized the
arrangements of which they learned.2 Satraps did command armies, for
they were charged to suppress rebellions, and now and then had to deal with
rebels without waiting for orders, and they had at times the responsibility of
making war on their own account with neighbouring tribes or states.3
They also coined money, which was normally a royal prerogative ; but when a
satrap was in charge of an army on military service, he coined the money to pay
it, and the coinages of some of them are well known—e.g. Tissaphemes,
Phamabazos, and Datames.4 Whether strict or easy, the general scheme
was for a long while effective—as effective as most plans of government ; for
the management of the great expeditions against Greece in the reigns of Darius
and Xerxes implies energy and skill
phon is
the first to use a-arpdjtijs (as he was to use 7-ayos in prose), and he
distinguishes xmapxos as an official of lower rank (cf. Anab. iii. 5, 17, and
iv. 4, 4). The Greeks were not all sure of the spelling of the
word—egaidpdirris and i^aiBpantiiav are variants. See Hicks and Hill, Greek
Inscr., No. 133.
1 Grundy, Persian War, 41.
2 Xenophon, for instance; see Cyrop. viii. 6,
1-4; Econ. 4, 9. The same is said of Herodotus. Foreigners generalize and
systematize what they hear, for they are very rarely in possession of the exceptions
that natives know. Tourist knowledge of the colonies illustrates what I mean.
8 Cf.
expedition against Naxos, Herodotus, v. 32 ; and Herodotus, v. 96, Artaphrenes
and Athens.
4 See Babelon, Les Perses Achemenides,
p. xxi f. We often hear of the King supplying the money for a war ; some wars,
however, must have been financed by the satraps at their own cost or at the
cost of the satrapies.
14
and organization. The expeditions, it is true, failed, but storms at sea
and the personal folly of Xerxes explain a great deal. Yet immense armies were
mobilized, and transported, and fed,1 and brought into action, vast
distances away from their homelands; and great fleets held the sea and
co-operated with the armies. Even in the decline of Persia, when the driving
power is supplied, as by Pharnabazos and Conon, the machinery is all there, and
a great fleet can take the sea and win a triumphant and decisive victory.
So far as we know, the satraps were paid no regular stipend, but it is
possible and likely that in organizing the tribute and its collection they
charged their upkeep upon their satrapies. Eastern and western governors have
grown rich without salaries in every age. Some satrapies seem to have been
practically hereditary. Of these the most interesting is that of Daskyleion on
the Propontis. Here, as a reward for his services to Xerxes in the great
campaign that was wrecked at Salamis, Artabazos the son of Phamaces was
established ;2 and he was succeeded by his son and grandson,
Pharnabazos and Pharnaces.3 Of these two men we know little, but we
may owe them a good deal more than we suspect; for it generally held that the
family of Daskyleion were among the Persian friends of Herodotus, who was
certainly remarkably well informed about their founder. Pharnaces was
succeeded by his son Pharnabazos, who plays a large part in Greek history — an
attractive figure in the pages of Thucydides and especially of Xenophon.
Xenophon yields to natural affinity and delays his narrative to speak of the
beauties of the satrap’s estate, his hunting-grounds and his paradises, the
river, the birds, the villages, the abundance;4 and then he tells in
his vivid and pleasant way of the discussion between the great Persian noble
and the Spartan king—how Pharnabazos reminded him what a friend he had been to
Sparta through the last years of the Peloponnesian
1 We have
certain slight hints of commissariat plans—e.g. Herodotus,
vii. 23, 25 ; Xen. A nab. i. 5, 6, the “ Lydian
market ” with Cyrus’ troops ; cf. Cyrop. vi. 2, 38, 39.
“Thuc. i.
129.
3 Thuc. ii. 67; v. 1; satrap, 430-414 B.C. He
befriended the Delians expelled from their island by the Athenians.
4 Xen. Hellenica, iv. 1, 15 ff.
War, and how he had built them fleets; and now they have ravaged his
country, “ and the beautiful buildings and the paradises full of trees and wild
animals that my father left me, which I enjoyed so much, all these I see cut
down and burnt down.” Agesilaos pled war, and with necessity (the tyrant’s
plea) excused his devilish deeds; but why, he suggested, should not Phamabazos
revolt from the King ? Phamabazos replies that he would, if the King made him
subject to another ; but if not, " know assuredly, I will fight against
you to the best of my power.” So king and satrap shake hands and part friends.
With such a tenure, and with troops of their own, particularly cavalry,
it was hard for the King himself to be rid of his satraps; and Herodotus tells
a story which illustrates how carefully the operation had to be undertaken,
even by so strong a King as Darius.1 But satraps were not left quite
to themselves. There were " King’s Eyes ” and " King’s Ears,” whose
functions are suggested by their names, and who were constantly keeping the
King in touch with what went on in his Empire.2 Whether he used this
information depended on himself, and, in some reigns, on the harem.
Aristophanes, in his Acharnians, represents a certain Shamartabas, the “ King’s
Eye,” as coming on an embassy to Athens ; Dikaiopolis wishes the crow would
pick out the " King’s Eye,” and in the end it turns out that Shamartabas
is as sham as his name. The title of the office evidently interested the
Greeks, but it is not clear that such an official would be sent on an embassy,
nor whether the King had more than one " Eye ” at a time.3 That
the King and his " Eye ” between them insisted on honest justice so far as
they could, is to be seen in the story of the judge whom Cambyses deposed, and
whose skin covered the cushion on which his son and successor sat to administer
the law.4 The
1
Herodotus, iii. 126-128 ; Oroites tlie satrap had a bodyguard of 1000 Persians.
8 Xen.
Cyrop. viii. 2, 10; 6, 16. How and Wells on Herodotus, i. 114, suggest that
these officers did not travel as much as the Greeks thought. Grundy, Persian
War, p. 43, accepts Xenophon’s statement.
3 The “ King’s Eye ” ; cf. Herodotus, i. 114 ;
iii. 126 ; Plut. A rtax.
12 ; Aristophanes, A ch. 92 ; and the
earliest reference (Aesch. Pers. 980) seems to imply a single “ Eye ” in
attendance on the King.
‘Herodotus,
v. 25.
Empire was after all a despotism, and, as the Royal Judges told Cambyses,
there was a law that the King could do what he pleased ;1 and he
did. The King’s vengeance on traitors, real or imaginary, could be terrible,
from the days of Darius to the end.2 To secure the King the quickest
news and the swiftest execution of his orders, the Persian posts were devised—
the quickest thing on earth, Herodotus says, and adds a qualification, “ of
mortal things.” So also says Xenophon without the qualification. Marco Polo
speaks in the same way of posts in the Chinese Empire at the time of his
residence there (about 1292).®
One feature of Oriental government has always been the steady
accumulation of treasure by the ruler, and the Persian Kings were no exception.
“ The Persian,” says Xenophon, “ considered that, if he had endless money, he
would have everything under his hand ; so all the gold there was among men, all
the silver, all the most precious things, he tried to gather for himself.” 4
Herodotus describes how all the tribute, which he computes to have amounted to
14,560 talents a year in the days of Darius, was melted down and kept in the
form of ingots.5 The expenses of the Court must have been large,
1
Herodotus, iii. 31. 1
Cf. Herodotus, iii. 119.
3 Herodotus, viii. 98 ; Xen. Cyrop. viii. 6, 17,
18. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, vol. iii. p. 98: Polo says the Chinese
post would cover 250 miles in a day and nearly as much in a night. From the
reminiscences of an old friend, writing of Bristol about 1823, I take a
sentence or two which may be of interest by way of illustration. “ About this
period coach travelling had been brought to perfection. The fast coaches
averaged ten miles an hour, exclusive of stoppages. It required, at least, 120
horses to work such a coach between Bristol and London . . . kept in first-rate
condition, with an unlimited supply of food—for the proprietors were well aware
how much dearer horses were than hay and corn. . . . Though the horses were
changed some thirteen or fourteen times, not more than half an hour was lost in
these frequent stoppages. I have seen one team taken out and another put to, in
less than a minute. The horses had seldom more than six hours’ work in a week ;
but at the pace they were driven, it was like fighting, and they required
prolonged rest to recover from the excessive strain.” He contrasts an
advertisement of a London and Bristol coach of the eighteenth century—“ the
proprietors solemnly pledge themselves, with the blessing of Almighty God, to perform
the journey in the short space of three days ” (F. Trestrail, College Life in
Bristol, p. 111).
4 Xen. Ages. 8,6. 6
Herodotus, iii. 95 ; perhaps he quotes the total.
and the Persian King no doubt found that what the Spartan king says in
Thucydides is true—as others have found since to their cost and their
children’s after them—that war is a matter of finance as much as of arms.1
Lysander took back to Sparta after the Peloponnesian War the sum of 470
talents, which Xenophon describes as the balance left of the tributes turned
over to him by Cyrus.2 Isocrates says the Persian King Darius II had
contributed 5000 talents to Sparta in all.3 He also says that the
war against Evagoras cost Artaxerxes II more than 15,000 talents,4
which it well may have, as we gather in fact from other sources that the
government of Artaxerxes had a certain genius for waste and inefficiency.8
None the less the hoarding went on, and when Alexander took Susa, he captured
there 50,000 talents, and another hoard at Persepolis.6 It was not
altogether an idle brag of Aristagoras that, if Cleo- menestook Susa,he might
challenge Zeus on the scoreof wealth.7 George Finlay computed the
treasure suddenly thrown into general circulation by Alexander’s conquest at
between seventy and eighty millions sterling.® The profound changes it must
have made in the Greek world, in all international relations and in morals, in
everything down to the cost of the simplest articles in the market of a country
town, it is hard to grasp ; and no doubt a great deal of the treasure had never
come West at all. Then the stream turned, and for centuries gold flowed
eastward again, and one of the difficulties of ^the Roman Empire was the
scarcity of the precious metals.
Side by side with the satrapies, or in some cases within them, there
survived many traces of older orders which Darius maintained and utilized.
Existing communities were in many cases preserved, and often they were allowed
to govern themselves as they preferred, though their liberties were precarious and
their cities unwalled. The reversal of the policy of setting up tyrants over
the Asiatic Greeks is a case in point; Mardonius put an end to the tyrants and
substituted democracies.9 Per
1 Thuc. i. 83, 2. 2
Hellenica, ii. 3, 8-9.
8 Isocrates, de Pace, 97. * Isocrates, Evag. 60.
6 e.g. Isocrates, Paneg. 142 ; and Diod.
Sic. xv. 41.
• Arrian, Anab. iii. 16, 7 ; Strabo, 727-730.
7 Herodotus, v. 49, 7. 8 Finlay,
Greece under the Romans, ch. i. p. 12.
• Herodotus, vi. 43.
haps it was not really so strong an indication of the prevalence of
democratic ideas among the Persians as Herodotus supposed, but it showed at
least a sense and a liberality that the imperial states of Greece did not
reach. In Egypt it was the other way. “ If Psammenitos could have been trusted
not to make trouble, he would have received Egypt again to govern it; for the
Persians are wont to honour the sons of kings ; and even if the kings revolt
they none the less give back the government to their sons,” says Herodotus,1
and he instances the sons of Inaros and Amyrtaios, though no men ever did the
Persians more mischief than these two. The Babylonians seem to have had the
same usage, to judge from Nebuchadnezzar’s treatment of the kingdom of Judah.
Xerxes took with him on his expedition against Greece quite a number of subject
or vassal princes2— the kings or tyrants (the latter name is rather
loosely used) of Tyre and Sidon, of Cilicia and Lycia,3 several from
Cyprus and Caria, and pre-eminent among the last Queen Artemisia. Xenophon
explains that Cyrus “ sent no Persians to be satraps of Cilicia and Cyprus and
the Paphlagonians, because it appeared they campaigned with him of their own
free will against Babylon ; but he appointed that these also should pay
tribute.” 4 Isdcrates, not quite accurately, says no Persian was
ever master of Lycia.6
It is difficult, sometimes very difficult, for a modern student to be
quite sure exactly how dependent or independent these tributary kings and
princes were from time to time ; perhaps it was no easier for themselves to be
sure. A good deal depended on geography—how accessible the kingdoms were to
fleets or armies, and how far available for the operations of cavalry ; a good
deal on what we call personal equations—the characters of the prince or princess
concerned, of his or her brothers and other relatives,6 of the
neighbouring satrap, of the
1
Herodotus, iii. 15.
1 Ci.
Herodotus, vii. 98, 195 ; and also v. 104 ; viii. 11.
8 A
brilliant emendation by E. Meyer may claim a note. The text reads Avkios Kvfiepvia-Kos 'SUa. But Kvftepvis
is a Lycian name attested by an inscription, and Koa-a-Uas answers to the
Lycian Cheziga. So Meyer divides the words accordingly. “ This is the state of
Keasars and of Kings ! ”
4 Xen. Cyrop. viii. 6, 8 ; and vii. 4,
2. 6 Isocrates, Paneg. 161.
" Cf. Strabo, c. 656, Pixodaros and Ada.
reigning Great King. But it is easy to see that if a native king could be
trusted at all, he might be a miich more congenial ruler for his subjects than
a Persian satrap would be ; and it is just possible that the consciousness of a
higher power beyond might be a check upon oppression, as is the case in India
to-day, though no instance seems to be recorded of the deposition of a king by
the Persians on any such ground. In any case, some of the countries or regions
mentioned had native dynasties throughout. In Cilicia, for instance, native
kings are known to have reigned from before the Persian conquest down to the
fall of the Empire.1 Seven of them are known to us by name, perhaps
eight, the most famous being the third Syennesis, who fell gloriously at
Salamis, and the fourth Syennesis, who with the aid of his wife and son trimmed
very dexterously between Cyrus and Artaxerxes. Artemisia of Caria and
Halicarnassus we have met before. Whether the later Artemisia who built the
Mausoleum to commemorate her husband, and the Ada who adopted Alexander the
Great as her son,8 are of the same family as the great queen whom
Xerxes so much admired, I do not know.
Beside the satraps and the native princes, there were here and there
throughout the Empire noble families established upon estates given them by the
Kings. Cyrus, Xenophon tells us, devised the plan, and “ to this day in one
land and another the descendants of those who then received them enjoy the property,
though they live themselves at the King’s court.” 3 Sometimes a city
with its tribute was assigned to a man and his descendants, or a group of
villages to a queen.4 The most interesting grants of this kind, of
which we have records, were those made to Greek refugees or exiles. In 491 B.C.
the Spartans deposed their King Demaratos, and he took refuge with King Darius,
who “ received him with great honour and gave him land and cities.” 6
Xerxes took him with him on the march to Greece, and Herodotus tells of the
acute advice which the exile gave the King from time to
1 See list
in Babelon, Les Perses AcMmenides, p. xxiv ; Syennesis III in Aesch. Pers. 327,
and Herodotus, vii. 98 ; Syennesis IV, Xen. Anab. i. 2, and Diod. Sic. xiv. 20.
a Arrian,
Anab. i. 23, 7-8 ; Strabo, c. 656.
* Cyrop. viii. 6, S- 4 Xen.
Anab. ii. 4, 27. 6 Herodotus, vi. 70.
time, and how the King himself defended him from Persian criticism.1
No doubt, if the expedition had succeeded, De- maratos would have been vassal
king of Sparta. Eighty years later the descendants of Demaratos meet us,
bearing the famous old Spartan names of Eurysthenes and Procles, and still
lords of Pergamon, Teuthrania, and Halisarna. Procles " went up ” with
Cyrus, and ranked among his Persian commanders. When the Ten Thousand started
on their weary journey over the mountains, Procles managed to get back to his
principality an easier way—and perhaps made his peace, as others did, with
Artaxerxes. He was able to befriend Xenophon and the mercenaries on their reappearance
in his country, and lent aid to the Spartan commander Thibron against
Tissaphemes—which, as we shall see, in a loose-hung empire was not fighting
against his sovereign.2 Here again, as in the Daskyleion family, the
fullness and interest of Herodotus’ information implies some friendship between
the historian and the intervening generation or generations of the exiled
king’s house. Xenophon was clearly interested in Procles, who saved his life
and entertained him. In the same region and at the same time Xenophon had the
friendliest relations with another Greek family of well-established exiles—the
descendants of Gongylos of Eretria, a less honourable ancestor than Demaratos.3
It is perhaps worthy of remark that the towns of Gongylos and his family were
included in the Athenian Empire in its great days, and, when it fell, reverted
to the exiles, as the Ionian cities did to the satrap. Whether the Gongylids
required the tribute they had lost during Athenian supremacy to be made good,
there is no guessing. The most curious instance of a grant of revenue of this
kind was that made to Themistocles in exile, for Plutarch had among his fellow-
students at Athens another Themistocles, a descendant of the great one, who was
still after five hundred years in the enjoyment of the honours granted to his
ancestor at Magnesia.4
1
Herodotus, vii. 3, 101, 209, 235, 237 ; also viii. 65.
s Procles:
Xen. A nab. ii. 1, 3; ii. 2, 1 ; vii. 8,17; Hellenica, iii. 1, 6.
3 Anab. vii. 8 ; Hellenica, iii. 1,6; they held
Myrina, Gryneion, and one or two more towns.
1 Plut. Them. 32 ; cf. Thuc. i. 138, 5. Probably
the later Themistocles drew less than the fifty talents a year that the
earlier one had from Magnesia.
The Persian Empire was not pre-eminently a military monarchy, though
conquest was its base, and too often reconquest was required of it. Its actual
military forces were not for the size of the realm large. The vast masses of
men, marched against Greece by Xerxes, were composed of national levies raised
for the purpose, with every variety of arm and accoutrement, as Herodotus
describes them.1 The real core of all was the Persian army,2
composed chiefly of archers and cavalry. The dress and weapons of the Persian
archer are described by Herodotus, and what he says is confirmed by Persian
monuments, notably by the Dieulafoy archer-frieze at Susa.3 The
tiara, or soft cap, the embroidered shirts with sleeves, the
trousers—especially the trousers—are again and again noticed. The archer
carried a light wooden or wicker shield (yeppov), a short spear,4 a
stout bow, some thirty arrows in his quiver, and a short knife or dagger in his
girdle on the right side. He wore no armour. For his long marches and his
archery armour would have been useless. There were, however, men in armour in
Xerxes’ troops,® and Xenophon speaks of armoured horses 6—the
familiar caiaphracts of the wars of Roman and Sasanian. Herodotus represents
Arista- goras as speaking with confidence at Sparta and again at Athens of the
ease with which the light-armed troops of the Persian King could be defeated.7
He may have spoken so, and later days realized that in hand-to-hand fighting
the Persian archer, for all his spirit and courage, was no match for the man in
armour ; * but the Greeks generally were afraid of the Persian army till after
Plataea. At Plataea the value of the Persian cavalry was felt,9 as
it was later on in the retreat of the Ten Thousand10 and in the
campaign of Agesilaos.11
1
Herodotus, vii. 61-80.
a
Herodotus, ix. 68, iravra ra 7rpijy^iara r£>v fiapfiapav vpTTjro ek
Heptreav.
8 See
article on Persian Arms by A. V. Williams Jackson in Studies in Honour of Henry
Drisler.
4 Rawlinson, Anc. Mon.1,
iii. p. 175, says about 6 or 7 ft. long. The Macedonian sarissa was 20 ft.
long.
5 Herodotus, viii. 113 ; ix. 22. * Cyrop. vi. 4, 1.
7 Herodotus,
v. 49, 97. 8 Herodotus, ix. 63.
• Herodotus, ix. 49, etc.
10 Anab. ii. 2, 7 ; 4, 6 ; 6, 5 ; iii. 1,
18 ; 3, 19-20; 4, 24.
11 Hellenica, iii. 4, 13-15 ; iv. 1, 3.
The two peoples took war in different ways. Mardonius, in the pages of
Herodotus,—and probably other Persians in talk with the historian,—pointed out
the folly of Greek warfare :1 " they find out the fairest and
most level place and then go down into it and fight; so that the conquerors
come off with great disaster—and I need not speak of the beaten party; they
perish.” They ought either to settle their disputes by negotiation, or do
anything else rather than fight, but if they must fight “ then find out where
each is hardest to beat and try there.” This was the Greek tradition, which had
grown up in the wars of neighbouring cities, when the point of attack was
always the cultivated land, “ the fairest and most level,” with its olives and
its grain. In the Peloponnesian War and later the Greeks learnt the use of
light-armed. Cavalry of any great value they never had. The wars of Western
Asia —Cilicia and Armenia and such regions excepted—were fought on great
plains, where mobility counted, and the horseman and the archer were
indispensable. As a result war on land between Greek and Persian could hardly
be effective, without bad blunders on one side or the other. The Anabasis shows
this plainly. Nothing on the Persian side can match the Greek hoplites ;
wherever hoplites can march in square formation, the Ten Thousand can safely
go. But where cavalry are concerned, the Ten Thousand are helpless, and take to
the mountains with relief ; and there they fall among light-armed enemies,
fight their way through with loss, and leave the mountains with relief as genuine.
It was not till Alexander combined hoplite, light-armed, and cavalry that
Persia really broke down ; and even then it is said that he owed his victories
to the bad tactics of Darius. Proof of this is found in the Parthian victory of
Carrhae, but there the major faults were on the Roman side. In the expedition
of Xerxes the strength of Persia lay in the co-operation of army and fleet—an
idea which the Spartans and other Peloponnesians refused to take in. It was
Themistocles who recognized it, and to him above all the Greeks owed their
victory and their national existence.
One feature of Persian war must not be quite overlooked. The employment
of the camel in war strikes the Western oddly, but it won Cyrus his battle
against Croesus at Pterie,
1 Herodotus, vii. 9, 2/3. Cf. Polybius, xiii. 3.
for “ the horse is afraid of the camel and cannot bear either to see its
shape or to smell it.” So said Herodotus.1 " Twice to-day,”
writes Mr. Hogarth,2 "we have had to draw aside on the mountain
paths to let long strings of swaying bearded camels jingle past. Strange how
the horses hate these familiar acquaintances.” I am told the same thing by a
traveller in China ; there separate inns exist for those who bring the one
animal or the other. The camels carried mounted archers.3 Xerxes had
camels in the army he led against Greece—the first ever seen in Europe, and the
lions attacked them in Thrace.4 Agesilaos captured camels, after his
cavalry battle near Sardis in 395, and marched them back to Greece.5
One would hardly have suspected the Spartan king of so amiable a trait as this
interest in strange animals. " No gentleman (/caXo? Kwya0o<;),” says
Xenophon, “ would wish to breed camels to ride them, nor to practise to fight
on camel-back” 9— an interesting touch of Western conventionalism.
The standing army of Persia seems never to have been very large at any
one time or place. When a large army was required, it took time to organize and
concentrate. In general, however, the Persian meant to have a peaceful Empire,
and never too large a force under one satrap. Persia like Rome understood this.
Garrisons were kept in important citadels and fortresses all over the Empire,
as in Sardis and Babylon, and several Egyptian centres.7 When it was
a matter of building or mobilizing a fleet, Persia seems to have had great luck
or great skill in managing it with a minimum of warning, but possibly her
enemies knew more than historians have told us.8
Darius stands out among Oriental rulers for his sympathetic grasp of the
significance of peaceful trade in the development of a country or an empire. He
fought and crushed
1 Herodotus, i. 80 ; cf. vii. 87 ; cf. Xen.
Cyrop. vii. 1, 27, 48, 49.
2 A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, p. 46.
8 Xen.
Cyrop. vi. 2, 8.
4 Herodotus, vii. 86, 126 ; cf.
Aristophanes, Birds, 276.
6 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 4, 24. * Xen. Cyrop. vii. 1, 49.
7 Cf. Xen. Cyrop. viii. 6, 3 ; Oecon. 4, 6.
8 Cf. Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 1, the
arrival of the news of the Persian fleet building in 396. No doubt the
Athenians knew about it already, as Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 1, seems to imply.
the rebels within and the disturbing tribes without, and he secured that
the satraps should be strong enough to administer justice and maintain order,
but not so strong as to be able to rebel. Trade began, with peace, to follow
its natural connexions. In Asia Minor, for instance, the trade routes come
down the three river valleys, through the mountain ranges that cut off the
Aegaean shore and its cities on bays and headlands from the Asian hinterland.1
When Greece and Persia were at war these routes would be little travelled; the
ports without the trade that had made them could not thrive,2 and
the cities declined in importance, as is shown by the relatively small tribute
they paid to Athens as compared with towns in Thrace. No doubt, when Pericles
made his pacification with Persia in 449, he had trade in view.3
After the Peace of Antalkidas—betrayal of Greece, as the historians called it
and as it really was 4—prosperity came to the seaboard towns— to
Ephesus, for instance, and Halicarnassus. Greek influence spread in Asia Minor;
merchants, adventurers, and artists6 passed hither and thither, and
above all mercenary soldiers.6 This intercourse sent gold to Greece,
and its value relative to silver dropped from thirteen to one down to twelve to
one.7
One of the curses of trade in the early Mediterranean world was
brigandage, and the Persian dealt with it sternly. Of Cyrus the Younger as
satrap, Xenophon tells us that no one
1 See D. G. Hogarth, Ionia and the East, pp. 64,
65, on the routes, and p. 48, on the strength of the continental power behind
the mountains. The shore cities cannot be independent or European, unless the
Aegean is held by a strong maritime power.
2 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealtha, p.
368.
* Cf. Thuc. ii. 69, Athenian Skuahes from
Asia and Phoenicia, and viii. 35, from Egypt; and the Oligarch's Ath. Rep. 2,
7, trade in Cyprus, Egypt, and Lydia.
* Cf. Polybius, vi. 49, 5 ;
Plut. Artax. 21.
6 Their work survives in the
monuments—e.g. Scopas, Leochares, Timotheos, and Bryaxis were engaged on the
Mausoleum; see Ernest Gardner, Handbook of Greek Sculptyre, pp. 376, 393.
* On this increasing intercourse, and its
significance in preparing the way for the Hellenistic kingdoms, Judeich, Kleinas.
Stud. pp. 5-7, 15-17.
7 Cf. Beloch, Gr.
Gesch. ii. pp. 342-343 ; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v.
could say that he allowed evil-doers to laugh at him, but he punished
them most unsparingly; one could often see along the trodden highways men
deprived of feet and hands and eyes ; so that in Cyrus’ province it was
possible for Greek or barbarian, if he did no wrong, to go where he would and
take with him what might profit him.1 Mr. Williams Jackson tells us
how he came on something of the same kind—the ferocious punishment of some
criminal—and it was for the same crime, robbery on the high road. Iran hamin
ast, he was told; " Persia is always the same.” 2
Really good roads are apparently a Roman invention, but the great trunk
roads of the Persian Empire, over which the King’s posts travelled faster than
anything else that was mortal, must have been kept in decent repair. This also
contributed to the freedom and activity of commerce.3
Another of Darius’ great contributions to commerce was the canal from the
Nile to the Red Sea. Sethos I (between 1326 and 1300 B.C.) was the first to dig
it, but it silted up. Necho (about 612 B.C.) began to repair it, but gave it up
after it had cost 120,000 lives,4 for an oracle said he was making
it for barbarians. Darius dug it again.5 Archaeologists have
discovered the traces of it and five monuments of Darius along its course. It
was fifty yards wide and sixteen to seventeen feet deep. The monuments had each
of them inscriptions in Persian, Median, and Assyrian on the one side, and in
Egyptian on the other :—“ Darius the King saith : ' I am a Persian ; a Persian
I govern Egypt. I commanded to cut this canal from the Nile, which is the name
of the river that runs in Egypt down to the sea that is connected with Persia.
Then the canal was cut here. I commanded this canal to be made, and said, Go
from . . . this canal down to the shore of the sea . . . Such is my will.’ ”
Darius also, it would appear, ordered the
1 Xen. Anab. i. 9, 13.
2 A. V. Williams
Jackson, Persia, Past and Present, pp. 272-273. Cf. also the story of the 4000
mutilated Greek captives who met Alexander at Persepolis (Curtius, v. 5, 6).
3 Herodotus’ description of the Royal Road, v.
52-54.
1 Very likely an exaggeration.
6 See
Herodotus, ii. 158 ; and the notes of How and Wells ; Budge, Hist, of Egypt,
vol. vi. 220; Flinders Petrie, Hist, of Egypt, vol. iii. 366 ; Authority and
Archesology, p. 84.
restoration of the schools;1 and in one way and another Egypt
flourished under his rule.
Geographical exploration seems to have been one of Darius’ interests as
it was one of Alexander’s, and we have records of a number of voyages and
expeditions made under his auspices. No one quite knows the object of his own
Scythian expedition ; the gold mines, which one scholar supposes the King
sought, are rather remote. Herodotus says that many parts of Asia were
discovered by Darius and that he was responsible for the exploring voyage made
by Skylax of Caryanda down the Indus about the year 509. Skylax, it may be
noted, was a near neighbour of Herodotus.2 It is likely that
Herodotus owed his knowledge of India, limited as it is, to this and other explorations
made for the Persian. In Central Asia, too, Darius was in touch with the
Scythians. Xerxes, we are told, sent a man to circumnavigate Africa, who sailed
some way down the Atlantic coast, but preferred to come home and be put to
death 3—not for his failure but for a crime previously committed,
which a successful voyage was to have expiated.
' Another wise measure of Darius was the issue of a coinage of a standard
weight and a very high purity. Herodotus says that the King refined his gold to
the utmost point possible, and modern chemical analysis shows that the darics
are of a gold with only 3 per cent of natural alloy.4 The weight of
the daric was normally 8 grammes 42—a weight, one might say, traditional, for
it was the Euboic standard, and that in its turn came from Babylon by way of
Phocaea. It had the advantage too of being the equivalent of 20 drachmas.5
The King then takes as his base the most widely accepted standard in the world,
and mints coins of pure gold. The design became
1 Inscription of Uzahor-ent-res ; cf. How and
Wells on Herodotus, vii. 7. '
2 Herodotus, iv. 44 ; Strabo, c. 100. If
Alexander had read or remembered this chapter, he would not have thought of
identifying the Nile and the Indus, on the score of the crocodiles. His actual
voyage down the Indus corrected the mistake (Arrian, vi. 1).
* Herodotus, iv. 43, voyage of Sataspes.
* Babelon, Les Perses Achemenides, pp.
iv-viii, on Persian darics; G. F. Hill, Handbook of Greek and Latin Coins, pp.
13, 30.
6 Xen.
Anab. i. 7, 18: Cyrus promises a soothsayer 10 talents (=60,000 drachmas) and
pays him 3000 darics.
familiar to all mankind—the Persian King with his cidaris erect on his
head, kneeling and holding a bow. This remained practically unchanged from
Darius I to Darius .III. Everybody knew it and it was current everywhere—as
the Attic drachma was and for the same reasons, the familiar look, the known
weight, and the pure metal.1 When Agesilaos said he had been driven
out of Asia by 30,000 archers, he did not need to explain his joke.2
We may perhaps add that Persian scholars hold that Darius reformed the
calendar in a Zoroastrian direction, and established the solar year, with
twelve months of thirty days, and five extra days, called the gathas. In this
connexion it is worth while to remember that a similar scientific reform of the
year was one of Julius Caesar’s first acts as dictator, and to contrast the
difficulties involved by the short Muhammadan year of lunar months without
intercalation.3
In all, it may be said, the contributions of Darius to trade and commerce
are very striking. He understood and he acted. It may be urged that the
hoarding of gold by the King withdrew it from circulation, and so far told
against trade, but this does not outweigh the substantial benefits he conferred
on all the trading communities of the eastern Mediterranean.
One indication of the success of his work is the appearance
1 Cf. nopot, 3, 2. 2 Plut. Artax. 20.
* See J. H. Moulton, Early
Zoroastrianism, p. 48 ; and E. G. Browne, Lit. Hist, of Persia, p. 100. The
Zoroastrian year is remarkable in ignoring the week. The twelve months are
named after the twelve archangels, while the same twelve archangels plus
eighteen other angels give each his name to one of the thirty days of the
month. Muhammad found among the Arabs a system of intercalation which (as in
Rome) was abused for the ends of faction. He forbade all intercalations in
consequence. As the Moslem year (354 days) is less than a true solar year,
Ramadan retrogrades through all the seasons in a period of about 33J years, to
the great discomfort of those who have to fast through long summer days. All
chronology is complicated in the most dreadful way by this use of a year which
is not a year. See Lane, Modem Egyptians, ch. ix. The Babis revived the solar
year in the form of 19 months of 19 days (=361 days) plus 5 days (or as many as
were required). Nineteen is the numerical value of Wahid (the symbol One used
for God), and 5 of Bab. The Bab aimed at basing all possible numeration on 19.
Cf. Chapter I. p. 30.
of a class of people, whom the Greeks called “ two-tongued ”1
—interpreters and the like—perhaps predominantly Asiatic, for the Greek was
rather noticeably a bad linguist. Herodotus spoke no Egyptian and no Persian,
and Plutarch could make a schoolboy blunder with a Latin preposition (sine
fiatris). It has indeed been suggested that in Aristophanes’ day " Persian
was as familiar to the Athenians as French was to Englishmen in the time of
Queen Elizabeth,” but the statement seems overbold.2 Negotiations,
such as that of Callias at Susa in 449, imply interpreters, and Athens had in
424 men capable of " rewriting a dispatch out of the Assyrian letters ”
and understanding it.3 The most curious instance known to me of the
bilingual is Pharnuches, a Lycian in Alexander’s army, who could speak the
language of the Asiatic Scythians and was very expert at it.4 Such
men are naturally only mentioned here and there, as occasion requires, but they
represent a steady intermingling of races.
In the period with which this book deals Persia is already in decline,
and that decline we have now to consider. There can be little doubt it began
with the disastrous issue of Xerxes’ splendid expedition. The Persian had been
unlucky in Europe—Darius among the Scythians, Mardonius in Thrace, Datis at
Marathon—and things could not be left so. To abandon all claims of sovereignty
over these rather insignificant European peoples—the uncivilized Scythians and
the numerically weak city states of the European Greeks—was to invite disorder
in Asia,5 and above all in Egypt. Marathon had been the most signal
failure, and before it could be avenged Egypt was in rebellion.® Three years
passed before Egypt was reduced, and (says Herodotus) more enslaved than it had
been under Darius. The Egyptologists tell us that there are no foundations of
Xerxes or Artaxerxes I in Egypt. Then came the crowning shame and surprise of
Xerxes’ expedition,
1 Thuc. viii. 85, Kapa 8ly\a><T<Tov.
2 Starkie on Aristophanes, Ach. 100. The evidence
he cites, viz.: the trick of Iphicrates (Polyaenus, iii. 9, 59), though the
general employed men acquainted with Persian, rather implies that the public on
whom the trick was played were shaky in the language. There is no evidence,
I think,
that Persian literature had any influence on Athenian.
3 Thuc. iv. 50. 4 Arrian, Anab. iv. 3, 7.
6 Cf.
Aesch. Per s. 586. * Herodotus, vii. 1; 7.
which everybody had expected to be invincible.1 It was
followed by the rapid rise of the victorious Athenian confederacy. One naval
disaster came after another, and then in the middle of the century fresh
trouble in Egypt (460-454) and rebellion in Cyprus. The meddlesome Athenians,
however, burnt their fingers in Egypt2—far more severely than we
generally realize. Cimon the war-spirit fell, off Cyprus (449), and Pericles
began to revert to the old view of Themistocles, that eternal war with the
Persian was nonsense. Both he and King Artaxerxes were inclined for peace—the
latter “ conspicuous above Persian Kings for gentleness and highmindedness,” 3
or, in plainer language, inertiaA Callias went to Susa, then, in 449-448, and
managed to negotiate, not exactly a peace, but an agreement, a pacification.4
The King undertook not to send a fleet west of Phaselis, and the Athenians to
leave his subjects alone—those in Egypt and Cyprus. The Asiatic Greeks were in
the Athenian confederacy, and were free of Persian rule. The Persian, however,
considered tribute as still due from them—autonomy and tribute the Persian
thought not incompatible.6 Autonomy is the most abused word of this
period. The tribute to Persia was not paid by the Greeks of Asia; but it was
not forgotten, and the day came when it was claimed. .
This was when the power of Athens was broken in the harbour of Syracuse
(413). The Spartan3 from the beginning of the Peloponnesian War had been
sending ambassadors to Susa, but either they did not get through,6
or they were “ indistinct,” 7 or Persia did not believe that Sparta
could do anything against the Athenian naval power (judging very rightly), and
was therefore indisposed to pick a needless and troublesome quarrel. Athens
also sent embassies (if we may trust Aristophanes8) who travelled
with incredible comfort
1
Herodotus, vii. 138 ; Diod. Sic. xii. 1 ; Meyer, Gesch. iii. § 211.
a Thuc. i.
104-110. 8 Plut. Artax. 1.
* The fact of the embassy, Herodotus,
vii. 151; the bargain, Thuc.
viii. 56 (an allusion) ; details (perhaps rather
brightened) in Isocrates, Paneg. 118; Areop. 80, etc., and fourth-century
orators; Diod. Sic. xii. 4.
5 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 25. Cf. also iv. 8, 1.
* Thuc. ii. 67. 7 Thuc. iv. 50.
8 A ch. 64; the embassy left in 430 and
got back in 425, we are told !
!5
at the highest salaries and stayed away for years on end, and then
returned with sham " Eyes.” But Syracuse harbour altered every
international relation in the world, and the King began by claiming his arrears
of seventy years of tribute.1 The Spartans again started
negotiations—this time with Tissaphemes—on the basis of the abandonment of the
Asiatic Greeks. Three drafts of their treaty of Miletui are quoted by
Thucydides,2 the first so scandalously drawn as to cede to the King
all territory or cities he or his ancestors had ever occupied—which, as the
Spartan Lichas said, would give him Thessaly and Boeotia3—more, one
may imagine, than either party expected or wished. The third confines the
concessions to Asia, which was considerable enough. Meanwhile a Phoenician
fleet was built, or at any rate launched—for what purpose the Greeks were not
clear; it might be to help the Spartans, or, if Alcibiades prevailed, to help
the Athenians, or neither. In any case, Persia was in the ascendant, and her
Western policy was being guided a great deal by Tissaphemes, who was a
recognized enemy of the Greeks,4 cunning, crooked, and unscrupulous.
At this point Alcibiades comes into the story, with the famous advice he
gave to Tissaphemes. No doubt it was not from Tissaphemes that Thucydides
learnt of it. Herodotus tells us of counsel given by Demaratos to Xerxes, while
the succession to Darius was still undecided, but he thinks that even without
the counsel Xerxes would have been King.5 Tissaphemes, we may
believe, listened to the brilliant Greek, and took his own shifty course. The
advice was sound 6— not to be in a hurry to end the Peloponnesian
War, but, with a minimum of expense and complete safety for himself, to allow
the two chief Greek powers to wear each other out; in any case, not to let the
same Greek state control both sea and land, but to secure that empire in the
Greek world was divided, to keep a fairly even balance between them—one of them
always available for the King’s purposes and ready to thwart and injure the
other. Thucydides says that, to
1 Thuc.
viii. 5. 2 Thuc. viii. 18, 37, 58. 3 Thuc. viii. 43, 3.
4 Plut. Alcib. 24, raW ovv &v kal
/ucre'XAijv ev Totr fioKurTa Hcpaoiv.
s
Herodotus, vii. 3. .
8 Thuc. viii. 46. Cf. complaint of
Isocrates, Paneg. 121.
judge from his conduct, Tissaphemes took the advice ; he certainly
shilly-shallied.1 He had been angry with Lichas already,2
and perhaps he had the weakness that often goes with cunning, indecision; and
now he tried the plan of balancing, which gained him time, and was perhaps as
bad for the Greeks as anything else he could try.
Phamabazos in the north threw himself more unreservedly on the Spartan
side. When the news of Sicily reached the world, he had asked Spartan aid for
himself, and it might well have been the wiser plan for Sparta to send it to
him before Tissaphemes. If with Spartan troops and ships Pharna- bazos could
have secured the cities on the Bosporus and the Hellespont—the wheat-route, the
end of the war might have come ten years sooner, and with much less loss of
life and general ruin. But Tissaphemes was of higher rank, as
<TrpaTi)yb<i r&v Kara,3 and Sparta preferred him and got what she deserved.
In the spring of 408 the whole situation was fundamentally changed. In
May, Alcibiades sailed into the Peiraieus, returning after seven years of
exile the hero of the Athenian fleet, winner of brilliant victories, and the
hope of his country. He stayed a while in Athens, and then returned to the
fleet to meet with a great surprise. Ambassadors sent up with Phar- nabazos to
the King had not returned; they had never reached the King at all; they had
been arrested and detained by the young prince, Cyrus, on his way down to the
coast as karanos,* commander-in-chief of the Persian armies of Western Asia
Minor. Tissaphemes was in the background, a rather discredited figure. Cyrus
lives in the portrait Xenophon drew of him—a splendid vigorous personality, a
lover of horses and hunting, generous and effective, a born leader of men.5
He was young and ambitious, and he liked neither Tissaphemes nor his hedging
policy, and swept both aside. He took to the Spartan Lysander immensely, for
Lysander, sinister and
1 Thuc. viii. 46 ; 57. 2 Thuc. viii. 43 ; cf. 52.
8 Thuc. viii. 5. The equivalent of
<apavos in the next paragraph.
4 Xen. Hellenica, i. 4, 3. A letter with
the royal seal, rat Kara iraa-i,
announcing,
KaTairifiira Kvpov Kapavov t&v els Kaoraikov aBpai^ofiivav. Cf.
Anab. i.
1, 2, war pair-qv eirair\<re k at (TTpaTTjyav fie.
6 Xen. Anab.
i. 9 ; Hut. Artax. 2. See also Grote, viii. 350.
false as he might be, was a man of action and energy; and energy appealed
to Cyrus. And it is possible, when one looks at what followed, to surmise that
the young prince was already nursing plans of his own, which could be helped
forward by a victorious and friendly Sparta, under the guidance of a man like
Lysander. At all events, Cyrus threw himself on the Spartan side with
emphasis—he had instructions to do so from his father, he said, who had
assigned 500 talents for the war ; if it was not enough, he would spend his
own, even if it came to coining the throne of silver and gold on which he sat.1
He was as good as his word, and Persian gold carried Sparta to a complete
victory. The Athenian Empire fell, and the Asiatic Greeks were never to be free
again. The victory of the Spartans was the triumph of Persia—what she had lost
at Salamis, she regained at Aegospotami. The King was supreme in Asia and
arbiter of Europe.
In the hour of triumph came the reversal—the peripeteia, as the Greeks
called it—as impressive and as dramatic as anything in a Greek tragedy.
No Agamemnon, king of men, ever occupied such a position as that of the
Persian King. “ A great god is Ahuramazda,” runs the inscription of Xerxes, “
who hath created the earth, who hath created the heavens, who hath created man,
who hath given to mankind the good spirit (life),2 who hath made
Xerxes King, the sole King of many kings, the sole Lord of many lords. I am
Xerxes the Great King, the King of kings,3 the King of many-tongued
countries, the King of this great universe, the son of Darius, the King, the
Achaemenian.” He stood above all law—the supreme law said that the King could
do what he pleased.4 The greatest nobles of Persia waited at his
gates for his bidding, whatever it might be ;6 they vowed loyalty to
him,® they were taught to put his name in their prayers,7 they were ready
(so the Greeks said, and it can hardly be exaggeration) to lighten the ship for
him in the
1 Xen. Hellenica, i, 5, 3.
2 The reader will notice a change of translation
here from the similar inscription of Darius. This is quoted from Curzon,
Persia, ii. p. 156.
8 This title had not been used by
Assyrian or Babylonian (Meyer, Gesch. iii. § 13). 4 Herodotus, iii. 31.
6 Xen. Cyrop. viii. 1. 6. 6 Xen. Cyrop. viii. 5, 27.
7 Herodotus, i. 132.
storm by jumping into the sea.1 Aeschylus repeatedly calls the
King the go'd of the Persians—Queen Atossa is spouse of god and mother of god 2—though
this language was not actually held by the Persians themselves. The King’s
unique position was marked out by his splendid Median dress,3 and
above all by his turban, which he alone of men wore erect.4 Whoever
entered his presence, prostrated himself to the ground; 6 where he
passed, men stood with their hands in their sleeves, on pain of death.* In war
and peace he was the one arbiter of life and death for every man and woman in
his realm—his son, his slave, his wife—his subjects, his nobles, his armies—
over all persons and in all causes within his dominions supreme.7
All power, all authority rested upon him, and all responsibility.
The Persian Empire had been made by a great personality, and the whole
system was organized in such a way that it depended in the last resort on the
character of the King. “ The greatness of the kingdom,” said the friends of the
younger Cyrus, “ needed a King of spirit and ambition,” and they were right.
But Nature denied such men to the house— her revenge, one might say, for the
harem system of queens and concubines and eunuchs.® There was generally one
chief queen,9 before whom all the members of the harem had to
prostrate themselves ;10 but it did not necessarily follow that her
son sat on the throne.11 The succession depended on the outcome of
the most complicated tangle of plots and intrigues,
I Herodotus, viii. 118, 119.
aAesch.
Pers. 157, 644; Atossa was in turn the wife of Cambyses, the false Smerdis, and
Darius.
* Xen. Cyrop. viii. 1, 40; 3, 1.
Ear-rings found in tomb of Cyrus, see Arrian, Anab. vi. 29.
4 Aristophanes,
Birds, 486 ; Xen. Anab. ii. 5, 23 ; Plut. Artax. 26-28.
6 Plut. Artax. 22
; Them. 28.
* Hands in sleeves, Cyrop. viii. 3, 10 ; Hellenica, ii. 1, 8.
7 Plut. Artax. 23.
Cf. Xen. Anab.
ii. 5, 38, reference of the King’s envoys to “ Cyrus his slave.”
8 On this, Plut. Them. 26.
9 e.g. Atossa, Amestris, Parysatis, the
queens of Darius I, Xerxes I, and Darius II.
10 So Demon, ap. Athen. xiii. p. 556B.
II Cf. Herodotus, vii. 2 ; Xen. Anab. i.
1,4. See also Isocrates, Nicocles, 41, 42, op effects of haxem system.
through which no one could safely count on picking his way. Xerxes, it is
said, was murdered by the man whom he had delegated to murder his own son, the
Prince Darius;1 and Xerxes was not the only Achaemenian King to be
murdered at home. The savagery and cunning of the queens stand out in the
horrible story of the palace. The King, distracted with duties and pleasures,a
the victim of his own fancies, and only too conscious of the atmosphere in
which he lived, could only protect himself in one way—a clumsy way. “ He suspected
all the chief men ; many he killed in anger, more from fear : for cowardice in
tyrannies is the most murderous thing." 8 The old Persian
practice of bringing children up " to speak the truth ” was as absurd in a
harem as it was impossible. Arta- xerxes I, Darius II, and Artaxerxes II were
not men of strong character, and for a century Persia was ruled by weaklings,
and the Empire felt the effects.
The reflex from this political system Isocrates sketches for us, in more
than usually philosophic mood, and he does not go beyond what we learn
elsewhere independently of his evidence.4 It is “ not in their
institutions " to make a great general or a good soldier—how could a man
be either who is " better trained to slavery than our house-servants ” ?
There is none of the real training of political life or freedom. Luxury and monarchy
make cowards of them all—they are unmanly and protect themselves by cunning and
treachery. They are forced to prostrate themselves before a mortal man, to
think meanly of themselves; and the outcome is overweening tyranny that
alternates with grovelling falsity. And he turns to the records of Agesilaos’
campaign to prove what he says. There is much else that confirms him.
1 Diod.
Sic. xi. 69.
1 The
luxury of the Persian court is constantly emphasized by the Greeks; for the
comment of Alexander upon it and its influence on him, see Plut. Alex. 20;
Arrian, Anab. iv. 9, 9 ; vii. 6, 2. The transport of specially boiled water
from the Choaspes, wherever the Kang went, was probably not luxury, but symbol
or tabu. See Herodotus,
i. 188.
8 Plut. Artax. 25.
4 Isocrates, Paneg. 150-153. Cf. the
life of Datames written by
Cornelius
Nepos—the story of a man of spirit who has to take to
treachery
to save himself, and is at last destroyed by treachery.
Out of this chaos of muddle and intrigue there suddenly emerges, as we
have seen, the attractive figure of the younger Cyrus. Whatever time might have
made of him, had he become King, he had gifts of nature that charmed the
Greeks. He was a personality at last. His military abihty, too, is warmly
emphasized by Colonel Arthur Boucher, after a close study of his strategy on
the great expedition.1 And it was Cyrus who in truth dealt the fatal
blow to the Empire of his fathers. It was not that he intrigued and rebelled,
but that he marched a body of 13,000 Greeks right into the heart of the
kingdom, and with their aid ignominiously defeated the Great King in battle.
Cyrus fell, but his Greek troops fought their way to the sea and got back to
Greece. They brought with them a new knowledge of what the Persian Empire had
become ; and the knowledge was fatal.*
The Ten Thousand could tell their countrymen of an Empire where
government had broken down. They had been enlisted, some of them, to help the
prince Cyrus to make war on another of his brother’s satraps—his mother, they
learnt, approved, and the Great King was well content to see his governors
waging civil war in his domains.3 They had marched with Cyrus for
hundreds of miles, practically unopposed—a Persian governor, it appeared, could
levy troops and march from the Aegaean to the Orontes, if he chose, to avenge
an injury on a fellow-satrap (Abrokomas4), and no one would stop
him. They had travelled through kingdoms whose loyalty to the King was patently
of the slightest—Syennesis was king, of Cilicia, whichever brother was Great
King. They found Mysians, Pisidians, and Lycaonians, prosperous and
independent, in Asia Minor itself.5 They had heard—the Greeks had
read it in Herodotus—of three satrapies on the Caspian Sea ;8 what
they found was a mountain region full of savage tribes, far more dangerous than
the royal troops, and
1 L’Anabase de Xknophon, pp. 86-88. See Chapter VIII. p. 246.
3 Isocrates,
Paneg. 138-149; adding with a sting, “ more safely than the ambassadors who
went up to the King to treat for friendship.” Cf. Xen. Hellenica, i. 4, 4-7 ;
Polybius, iii. 6, 9-13.
3 Xen. Anab. i.
1,8.
1 Xen. Anab. i. 3, 20.
6 Xen. Anab. iii. 2, 23 ;
cf. ii. 5,13.
• See Maspero, Passing of Empires,
p. 774 ; Herodotus, iii. 94.
none with the least regard for the Great King ;1 nay, the King
had to pay the Mardians and other robber tribes toll to reach his summer palace
in Ecbatana;2 and before long Greece had their story confirmed by
rumours of the disastrous failure of Artaxerxes to reduce the Cadusii.3
When they reached the Euxine and travelled along the North of Asia Minor, they
found the Paphlagonians a strong military nation, proud of their cavalry and
independent of the King ; 4 the Bithynians also independent; and a
number of Greek towns, such as Herakleia, independent too.
All this they told the Greek world, and it was true. Had they not marched
where they would, defeated the Great King in drawn battle—“ beaten him at his
doors, laughed and come away ” 5—defied alike the cavalry of his
satraps and the ambushes of the mountaineers—demonstrated in short that there
were no troops like Greek hoplites—demonstrated, too, that the Persians
themselves knew it and avowed it ? Why had Cyrus chosen to depend on Greek
troops ? What did it mean that, now his rebellion was over, the satraps were
beginning freely to engage Greek mercenaries ?6 Was it to fight one
another, or to fight their sovereign ? Again, look at the naval and military
power of Evagoras in Cyprus, or at Egypt in rebellion—and Egypt was in
rebellion off and on, under one dynasty or another, for half a century from the
death of Darius II i,n 405. Was not the Empire on the verge of break-down ? A
united movement in Greece, and Persia would be gone.
Not yet. For, a few years after his victory over his brother, Artaxerxes
avenged himself on the Spartans who had supported Cyrus, and whom he hated. A
Persian envoy
1 Anab. iv. 3, 2
; and especially iii. 5, 16, the lost army of the King in Kurdistan.
2 Strabo, c. 524, on the authority of
Nearchus, who of course may be speaking of a later development. E. R. Bevari,
House of Seleucus,
1. 77-86, suggests that the
power of the government had never reached very far from the high roads.
8 Plut.
Artax. 24 ; Diod. Sic. xv. 8. 1 Anab. v.
6, 8.
6 The
actual words used, in Anab. ii. 4, 4.
* Cf. Isocrates, Paneg.
134-135 ; Philip, 125-126. A little later among the mercenaries are Iphicrates
(Diod. Sic. xv. 41), Chabrias (Plut. Ages. 36), and King Agesilaos himself in
his old age (Xen. Ages.
2, 28 ; Plut. Ages. 36).
appeared in Greece with a subsidy, and all Greece was in arms against
itself (395 B.C.). A Persian fleet, next year, though under a Greek admiral,
swept the Spartan from the sea (the battle of Cnidos, August, 394). Phamabazos
was cured of all friendliness for Spartans, and, at a hint from Conon, fell
back on Alcibiades’ plan of getting the Greek powers on a level— and rebuilt
the walls that linked Athens to the sea and made her independent. Then the
Spartans themselves came to terms and asked peace, and received what posterity
calls the Peace of Antalkidas but what contemporaries called, with a bitter
accuracy, that heightened the shame of it, the King’s Peace. This finally and
definitely gave the Asiatic Greeks to the King, while it made him arbiter,
manager, " quartermaster,” and absolute lord of all Greece.1
The biting words of Isocrates accentuate the complete triumph of the King.
The King had triumphed, and yet everybody knew it was a victory of the
Persian kind—like the only victory Tissaphemes won over the Ten Thousand—an
affair of lies and treachery and darics. The satraps knew it, and they knew the
King, and protected themselves by hiring Greek mercenaries and by
rebellion—like the faithful Datames, fallen on evil times and denounced by
traitor tongues; they rebelled one after another; and if they were reduced, it
was because they sold one another to the King.
It was seventy years after the rebellion of Cyrus before the Empire
actually fell. Agesilaos had attempted to overthrow it. His wish to start like
Agamemnon with a solemn ritual at Aulis 2 was a symbol of his
intention to march as far up country as he could, to capture the King if he
could ; but the ritual and the expedition achieved nothing—nothing, unless we
reckon, as we should, a second demonstration that the Persian had no troops to
match against Greek hoplites and that a strong Greek force might march where it
pleased in the King’s country. It was Alexander who overthrew Persia, and
Polybius thus sums up the causes of his expedition.3 It was
1 Isocrates,
Paneg. 120, 121.
2 Xen.
Hellenica, iii. 4, 3. The Homeric touch reappears in Alexander very markedly.
Cf. Plut. de fort. Alex. i. c. 4. ’A\c£av8pov tt/v 'Arnav
ifrffiepovvTos "OfiTjpos r\v dvuyvfdfTfjLQ.
3 Polybius,
iii. 6, 9-13. ,
not to avenge the wrongs Persia had done to Greece1—that was a
mere pretext; it was that he knew the meaning of Xenophon’s retreat, of
Agesilaos’ filibustering ; that he knew Persia was weak and inefficient; that
the prize was splendid and that he knew he could win it.
1 Alleged by Alexander in his letter to Darius
(Arrian, ii. 14, 4-19).
THE ANABASIS
THERE are few books in Greek, and there cannot be many in other
languages, to match Xenophon’s Anabasis. A plain tale of adventure, simply but
vividly narrated, it is surprising how, as one studies it, it grows in interest
and significance. The teller of the tale is a pupil of Socrates, a contemporary
of Thucydides and Euripides, and yet in gifts and feelings he seems to belong
to an earlier day, to be the contemporary and friend of Herodotus. Born in the
same deme and perhaps in the same year as Isocrates, he is content to write
naturally, to put down what comes into his head and to have no style at
all—unless perhaps we hold with the ancient critic that “ art is perfect when
it seems to be nature.” 1 He is a man who has travelled far beyond
the limits of his people, Who has escaped for a while from street and market
and assembly, and seen a new world, and, like a Greek, found himself at home in
it. He has seen new peoples—barbarians as they were called—and he has been
interested in them; he has liked the men he met and enjoyed his adventures with
them. And ranging beyond the common round, he has somehow dipped into the
future and become the path-finder for a new age. We undervalue him in comparing
him with Plato and Euripides; his greatness is not theirs, he is of another
order; but like them and like the great Greek minds that made, centuries
before, the Greece we know, he too showed the Greeks a new world to conquer and
proved to them once more what they could do. He gave them a new sense of power.
In plain language, he prepared the way for Alexander— no mean feat, when we
think what Alexander did and what Hellenism has meant. And to come again to our
story, he gave the world new insight into the possibilities of reflective
1
Longinus, 22, Tore yap 17 rk^vT] ri\eios ijvik’ &v <pwns eTvat &OK7J.
»35
warfare and demonstrated the military weakness of the strongest empire
that men had known. The book is a pioneer’s book—in autobiography, in travel,
in military history alike, it marks an epoch ; in each it is the oldest we
have, and still fresh and bright, a human-hearted book of the kind that never
grows old.
Something has been said in the preceding chapter of the effect produced
upon the world by the expedition of Cyrus and the retreat of the Ten
Thousand—the latter in itself the most signal triumph of. Greek arms between
Salamis and the battle of the Granikos. Here our task is different—it is to
study the book and the man who wrote it, to follow (in brief) the story of
adventure, and to see something of its value. For the whole book is alive, and
it is the Greek spirit within it that makes it live. Every chapter of it is a
page from Greek life and illustrates for us how a Greek looked at the world,
how he touched it, entered into it, and mastered it, and what every fresh
contact meant. Mountain and river, city and sea, the vast spaces of Asia—and
all the variety of the foreigner, from the Persian prince to the primitive
savage of the highlands— and all the action and reaction of the multitudinous
Greek mind, friction, co-operation, friendship, peril shared and the common
enjoyment of adventure, and the great sense of deliverance and triumph—all
these things, varieties of human experience that have never failed to stir the
spirit and make the heart beat, as age after age men have known them in one
form or another—they fill the pages of Xenophon, all living and interpreted in
a dialect simple, strong and true, intelligible at once to any man who has any
understanding for simplicity and truth. Wordsworth has spoken of
the depth of human souls.
Souls that appear to have no depth at all To careless eyes—
and one is tempted to put Xenophon in this class—so familiar it is by now
to find him despised and ignored, dismissed as naive and unimportant by clever
persons. But for those who care to see, the Anabasis is one of the most
wonderful and attractive pictures of Greek life that antiquity has left us. In
the pages that follow some attempt will be made to indicate
some aspects of the story that bear upon our general theme of Greek
movement between Pericles and Philip.
In the early centuries of Greek history we meet the soldier of fortune,
often far enough afield from the Greek city on the Asian shore that gave him
birth. In Egypt he carves his name on the legs of the gods ; he serves under
Nebuchadnezzar in Babylonia.1 Nearer home he makes a tyrant house
secure for one or two generations. And then for a while we hear less of him.
The islands and the Asian cities sink into weakness and obscurity, and the
great states of European Greece in their struggles against one another and
against Persia occupy the attention of history, and little is heard of
mercenary troops. There was, it would seem, occupation enough, and no doubt the
Athenian fleet in its great days absorbed vast numbers of men. " If we
borrow the money,” says a Corinthian, " we shall hire away their foreign
seamen with better wages. For the strength of Athens, is bought rather than
native.” 2 It may be that we have here the explanation why
the disasters in Egypt in Artaxerxes’ reign had comparatively so little effect
upon Athenian prosperity. Ships and citizens were losses indeed, but
mercenaries lost might involve some slight compensation if the Athenian plan
of paying wages well after date 3 prevailed at this period. In the
Peloponnesian War we find mercenaries employed on both sides—like “ the Manti-
neians and other Arcadians, accustomed to attack any enemy who from time to
time might be pointed out to them, whoever they might be, and in this case
counting the Arcadians serving with the Corinthians to be enemies as much as
any other, for the sake of gain.” 4 When Athens fell, and the Thirty
ruled her, we find them in self-defence hiring foreign mercenaries— “ whole
towns full,” Lysias indignantly says.5
After the Peloponnesian War, and indeed for the whole two and half
centuries down to the conquest by the Romans, Greek warfare is more and more in
the hands of mercenaries. This was due to two main causes—to the utter
disorganization of Greek fife, which resulted from the war and involved
1 Cf. Chapter II. pp. 39, 40. 2 Thuc. i. 121, 3.
3 Thuc.,viii.
45, 2. 4 Thuc. vii. 57, 9.
5 Lysias, xii.
60 ; which may be one reason why they confiscated his father’s armament factory
(xii. 17-19).
economic ruin and agricultural stagnation over great areas; and to the
new developments that military science was showing. Greek warfare in the old
days, as the Persian critic said,1 was simple enough—a level plain,
two armies, and straightforward massacre till one side gave way. The rise of
light-armed forces and of cavalry, the new attention to siege operations, the
possibilities of making army and navy co-operate whether close at hand or
hundreds of miles apart,2 and the conceivable combination of every
method at once, made war a new thing, far outside the capacities of the
political leader elected " General ” for a year. It becomes a science, and
we meet with men who professed ,to teach it.3 Harpers and dancers
learnt their trades, said Socrates, " but most generals improvise on the
spur of the moment.” But that day was passing or had passed. A more striking
and remunerative trade than lecturing on military science was that of the man
who engaged his own mercenary soldiers and then leased himself and his troop to
an employer, prince, satrap, or city, and took supreme charge himself of all
military operations or acted under another but in command of his own forces.
Xenophon’s tone rather suggests the feeling that the practical man has for the
theorist when he speaks of the professor " ready to serve if any city or
tribe needed a general ” ; but the other sort fill the Anabasis. Good, bad, and
indifferent, like other men, Xenophon knew them, and some of them he liked. They
at least—when they spoke of war—knew what they were talking about, so far as a
subject always changing and developing can be known.
The Anabasis begins with the minimum of prelude. Darius II on the
approach of death wished to see his two sons. So Cyrus went up from the coast,
taking with him Tissaphemes " as a friend,” and a guard of three hundred
Greek hoplites commanded by the Arcadian Xenias. The presence of the “ friend ”
was perhaps a necessary precaution, but the " friend ” managed to whisper to
the new King, Artaxerxes II, that Cyrus was plotting against him. This may or
may not
1 Herodotus, vii. 9, 20. Cf. Chapter VII. p. 218. •
a As in the reduction of Athens by Lysander.
* e.g. Dionysodorus, Xen.
Mem. iii. 1, 1-7 ; Koiratadas, Anab. vii. 1. 33-
have been true, but Cyrus came near being killed, and when, by his
mother’s aid, he escaped death and regained his provinces, he at once took
steps to be King* himself. He began by quietly securing large forces of Greek
hoplites. He had garrisons already in a number of cities, and he gave orders to
the commanders to increase them with as many men as they could get, the best
obtainable, preferably Peloponnesians. There were reasons for this preference —
Arcadians and Achaeans, as we have seen, were in the way of serving as
mercenaries'; and Cyrus had already some understanding with Lysander, if not
with the Spartan government, to judge from the support which it gave him with
its navy. Beside increasing his garrisons, Cyrus raised troops for two or three
other avowed purposes. He had a private war with Tissaphemes, which Artaxerxes
^vould quite well understand, and was, in fact, not sorry to see, for gratitude
was not an element in this King’s character.1 He also announced his
intention to reduce the Pisidians, and enrolled men for that expedition. He
further maintained the Spartan exile Clearchus in a sort of war with the
Thracians who worried the Greeks of the Chersonnese. Clearchus seems to have
been alone of them all in Cyras’ secret. He was a hard, harsh, and rather
doctrinaire soldier, but somehow appealed to Xenophon as Agesilaos also did.
With a subsidy of 10,000 darics from Cyrus and further sums from the cities of
the Hellespont, Clearchus was able without waking suspicion to raise a large
force, and when he joined at last, it was with 1000 hoplites, 800 Thracian
peltasts, and 200 Cretan bowmen.2 Yet farther afield in Thessaly,
Aristippus of the noble house of the Aleuadai of Larissa was subsidized. He was
engaged, it would appear, in a war against the new democracy of the town, and
was bent on restoring his family ; but he received instructions not to make
terms with his opponents till Cyrus gave word.
At last the moment came, and the various forces began to assemble at
Sardis, and their destination was revealed : they were designed for war against
the Pisidians. Tissaphemes had word of all; and, " thinking the
preparations rather
1 To be fair to
him, neither was unusual resentment.
a Cretan bowmen in the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. vi.
25).
large,” he posted off with a bodyguard of 500 horse to tell the King.
Cyrus advanced to Celainai, and there waited a month. At this place Clearchus
joined, and Cyrus held a review and found he had about 11,000 Greek hoplites
and some 2000 peltasts. The men came from all over the Greek world—even
Syracuse and Thurii were represented. Amphi- polis, Dardania, Oeta, Acamania,
Boeotia, Locri, Samos, and Chios appear among the native places. But we hear
most of Peloponnesians and in particular of Arcadians, though even toward the end
the Arcadians and Ach&eans seem scarcely to number more than half of the
forces. First and last we glean the names of some half-dozen Athenians beside
Xenophon and “ Theopompus.” Spartans were few—one or two exiles, notably
Clearchus, and the commander Cheirisophos, who joined with 700 hoplites at
Issos, dispatched there on a fleet by the Spartan government.
What sort of men they were comes out in the story. Treachery, intrigue,
dissension were not unnatural among men of such various stocks and such miscellaneous
history. Women of the hetaira class came with them in great numbers, slave or
free,—one man brought a dancing-girl whom he owned,—and shared with them their
adventures in Mesopotamia and the mountains.1 Isocrates, twenty
years later, gives the numbers of the men at 6000—not men picked for valour, he
says, but men compelled by poverty to go abroad.2 Mercenaries,
Isocrates says elsewhere (in 355 B.C.), speaking more generally, are " men
without cities, runaway slaves, a congeries-of every kind of villainy, who will
always desert for more pay.”3 Xenophon gives a more favourable
account of his fellow-soldiers 4—“ most of them had not sailed from
home for this service for want of a livelihood, but because they had heard a
good account of Cyrus ; some brought men with them, and others had sunk money
in the expedition ; 6 others again had run away from fathers and
mothers, and some had left children 6 behind them, and meant
1 Anab. iv. 3,
19 ; v. 3, 1 ; iv. 1, 14 ; the dancer, vi. 1, 12.
2 Isocrates, Paneg. 146. ■ Isocrates, de Pace, 44-47. * Anab.'vi.
4, 8.
5 Cf. Isocrates,
Philip, 96, on bounties given by those engaged in
£evokoyeiv
at this time.
• Cf. Anab. iii. 1, 3.
to make something and return ; they had heard that the other men with
Cyrus did very well for themselves.” How Cyrus was recommended as a paymaster,
we can see in the promise held out to Xenophon himself by Proxenos, that, if he
would come, he would make him a friend of Cyrus; and Cyrus, Proxenos added, he
reckoned as more to him than his country was.1 The generosity of
Cyrus is a frequent point, and there can also be little doubt that a commander
of such spirit and such friendliness would attract men. Poverty there was in
Greece, and it helped the recruiting officers. Long afterwards Theocritus in
one of his idylls makes disappointed love turn a shepherd’s thoughts to
enlistment abroad.2
None of them knew where they were going, except Clear- chus3—their
goal, they were told, was Pisidia. It was not till they were in Cilicia that
they began to suspect that the expedition was really against the King. “They
were afraid of the journey,” Xenophon says at a later point; “ but, though
reluctant, they went all the same, for shame—for shame of one another and of
Cyrus ; and of these Xenophon was one.” 4
The story of the mutiny at Tarsus, when they first suspected the truth,
is very characteristic.5 They said flatly they would go no farther ;
they had not been hired to march against the King. Clearchus, the Spartan, true
to the national character and his own, tried to force them, and he came near
being stoned to death. The use of stones by the Ten Thousand is very frequent,
a blunter and more public way of settling accounts with an unpopular officer
than the modem one of the bullet. Clearchus on this hint tried the other
way—of persuasion. He called an assembly, ecclesia, and as ever with the Greeks
the matter came to a public meeting and a vote. The modem reader will remember
the storm in Eothen—“ where was the crew ? It was a crew no longer, but rather
a gathering of Greek citizens; the shout of the seamen was changed for the
murmuring of the people—the spirit of the old Demos was alive. The men came aft
in a body and loudly asked that the vessel should be put about, and that the
storm be no longer tempted. Now, then, for speeches. The captain, his eyes
1 Anab.
iii. 1, 4. 2 Idyll, 14. * Anab. iii. 1, 10.
4 Anab. iii. 1, 10. 6 Anab. i. 3, 1 fi.
16
flashing fire, his frame all quivering with emotion—wielding his every
limb, like another and a louder voice, pours forth the eloquent torrent of his
threats and his reasons, his commands and his prayers ; he promises, he vows,
he swears that there is safety in holding on—safety, if Greeks will be brave. ’
’ Kinglake pictures the men “doubtfullyhanging between the terrors-of the storm
and the persuasion of glorious speech,” till "brave thoughts winged on
Grecian words gained their natural mastery over terror.” Clearchus met his
soldiers, and managed to weep before them—he threw in his lot with them, he would
abandon Cyrus, and so forth. Meantime by a private message he reassured the
prince, and then got the soldiers to discuss alternative plans, and so on, till
by dint of fair words and half a daric more a month, the Greeks consented to
march on— against Abrocomas, though they still suspected it was against the
King.
At Thapsacus on the Euphrates there was another mutiny. They did not wish
to take the decisive step of crossing the river, for Cyrus had now avowed his
purpose. But Menon the Thessalian, who proved Jiis gift for treachery more
clearly later on, managed the matter by finesse. He persuaded his own men to
cross while the rest were still debating in ecclesia—to steal a march on their
comrades. In this way they would win extra bounties from Cyrus for being the
first; and if the rest failed to follow, then they would cross back again.
In this way the army manages its discipline—not quite as modem European
soldiers would wish it. But it must1 be remembered that they were
essentially a foreign legion and in no sense a national force. Leaders and men
were much on a level, and anybody might offer a suggestion. Later on, when
Xenophon was in charge, he made it known that he welcomed such suggestions—“
the men all knew that they might approach him at breakfast or at dinner, and,
even if he were asleep, wake him up and tell him anything any man had to say
that bore on the war.” Xenophon always meets mutiny halfway and disarms it by
sense and good humour. He will hear what is to be said—anybody can speak ; only
let them consider where they are, in what danger they stand, and how they will
heighten that danger by divisions and by quarrelling. Back to the facts—all
above-board—and now in good temper let us
look at the thing as it is; and he carries the men with him. Or, if he
does not, well, they are still friends, and by and by they are working together
again. Always reasonable, often with a touch of playfulness in his speech, he
keeps his crew of shipwrecked pirates (the analogy is only too close) working
together till safety is assured.1 The more closely we study the Ten
Thousand, with their natural and inevitable want of cohesion, their gusts of
fury and suspicion—“ all of a sudden we hear a row—‘ hit ’em! hit ’em! stone
’em! stone ’em! ’—and next moment we see a crowd running up with stones in
their hands ”2—the more one wonders that they ever got through.
" One unfortunate result,” says Mr. William Miller of the modern Greeks,3
“ of this extreme democracy, so firmly engrained in the Hellenic character, is
the disinclination to obey a leader and the consequent tendency to split up
into cliques and groups. The Venetians truly said, ' Every five Greeks, six
generals.’ ” Turkish discipline is better; but at what a price it is had ! That
the most gifted races on earth are the hardest to discipline seems a
consequence from independence of mind.4 Xenophon is all on the side
of discipline,5 but the discipline
1 Perhaps the
best speech of all is in Anab. v. 7.
2 Anab. v. 7,
21. 8 Greek Life in Town
and Country, p. 7.
1 A very interesting parallel is given by Parkman in
his Oregon Trail, ch. xxvi. In the Mexican War of 1846 the Missourians, “if
discipline and subordination are the criterion of merit, were worthless
soldiers indeed. . . . Their victories were gained in the teeth of every
established precedent of warfare. . . . Doniphan’s regiment marched through New
Mexico more like a band of free companions than like the paid soldiers of a
modern government. ... At the battle of Sacramento, his frontiersmen fought
under every disadvantage. The Mexicans had chosen their position ; they were
drawn up across the valley that led to their native city of Chihuahua; their
whole front was covered by intrenchments and defended by batteries, and they
outnumbered the invaders by five to one. An eagle flew over the Americans, and
a deep murmur rose along their lines. The enemy’s batteries opened ; long they
remained under fire, but when at length the word was given, they shouted and
ran forward. In one of the divisions, when midway to the enemy, a drunken
officer ordered a halt; the exasperated men hesitated to obey. ‘ Forward, boys
! ’ cried a private from the ranks ; and the Americans rushed like tigers upon
the enemy,” and they won a complete victory. All this—down to the eagle—is surprisingly
like the Ten Thousand.
‘ Cf. Anab. iii. 2, 29-31 ; v. 7, 26-33.
he managed to attain depended more on his own personal qualities than on
anything else. No wonder that, once established at Scillus, he had no wish to
campaign with mercenaries again ! No wonder that he writes so often, with such
wistful admiration, of Spartan discipline ! Yet, as Grote loved to emphasize,
with all the handicaps against him, the Athenian managed things better than the
Spartan with this impossible army of democrats and demagogues.
This, then, is the Army of the Ten Thousand, and with it— with only two
mutinies of any account, and these not without some moral justification—Cyrus
marched against his brother. Of late a military commentary upon the expedition
has been ! published by a French soldier, Colonel Arthur Boucher, author
already of works looking forward to the war of 1914-5. Colonel Boucher is
strongly for Xenophon against his scholarly commentators—“ in general, the
classical solution, on the points where it disagrees with the text, clashes
still more with the most elementary strategic necessities. The military
solution, answering rigorously to these same necessities, is in accordance with
the data of the text.”1 “ It is with the Anabasis,” he says, “ that
military history, properly so called, begins— that is to say, the technical
history of a war written by a soldier. . . . The Anabasis permits the
strategist to follow most closely the operations of the attacking commander,
and on those of his opponent it gives general information of great importance.”
2 Colonel Boucher’s criticism of Cyrus as general is of interest.
There are points in which he differs from some established authorities — he
refuses, for instance, to concur with them 3 in Plutarch’s censure
of Clearchus in the battle of Cunaxa; “ Plutarque parait peu verse dans les
choses de la guerre,” is his verdict,4 and few readers of Plutarch
could question it.
In summary, then, the conclusions of Colonel Boucher are these.6
He recognizes the able use of fleet and army in combined action which gave
Cyrus Cilicia and Syria, and the monetary advantage that Cilicia meant, which
enabled him to pay
1 L’Anabase de
Xenophon, p. xix. 2 Ibid.
p. xxix.
8 e.g. Eduard Meyer, Gesch. v. § 834. 4 L’Anabase, p. 131.
6 L’Anabase, pp. 86-88. As I share Plutarch’s
disability, I prefer to summarize and not to criticize.
his Greek troops. The commissariat he commends as simple and practical,
emphasizing four points : the use of waggons (of which there were still four
hundred on the day of battle) to bring food from the nearest revictualling
centres ; the halts at such centres to rest the army and to extend the zones of
requisition; the “ Lydian market " allowed to follow the army ; and the
reserve convoy. He remarks the great rapidity of the march 1—68
stages averaging 29 kilometres, an extraordinary figure for a march so long.
Twice there were serious delays—at Tarsus, in consequence of the Greek mutiny
and the non-arrival of the fleet; and at Thapsacus, for a detailed reconnaissance
of the river—both involving serious consequences which Cyrus recognized. The
march from Thapsacus 2 to the frontiers of Babylonia—875 kilometres
in 35 days with 7 days for rest—will bear comparison with the best that history
records. In short, the strategic part of the operations could hardly have been
better executed. In the matter of tactics, Cyrus is open to criticism. A fixed
idea of where Artaxerxes must be was the source of all his errors. “ Convinced
of the clairvoyance of his imagination,” he advances unaware of the nearness of
the enemy, only a few kilometres away. Yet his activity in disposing his troops
repairs the mistake, and he is ready. In making his dispositions, he is clear
that victory in the centre, i.e. over Artaxerxes, will be definitive; therefore
the Greeks must be there to meet Artaxerxes. But the order given to Clearchus
is not one that could be executed. The success of the Greeks was thus not
decisive, as they left the King’s division unbroken. Cyrus seized the moment,
routed his brother, and then—fell by an act of rashness. Still Boucher
concludes that Cyrus had in him the qualities that make a great general.
But if the First Book of the Anabasis permits the soldier to follow
closely the military operations day by day, the mere human being has glimpses
that leave him less forlorn. Xenophon is always alert for the human interest.
The raising of the men, the mutinies, the desertion (at Myriandros) of Xenias
the Arcadian and Pasion the Megarian on a merchant vessel, and
1 Xenophon
emphasizes this (Anab. i. 5, 9).
2 The Colonel
does not find Thapsacus so near Babylon as the classical atlases give it.
the camp-talk that followed—the cowards ! serve them right if Cyrus
catches them, and pity if he does—and the magnanimity of the prince1—and
then the elaborate machinations of the royal family of Cilicia, through which
Syennesis yields to force what his queen has arranged by diplomacy2—the
speculation as to whether Artaxerxes would fight : “ Do you think, Cyrus, he
will fight ? ” asked Clearchus. “ By Zeus,” said Cyrus, “if he is the son of
Darius and Parysatis, and my brother, I shall never win all this without a
fight ”3—the blunt suggestion of Gaulites, the Samian exile, who
tells Cyrus that some say he won’t remember his friends, and some that he has
nothing for them if he does, and Cyrus’ magnificent answer : “ Men ! the empire
of my fathers reaches southward to where men cannot live for the heat, and
northward where they cannot for the cold ; all between, my brother’s friends rule
as satraps. If we conquer, then we must put our friends in possession of all
this ” 4—so the tale of parasangs and stages is varied with the play
and movement of human feeling, and the chance talk that breaks the march of
events and reveals the characters whose interactions make the events. For the
scenes of the journey, the pleasant paradises and hunting parks as well as the
famous defiles, the Cilician and Syrian Gates, Xenophon has a friendly eye. He
notes the sacred fish of the river Chalos, which the Syrians worship as well as
the doves,6 and the hunting in the desert by the Euphrates, where
trees were none and all the herbs were aromatic, and where the Greek soldiers
managed by strategy to catch the wild asses, but the ostriches beat them
altogether, horse and foot—and how good the flesh of the bustards was ! * and
the date-wine remains a memory.7
Here and there is a touch of Persian life. The waggons stick in the mud
and the men detailed to extricate them are slow—Cyrus, “ as if in anger,
ordered the Persian gobies around him to hurry up the waggons. And then there
was a real display of what good discipline is. For they threw off their crimson
cloaks just as they stood, and, as if charging
1 Anab. i. 4, 7. 1 Anab. i. 2, 12-27.
8 Anab. i. 7, 9. * Anab. i. 7, 5.
6 Anab. i. 4, 9 ; and cf. Rendel Harris, Letters from
Armenia.
• Anab. i. 5, 2-3. 7 Anab. i. 5, 10.
to victory and down a steep hill-side, they flew in their costly tunics
and embroidered trousers, and some with necklaces round their necks and bracelets
on their wrists, leapt into the mud, and quicker than one could have thought
had the waggons high and dry.” 1 Such importance did Cyrus attach to
speed. At Tyriaeum, partly to please the Cilician queen Epyaxa, Cyrus held a
review of his Greeks—in their crimson tunics, brass helmets, and greaves, and
with their shields uncovered and ready for action.2 He sent the
interpreter to order them to charge, and they did with a shout and a run ; and
the Cilician queen turned her carriage and fled, and the hucksters in the
barbarian camp left their wares and fled too, “ and the Greeks with laughter
came to the tents. The Cilician was astonished to see the brilliance and the
order of the army ; and Cyrus was delighted to see what fear the Greeks waited
in the barbarians.”
The battle of Cunaxa Xenophon narrates in a splendid chapter. Plutarch in
his Life of Artaxerxes compares it with the story of Ctesias;—Xenophon, he
says, all but shows us everything actually happening before our eyes ; it is
not past ; there it is, and the reader feels it all as it moves, and shares the
peril, as it were, while he reads ; but as for Ctesias’ account of Cyrus’
death, it is " murdering the man with a blunt knife.” 3 Eduard
Meyer holds that Xenophon’s story is in no way sufficient—a mere soldier’s
diary. Boucher, on the other hand, a soldier himself, emphasizes the value of
Xenophon’s account, and its precision, which allows the military critic to
reconstitute moment by moment every feature of the action where the Greeks
operate.
The book closes with the character of Cyrus ; the plundering of his camp
by the King’s troops ; the confusion ; the capture of the Phocaean mistress of
Cyrus, “ who bore the name of being sensible and beautiful,” and the flight of
the Milesian, naked, to the Greeks ; the return of the hoplites flushed with
their victory to a plundered camp and no supper; and their surprise at not
hearing from Cyrus.
The Second Book opens with the strange situation of the
1 Anab. i. 5, 7-8. a
Anab. i. 2, 14-18.
•Plut. Artax. 8-11 ; Plutarch uses both accounts, and the long rigmarole
taken from Ctesias goes fax to justify his criticism.
Greeks, three months’ march from the Aegaean, victorious but leaderless,
and their negotiations, confused and hesitating, with the Persians. One moment
stands out. A Greek envoy is sent by Tissaphemes to get them to surrender their
arms. M Theopompus, an Athenian, said : ‘ Phalinus, as things are
now, and as you see, we have nothing good but our arms and our valour. If we
keep our arms, we think we might use our valour; but if we surrendered them, we
might lose our bodies too. Do not think that we will yield you the only good
things we have ; no, with these we will fight you for those you have.’ Phalinus
laughed : ‘ Young man, you seem quite a philosopher, and you talk charmingly;
but know this—you are a fool, if you think your valour could overcome the
King’s power.’ ” And here Theopompus perhaps drops out of the story, unless the
“ worse manuscripts ” are right (as they often are) when they read "
Xenophon ” for “ Theopompus ”—or unless the author by the name "
Theopompus ” is gently allusive and means the young man whom the god sent, when
he gave an oracle of which we shall hear by and by.1 The whole
uneasy book we may here pass over and take up the story after the treacherous
murder of the Greek commanders by Tissaphemes.
The plight of the Greeks is vividly described by Xenophon: " The
Greeks were in very great difficulties—they reflected that they were at the
King’s gates, surrounded on every hand by many nations and hostile cities; no
one would offer them a market ; Greece was not less than 10,000 stades away;
they had no guide for their journey; impassable rivers lay across the homeward
way ; the barbarians who had marched up with Cyrus had betrayed them, too ;
they were alone and abandoned; they had no friendly cavalry, so that it was
easy to see that, if they won a battle, they would kill no one; if they were
beaten, none of them would be left. So they reflected, and they were in
despair; few of them tasted food till evening, and few lit fires. Many never
came to their arms all night,
1 There is a
good deal to be said for this suggestion. For instance, who but Xenophon was “
Themistogenes the Syracusan,” who wrote how the Greeks escaped to the sea
(Hellenica, iii. 1, 2) ? Was the Spartan admiral Samios (Hellenica, iii. 1, 1)
or Pythagoras (Anab. i. 7) ? Who was the shrewd veavla-Kos ns of Anab. ii. 4,
19-20 ?
but rested where they chanced to be, unable to sleep for their misery and
their longing for country, parents, wives, children, whom they never expected
to see again.”
And now, with a Homeric simplicity and a Homeric turn of phrase, as Grote
remarked, Xenophon comes into the story, in the third person. He tells how
Proxenos wrote the letter in which he urged him to come abroad and promised to
make him the friend of Cyrus ; how he showed the letter to Socrates, -and
Socrates sent him to consult Apollo in Delphi; how he put the question in a way
of his own, leaving the god little option but to offer some helpful suggestion
in a matter already decided ; and how Socrates pointed out the awkward form of
his address to the god, but now told him to go—though at first he had not been
sure whether the city would like him to be the friend of Cyrus, the enemy who
had given Sparta such effective support in the Peloponnesian War. This doubt
which Socrates felt is significant—why does Xenophon mention it ? And why does
he, as a matter of fact, though he is explaining his presence in the army, yet
give no hint of his reasons for leaving Athens ? He consulted Socrates; but, he
half suggests to us, he made up his mind himself, and Socrates and the god had
not much responsibility. What were his reasons ? a mere fancy for adventure ?
For it is quite clear that this student, as he sometimes seems to us, was a
spirited hunter and a real leader of men. Was it some memory of what the "
young men ”1 or the knights had done—some consciousness that Athens
also remembered—that quickened him to seek foreign service ? Was he among those
knights who were not trusted to serve Athens again, or not in the meanwhile ? 2
" Whatever his reasons, Xenophon went to Sardis and saw Cyrus,who
asked him to stay with them ; and he stayed,3 and went with them,
but neither as general, nor captain, nor
1 See Chapter
IV. p. 111 ; Chapter VI. p. 187.
2 Cf. Hellenica,
iii. 1,4, where he tells us that Athens sent to the new Persian War in 399 a
contingent of “ men who had served as knights in the time of the Thirty,
thinking it a gain for the Demos, if they went away and perished.” Lysias, xvi.
6, says or implies that some of them were excluded from further military
service and compelled to give up their equipment.
8 Anab. iii. i, 9.
soldier.1 On the very verge of the fatal battle, he mentions
how Cyrus spoke to him again, and bade him tell all that the omens were good
and the sacrifices spoke fair.2 But till the generals were murdered,
Xenophon was in the background. Now things were different; the man who could
save the rest must come forward ; and, stimulated by a dream, he did come
forward. Modem readers, especially some of a rationalist school, have commented
in an unsympathetic way upon ' Xenophon’s dreams and omens and sacrifices. Some
sweeping and perhaps swift judgment of human life lies behind such criticism;
but the historian does better to judge slowly and to study with sympathy. Men
so practical as Pascal Paoli and Abraham Lincoln have not disdained to notice
their dreams —some dreams.3 Few of us, perhaps, would wish to be
influenced by dreams, but the recurrence of this type of great man is
remarkable.
; Xenophon, it is clear, changed the atmosphere from depression to hope
; only that, but it was everything. “ Xenophon,” said Cheirisophos the
Spartan, “ before this I only knew so much of you, that I had heard you were an
Athenian; but now I praise you for what you say and do, and I wish there were
lots of you.” 4 Cheirisophos died at some point on the Euxine coast
of a drug which he had taken to allay a fever, but in the interval he and
Xenophon worked together effectively and happily. They only once disagreed, and
then about the treatment of a native guide, whom the Spartan struck in anger.
It is worth recording here, too, how they chaffed one another. For such things
do not receive mention in the more formal histories; but in a book of travel
like the
1 A curious addition with some purpose behind it,
which I cannot clearly make out.
8 Anab. i. 8, 14.
8 Boswell, Corsica, p. 361, for Paoli. John G.
Nicolay, Short Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 531 ; Lincoln on the morning of 14
April, 1865, told his cabinet he had the previous night had his usual dream,
which preceded great events—he had had it before Antietam, Murfreesboro,
Gettysburg, and Vicksburg. General Grant, in his matter-of-fact way, said that
Murfreesboro was no victory and had no important results ; but Lincoln was sure
the dream must refer to something important. That night he was shot in Ford’s Theatre,
and died in the house across the street.
* Anab. iii. 1, 45.
Anabasis much emerges that shows us the real texture of life. Xenophon
proposes a feint—stealing a march on the mountaineers—and, with a little pun,
suggests that Cheirisophos should undertake it, “ for I am told that you
Spartans, who are of the Peers, practise stealing from your boyhood, and there
is no shame in stealing where law allows. ... So now is the time for you to
show your training, and take care we are not caught stealing up the mountain
and get beaten.” “ And I,” says Cheirisophos, “ hear that you (Athenians are
great hands at stealing public funds—won’t you show your training ? ” 1 The jests are slight, but they let us see the
temper of the men in the hour of danger, and again illuminate character, and
the terms on which men of different states were living.
The story of the march it is not needful to tell here, nor to discuss the
routes taken. At one point there is a good deal of difficulty, but when the
regions are more exactly surveyed, it may be resolved. In any case,
travellers—the great von Moltke among them—bear witness to the general truth of
Xenophon’s descriptions. There the mountains are still, and the Kurds, and, as
Tertullian says, “ nothing is warm there but savagery.”2 Mountains,
rivers, and natives—Xenophon watches and remembers all, and sees them again as
he writes. Once more, Boucher insists on the military value of his data, and
men with other interests have praise no less hearty for the Third, Fourth, and
Fifth Books. For example, whether we call it commissariat or diet, taking the
military or the anthropological view, Xenophon tells us things that we do not
find elsewhere—things of no consequence to the " scientific ” historian,
it may be, but illuminative. We saw how he and his friends found fresh
satisfactions on the march jlown the Euphrates. In the worst days after the
battle, Xenophon recalls the dates they ate—“ what we got in Greece, were left
to the slaves, but what the masters had were selected, of a wonderful beauty
and size, and the colour of electron ” ; but
1 Anab.
iv. 6, 15-16. ,
8 Tertullian, adv. Mar cion. i. 1: Gentes ferocissimae inhabitant. . . .
Duritia de caelo quoque. Dies nunquam patens, sol nunquam libens ; unus aer
nebula ; totus annus hibemum, omne quod flaverit aquilo est . . . nihil illic
nisi feritas calet.
the wine made of the dates, and the “ head ” of the palm, though
pleasant, gave you head-ache.1 So in the underground houses of the
Armenian mountains, among their village hosts and the goats and cattle and
poultry, the Greeks fared sumptuously on lamb and pork and veal and so forth,
with wheaten bread and barley bread, and "barley wine in bowls,” which
they drank native-way through straws and found " very strong indeed,
unless one put water in; but it was a very pleasant drink when one learnt the
way.” 2 The strange honey that made the men ill, “ as if drunk or
mad,” is still known.3 The strangest diet of all was found among the
Mossynoeci—magazines of dry bread, slices of pickled dolphin, dolphin-blubber
(which they used as the Greeks use oil), boiled chestnuts, baked bread or
biscuits, and a wine of “ dry rough quality ” which they improved by adding
water.4 The Mossynoeci were the most barbarous people they met; they
were tattooed and knew nothing even of such elementary reserve as the Greeks
had ; they cut the heads off their fallen enemies and danced and sang as they
displayed them ; and they counted sheer fat a beauty—the boys of the well-to-do
were plump and white and about as broad as they were long.
Perhaps the most memorable chapter of all describes the march in the
snow.® Colonel Boucher says that “ those who, in Algeria, have seen a troop
surprised by a snowstorm will recognize how strikingly accurate is the story of
Xenophon ” ; and he will use the situation to decide the reading. For the
manuscripts vary as to how many parasangs the men marched in three stages—five,
ten, or fifteen. Five hours’ marching over snow in fair weather would be much ;
in a storm impossible ;
1 Anab. ii. 2,
15-16.
2 Anab. iv. 5,
25-31. Ainsworth in 1844 and von Moltke later found the people still living
underground, and Boucher, p. 217, gives a photograph of some houses of the
kind. Ainsworth, On the Track of the Ten Thousand, p. 178, adds, “ The
barley-wine I never met with.” Tertullian, adv. Marcion. i. 1, appears to refer
to some of the customs of the Mossynoeci.
3 Ainsworth, op.
cit. p. 190, suggests the honey is probably from the flower of the rose-laurel,
Nerium oleander, of the family of Apocynae.
Strabo, 549, a story how it was put in the way of Pompey's soldiers, who
were cut up before they recovered from its effects.
* Mossynoeci,
Anab. v. 4, 1-34. 5 Anab.
iv. 5.
and he concludes for ten parasangs in three days.1 As a
soldier, he comments with Xenophon upon the boots of the men— Xenophon noticed
that the new-made brogues of raw leather, that they were now wearing, froze to
the feet, if they did not take them off at night.* The march in the driving
snow, which kept falling till it was six feet deep, must have been appalling.
Ainsworth records his experience of the difference in temperatures between the
hot plains of Mesopotamia and the Armenian uplands in 1839,3 and the
Greeks had been equipped for Mesopotamia. In their distress, one of the
soothsayers suggested sacrifice to the wind ; and when it was done, says
Xenophon, “ the violence of the storm distinctly seemed to all to abate.” 4
After this came other experiences, bulimia or false hunger, frost-bite and
snow-blindness, which Xenophon well describes,5 noting, as he goes,
what remedies had been found of use. At a later stage Xenophon was accused of
using personal violence to the men. It was in these days of marching through
the snow that he did it—to sit and rest, he found, was dangerous, and at any
cost he made the men get up and move and save themselves, against their will,
from frostbite and death. Many men and beasts, as it was, perished. The speech
in which he defends himself has all his cleverness and charm.®
The most famous episode in the retreat is the first sight
1 Boucher, p.
216. He, with Grote, holds that parasang, like the modern farsakh, is roughly
an hour’s march—not a uniform distance at all.
2 Cf. the
prevalence of frost-bite from a similar cause in the trenches in the winter of
1914-5.
8 Ainsworth, op. cit. p. 173.
* Cf. the sacrifice by the
Magians to the wind at Artemisium (Herodotus, vii. 191), and what followed.
See Chapter I. p. 22.
6 Cf. Ralph Stock, Confessions of a Tenderfoot (1913)
: “ I have vivid recollections of my first experience of snow-blindness. I was
riding over snow-plains that glistened and glittered like a sea of diamonds in
the midday sun, when I became aware of tiny red spots floating between my eyes
and the horse’s ears. They grew rapidly to the size of billiard balls, and
finally burst into a blood-red mist that swirled and eddied before my eyes,
blotting out the world as completely as a red window- blind. My mount took me
home—trust a horse for knowing his own stable—but it was three days before I
came out of a darkened room with blood-shot eyes.”
8 Anab. v. 8, 2-26.
of the sea.1 (A guide is given them at Gymnias who undertakes
to bring them in five days to a place from which they will see the Euxine ; and
meantime they march through the land of enemies of his tribe, burning and
harrying as they go. " They come to the mountain on the fifth day, and its
name was ITieches. And when the men in front climbed it and saw the sea, there
was great shouting. On hearing this, Xenophon and the rear-guard thought that
other enemies must be attacking them in front; for people were pursuing them
out of the country which was all aflame, and of these the rear-guard had killed
some, and caught others alive by means of an ambush, and had taken about twenty
wicker shields covered with raw hides of shaggy oxen. And when the shouting
grew louder and nearer, and those who from time to time came up joined the
shouters at a run, and the shouting grew in volume as more men came, it seemed
to Xenophon to be something of more import. So he mounted his horse, and,
taking with him Lycios and the cavalry, galloped to the rescue. And very
quickly, then, they hear the soldiers shouting and passing the word along : The
Sea ! The Sea / Then they all came running, rear-guard and all, and the baggage
animals were driven up and the horses. When they had all come to the height,
then they fell to embracing one another, and the generals and the captains, with
tears. And on a sudden, some one or other passed the word, and the soldiers
bring stones and build a huge cairn. Then they hung on it a lot of raw cowhides
and staves and the captured wicker shields; and the guide with his own hands
began to cut up the shields and told the others to do the same. After this the
Greeks sent the guide home again, and gave him gifts from the common stock, a
horse and a silver bowl, a Persian dress and ten darics; and he asked for their
rings and had many given him by the soldiers.” What a memory to carry with one!
Whenever it was that Xenophon wrote his Anabasis
1 Anab. iv. 7, 21-27. I have deliberately tried in
this rendering to keep close to the simplicity and structure of the original,
but perhaps have been too bald and literal. Mr. Dakyns, to whose translations
of Xenophon, with their scholarly introductions, students owe much, always
seems to me to do Xenophon into English of a texture a good deal sprucer than
the Greek.
—and some parts of it were written years after—the fact that stands out
is his wonderful gift of carrying a scene, a great moment, a conversation, in
his head; and when he recalls it, he lives it over again, and his reader, as
Plutarch said, lives through it with him.
The sea was not the end of their difficulties by any means, but, instead
of difficulties, let us turn to festivals. When they were first starting on
their long march against the King, and had reached Peltae, Xenias, the Arcadian
captain of the body-guard (who, as we have seen, deserted from Myriandros),
celebrated the Arcadian festival of the Lycaea with his fellow- countrymen ;
there was a sacrifice, and then athletic contests, and the prizes were
headbands of gold. Cyrus, we are told, went to watch, and, we may imagine,
Xenophon.1 Another festival with a sacrifice and an athletic
competition was held at Trapezus under the management of Dracontius, a Spartan,
a man exiled from boyhood for killing another boy. Captives took part in one
race; Cretans, sixty of them, in another; there was wrestling, boxing, and the
pancration—“ a beautiful spectacle,” ending with a terrific horse-race downhill
to the beach and up again, with tumbles and shouting and laughter.2
Later on, when they made peace with Corylas, the Paphla- gonian chief, the
Greek generals gave an entertainment to the ambassadors.3 They had
plenty of captured animals for food, they lay on truckle beds at dinner, and
drank from hom-cups of the country’s make. Then came the libations and the
paean, and “ first of all some Thracians stood up and danced to -the flute, in
full armour, leaping high into the air and very lightly, and used their swords;
and finally one struck the other, as it appeared to everybody, and he fell with
great art, and the Paphlagonians cried out. Then the man who dealt the blow
stripped the arms off the fallen man and went out chanting Sitalkas (the
Thracian King); and other Thracians carried out the other man as if dead,
though really he had suffered nothing. Aenianians and Magnesians followed, and
danced the Kaipeia under arms ; and this is the method of the dance. One man
lays aside his arms and sows and drives a yoke of oxen, often looking round as
if he were afraid; and then a robber comes, and when he sees him he snatches up
his arms
1 Anab. i. 2, 10.
2 Anab. iv. 8, 25-28. 3 Anab. vi. 1.
and runs to meet him and fights in front of the oxen—all in rhythm, to
the flute ; and finally the robber binds the man and drives off the oxen, or,
sometimes, the driver binds the robber and drives him along with the oxen with
his hands tied behind him.” A Mysian came next, with a pantomimic dance, as if
he were fighting two men at once, twirling about, with some somersaults thrown
in—“a beautiful sight ”—which be followed up with the Persian dance with
shields, all in rhythm, to the flute. He was succeeded by Arcadians in national
dances, also under arms, as they do it in procession to the gods. The
Paphlagonians were surprised to see such dances under arms; so " the
Mysian talked to an Arcadian who owned a dancing girl, and brought her on,
after dressing her with the utmost beauty and giving her a light shield. She
danGed the Pynhiche very gracefully. There was much clapping, and the Paphlagonians
asked if women also fought beside them in battle, and they answered that it was
the women who drove the King out of the camp.”
The skill with which all this gaiety, this medley of national and tribal
life and character, the snatches of natural talk, are woven into the military
record and the tale of adventure, makes it admirable reading and gives the book
a high value.. We lose a great deal by not realizing the simpler side of Greek
life, and the relations of the Greek with his neighbours. No book that the
Greeks have left us—not even Herodotus himself—has given us quite this full and
easy range over the fringes of the Greek world ; and we have yet to think of
the Euxine and of Thrace.
The Greek cities of the Euxine are, in a way, a world by themselves. Stupendous
mountain barriers and unconquerable barbarian tribes were a safeguard for them
against the Persian Empire. It is little in general that we hear of them. Of
the cities on the northern shore, among the wheat lands, we hear something—many
things, indeed, incidental to the wheat trade and its control reach us,1
but the first real picture of life in these regions is given us centuries later
than our present period by Dio Chrysostom, in one of the two really charming
sketches that he has left.2 He pictures an old-world place.
1 Some
references to this in Chapter X.
2 Dio
Chrysostom, Bovystheniticos, Or. xxxvi. (von Arnim), with which Grote deals in
his last chapter. The other to which I refer is
The Greek seems to have been cut off there from most of the main currents
of national life and to have kept, as French Canada long kept, an air of
another day. Something of this may be due to Dio’s art, just as a parallel
study, made three centuries later still by Synesius, of life in the back parts
of the Cyrenaica, suggests the imitation of Dio himself.1 In the
fourth and third centuries young men from Pontus (as we shall see in a later
chapter) came to Athens for their education, and probably did not return home
quite so unsophisticated as the attractive lad with whom Dio discussed Homer.
It is likely enough that they preferred not to return to Scythia at all. But
the northern shore does not come into Xenophon’s story.
What invasion by an army of some 10,000 hoplites, with women and children
and slaves,—suddenly launched over the mountain range and rolling down upon
them,—meant to these cities, we may in some degree imagine, perhaps, in the
light of modem war, but the ancients were less scrupulous. Andrapodize is not
in the modem vocabulary of warfare, in any language.2 One can only
guess at the population of Trapezus—what could it be ? Twenty thousand people
made a big city—Bristol or Glasgow—in the days of the Commonwealth. If
Trapezus had so many inhabitants, away at the world’s end all by itself, its
nearest Greek neighbours many miles away, the disturbance made by the sudden
advent of the Ten Thousand must have been terrible. Adventurers one and all,
reckless and undisciplined, newly free from desperate perils, eager to get away
to Greece and resolved never to return—there was no predicting what they might
do. Murder and pillage on a small scale were very obvious; the utter sacking of
the city was quite possible. What Xenophon tells us of the doings of Clearetus
in the neighbourhood of Cerasus and of the disorder and danger that followed,
the Euboicos, vii., for which see the Countess Martinengo Cesaresco’s
pleasant book, The Outdoor Life in Greek and Roman Poets, ch. iv.
1 Letter 148.
See Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, p. 334. Both he and Dio speak of
Homer as the sole literature of these places.
2 Cf. Anab. ii.
4, 27. Tissaphemes lets the Greeks plunder the villages of Parysatis ttXijh
dvdpan-oSav—they were not to make slaves of the people.
is typical.1 We can understand that the Greek inhabitants of
the scattered cities of the coast were eager to aid their visitors in getting
away—even to the extent of making roads for them for the purpose, on Xenophon’s
suggestion.2 At Cotyora the soldiers were not admitted within the
walls at all—not even the sick—though they lay forty-five days outside,3
and no opportunity of a market was given them. Sinope, too, the suzerain city
of Cotyora, sent to the Greek generals and warned them that, if violence were
used, they themselves might be forced into alliance with Corylas and the
Paphlagonians—a threat withdrawn on the expostulation of Xenophon,4
though anxiety for Sinope was read plainly enough in the advice to them to
press on to Herakleia by sea.8 At Herakleia, at a meeting of the
soldiers an Achaean proposed that, as the generals fail to secure them
provisions, they resolve to demand of the Herakleots not less than 3000
cyzicenes, or darics; an amendment was accepted substituting 10,000 ; and
Cheirisophos or Xenophon was to make the demand. Both men stoutly refused such
a task— they would be no parties to such violence to a friendly Greek city.
Other envoys were found, less scrupulous, who went to Herakleia with the
demand, reinforcing it with a threat. Herakleia, not unnaturally, on the first
word of the proposal put all her defences in order.* The affair had miscarried,
and the Arcadians and Achaeans resolved to be done with such spiritless leaders
as the Athenian and the Spartan, who really represented no numbers at all in
the army. They went off in a body by themselves, till a disaster cured them of
their desire for independence and reconciled them for the time to their old
leaders, who, spiritless as they were, had none the less rescued them.7
At Calpe they came into touch with Spartan authorities, and problems of another
colour. But, before we consider these, there are other matters to be thought
of, which will take us back to Trapezus.
When the Greeks reached the Euxine and set about considering how they
were to move forward, a man from Thurii carried them all with him in a short
speech. He was tired of
1 Anab. v. 7, 13-26. 2
Anab. v. 1, 14.
8 Anab. v. 5, 6. 1 Anab. v. 5, 7-25 ; 6, 3.
6 Anab. v. 6, 11. 6 Anab. vi. 2, 4-8. 7 Anab. vi. 2, 9-3, 26.
it all, he said—all this life of packing one’s kit, marching, running,
carrying armour, tramping in line, and mounting guard, and fighting. He wanted
to be quit of all this toil and sail home like Odysseus, lying full length on a
ship, and so reach Greece. Every one agreed ; only there were no ships. Then
Cheirisophos offered to go ahead and see Anaxibios, the Spartan navarch who was
a friend of his, and get triremes and merchant vessels from him, if they would
wait till he returned, and he would not be slow. So Cheirisophos was sent on
this errand, which took him longer than he or any one else expected. Meantime
another man, a Laconian perioikos, Dexippos, was sent off on a penteconter to
collect ships also ; for the transport of 10,000 people, all anxious to travel
like Odysseus, involved a whole fleet of one kind of ship and another.
Dexippos, however, was tired of the whole thing too, and seized his chance to
get clear of the Ten Thousand ; and once aboard a ship in his own charge he
went away for good, sailed out of the Euxine, and left his comrades to get home
as they might. An Athenian, sent on a similar errand, brought into harbour all
the vessels he could get. If they were loaded, the Greeks emptied them, and set
guards over the cargo. But the business of transport was going to be slow, and
Dexippos represented a very general feeling.
For now it became clear that everybody had the same wish—if it were only
practicable, to get away and to reach home.1 The army was going to
break up as soon as it conveniently and safely could do it ; and some of them
wished to gojhome “with something.” 2 All this meant danger— an army
in fragments along such a coast engaged in looting was bound to meet disaster ;
it could not “ come off rejoicing.” 3 Yet if they held together,
what lay before them ? The Spartans ruled at that time, as Xenophon said,4
and he was genuinely anxious as to the reception they might have from the
Spartans.
Sparta’s support of Cyrus had compromised her with the King, and the army
of Cyrus was a force that she could neither very well do with nor do without.
To enlist them would
1 Cf. Anab. v. 6, 33 ; also vi. 2, 13-14. 2 Anab. vi. 1, 17.
8 Anab. v. 6, 32. . *
Anab. vi. 5, 8-9, Tore is significant.
involve great expense ; but why enlist so many mercenaries at all in time
of peace ? men would ask. It would be a menace to some state or other ; and in
particular the Persian King, in view of the fleet sent to support Cyrus, could
only regard the enlistment of Cyrus’ Greek army as a notice of some purpose to
declare war upon himself or his dominions. For this Sparta was not at present
prepared or inclined. On the other hand, so large a force could not safely be
left to wander intact about the Greek world, and still less could it be allowed
to take service with any doubtful or hostile power. Anaxibios sent Cheirisophos
back to his men with nothing but a polite message and a vague promise of
enlistment when they should arrive.1 The promise, unaccompanied by
any ships, could hardly be misunderstood by the leaders. The Spartans did not
want them—at any rate as a body—in Greek regions; they would prefer to see them
stay away or break up. But the men were all keen to reach Greece, and to break
up would be ruin—as the Arcadian secession showed.
Some of the soldiers had the notion that they were strong enough to risk
a quarrel with the Spartan rulers, but Xenophon assured them they were not.
Look at the Athenian Empire and its fleet, compare their resources with those
that Athens had —it was absurd; and he bent every endeavour to keeping the
peace.2 Even when Aristarchos, the new harmost of Byzantium, sold as
slaves no less than four hundred of the Cyreians—doing it on the advice of the
polite Anaxibios3— Xenophon, in spite of this monstrous outrage,
managed to avert any breach. The act was typical in a way of Spartan rule—the
extremest oppression and violence and the^utter disregard of right and
wrong—and Xenophon’s pages make it clear, in spite of his long friendship with
Sparta, how bad in every way her predominance was. His emphasis on the power of
a single Spartan in a city 4 reveals to what the fall of Athens had
brought Greece. There was even some danger, as Xenophon told the army, in their
being commanded by an Athenian, while they had a Spartan with them.5
When one surveys the difficulties attending their return to Greece, the
alternative plan which Xenophon was known to
1 Anab. vi. i, 16. 2
Anab. vi. 6, 12-16 ; vii. 1, 25-31.
a Anab. vii. 2, 6. *
Anab. vi. 6, 12. 6 Anab. vi. 1,
26.
favour, becomes interesting—a plan revived and carried into execution by
Alexander the Great. He reflected, he says, upon their numbers; for when they
held a review at Cerasus,1 they still numbered 8600, after losing
perhaps a quarter of their forces in battle, in snow and by disease, and (here
and there) by desertion. They were still a large body of men, hoplites,
peltasts, cavalry, all in good training—and in Pontus, where such a force could
hardly be raised at all. “ It seemed to him a good idea to found a city and
acquire new territory and power for Greece. It would be, he thought, a great
city, when he considered their own numbers and the population on the shores of
the Euxine.” 2 So he consulted the gods. Unfortunately, his
soothsayer had ideas of his own ; a successful prophecy had won him a reward of
3000 darics from Cyrus, and he had managed to keep them through all the risks
of their journey, and he wanted to get home to Greece with them.3 So
he put the story about that Xenophon wished to hold back the army, and found a
city, and get himself a name and power. A Dardanian exile, Timasion,4
who also had plans of his own and dreamed of engaging the whole army to regain
his native place, and make it a centre of conquest or pillage, took pains to
frustrate his chief by insinuating to the merchants of Herakleia and Sinope
that, if they did not take prompt measures to help the army out, Xenophon meant
to stay and found his new state, perhaps by capturing by force some existing
city. The story went all along the coast, as was intended, and the intrigue
prospered in the army. At last Xenophon had to defend himself. First he dealt
with the prophet, and then he admitted that he might have been willing to help
them to capture a city ; but Herakleots and Sinopaeans were now furnishing
ships, and more than one person was guaranteeing monthly pay—well, let them
take the chance when it offered; the colony idea was abandoned; only let them
keep together and see to it there were no desertions— which was a parting shot
at the prophet.6 Even so the matter was not settled, and Xenophon
had to defend himself a little
1 Anab. v. 3, 3. 2
Anab. v. 6, 15.
3 Anab. v. 6, 16-18 ; i.
7, 18. * Anab. v. 6, 23.
6 Anab. v. 6, 21-37. The prophet managed to escape on
a merchant vessel when they were at Herakleia (vi. 4, 13).
later against the charge of plotting to take the whole force back to
Phasis in the extreme east of the Black Sea. His speech was a clever and a
witty one : Greece, they all knew,, was toward the sunset; Phasis toward the
sunrise ; so there could be no mistake as to where they were going. The North
Wind, as a proverb said, took you out of Pontus ; so they had only to stay
ashore when the South Wind blew; and so on; and he passed to a vindication of
himself and a plea for decent and orderly trust and co-operation. The soldiers
listened, and resolved to be done with lawlessness ; to set up a regular court
consisting of the lochagoi, or captains, which might deal with accusations made
in a more orderly way than was possible with stones and shouting ; and to have
the army “ purified as the prophets advised.’'1
So there was to be no new colony on the southern shore of Pontus, thqugh,
when in his narrative he comes to Calpe, Xenophon look‘d back wistfully to his
idea. It was just the very spot, midway between Byzantium and Herakleia, and
not a Greek city between them—nothing but Bithynian Thracians who mishandle
every Greek sailor who falls into their hands. A fine headland juts into the
sea and makes a good haven; there is room for a city of, say, 10,000
inhabitants—a good water-supply, commanded by the stronghold, shipbuilding
timber in plenty down to the very beach, a fertile soil round about that will
produce barley, wheat, figs, and a good wine,# everything, in short, except
olives. Olives, as we have seen already, did not grow round the Black Sea, but
were imported- If his soldiers would not hear of a colony, some of his readers
might take it up. In any case it is interesting to find Xenophon taking the
lead in the matter of fresh colonization. Isocrates, as we shall see, advocated
it for years as a means of dealing with Greek poverty and of getting rid of the
swarms of mercenaries who infested the world. Alexander and his successors
carried it into action. Once again, if Xenophon was, as we have seen he was,
the real inspirer of the great retreat that proclaimed the weakness of Persia
and invited the Macedonian conqueror, here again he is, in truth, a real herald
of that Hellenism to which the wor d owes so much.
When the colony proved impossible and return to Greece
1 Anab. v. 7,
1-35.
could not be managed, what with one Spartan governor and another, escape
suddenly became possible in a totally new direction. Xenophon, and some large
portion of the Cyreians at any rate, took service with Seuthes the Thracian
prince ; and once more the Anabasis opens for us a wholly new and unique
chapter on a part of the outlying world of which we learn very little from any
other author. Some tone of disappointment has been felt in this Seventh Book,
which is perhaps not unnatural. But the whole goes with unflagging spirit, and
for variety and freshness it is well on a level with the rest of the Anabasis.
Mindful of their long j oumey in Asia, the Greeks covenanted that they
should not be taken more than seven days’ march from the sea, and this part of
his bargain Seuthes appears to have kept. His proposals were made to Xenophon
in an interview by night. Xenophon with a small body of men left the army, and
after going sixty stades came on a line of apparently abandoned watch-fires,
behind which, well in the dark, Seuthes’ men were watching. The interpreter
goes forward ; “ it is the Athenian from the army; ” and 200 pel- tasts escort
them to the tower where Seuthes waited, well guarded, with horses bitted and
bridled in case of emergency. They begin conversation with horns of wine in the
Thracian way. After some talk Seuthes says he cannot distrust an Athenian—they
are kindred of his, he knows, and friends, he thinks, on whom he can rely. His
father, he explains, had been king or chief, but when “ the fortunes of the
Odrysians fell sick," he died (of disease) and left Seuthes an orphan,
with Medokos the present king. “ But when I became a youth, I could not endure
to live for ever looking to the table of another. So I sat on his seat beside
him as a suppliant and begged for as many men as he could give me, to do any
mischief I might to the men who drove me out, and not live looking at his
table. So he gave me the men and the horses you shall see at daybreak. And now
I live with these, plundering the land that belonged to my own fathers; and if
you will join me, I think that, with the aid of the gods, I could get my
kingdom again. That is what I ask.” The pay promised is satisfactory. But, if
we cannot manage it, and “ fear come from the quarter of the Spartans,” will
Seuthes receive any of them who comes
for refuge ? “ Yes, like brothers, and have them on my seat, to share all
we can get. And as for you, Xenophon, I will give you my daughter, and if you have
any daughter of yours, I will buy her in the Thracian way; and I will give you
Bisanthe to dwell in, the best place I have upon the sea.”
Bisanthe, the modem Rodosto, had once been the castle of Alcibiades. If
not a colony, a fortress, some foothold on new territory for Greece—that seems
now to be Xenophon’s hope, though it is not realized.
Gomperz for the moment feels it disconcerting to find the pious pupil of
Socrates and the diligent student of ethics laying Thrace waste with fire and
sword, and burning villages, at the bidding of Seuthes. Long centuries after,
Samuel Champlain joined himself and his Frenchmen, with their firearms, to the
Hurons in a similar campaign against the Iroquois, with whom he and his had
till then no quarrel; and French Canada rued it for a hundred and fifty years.
Greece had leamt something already at Myealessos of Thracian methods of
warfare.1 “Next day,” says Xenophon at a stage in the campaign, “
Seuthes burnt down the villages—utterly, and left no house standing, to put
terror into the others as to what they will undergo if they do not submit.” 2
It sounds very modem —as we have come to reinterpret modernity.
We need not follow the story of the campaign. It was severe even for the
Greeks after their experiences in the Armenian mountains. “ There was much snow
and cold so great that the water brought in for dinner froze, and the wine in
the vessels, and many of the Greeks had their noses and ears frostbitten. And
then it was plain why the Thracians wear fox- skin caps down over their ears,
and tunics to cover not only the chest but the thighs, and long riding cloaks
down to the feet, instead of the chlamys, when they ride.”3
The banquet of Seuthes is a pendant to those we have watched elsewhere in
the story.4 The guests sit in a circle, with three-legged stools in
front of them, on which is piled meat and bread skewered together. Seuthes, in
accordance
1 Thuc. vii. 29
: ", The Thracians when they dare can be as bloody as the worst barbarians
” is the historian’s comment. See Chapter III. p. 76.
2 Anab. vii. 4,
1. * Anab. vii. 4, 3, 4. 4 Anab. vii. 3, 21-33.
with the fashion, began and broke up his bread into pieces and threw the
bits to whom he would, and the meat in like manner ; and those who had tables
by them copied him—Arystas the Arcadian excepted, who soon tired of it and fell
to the steady business of dinner, too busy even to drink. “ Give it to
Xenophon,” he said to the cup-bearer; “he’s ready; I’m not.” The cup-bearer
understood Greek, and obeyed, amid general laughter. As the drinking went on,
Thracians came in with presents for the chief, one with a white horse, which
after drinking a horn of wine he gave to him—another with a slave— another with
garments for Seuthes’ wife. Timasion the Dar- danian offered a silver bowl and
a carpet worth ten minae. Gnesippos the Athenian rose and said it was a good
old custom for those who had to give to the king, and for the king to give to
those who had not. Xenophon was in the last case, and had nothing to give, but
when the horn came to him (" he was already fairly well on in
drinking,"1 he says) he rose and made a speech, offering the
king himself and his army, by whose aid he should get for himself lands and
horses and men and fair women. Seuthes jumped up and drained the horn with him,
spilling the last drops in the Thracian way. Music followed of the native kind
on horns and on trumpets of ox-hide—music of a primeval and uncomplicated
style, which made Seuthes leap up again and shout for battle, and do a
war-dance in the character of one dodging a javelin, with great energy. After
that came clowns and jesters, and at sunset the Greeks rose and went to their
camp—Seuthes at least with no signs of drink about him.
Such is life in Thrace, but there are the beginnings of law and order and
civilization, for they mark out the seashore of the Euxine with landmarks to
regulate where a man may, and where he should not, loot a wreck driven ashore.
For want of this, in old days, there had been robbery and fighting and loss of
life. In those regions the Greeks found beds and boxes, and a great many
manuscripts, and all the things that sea-captains carry in their chests.
1 vii. 3,- 29, 17817 yap vjrojrejr<oic6>r
ervyxavev—a phrase familiar in Aristophanes, e.g. Peace, 874. Perhaps the Irish
distinction (which I borrow from Some Reminiscences of an Irish R.M.) achieves
what is meant—" not dhrunk, but having dhrink taken.” It is an interesting
admission to find Xenophon making.
There were difficulties about the pay that Seuthes promised, which need
not delay us. But by now Sparta had come to open war with Tissaphemes, if not
with Persia, and the army of Cyrus was no longer a dreaded incubus but a
welcome reinforcement. The Cyreians crossed once more to Asia and took service
with Thibron. With them went Xenophon, and five years of desultory war lay
before them, before they marched home with Agesilaos by the route that Xerxes
took, with camels in their train.1
If I have to offer an apology for a chapter on a book so obvious as the
Anabasis, it is a simple one. It was the first book in Greek prose that I ever
read—painfully and slowly a chapter or two was crawled through, and then the
book was abandoned for years. Many of my readers will perhaps have the same
dreary memory of it. And then after years I found out what a good story it was,
and came to see how at point after point it is not merely interesting, but
illuminative—one of the very clearest and strongest interpretations of Greek
life ever written.2
1 Xen.
Hellenica, iii. 4, 24. Cf. Herodotus, vii. 86 ; Aristophanes, Birds, 276 f.
2 Since this
chapter was in print, I have read Mr. E. B. Soane’s remarkable book, To
Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise. Mr. Soane crossed the track of Xenophon
in 1909, and lived as a Persian among the Southern Kurds. He came down the
Tigris on much the same sort of raft as Herodotus described (i. 194), and his
account of the Kurds is fresh and singularly vivid.
THE NEW AGE
/ ;
IN October 1777 the news reached London of the defeat of British arms at
Saratoga. Sir John Sinclair, who is described as the prince of busybodies,
heard of it and brought word to Adam Smith, exclaiming in the deepest concern
that the nation was now ruined. Adam Smith was less disturbed. “ There is a
great deal of ruin in a nation,” he said. He was right; nations are oftener
ruined in the newspapers than they are in history, and if they are ruined, it
takes more than a day to do it. Yet, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, a
day may mark the close of one epoch and the beginning of another ; it may bring
home alike to contemporaries and to after generations that a new age has begun,
of grandeur, it may be, or of decline. The battle of Salamis marks the beginning
of a new age of the one kind, the day of Aegospotami of the other. The fourth
century is quite another thing from the fifth ; it is the age of Philip and
Alexander, not of Pericles and Alcibiades; and by the time it ends, our
thoughts are far away from the centres that held them in the fifth century, we
are with Ptolemy and Seleucus, in Alexandria and Babylon, face to face with a
new world, a new civilization, new conceptions of government, and new ideals
of conduct. Demos of the Pnyx is an odd memory of the past; and Athens, which
after all meant Greece for us—her empire is long gone, and Rhodes is capturing
her trade ; she is a fortress, a university, a city of monuments and tourists1—a
sort of Oxford ; and when she counts in history it is as a make-weight, magni
nominis umbra.
With Athens, somehow, as almost every student of history feels, something
else goes—
A Power is passing from the earth To breathless Nature’s dark abyss.
1 Isocrates,
Areop. 66, on the impression made upon visitors to Athens by the great
buildings of the Periclean period.
267
As a brilliant scholar of to-day puts it: “ There is something wrong with
the fourth century. The greatest charm of its predecessor is too volatile for
language. It is the fullness and beauty of Athenian life. After 400 b.c. that is gone. It fades out of
Athens, leaving her ostensibly unchanged, just as the expression which gave all
the charm to a face fades out of it without any definite alteration of the
features.” So writes Mr. Livingstone.1 Julius Beloch, on the other
hand, one of the freshest and most vigorous minds that have dealt with Greek
history in our times, holds another view.2 He admits that the gloomy
social and political conditions of the fifty years that followed the fall of
Athens give a semblance of truth to the view that the bloom of Greece is over—“
yes, but for him only whose gaze is on the surface of things or who confuses
Athens with Greece. For him who will go deeper, the fourth century shows
another picture. He sees fresh life in all directions ; and, if the nation was
sick, it was really from fullness of life, struggling for expression. Never
before or after did Greece produce so great a number of political and military
capacities ; while in literature, art, and science a forward movement reigned
of the most vigorous and most rich in results.” ,
It depends on what we are looking for, and (to some extent) where we look
for it. The eighteenth century in England is a very different story from the
seventeenth—no Milton, no Prince Rupert, no Pilgrim Fathers ; Adam Smith seems
much more characteristic of it than the Young Pretender ; science and sense are
in the ascendant, and poetry, apart from echo- work, there is none till the
Task was published in 1785 and Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Yet England, if less
interesting to the student of imaginative literature, especially if he limits
himself to poetry, had in many ways never been at all so great. But there is no
denying that to most human beings the century between the deaths of Queen Mary
and of Oliver Cromwell means incomparably more. The parallel here suggested
with fourth-century Greece may be carried further and may give
1 In his
admirable book, The Greek Genius and its Meaning to Us, p. 239.
2 Griechische
Geschichte, ii. 367. I plead guilty to compressing one sentence rather than
translating it.
us some clue. Those hundred years in England are years of boundless life
and energy—every man seems instinct with force, and, as suggested before,1
every man seems to have a grip upon all life, to understand the whole ; he may
see it from an angle—then every other man shall see it from that same angle
too. There is clash of opinion endlessly and fiercely; and England and the
world gain by it, for, as Milton said, “opinion in good men is but knowledge in
the making.” There are wars for religion, with the Spaniard and the Pope abroad,
with the King and the bishops and others at home— " and,” as the humorous
Burton sighs, “ all for the peace of thee, 0 Zion ! ” And then there is a
change when Charles II comes home again. There is no longer any national glory
which the King will not sell, till a new King is fetched from Holland. There is
no poetry—except a couple of epics written by a blind survivor of the old days.
And England wants to hear very little more about religion ; let her only have
toleration and be done with the quarrels of churches. Let her get to business,
and, forgoing raptures and ideals and enthusiasms, let her see facts. So to
facts England turned—to trade, and built up a n^w commercial system, and laid
the foundations of a Canadian Dominion and an Indian Empire ; to science and
philosophy—and Newton and Locke taught Europe to think, and the Royal Society
became an integral part of national life ; to comfort, and the nineteenth
century became possible. Afterwards, because England was a nation, and not a
city, other things followed. A man, according to Isocrates,2 may
escape some things because of the accidents of life, but a city has a certain
immortality which makes inevitable the consequences of her acts. A man may miss
much by early death, but even a city has nothing like the immortality of a
nation. With this in mind we may compare and contrast the story of Athens with
that of our own country.
Athens had her great century—her century of victory over Persian and
islander, of empire over the sea and commerce, of leadership in everything
that makes human life, in art, literature, music, all the preoccupations and
interests of mind and spirit. Her huge ideals became incompatible with the
peace of the world. “ They are the sort,” said the Corin-
1 See Chapter II. p. 38. 3 De Pace, 120.
thian speaker, “ that can never have quiet themselves, nor let other men
have it.” 1 The weariness that came to England from civil war came
to Athens from foreign war. Here perhaps it helped England that she is a nation
that tires quickly of the strain of thought, in spite of Milton’s glowing
belief to the contrary. The day came when the foreigner imposed by force upon
Athens the peace she needed. Cleon had taunted the people, who followed him
into extravagance only too readily, with being " slaves of fancy,” with “
always seeking something different from the conditions under which we have to
live ”—with being idealists in short.2 In the fourth century, in
spite of the regrets of thinking people that the Demos is still at the mercy of
clever demagogues and unscrupulous generals, the dominant note of Athens is
the exact opposite of what Cleon said it was in his day. As far as so bright a
people could, in weariness they renounced the ideal world for the actual and
concentrated themselves on “ the conditions under which we have to live.” The
sense of fact is the dominant thing in the life and thought of the whole period
; and to trace its influence and its manifestations is the matter we now have
in hand.
The Peloponnesian War took out of Athens far more than any modem war
takes out of a modem nation. First as to losses in battle and the like,
Isocrates, rehearsing the cost of the Imperial idea to Athens, passes from the
old disasters of Egypt and Cyprus to the Peloponnesian War and mentions two of
them. " In Sicily they lost 40,000 men and 240 triremes; and finally at
the Hellespont 200 triremes. And the ships that were lost by tens and fives and
more, and the men that died by the thousand and two thousand, who could count ?
Only this was one of the regular duties, to hold a public burial for them every
year, to which many from the neighbouring cities and from the other parts of
Greece used to come, not to join us in mourning the dead, but to exult together
in our misfortunes. . . . The families of the most famous men and the greatest
houses, that survived the revolution against the tyrants and the Persian War,
we shall find, disappeared in the time
1 Thuc. i. 70, 9.
8 Thuc.
iii. 38, 5> SoOXot OVTCS tu>v ardmav, . . . 7> CyTovvrcs re aXXo ti as elireiv r) iv oh (afiev. Cf. p. 74.
of the Empire ; ” and he laments that on the burgess rolls in their stead
are the names of foreigners from all sorts of places.1 So he wrote
some fifty years after Aegospotami—an old man recalling what he remembered too
well from boyhood and youth ; and he emphasizes how near the survivors came to
being sold for slaves and Athens to disappearing for ever. In the second place
we have to remember the great plague in the early part of the war, which cost
Athens, Eduard Meyer calculates, something like 17,000 soldiers, and cost her
more still in spirit, Mr. Zimmern suggests—" the old hope and reverence
and self-discipline and joy had passed away as in a dream.” It may be too that
in these years, as Mr. W. H. S. Jones has maintained, malaria became endemic in
Greece, a constant drain on the nation’s vitality.
Industry, too, on which, as agriculture declined in Attica, Athens relied
more and more, was terribly affected by the long strain of the war. Everything
had to be sacrificed to shipbuilding, and fleet after fleet was lost. The
capital expended on ships must have run into thousands of talents. We do not
hear in the fourth century of the great sums the city reckoned up so
confidently before the war. Piracy rose as the Athenian fleet declined, and the
Spartan rulers never seem to have dealt very effectively with it; it meant much
less to an inland and agricultural state. The occupation of Deceleia during the
last nine years of the war meant the stripping of Attica of everything that
could be catried away, down to the tiles of the farm-house roofs.2
More serious still, " more than twenty thousand slaves deserted, many of
them artisans.” 3 The industries of Athens and the mining in
Laureion depended on slave labour. Add to all this the crowding to Athens of
citizens from the lost dependencies and cleruchies, stripped of everything.4
An interesting chapter in Xenophon’s Memorabilia6 tells how
Socrates met a friend towards the end of the troubles under
1 Isocrates, de Pace, 86-89.
1 Hellenica
Oxyrhynchia, 12,, 3, 4. 8 Thuc. vii. 27, 5.
* Cf. Xen. Mem. ii. 8, 1. !‘We
lost,” says Eutheros, "our possessions outside the country, and my father
left nothing whatever in Attica. So now I am come back, I am driven to work
with my hands to get food.”
5 Xen. Mem. ii.
7, 1-12.
the Thirty, and remarked on his gloom. Yes, he was gloomy; sisters and
nieces and cousins have crowded in on him, till they are fourteen of them, free
persons, at home ; the enemy holds the land, and nothing comes from thence ;
house-property in Athens will not let—the city is empty; there is no selling
the furniture, and as for a loan, “ I think one would be likely to find money
lying in the street quicker than to borrow it.” Socrates urges him to set all
these women to work ; they can spin and weave, and people will buy garments.
And the story ends with wool being bought, the women getting to work and
brightening up, till, as Aristarchus tells Socrates, they chaff him with being
the only idle person in the house. The story is interesting in several ways;
for our purposes it is a little picture of the straits to which the whole
nation was reduced and a hint of how it recovered. The walls were gone, but the
harbours were left;1 Athens was still in the centre of the Greek world
; winds and currents remained the same ; and when peace was restored, commerce
began to follow its old lines and they led to Athens.2
Athens regained her commercial supremacy over the Greek world, but her
empire was gone. She lay at the mercy of her enemies, for the long walls that
linked her to the Peiraieus were destroyed, and for ten years she was
compulsorily kept at peace with the world. Then Conon, after his years of
exile, came back in the character of a victdrious Persian admiral3
and persuaded Phamabazos to re-build the walls—“ no heavier blow, he knew,
could be dealt to the Spartans.” * “ He won the sea-battle,” says Isocrates, “
and hurled the Spartans from their dominion, and freed the Greeks; not only did
he build the walls of his country, but he raised the city to the glory from
which she had fallen.” 8 So says the patriot; but it was not quite
the old glory. The essential fact was that the world had
1 In a tideless
sea like the Mediterranean a harbour was a harbour and had no rival in the
river-mouth that could be a harbour at high tide. Cf. Forbes and Ashford, Our
Waterways, p. 145, on the almost incredible differences that tide makes.
2 Isocrates,
Panath. (342 B.C.) § 57, boasts of Athens iv tkarrooiv cTctrtv dvaXajSovaav
avrijv KaTcwo\efi^6i). On commerce, see further Chapter X. generally, and
Chapter XII. p. 364.
8 Diodorus, xiv. 81, Koviav 8e o rav JXepaav
vavapxps. . . •
* Xen.
Hellenica, iv. 8, 9. 6
Isocrates, Philip, 64.
undergone a great change—a greater change by far than the substitution of
a Spartan for an Athenian Empire. The centre of gravity had shifted, and it
took time to find it. By 386, when Athens reluctantly and Sparta triumphantly
signed the King’s Peace, it was plain that the world’s centre of gravity lay
outside Greece—hundreds of miles away, in Susa. Still it was not clear that it
need ; for first Xenophon with the Ten Thousand, and then Agesilaos, had shown
that Persia was not a strong power; and the question rose as to where the next
shift would be. The city-state was not to be the centre of everything ; and
men somehow felt it and began to turn to what interested them more.1
In that sentence perhaps lies the most signal change of all.
The Spartans had imposed upon Athens, as upon other places, a government
entirely to Lysander’s mind. But, as we have seen, the Thirty fell and
Democracy on the familiar lines took their place, to hold it with a surer
tenure than ever. It was not that men were necessarily 'better pleased with
Democracy than before, but that, as it was with the Republic in France in the
seventies, it was “ the government that divides us least.” Historians are
agreed that the hopeless failure, first of the Four Hundred, and then of the
Thirty, had discredited for generations every idea of oligarchy. Thirty or
four hundred or five thousand—it was all one ; no “ Constitution,” which
limited or moderated or in any way tampered with Democracy had a chance. In
their few months the Thirty had killed fifteen hundred people.2
Henceforth there was no alternative to Democracy, and even moderates like
Xenophon recognized the fact and accepted it.3 That they should be
hearty in their acceptance of the rule of the Ecclesia, was too much to ask in
reason ; they accepted it, and put up with its exactions, liturgies, trierarchies,
festivals, and law- courts ; but they might fairly ask to be allowed to give
their minds to what interested them more.
It was long, however, before all echoes of the quarrel between the City
and the Peiraieus died away. As late as 382 there are traces of it in the
speeches of Lysias. Lysias, of course, and his
1 Cf. the lines
of Euripides quoted by Callicles in Plato, Gorg. 484E.
2 Isocrates,
Areop. 67. * Cf. Beloch, Gr.
Gesch. ii. 192.
18
family had suffered heavily under the Thirty. Anyone who wishes to
realize with what Thrasybulus and the leaders of the restored Democracy had to
contend, has only to read some of Lysias’ speeches. They mark an epoch in the
development of Greek prose. Long afterwards Dionysius of Halicarnassus set
about analysing the literary gifts of Lysias—the purity of his language, his
clearness—his power of being lucid and brief at the same moment—his vivid way
of bringing scene and character before your eyes alive, with no loss of passion
or feeling, and yet naturally and simply—“ he makes things look serious and
impressive and great, and yet he uses the most ordinary terms and has no hint
of poetic furniture ... he seems to talk exactly like any ordinary person,
'while all the time he is utterly unlike any ordinary person. ” With this easy
style, " so free from artifice that he seems to speak without preparation
and on the spur of the moment,” he tells the court the tale of the Thirty, and
brings out the share of Eratosthenes or Agoratos in those deeds of tyranny and murder,
till the reader wonders how any Athenian court could resist the inference and
the appeal that come of themselves from the facts so plainly and movingly
stated ; and as he wonders there comes to him a new sense of the greatness of
the achievement of Thrasybulus and his friends. “ They took oaths that there
should be amnesty,” says Xenophon in his quiet way, “ and to this day they live
together under one constitution, and Demos abides by his oaths ”—a testimony,
as a German historian says, the more honourable to the Demos, the further
removed the writer himself is from the democratic standpoint. The policy was
sense, moderation, reconciliation ; and it was triumphant.
The two most prominent names are those of Thrasybulus and Archinos. They
were together at Phyle, and they worked together in the reconstruction. To them
we may attribute the resolution that the People repay to Sparta the hundred
talents the Thirty borrowed for the people’s undoing—a master-stroke in
reconciliation, even if Spartan pressure helped it through.1
Archinos, however, checked the plan
1 For the
hundred talents, see Demosthenes, Lept. 12 ; Isocrates, Areop. 68-69; Plut.
Lysander, 21. Lysias, Evat. 59, says the loan was to hire mercenaries, and they
hired “ everybody—whole cities of them.”
of Thrasybulus for enfranchising the loyal metics at once and in a block.
Citizenship since the days of Periclfes meant not merely service of the state
but claim on the state ; and it was perhaps not wise to create too many claims
in a hurry. Archinos’ readiness of resource served Athens well in the critical
days, and his invention of the paragraphe (demurrer) put an effectual check on
the dangers of the law courts and helped to make the amnesty a reality. One
characteristic thing that he did, was the carrying of a law to substitute the
Ionic for the Attic alphabet in Athenian inscriptions— emphatically, an act of
common sense, and “ a significant symptom of the impulse to unity, vigorous in
the race.” 1
Thrasybulus is the more outstanding figure—the leader in the movement on
Phyle and in the fighting in the Peiraieus —the man who brought back the
people, and who led them for years, till Conon, with his victory of Cnidos, his
Persian gold, and his restoration of the walls, outshone him. He had undergone heavy
losses in the bad days, and he knew who were responsible for them, yet, as
Isocrates points out in 401 B.C., for all his power in the city he respected
the amnesty, and did not ask more than any other citizen.2 But the
extremists did not like him. Lysias, writing for Mantitheos, just after the
battle of Corinth (394 B.C.), represents his client, in spite of the losses to
his tribe and the many killed, as “ retreating after the impressive Steirian,
who taunts everybody with cowardice.” 3 There was another rather
conspicuous Thrasybulus of Collytos,4 so the demes had to be used
to distinguish them ; hut the omission of the statesman’s own name and the
addition of the adjective show malice. There was plenty of malice, though
perhaps it was not always so silly as when “ another Dionysius ” was detected
in Thrasybulus—a tyrant of the Syracusan type in the liberator ! 8
His last great service to Athens was the naval expedition of 389, when he set
up a democracy in Byzantium, and made allies of Chalcedon
1 On the work of
Archinos, see ’Ad. no A. 40 ; Isocrates, 18, 0. Callim. (a speech on a
paragraphe, explaining and illustrating it admirably) ; Aeschines, c. Ctes. 195
; Demosthenes, Timocr. 135. The alphabet, Theopompus, Frag. 149, and Beloch,
Gr. Gesch. ii. 526-527.
2 Isocrates,
18, c. Callim. 24. 3 Lysias,
16, pro Mant. 15.
* Lysias, 26, 23 ; Xen.
Hellenica, v. 1, 27.
6 Cf. Aristophanes, Eccles. 203, Plutus, 550.
and Mitylene, beside reconciling Seuthes the Thracian King and Amedokos
the Odrysian to each other, and making both friends of Athens. And then he was
killed in his tent by night in some quarrel of soldiers. Meantime the
extremists had deposed and recalled him, and superseded him with Agyrrhios, the
democrat hero of the three obols.1 “ He did well to die so,” cried
Lysias, “ for it was not fitting for him to live with such designs as his on
foot, nor to die at your hands in view of the good he appears to have done you
in old days.” It is such utterances that make Athenian democracy of this
period' repulsive and serve to explain why people went abroad or kept aloof
from national life. Thucydides indeed makes it quite plain that generosity to
those who served it and who failed had never been a mark of the Athenian state.
Still, injustice so flagrant as this to Thrasybulus was a new thing— if we may
leave the case of Themistocles undecided. It is Xenophon who keeps the fame of
Thrasybulus alive for ever, and here his quiet word suffices : “so died
Thrasybulus, a good and great man by all admission—avt)p ayados.” 2
With Thrasybulus was associated Anytos.3 Isocrates praised
them together for their disinterested patriotism in 401; whether he would have
done so a few years later is another question. For Anytos is known to history
as the man who prosecuted Socrates on the charges of not accepting the gods of
the city, of introducing other new gods, and of corrupting the youth. Posterity
has been unanimous in condemning the successful prosecutor and the court that
voted for the death of Socrates, so that it is of more importance to try to see
their grounds of action. Of the various books written by Socrates’ pupils upon
the case, Xenophon’s Memorabilia perhaps helps us best to understand the action
of Anytos and his people, for it grapples most closely and sympathetically with
the actual prejudices that influenced the verdict. The Athenians were a pious
people in their way— which was not our modern way, nor the way of Socrates ;
and
1 The rpiwfiahav
for attendance at the Ecclesia ; Aristophanes, Eccles. 102, 186, 307 ; Plutus,
329. See Demosthenes, Timocr. 134.
2 Hellenica, iv.
8, 31. Grote echoes his praise, and Meyer and Beloch both remark, with
sympathy, upon the sentence of Xenophon.
3 Anytos and the
corn trade (Lysias, 22)-
Xenophon in the first book of his memoirs devotes himself to showing how
pious and god-fearing Socrates really was in all the conduct of his life, not
merely in a higher or esoteric sense, but in the ordinary sense of the words.
He emphasizes how Socrates sacrificed to the gods of Athens, how he believed in
divination, how he taught his pupils to worship and trust the gods and to
sacrifice to them—Kahhvvafiiv S' epheiv.1
This was very well; but contemporaries who did not understand
Socrates—and who did ?—might be forgiven for thinking that the conduct and
careers of the most conspicuous of Socrates’ pupils were very strong evidence
that Socrates was anything but a moral teacher. Aristophanes long ago had shown
up Socrates in his Clouds, and the play was remembered ;2 and time
had shown that the comic poet was not very far wrong when he drew the son of
Strepsiades. Alcibiades and Critias were two of the cleverest young men in
Athens and of the best families ; they consorted with Socrates ; and what did
they learn of him ? 3 They had wrecked the Empire, ruined Attica,
upset the Democracy, established a tyranny, and been the death of hundreds and
thousands of Athenians. Xenophon replies that, so long as they went with
Socrates, they conducted themselves aright. But they were men of great ambition
; they frequented Socrates’ company not to learn his self-government and
self-restraint, but to acquire the arts of speech and of public life, and they
left him—" leapt away from him ”—as soon as they thought they were equal
to political careers. Exactly ; and when in later years Plato’s dialogues
appeared, there were disastrous admissions about this training. Socrates there
figures as a master of dialectic, sly, ingenious, ironical, full of twists and
turns and cleverness, an adept at tripping up common-sense people and making
ordinary experience, the practical,perhaps unreflective, wisdom of daily life,
look absurd. " They find themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing
to say in this new game, of which words are the counters ; and yet all the time
they are in the right.” 4 The young men learnt the tricks of
Socrates,
1 Mem. i. 3, 3.
See Chapter VI. p. 183.
2 See Plato,
Apol. i8b, C-19C.
3 Aeschines,
Timarch. 173.
* Adeimantos in Plato, Rep.
vi. 487B.
and used them freely ; 1 and it led to family divisions, and
to ill-feeling wherever they went. The Athenians knew as well as we do that of
all types the most unsufferable are clever youths and advanced women ;—even
Euripides disliked them. But to go deeper than mere tricks of speech and bad
manners, there was a strong feeling that Socrates unsettled men. I do not know
whether Anytos ever read Plato’s Apology ; if he did, he might well have urged
that there could be no more damaging admission than the famous sentence, “ the
unexamined life is un-live-able for a human being ” ;2 it was the
very charter of the individualist and the anarchist; it meant the unsettlement
of everything, and implied the reference of everything in state and life and
religion, of the whole body of human relations, to the individual judgment.3
Alcibiades’ whole career was a commentary on that principle. There never was
any Athenian who had exercised an influence so subtly destructive of Democracy
as Socrates. Even Plato represents the personified laws of Athens, reminding
Socrates how he had always praised Sparta and Crete as well-governed.4
His emphasis on the opinion of the expert was obviously antidemocratic. As for
Socrates’ piety, there was that poem of Critias on the origin of the gods,
which he traced to the happy thought of a cunning fellow who invented an
invisible police to quench secret lawlessness 5—a fine outcome of
religious guidance by Socrates.
Still the hemlock-cup was a blunder; it did nothing to check the
tendencies of the modern culture, nothing to consolidate the state, nothing to
counteract the spread of individualism. It alienated thoughtful people from
the
1 See
the dialogue of Alcibiades and Pericles (Xen. Mem. i. 20, 40-46) referred to in
Chapter IV. p. 116. .
2 Plato, Apol. 3
8a. I find it very hard
to get any clear idea of the dates of Plato’s works.
3 This is always
the conservative argument; it meets us again in Plutarch in another connexion.
Invariably futile as it is, it has a certain obvious sense about it, but what
those who use it fail to see is the fundamental unbelief that prompts its use.
4 Crito,
52E.
5 A p. Sextus
Empiricus, adv. Math. ix. 54. One feature of the rule of the Thirty noted by
Isocrates (Areop. 66) is their contemptuous treatment of the temples, built
with such splendour by the Democracy {Koa^ijjaaaav rf/v nohtv).
Democracy. They did not renounce it; they only left it alone the more, so
far as they could, and turned to what had more interest for them. What this
attitude means in a modern community, whether state or municipality, we are
beginning to realize. Where state and municipality are one and the same, and
when “ some lofty soul bom in a mean city, the politics of which he contemns
and neglects,” some pure-minded man, who “ will not join in the wickedness of
his fellows, but neither is he able singly to restrain all their fierce
natures,” comes to the practical conclusion that, as he cannot be of use to the
state, he will hold his peace, and go his own way, or, like a traveller in a
dust-storm, will shelter under a wall, content to live his own life and to be
innocent1— state and man suffer perhaps even more than they do with
us.
The city-state in the fourth century has lost the " integrity ” or
" unity ” which it had in the age of Pericles. The stress is shifting more
and more to the individual—a movement that had begun indeed long before, but
was now more evident. Tjie whole sophistic Aufklarung, the teaching of
Socrates, the attitude of Euripides to life, tended to make “ man the measure
of all,” 2 to emphasize the individual; and the individual always
likes to be emphasized. The Peloponnesian War itself- contributed in the same
direction. The art of war was not the same thing at the end of it as at the
beginning.3 The career of Demosthenes the general changed many
things and suggested many—a new value, for instance, for lightarmed troops ;
and the hapless end of Cleon was a forcible illustration of the fact that to
lead an assembly and to lead an army demand different gifts. The length of the
war and of the several campaigns in it made it clear that finance was too
serious a matter to be entrusted to an official elected by lot, as under the
constitution of Cleisthenes. Thus, as national life grew complex, functions
were specialized, and in the fourth century we find financiers, demagogues, and
generals in different classes. A demagogue and a general
1 Plato, Rep. vi. 496.
1 Adam, Gifford Lectures, p. 274, emphasizes that Protagoras meant not “
universal man,” but man as the individual and not the genus. He cites
Theaetetus, 152A, and refers to Nestle’s criticism of the other view in his
Euripides, p. 406, n. 12.
8 See Chapter VII. p. 218.
might work together, and a financier with them; but, just as it appears
that in modem athletics Greeks never do so well in a team as Turks and such
races,1 because every Greek must play for himself, so in the fourth
century political alliances were unstable combinations. The group would be
dissolved, and the men in it would be hand and glove with their bitterest
enemies of yesterday against their former colleagues. Timotheos swears publicly
that he will prosecute Iphicrates for being an alien — and then they seal a
partnership with a betrothal of their children. And what became of the state
meanwhile ? When it began to be tiresome, the great general coolly went away
and lived in Lesbos. So much for the outcome in actual life of the insistence
of Socrates upon the expert. The expert becomes inevitable; and then, as we
find to-day, some one else will pay more for him, and he goes.
In every field of life the expert and the individual had a new
predominance. In the old days of the Persian War they put up no bronze statues
in honour of Themistocles or Miltiades.nor did they call the sea-fight at
Salamis Themistodes’ battle but the Athenians’, and the fight at Marathon was
the state’s, not Miltiades’; but nowadays most people, continues Demosthenes,2
say that Timotheos took Corcyra, and Iphicrates cut up the Spartan mom, and
Chabrias won the sea-fight off Naxos. Statues of individuals were multiplied past
counting. “ If,” writes Dr. Ernest Gardner,3 “ there is one
characteristic which, more than any other, marks the distinction of Greek art
of the fourth century from that of the fifth, it is the greater prominence of
the individual and personal element, alike in employer, in artist, and in
subject.” He points out how, apart from statues of victorious athletes, almost
all the chief works of art of the fifth century were public dedications, made
at the expense of the state, and recording the triumphs of the people, or
giving expression to its religious aspirations. In the fourth century the
private dedication is more prominent. The, individuality of the various masters
seems to assert itself more strongly. Portraits
1 Pears, 'Turkey and her People.
1 Demosthenes, 23, Aristocr. 196-198.
8 A Handbook of Greek Sculpture, pp. 350, 351, 450,
363.
are made with realistic exactness—Lucian tells how Demetrius of Alopece
made one of the Corinthian generals, Pellichos,
“ high-bellied, bald, his clothes half off him, some of the hairs in his
beard caught by the wind, his veins prominent,” and Dr. Gardner contrasts it
with the bust of Pericles by Cresilas. “ The Aphrodite of Praxiteles had as
great an influence on later art, and represents as essential a part of Greek
religion as the Zeus or Athena of Phidias. But alike the choice of the subject
and the manner in which it is treated belong not only to a different artist but
also to a different age.” It was said in antiquity that the model for the
Cnidian Aphrodite was Phryne, and whether this is true or not, Praxiteles left
two other statues of her. She too represerts an aspect of the individualism of
the new age ; she and her profession have as individuals a far larger place in
literature and biography.
Biography is one of the features of the new century. Ion of Chios, with
the sketches in his Epidemiai, is a forerunner, but the greatest and most
obvious contrast lies between Thucydides and Xenophon. Xenophon indeed in the
Hellenica tries to follow the Thucydidean model, but there are always happier
moments when he lets himself go in accord with his own instinct and writes of
his hero or the scene he has witnessed with his own eyes—of Agesilaos on the
frontiers of Boeotia, or in parley with Pharhabazos, or arranging a marriage
for an ally.1 Alcibiades comes again into history, but rather as a
controversy in biography. Plato’s characters in his dialogues speak aloud of
the age. There is Anytos sensible, pragmatic, impossible, with his idea that
any Athenian kalos k&gathos—“ gentleman,” let us say, and be democrats with
him—would be a better instructor of youth than any sophist; and if we ask, how
or where this gifted Any Man learnt what he has to teach ? why, where but from
the “ gentlemen ” of his father’s generation ? Of course Anytos is right—
ducimus
autem hos quoque felices qui ferre incommoda vitae nec jactare jugum vita
didicere magistra.
1 This contrast
between Xenophon trying to write in the style of Thucydides and writing in his
own is brought out by Ivo Bruns, Lit. Portrdt, p. 38.
Life is the best of teachers, even when we only take her as a companion
or a taskmistress but when once her authority is challenged, what has she to
say—or Anytos ? But Plato has achieved here a portrait—doubly or trebly
significant; it is not a parody—Anytos would admit that; but it is a fatal
criticism all the same ; and that such portraits are made is a sign of the
times, a new thing. Callicles in the Gorgias is an even greater triumph—he is
so tremendously right and sensible—and hopeless, and never sees it. There is
nothing in Aristophanes to equal either of them. The later years of the century
see Characters written with great wit and penetration by Thepphrastus, but far
from rivalling the intensely individual portraits of Plato.
Portraiture and biography are manifestations of that triumph of the sense
of fact which we noted as the mark of the age. Philosophy is another and a
greater, and like biography it implies prose. The old philosophers had used
verse, bdt for analysis prose is the true medium. Verse had done its utmost for
analysis and criticism in the hands of Euripides, and now prose began to take
its place. Poetry was of course written— it always is ; but the ode on The
Persians composed by Timotheos in the first decade of the new century is
tiresome and empty ; as an exercise in metre, we are told it is perfect, and,
no doubt, it went well to its music ; it was good enough if you did not care
about the words sung. Prose prevailed, and the century gave Greece some of its
greatest masters in prose. No one by now, if he wished his book to be read,
would take Herodotus as a model, nor, as a rule, Thucydides. But from the very
close of the war we have three of the greatest of Greek prose writers rising
steadily to the height of their powers. Enough for the present has been said of
Lysias, the first to emerge. For narrative Greek literature has few to match
Xenophon, and no one in dialogue to approach Plato. Isocrates had an enormous
influence on Greek style right down into the days of the Roman Empire—not
greatly for the gain of readers in after days. Demosthenes was yet to come.
Names such as these go far to show that there was still abundance of life in
the Greek stock, if it needs to be shown. An age that teaches mankind to think,
and gives it a speech adequate to render its thought, is a great age, even if
empire is gone and
greater changes are coming. The fact and the individual, criticism and
independence—one does not need to repeat that here also they mark the period.
And what became of the state meanwhile, as we asked a few pages back ?
Individualism, though the ugly abstract term had not appeared, was the
prevailing philosophy of street and market, unconscious as such potent
philosophies generally are. When Apollodorns told the Athenian court of his
troubles with the crew of his trireme, he explained that the rowers, whom he
had got from the roll provided by the authorities, waited with him on the ship
till they should come home in due course, but they were poor workmen ; “ my own
rowers had confidence in themselves and in their powers of rowing, and they
deserted and went wherever they thought they would once more get the highest
pay, reckoning the present advantage to outweigh any future dangers, if ever I
caught them again.” 1 Years before the end of the Peloponnesian War
this very habit of desertion had paralysed Athenian fleets again and again ;
and we can hardly blame the sailors, for there is a limit to the service one
will render to a state that provides neither pay nor rations. When a state
either will not or cannot provide these for its men, it is teaching them to
think for themselves and of themselves. The same weakness tells upon every
naval and military endeavour of Athens and most other city-states during the fourth
century.
Xenophon gives us a conversation between Socrates and the younger
Pericles which anticipates or recalls features of a later day ; Athenians will
not drill (they ridicule the idea of it); they will not obey magistrates, and
they will not agree.2 Isocrates complains that they will not face
the enemy even in front of their own walls ; 3 and the demand of
Demosthenes that Athenians should serve in person is famous. No doubt the
change was due to several causes ; the state in peace had to pay for ordinary
services in law court and ecclesia, and it was only reasonable to expect it to
do so for military service in war ; but there were other reasons. A commercial
and industrial
1 [Dem.] 50,
Polycles, 16. This may explain the Athenian practice in an earlier day,
mentioned to Tissaphemes by Alcibiades, of not paying the rowers up to date
(Thuc. viii. 45, 2).
2 Xen. Mem.
iii. 5, 15. s Isocrates,
de Pace, 77.
people cannot suddenly leave all its business for an indefinite time, as
a nomadic or (to some extent) a farming community may. So the states had
recourse to mercenaries, and for one cause and another there was abundance of
these “wandering men,” as Isocrates again and again points out, his explanation
being that it is due to poverty. It may be also that Greece was over-populated
again.1 Slave-labour at all events was a factor in driving freemen
abroad. But it was not only poor men who went wandering off as soldiers for
hire, or deserted their ships to seek better wages ; we find the habit of
foreign travel established. Actors went from city to city, and came to be
trusted as international agents. Physicians apparently were also a wandering
race from Democedes downwards. According to Aristophanes, about 388 Athens was
without a physician.®
Chremylos. Is there a doctor now
in all the town ?
There are no fees and therefore there’s no skill.
Blepsidemos. Let’s think awhile.
Chremylos. There’s none.
Blepsidemos. No more there is.
Thus sailor and soldier, physician and philosopher, were content to lack
a country, to live abroad and be comfortable. If Athens had abundance of
foreign merchants domiciled in the Peiraieus, we may well suppose that foreign
ports had Athenian residents. Plato and Xenophon illustrate how readily men of
culture were content to be citizens of the world. One inference may be drawn at
once—that, in spite of wars and jealousies between the governments of states,
ordinary people were beginning to realize that one part of the Greek world was
very like another; and when this sort of feeling begins to be general at any
period of history, it is a sign of further changes.
If it meant the decline of the city-state, or even its disappearance—why
not ? The question was already beginning to be asked. In the Gorgias Callicles
goes back to the old sophistic distinction between Nature and Convention, as
anyone must who has travelled the world and has any strong
1 This is a
guess merely. Most of the estimates of population at this period which I have
seen appear to me to be rather too conjectural.
2 Plutus, 407.
sense for fact. Polus has challenged Socrates on the case of Archelaos
the Macedonian usurper, and sarcastically dilated on his “ misery,” 1—and
has suffered the natural consequences of an argument with Socrates. Callicles
sees that Polus tripped over Nature and Custom ; so he joins in and maintains
that, if we stick to what clearly is Nature, and will be done with Convention,
we shall get a grip of realities. Nature shows that it is right that the
stronger should have the advantage— shows it in the case of animals, and of
mankind too; in states and races the stronger rules, and ought to rule. Of
course, society, to protect itself, weaves spells around the strong from the
very cradle—instilling conventional notions about “ fair ” and “ just ” ; but
when a really strong man rises up and flings off all this nonsense, all our
prescriptions, and enchantments, and laws contrary to Nature, lo! and behold,
we find we have a Master, and there is real natural Justice all ablaze and
plain to see.2 Real natural beauty and justice require that a man,
who is to live the really right life, should allow his desires to grow to the
utmost and not repress them, but be able by his manhood and his general sense
to gratify them to the full whatever they are. Of course, in his turn Callicles
is tripped and tangled by Socrates ; but, all the same, he is not convinced.
The supposed date of the dialogue is a little before the end of the
Peloponnesian War. If the impulsive Callicles overstates things in his generous
indignation, the principle which he lays down is one supremely operative in the
period that follows. Not everybody tried to play Archelaos—far from it; but
men sat loose to the traditions of race and state, and if the state suffered,
well ? What did Nature say ? If Nature did not speak in Callicles’ emphatic
way, she said very much the same things, and plenty of people thought with her.
To a certain extent they were right; the city-state was not everything; perhaps
we all of us overestimate the significance of any and every state. Euripides
in the previous generation had challenged the moral right of the state to play
with human life. The new challenge threatened the very existence of the state.
One feature of the new age is the massing of wealth in a few hands, and
the employment of it for pomp and enjoyment.
1 Plato, Gorg. 470, 471. 2 Gorg. 483, 484.
Timotheos, Chabrias, and Meidias are mentioned as building themselves
sumptuous palaces—Timotheos even included a tower in his design.1 “
Some people,” says Demosthenes, indicating the political leaders of the day, “
have provided themselves with private houses more imposing than our public
buildings ; and the lower the fortunes of the city have fallen, the higher
theirs have risen.” 2 Xenophon describes the views of
Socrates on house-building, perhaps with more than a glance at his later
contemporaries; “pictures,” he says, “ and decorations take away more enjoyment
than they add.”3 In the grand old days of Athenian greatness, so
Isocrates tells us in 380 B.C., men did not despise the common gbod; “ they
neither enjoyed it as if it were their own, nor neglected it as if it were
other people's ” ; they did not judge happiness by a money standard ; their
only rivalry was to be the first to do the state a service.4 Five-and-twenty
years later, in 355, he returns to the contrast of past and present with a
still gloomier feeling. In the old days they did not count expensiveness piety,
nor keep extraneous festivals, whiph involved banquets, on a sumptuous scale,
while they sublet to contractors the holiest sacrifices. Sacred embassies were
not managed in a spirit of wanton extravagance, but sensibly; and happiness was
not measured by processions or by rivalries in equipping choruses for tragedy.
You would not have seen the many in those days dependent on the chance of a
ballot at the law-court door for their daily bread, “ nor dancing on the stage
in gold and going through the winter in what I will not describe.” 5
In those days the poor did not envy the rich, nor the rich despise the poor;
no, wealth succoured need.6 Country houses were better then than
those in the town ; many people never came into town even for a festival —they
preferred to celebrate it at home.7 Well-to-do young men were
compelled to spend their time in riding, in the gymnasium, in hunting, and in
philosophy; they did not pass
1 Timotheos’
house (Aristophanes, Plutus, 180; Athenaeus, xii. 548A), Chabrias’ (Hypereides,
Frag. 137), Meidias’ (Demosthenes, Meidias, 158).
2 Demosthenes,
Olynth. iii. 29. 3 Xen.
Mem. iii. 8, 10.
4 Isocrates,
5, Paneg. 76-79.
6 Isocrates,
7, Areop. 29, 30, 53, 54.
• Isocrates, Areop. 31,
32. ’ Areop. 52.
their days, as they do now, in gambling-houses and among flute-girls ;
they avoided the agora; there were traditions of good conduct and modesty; and
as for eating or drinking in an inn (iv KairTfKelm)—why, not even a decent
slave would have done it.1 The very soul of a city is its constitution
;2 all depends on that, and in Athens the constitution is ruined.
Multitudes of laws there are—endless minutiae—a sure sign of bad government,
Isocrates maintains; good government depends not on porches full of laws
inscribed, but on righteousness in the individual souls of men.3 His
only hope would seem to lie in the restoration of some effective powers to the
Areopagus.
These preterites of Isocrates point to the present rather than to the
past. The state in the early years of the century was in desperate need of
money, and so were the citizens ; and, if we may believe Isocrates, the poverty
of the lower classes remained a permanent factor in the Athenian situation —in
all Greece, in short. Slave-labour was one of the main causes, but little, if
anything, was done to meet this; even the great philosophers recognize slavery
as a natural institution—some men and nations are “ slaves by nature.” The
slave competed against the free labourer, and the slave-owner grew rich, while
the free labourer continued poor, and clamoured for state pay, and voted (when
he got the chance) for the condemnation of the rich man on trial and the
confiscation of his property. “You must reflect,” says a speaker, whose speech
Lysias is supposed to have written,4 " that you have often
heard these men tell you that if you do not condemn whom they bid you condemn,
there will be no state pay for you.” The people live on such state pay, says
Isocrates, and are grateful for prosecutions and impeachments.8
The maintenance of fleets, the levying of war, the festivals of
Dionysos—everything was laid on the rich. What Plato emphasizes as one of the
prime defects of Oligarchy seems to be shared by fourth-century Democracy—“ the
inevitable division; such a state is not one but two states, the one of
1 Areop. 45-49.
a Areop. 14, eon yap (09
ovBiv crtpov rj iroKirtia.
3 Areop. 39-41.
* Lysias, 27, 1; cf. Meyer, Gy. Gesch. v. § 871.
6 Isocrates, de Pace, 130.
poor, the other of rich men ; and they are living on the same spot, and
always conspiring against one another.” 1 “ What they consider,”
says Isocrates, “ is not how to provide a livelihood for those in need, but how
they may level down those who seem to have something to those who have
nothing.”2 Every man for himself—artist, general, sycophant, or
juryman—we seem a long way from the glorious Athenian Democracy described forty
or fifty years ago by Pericles, a thing of soul and spirit, instinct with the
most generous ideals, existing for one consecrating purpose—the general uplift
of all human life. In this fourth century there seems a universal want of
ideals in the state. “You must reflect,” says Lysias in 402,3 as if
stating an axiom which everybody will admit, “ that no man is by nature an
oligarch or a democrat; not at all, but whatever form of constitution suits his
individual interests, that is the form he wishes to see established ” ; and he
illustrates his axiom from the careers of Phrynichos and Pisander—“ many of the
Four Hundred returned with the Peiraieus party, and some of those who turned
out the Four Hundred were themselves among the Thirty.” Fifty, years later
Isocrates says much the same 4—“ let us leave off thinking that
sycophants are democrats ”—and better democrats if they are drunken 5—“
that gentlemen are oligarchs, and let us recognize that by nature nobody is
either the one or the other, but in whatever constitution men are honoured,
that they wish to see established.” The verbal similarity is striking, the more
so, when we remember that it is not a quotation. The state is a club, in fact,
or a benefit society, and the best state is that which costs least and yields
the largest dividends in comfort or in cash. In the old days the state ran the
Empire as a trade, some critics tell us; it was a business, an industry, that
supported so many hands afloat in triremes, and so many ashore in law courts.
Athens has lost that industry, but the idea survives; the state exists to maintain
the citizens. It is of the essence of a club or any such society to provide the
maximum of comfort for every member and to secure that all are equally
comfortable. In Athens,
1 Plato, Republic, viii. 55id.
8 Lysias, 25, 8.
6 De Pace, 13.
8 Isocrates, de Pace, 131.
* Isocrates,
8, de Pace, 133.
it was plain to everybody, there was abundance of comfort and luxury for
a few, and none at all for most; it was a Democracy without equality.
In such a world Aristophanes produced his Ecclesiazusae, or Women in
Parliament—a play which lacks some of the features of his earlier comedies, but
hardly their wit and invention. He describes a meeting of the Assembly, and how
Evaeon, smart accomplished chap,
With nothing on, as most of us supposed,
But he himself insisted he was clothed—
He made a popular democratic speech.
Behold, says he, I am myself in want Of cash to save me ; yet I know the
way To save the citizens, and save the state.
Let every clothier give to all that ask
Warm woollen robes, when first the sun turns back.1
No more will pleurisy attend us then.
Let such as own no bedclothes and no bed,
After they’ve dined, seek out the furriers, there To sleep; and whoso
shuts his doors against them In wintry weather, shall be fined three blankets.
Blepyros. Well said indeed;
and never man would dare To vote against him, had he added this :
That all who deal in grain shall freely give Three quarts to every
pauper, or be hanged.2
But the great achievement at the Assembly, in which this democratic
speech was delivered, was the transfer of every power in the state to the
women. We need not dwell on the trick by which it was done, but consider at
once the main features of the new feminine government, remembering at the same
time that parody is nothing unless it parodies. Praxagora shall set forth her
schemes herself (with the aid of Mr. B. B. Rogers 3)—
The rule which I dare to enact and declare,
Is that all shall be equal, and equally share All wealth and enjoyments,
nor longer endure That one should be rich, and another be poor,
That one should have acres, far-stretching and wide,
And another not even enough to provide
1 The winter
solstice, 21 December.
2 Aristophanes,
Eccles. 408-425.
* Aristophanes, Eccles. 590
£f.
Himself with a grave : that this at his call
Should have hundreds of servants,1 and that none at all.
All this I intend to correct and amend :
Now all of all blessings shall freely, partake,
One life and one system for all m£n I make.
Blepyros. But how will you manage it ?
Praxagora. First, I’ll provide
That the silver, and land, and whatever beside Each man shall possess,
shall be common and free,
One fund for the public ; then out of it we Will feed and maintain you,
like housekeepers true, Dispensing, and sparing, and caring for you.
Blepyros sees how land can be put into a common stock, but a man, he
thinks, might conceal his money, silver currency and gold Persian darics. Well,
he won’t be allowed to. But if he does all the same ? It won’t matter ;
Now each will have all that a man can desire,
Cakes, barley-loaves, chestnuts, abundant attire,
Wine, garlands and fish : then why should he wish The wealth he has
gotten by fraud to retain ?
But how will all this bear on marriage, for instance ?
All women and men will be common and free,
No marriage or other restraint there will be.
Blepyros sees difficulties, but Praxagora sweeps them aside with a
magnificent inconsequence.
No girl will of course be permitted to mate
Except in accord with the rules of the State. . . .
A nice democratic device, she says; and, as a result, if no one knows who
his father is.
All youths will in common be sons of the old.
Here we are reminded of Plato’s Republic ; and the question rises as to
which comes first in order of time, Praxagora’s or Plato’s. Some scholars hold
that Aristophanes is parodying ideas of Plato, which he knew before the
publication of the Republic. If the precedence is the other way, it makes
Plato’s idea the stranger. Could he seriously have meant it, with the 1
Slaves, in the original.
comedy before him ? Further advantages Praxagora has to unfold : there
will be no lawsuits, when there is no private property. (That, thinks Blepyros,
will hit a lot of people.) There will be no gambling ; and the law courts will
be turned into dining-halls ; and free women shall be rid of the competition
of slave hetairai. And so the Chorus appeals to the judges for the prize for
comedy—to the wise for the wisdom of the play, to those who love laughter for
its fun, and to all for the oath’s sake, seeing they have sworn to judge
aright. -
The motive of the Plutus, the last play of Aristophanes, is again
economic. The hero has always been virtuous and luckless, while temple-thieves,
demagogues, sycophants, and rascals generally are rich ; so he goes to consult
the god at Delphi as to whether his son would do better to turn knave. The
oracle bids him take home the first man he meets, and it proves to be the blind
god, Plutus. The proposal is made to get his eyes cured, so that he can see
what he is doing and give prosperity to the deserving. Poverty appears in
person on the scene, and carries on a long argument to show that all industry
depends upon Wealth not being equally distributed, and that industry is the
mainstay of comfort. She convinces nobody; and the god is taken away to "
incubate ” in the temple of Asclepios, and he recovers his sight. The results
that follow fill the rest of the play, which (like so many) ends with a series
of episodes illustrative of the new situation. The last is the arrival of the
priest of Zeus the Saviour ; he is starving, for no one needs to pray for
wealth now. For our purposes the play is of less significance than its
predecessor, with its new socialist commonwealth, its feminine government, and
its abolition of marriage—parodies all of them of the naturalistic notions of
the day.
But the crowning comedy came not from the theatre but from the
philosophic schools, and not quite at once.
Towards the end of the Peloponnesian War there was in Athens a man called
Antisthenes.1 He was said to be a bastard, born of a Thracian woman,
and at that time most Thracian women in Athens were slaves. However, as he
said, the
1 In dealing
with Antisthenes, I have drawn, of course, from Diogenes Laertius, vi., and
found much help in E. Caird’s Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophies,
vol. ii., and Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. ii.
Mother of
the Gods was a foreigner too, and Phrygian at that; while, as for being
earthbom like the Athenians, the snails and the locusts shared that high
origin. He became a pupil of Gorgias of Leontini, and to some purpose ; for
grammarians of later days reckoned him one of the masters of Attic prose.1
Later on in life—for Plato calls him a “ late learner,” 2 and he had
already pupils in rhetoric—he fell in with Socrates and came under his
influence. The simplicity, the plain life, the independence and self-mastery of
Socrates made the deepest impression on him, and he walked up to the city from
the Peiraieus every day to hear him. The words of the teacher and his character
were to him a call to emancipation from the false standards of the day—to
return to Nature. He would examine life ; and he did, and his report upon it
tended to immense simplification.3 He too became master of a school.
“ What shall I need ? ” asked a Pontic youth who wished to study with him. “ A
little book—and sense; a pencil—and sense ; a little tablet—and sense,” he
said. Xenophon draws him in his Symposium, and he is one of the striking
figures there—with his sturdy sense, his shrewd and incisive criticism, and his
speech blunt to rudeness. When the question goes round, “ On what do you plume
yourself ? ” he answers, “ Oh my wealth,” and it proves that his wealth is the
faculty of seeing how little one needs, of being able to go without things.4
“ Better madness than pleasure— /jLaveirjv fiaXKov rj rjaOeirjv,” his
biographer tells us he would say. “ If I caught Aphrodite, I would shoot her,
for she has spoiled many beautiful and good women for us.” 5
“ Back to
nature ” and " freedom from illusion ” (arvfyla) were his watchwords—a
freedom which he held that Plato did not know. Virtue is sufficient for
happiness, by itself, without any addition, unless it be the strength of
Socrates ;— virtue is a matter of deeds, and needs no words; and the wise man
is sufficient to himself. He was an individualist,
1 A love of assonance and antithesis is to be
seen in his recorded sayings.
2 Plato, Sophist, 251c.
s It may
not be quite fanciful to compare Francis of Assisi and his “ marriage to
poverty.”
* Xen. Symp. 4, 34-44. ,
6 Clement Alex. Strom, ii. 20, 107,
485P.
in logic
and in life. He wrote a great deal; in a political dialogue he ran down all the
democratic leaders of Athens ; in his Archelaos his old teacher Gorgias ; in
his Aspasia the sons of Pericles and Aspasia.1 He attacked Plato and
the “ ideas,” for the one thing real was for him the individual. State and
family seem to be improvements on nature, additions, conventions, mistakes
;—he avowed himself a “ citizen of the world,” KoafionroXirT]';. He was the
founder of the Cynics, a school which in its way did a good deal for mankind.
They were a challenge that could not be ignored—a provocation to Plato and
Aristotle as much as to the vulgar new citizen with his big house and his big
meals. Above all from them came a nobler school, who did more for mankind, who
captured the best of the Romans and exercised an influence on some of the
greatest teachers of the Christian church—the Stoics.
It was
Diogenes of Sinope,2 the follower of Antisthenes, who carried his
ideas to a further point, but, while he preached virtually the negation of all
human life, tempered his Nihilism with a touch of comedy. There is an air of
conscious advertisement of himself and his views that pervades the many
stories told of him—the tub, the lamp at midday, and the like. He was ready to
talk with anybody ; he was brilliant, paradoxical, charming, unexpected, and
invincibly cheerful. " He used every place for every purpose,” we are
told, and we are given details ; and one may surmise that some of the things he
did were done simply to startle and to shock. " So he spoke and so he
acted, in very truth ‘ re-minting the currency,’ 3 never conceding
to custom what he did to nature, claiming that he put the same stamp on life as
did Herakles, and setting nothing before freedom. . . . Everything, he said,
belonged to the gods ; the gods are friends to the wise ; all things are in
common between friends ; therefore all belonged to the wise. . . . Good birth
and glory and the like he derided, as mere trappings of wickedness ; the only
real state was the cosmos. Women should be common, he
1 Athenaeus, v. 220.
2 Here I overstep a little the limits of our
period. The source is again Diogenes Laertius.
3 vofua-jia irapaxaparruv—a very
famous phrase of Diogenes himself.
said ;
marriage he never named, but as one persuades or the other persuades. Children
would be common to all. There was nothing out of the way in taking anything
from a temple or eating the flesh of any animal; nor was there anything impious
in eating human flesh, as the customs of foreigners proved. . . . Music and
geometry and astronomy he neglected as useless and needless.” •
Such a
school could not fail to have an effect—an effect not lessened by the
deliberate absurdities of Diogenes. A strong shock was given to old opinions ;
individualism received a new and tremendous emphasis. Plutarch is credited with
remarking that Alexander realized the Cynic ideal on its political side by the
foundation of his world-empire. Diogenes was certainly a contributor to the
making of the new world which Alexander brought about—a world where the
city-state hardly counted, where there was neither Greek nor barbarian, where
nations were lost and races fused, and the West married to the East, Europe to
Asia. Once more, what was parody in the play of Aristophanes is serious thought
with Antisthenes and his school, and it militates of set purpose against every
tradition and every ideal of which the Greeks were conscious.
Side by
side with Cynicism, another great influence was working for the obscuration of
the city-state. To study philosophy and rhetoric men forsook home and country.
The intellectual interests prevailed, and men left the state on one side to
follow what interested them more. The Greeks had always been wanderers, but
wanderers with a passion for home ; now that passion was weakened. Rhetoric and
philosophy began to prove themselves international forces working for the
breakdown of barriers. Isocrates was an Athenian, proud of Athens. After the
great Funeral Speech of Pericles stands his Panegyric. Athens had been the
saviour of the weak in Greece, of Greece itself; she had from of old fought the
barbarian, she had driven back the Persian, and received the Empire of the Sea
as her reward, given her by the Greeks at large. She had taught the Greek world
the arts of peace, of government, of life. She had led the way in colonization.
She had been a city of refuge, an emporium for the world, an age-long festival
and reunion for mankind. “ So far behind has our city left all others in
thought and
language,
that her pupils are the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of
Greek seem no longer a badge of blood but of mind, and men are called Greeks
more because they have a part in our culture than because they come of a common
stock.” How much Athens had meant to the world was shown when Sparta took her
place and the Peace of Antalkidas was made—violence in the cities, the betrayal
of the Greeks of Asia to the Persian, the triumph of Artaxerxes, and the
humiliation of all Greece together.
Isocrates
cannot be accused of want of patriotism, but he too could learn from life. He
saw how much better Evagoras of Cyprus had managed in his terrible struggle
with Persia than either Athenian democracy or Spartan oligarchy ; and the
lesson was not lost on him. He lived in Athens, and he slowly turned against
the great Athenian nostrum, this equality which was not equal. “ There were two
equalities,” he wrote,1 “ and of these one gave the same to all and
the other what is fitting to each ; and they [of old] recognized which of the
two is preferable. They rejected that equality that counts good and bad worthy
of the same ; and they chose that equality which honours each according to his
deserts. With that equality they lived in this city, not filling their
magistracies by lot from all, but choosing for each task the best men and the most
fit.” It was the more truly democratic way ; but it has passed. And it comes to
this, that neither Athens nor Sparta is equal to the task of saving the Greeks
now from the troubles upon them ; Empire has in turn undone both of them—for
heaven’s sake let Athens at least be done with it; and for the great crusade,
for the overthrow of the power that overshadows and ruins Greece, for the
relief of all Greek troubles, for reconciliation among the states, and for the
colonization of the eastern world anew with fresh Greek cities—Isocrates turns
to Philip of Macedon. It is not a failure of patriotism ; it is a recognition,
almost prophetic, of a new order of things, of a world where Greece shall do
everything but govern, and do it better unencumbered by the fatal gift of
empire.2
Of all
critics of contemporary democracy the most im-
1 Areop. 21, 22 ; a document of the year 355 b.g.
2 More upon all this in Chapter XII.
pressive
and significant is Plato.1 It does not come under our present
purpose to attempt to discuss the greatest of Greek thinkers, nor even his
ideal Republic. Great men and great books call for great treatment. It is not
enough to say that Plato’s ideal state is communistic and minutely regulated,
that it virtually prolongs slavery and even extends it,—for most people in it
seem slaves in mind and body ; they must mate and think and worship as
directed,—that it abolishes marriage and the home, and prescribes the orphanage
as the finest upbringing for children. Such criticism would put the Republic of
Plato on a level with those of Praxagora and Diogenes—who also wrote a Republic
of his own. Perhaps as often as not the great mind’s contribution is to be
found not in its ideas but in its outlook on life at large and its treatment
of its own ideas and other men’s—breadth of handling, insight, sympathy and
stimulus. Here our concern is with Greek democracy, and if we go to Plato for
his view upon it, we may find at last that he does not share to the very utmost
the views of his characters. When Socrates criticizes Pericles because, as he
hears, Pericles has made the Athenians idle and cowardly and talkative and so
forth, the criticism is intended to stir up Callicles; however much it is meant
in fact, its design is to provoke.2 So in the Republic some part of
Plato’s purpose may be by over-statement to set thought in motion. For his real
feeling—so great a man has many real feelings. “ My friend, I said, do not
attack the multitude ; they will change their minds, if, not in an aggressive
spirit, but gently and with the view of soothing them and removing their
dislike of over-education, you show them your philosophers as they really are,
and describe as you were just now doing their character and profession, and
then mankind will see that he of whom you are speaking is not such as they
supposed. . . . Who can be at enmity with one who loves them ? who that is
himself gentle and free from eniy will be jealous of one in whom there is no
jealousy ? Nay, let me
1 Dr. Adam held that ‘‘ Plato’s whole account of
democracy and the democratical man, in spite of manifest exaggerations, brings
Athens nearer to us than almost any monument of ancient literature,
Aristophanes alone excepted ” ; on Rep. viii. 557A.
2 See Chapter IV. p. 111. ' /
answer for
you, that in a few this harsh temper may be found, but not in the majority of
mankind. . . . And do you not also think, as I do, that the harsh feeling which
the many entertain toward philosophy originates in the pretenders, who rush in
uninvited, and are always abusing them and finding fault with them, who make
persons instead of things the theme of their conversation ? and nothing can be
more unbecoming in philosophers than this.” 1
At the
beginning of the Seventh Letter, Plato—or some imitator or compiler writing for
him—describes his youth: how among the Thirty were kinsmen and acquaintances of
his own ; and how, as was natural with a young man, he supposed they would mend
national life and bring it in line with justice ; and how “ in a short time
these men made the former constitution look golden ” ; and how he was repelled
by their deeds ; how the Thirty fell and the Democracy came back, and, though
many things were not quite to his mind, in the main there was moderation ; and
then how the judicial murder of Socrates led him to feel the difficulty of
political life. Whoever wrote the passage, it represents the experience. Plato
was of aristocratic origin, and his heart was engaged with the Thirty and with
Socrates, and what befell in Athens might well (in the phrase used by
Wordsworth in describing the events of 1793) throw him out of the pale of love.2
But there was much, there always will be much, in democracy to shock or
disquiet a thoughtful spectator—too much impulse, change of mind, headlong
fickleness, too much of the spur of the moment.3 Pericles had
glorified the Athenian amateur in his Funeral Speech—his readiness, his
adaptability, his gay capacity- for every phase of life. Plato finds in
Athenian democracy a darker strain—it is essentially absence of principle made
into a principle.4 But, as the Greek orator says, there is nothing
like hearing the man himself.5
Democracy
comes into being after the poor have conquered
1 Rep. vi.
499D-500A (Jowett). 2
Prelude, xi. 176.
* Paraphrasing Polybius, vi. 56. •
* Nettleship, Lectures on Plato’s
Republic, p. 310. Se$ also the interesting chapter on Plato in Mr.
Livingstone’s Greek Genius.
6 What
follows comes from Rep. viii., especially pp. 557, 558, 562-565. I have
compressed, and omitted the interlocutor with his “ Certainly ” and "
Yes,” and used Jowett’s translation.
their
opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while the rest they admit on
equal terms to citizenship and magistracies ; and as a rule their magistrates
are elected by lot. Now what is their manner of life, and what sort of a
government will they have ? For man and constitution will resemble v
each other, and both be democratic. They will be free ; the city will be full
of freedom and frank speech, and full of liberty to do whatever one pleases. So
there will be in it the greatest variety of human natures ; and, it would
follow, it ought to be the most beautiful of all states—like an embroidered
robe made gay with every kind of flower. This liberty to do whatever one
chooses will mean a complete assortment of constitutions ; anyone who (like
ourselves) wants to found a state, has only to go to a democratically governed
city, and there he will find a whole bazar (1wavToirdikvov) full of constitutions,
where he can pick what he pleases and have patterns enough. There will be no
necessity for you to rule or to hold office in this state—no, not even if you
are fit for it; no necessity for you to be ruled, if you don’t want to ; nor to
go to war, when your fellow-citizens go to war ; nor to be at peace when the
rest are—unless, of course, you feel like it; even if some law forbids you to
be a magistrate or a dicast, that is no reason for your not being either, if
you have the fancy ;— really, isn’t such a way of life divinely pleasant for
the moment? Then think of Democracy’s forbearance,—there is nothing small about
her,—her contempt for all our fine talk about the special training of the ruler
; no matter what a man’s equipment may be, if only he says he is a friend of
the many ! It will be a charming commonwealth, anarchic and polychrome, with
equality for all, equal and unequal, whatever they are.
And now
for the Democratic man and his mind. His mind will be swept clear of modesty,
which would be called silliness, of temperance,—mere unmanliness!—of
moderation, as being boorish and illiberal; these are oligarchic elements in
his nature, and they are expelled by a rabble of useless appetites. “ And when
they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and
who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring
back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright
array, having garlands on their heads,
and a
great company with them, hymning their praises, and calling them by sweet
names.” He believes in a true democracy of inclinations; they are all alike
and must be equally honoured. So he plunges through life from one thing to
another—drink, music, water-drinking, gymnastics, philosophy, politics, war—
Myself
will to my darling be Both law and impulse—
a jolly
life, a generous life, motley and manifold—an epitome of all sorts of things,
real happiness !
Such is
the progress of Democracy. She drinks too deep of the strong wine of freedom,
and then, if her rulers will not give her more still—they are cursed oligarchs.
The same spirit pervades the whole state—the home, the schoolroom, the very
stables—master and pupil, the old man and the young so pleasant and witty
together, the sexes of course equally free, and the bought slave as good as his
buyer or her buyer. It does not even stop there—the bitch is as good as her
mistress (as the proverb says), and the horses and the donkeys march the
streets with a very free spirit and a very dignified gait, and you will please
make way for them. Everything ready to burst with liberty.
So this is
Democracy drawn for us by a man of genius in “ one of the most royal and
magnificent pieces of writing in the whole range of literature, whether ancient
or modern ” 1 —“ a land of Hedonism, peopled by Anarchy and Waywardness,
and darkened by the shadow of the Tyranny to which at last it must succumb.” 2
Is it a true picture ?
First of
all, there is a reply on the philosophic side, the classical example of which
is Milton’s Areopagitica. We must have freedom if we are to grow. Out of the
disorder and the challenge of Athenian democracy grew Plato. In Plato’s
Republic, it has been pointed out, Socrates’ shrift would have been short ;
there is to be little intercourse there with men of other minds, little travel,
" and when they come home, they will tell the young that the customs and
constitutions of other men are inferior to ours ”—like Englishmen who. visit
America and the Colonies.
1 So Adam,
on Plato, Rep. 559D. 2 Adam
on 557D.
We can
feel for ourselves how Greece began to decline when she took to thinking she
had nothing to learn from the barbarian ; how the later Greeks fall below the
people of Herodotus ; and how the men stand out who, like Xenophon and
Alexander, consorted with the foreigner and learnt his mind and respected him
and grew by it. Plato’s ideal state would have been more stifling than the
later Athens, or any other known example of insular life. A state1
or a constitution may be judged from many points of view, but it is at least
arguable that that state is best which offers the most varied stimulus to each
citizen to think, to explore, to be to the utmost. If this is true, then there
is something more to be said for Athens than Plato allows in this “ most royal
and magnificent ” of travesties.
But in so
saying we move on to a further point. Does Athens in fact merit this brilliant
description, does she deserve the censure ? It is quite clear from the history
of our period, and, still more, of the generations that follow, that Democracy
as conceived by the Athenians had played its part in the world, and that it was
becoming obsolete. It was not so much that Democracy itself was outworn, but
that so far no system had been successfully thought out for the application of
Democratic principles to any state much larger than an ordinary Greek town.1
• The hour had come when all was to depend on national powers of larger
dimensions, and for them no scheme had yet been achieved that would make
Democracy possible. In world-politics, therefore, Democracy was to recede. But
if we study Athens even in this century when she is falling into the
background, do we find that Plato’s censures apply to her ? There is, of
course, endless variety of mind and thought in Athens—it is a bazar of opinion,
outlook, principle, and everything. Yet government is stable, and life and
property are secure. If we except, as we have to except, the government of
subject provinces, which was now no part of the duties of the Athenian people,
every other function of government is managed better than in any other state of
the day of which we have any knowledge. Athens is still the pleasantest place
in the world, and her citizens, despite all their genius for variety, as
reasonable and as obedient to law as those of any 1 The Achaean
League was not really very democratic.
other
state. She offers the surest and the happiest home for genius still. Human life
was still possible in Athens, as it could not have been possible in a land of
Hedonism, peopled by Anarchy and Waywardness—human life, too, that was more
truly and fully human than anywhere else. Greece had still abundance of
life—life enough to quicken the nearer East; to learn of Persia, of Syria, and
of Egypt; to make all that imperishable contribution to mankind which is summed
up in the history of Hellenism and of Constantinople ; and Athens was still the
very heart of all Greek life.
“ There is
a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
THE HOUSE
OF PASION I
SOMEWHERE
about the year 395 a young man arrived in Athens from the Black Sea. He had
always been hearing about Greece, above all (as he politely tells the
Athenians) about Athens, and he had conceived very naturally a young man’s
desire to travel. So his father gave him some considerable sum of money, and
sent him off in charge of two shiploads of wheat “ to trade and to see the
world ”—Kara ifiiroplav teal Kara dewpi'av.
He reached
Athens at a very interesting moment. Great movements were in the air. It looked
as if at last, under the stimulus of Phamabazos the satrap of Daskyleion and
Conon the Athenian exile, the King of Persia was really meaning to do something
with the fleet which had been so long building in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Athenian embassies'had from time to time been sent to Susa to make it clear to
the King that it was neither just nor expedient that one city, viz. Sparta,
should be mistress of the Greeks ;1 though the ambassadors did not
always reach Susa, for on one occasion at least they were caught by a Spartan
admiral, sent to Sparta, and there put to death.2 But by now
apparently an ambassador had come from Asia. A Rhodian, by name Timo- crates,
had been sent by the satrap Tithraustes, with a substantial guarantee of
Persian intentions. With silver to the value of fifty gold talents he had been
moving from one city to another, where there was ill-will to Sparta ; he had
seen the leading statesmen ; and the result of his mission was a new confidence
that Persia was in earnest and that it would be safe to take steps long
contemplated. For the moment Sparta was
1 Isocrates, de Pace, 68. 2 Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 2,
1.
30 a ’ ’ "
still
supreme, but she was not to be so for very long. The battle of Haliartos in the
autumn of 395 was made a decisive one by the death of Lysander under the city
wall and the extortion of a truce from King Pausanias for the recovery of his
body. The moving spirit of Sparta was gone—the mind and character that had
finished for her the long Peloponnesian War with an unequalled triumph and had
won her an undreamed-of empire. The Spartans sent to Asia to recall King
Agesilaos, and before he reached the borders of Boeotia the battle of Cnidos
had been fought and won by Conon in his capacity of Persian admiral, and the Spartan
sea-power was ended (August 395).1
For the
son of Sopaios—in the absence of his own name we have to use his father’s—as
for all others who travelled by sea for trade and to see the world, all these
international relations were supremely relevant. But for our present purpose
high policy and great armaments must be mere background, felt but not
emphasized. He does not, like other Pontic youths in Athens, bring us among the
philosophers.2 Our interest is rather in the world of commerce and
finance in which the young man moved, and in the people we meet there— in their
personalities as far as we can distinguish them, in their concerns and
outlooks, and at last in the fortunes of one household—a family group
outstanding and significant.
“ My
father,” says the young man, “ is Sopaios, whom all who sail to the Pontos know
to be so intimately associated with Satyros, that he rules a great deal of his
country and is in charge of all his powers.” Satyros, as he says, bore a very
well-known name—so familiar that he needs explain no more to an Athenian
audience.
At the
entrance to the Sea of Azov, on or very near the site of the modem town of
Kertsch, stood the city of Panticapaeum, or Bosporos, as it was often called.3
A Milesian settlement, and
1 The battle is dated by the fact that Agesilaos
heard the news of it on the Boeotian frontier on 14 August (eclipse of the
sun).
2 See Diogenes Laertius, vi. x, for several of
them. One of them promised Antisthenes fine things, “ when his ship of dried
fish should arrive.” Diogenes, the Cynic, also came from Pontus, the son of a
banker at Sinope.
3 What follows comes from Strabo (cc. 309-3x1) in
the main. Polybius, iv. 38-42, has a long discussion as to the effects of the
great rivers and their silt in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
built all
over a hill twenty stades round, it had a harbour for thirty ships. Between it
and Theodosia (still so called) lay good wheat lands, some five hundred and
thirty stades in length, dotted with villages, and also a town and harbour
called Nymphaion. Theodosia, another Milesian settlement, could accommodate a
hundred ships, and commanded a further plain of good land. The region was ruled
by a dynasty, which came into possession of it about 438 B.C., and held it down
to the days of the great Mithradates—“ rulers ” they were called in formal
documents, " tyrants ” or “ dynasts ” in common speech, but most of them
were admittedly wise and moderate sovereigns. Satyros was the fourth of his
house, it appears, and succeeded his predecessor in 407. At this time it seems
likely that Athens held Nymphaion, for Aeschines says that the maternal
grandfather of Demosthenes, Gylon by name, an exile under impeachment, betrayed
it to “ the tyrants ” and received a reward in land, " the so-called Kepoi,”
and a Scythian wife, whose daughter afterwards bore Demosthenes, “ Scythian on
his mother’s side, a barbarian, who speaks Greek, but whose villainy is not
native to us.” 1 As Satyros was definitely in friendly relations
with Athens " before the disaster in the Hellespont,” 2 and
remained so afterwards,3 and as all chance of holding foreign
dependencies was swept away from Athens by that event, the betrayal of
Nymphaeum to the friendly neighbour was probably not an unpatriotic act.4
From of
old the Pontic wheat trade had been of the highest importance. Herodotus tells
us of Scythians somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Borysthenes (the Dnieper)
" who till the ground and sow corn not for food but to sell,” and he
describes how Xerxes at Abydos saw wheat-ships from Pontus sailing through the
Hellespont on their way to Aegina and the Peloponnesos.6 Athens,
above all peoples, lived upon imported wheat, as Demosthenes more than once
points out.6 Socrates bears witness to the energy and spirit of the
com trade : " the dealers are lovers of wheat; for, you know,
‘Aeschines, c. Ctesiph. § 172.
2 Cf. Lysias,
Mantith. § 4. 8 Isocrates,
Trapex. § 57.
‘ Schaefer, Dem. u. seine Zeit (ed. 1), i. 237 f.
6
Herodotus, iv. 17, and vii. 147.
* Demosthenes, Lept. 31 ; de Cor. 87.
through
their extraordinary love of wheat, wherever they hear it is most abundant, they
go sailing off for it—over the Aegaean, across the Euxine, across the Sicilian
Sea. And then, when they have got as much as ever they can, they bring it over
the sea— yes, and keep it with them on the ship they are sailing on themselves.
And when they need money, they will not unload it at haphazard, in any place
wherever they may happen to be, but wherever they hear it stands highest
[TiftaaOai, a play on “ honour ” and “ price ”], wherever men set most store by
it, they bring it and hand it over to these people. Your father was just as
fond of agriculture. You’re joking, Socrates, said Ischomachus.” 1
It was no joke. King Agis, during the Peloponnesian War, looked from Deceleia
and saw wheat-ships in great numbers running into the Peiraieus, and realized
that it was useless to ravage the land if food came from the sea, and sent
Clearchus off to Byzantium.2 Five years later when Lysander captured
the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont, the wheat-ships came no more, and Athens
fell. Fifty years later Philip again saw that to deal with Athens he must hold
Byzantium.3 Still later 4 Polybius emphasizes the importance
of Byzantium—“ by sea it so completely commands the entrance to the Pontus that
no merchant can sail in or out against its will. The Pontus is rich in many
things which the rest of the world requires for the support of life . . . those
commodities which are the first necessities of existence, viz. cattle and
slaves, are confessedly supplied to us by the districts round the Pontus in
greater quantity and better quality than from elsewhere ; and for luxuries,
they supply us with honey, wax, and salt-fish in great abundance ; while of the
commodities that abound with us, they take oil and every kind of wine. As to
com, there is interchange, in good seasons they export it, sometimes they
import it.” 5
Miletus
had once ruled the trade in the Crimean region, but she had fallen to the
Persian, and her heir was Athens. When one reflects that oil stood for the
Greeks in the place held among us by butter, soap, and electric light, and that
the olive does not grow in Southern Russia, the exchange of gfain for
1 Xen. Oecon. 20,
28.
8 Demosthenes, de Cor. 87. 6 Polybius,
iv. 38.
2 Hellenica, i. 1, 35, 36. 1 About 150
B.C.
wine and
oil grows more significant; and we may remember, with a new pleasure in it, the
corner which the philosopher Thales is said to have made one good year in oil
presses.1 Solon had turned Athenian attention to the commercial
importance of the olive, and Peisistratos to that of wine ; and archaeologists
tell us of the widely found remains of Greek wine jars of the sixth and fifth
century all over the Mediterranean. The trade between Pontus and Greece was
very great, concerned as it was with the foundations of life. Grain was raised
on the southern shore ; round Calpe, for instance, we saw how Xenophon noted a
good soil that produced barley, wheat, and other cereals—“ everything except
olives.”2 We learn, however, from Theophrastus that the com grown on
the northern shore, though inferior in quality to that of the southern, bore
exportation better and could be kept for a longer time.3
All
through the fourth century the friendliest relations were maintained by Athens
with the dynasts of Bosporos. Compliments, immunities, statues—every kind of
honour was paid to them ; and they deserved their honours. For it appears that
the export duty of one-thirtieth levied on exported wheat at their ports
Leucon, the successor of Satyros, remitted to Athenian traders 4—a
remission which must, as Grote says, have thrown into Athenian hands almost the
whole exporting trade. The son of Sopaios, when he comes before the Athenian
court, makes the most of Athenian privileges at Bosporos— “ it is fit,” he
says, “ that you should think of Satyros and of my father, who always make more
account of you than of the rest of the Greeks, and many a time before now have
from the scarcity of wheat sent the ships of the other traders away empty and
given you freedom to export it; yes, and in private contracts, of which they
are judges, you get not merely what is fair and right, but more than that.”
The young
Bosporan then got his two ships loaded with wheat and set sail. Neither he nor
his advocate thought about
1 Cf.
Chapter II. p. 41. See the address of Mr. J. L. Myres on " The
Geographical Aspect of Greek Colonization “ in the Proceedings of the Classical
Association, 1911.
1 Anab. vi.
4, 6 ; and vi. 6, 1.
* Theophrastus, H.P. viii. 4, 5. 1 Demosthenes, Lept. 31.
THE HOUSE
OF PASION 307
I
posterity,
and they have left us no account of the voyage. A hint escapes when another
transaction is mentioned. It is alleged that he borrowed money of a certain
Stratocles, and he explains that he did so to draw as much as he could of his
property from home ; Stratocles was to pay down 300 staters in gold and draw on
Sopaioswhen he reached Bosporos; and the object was to avoid risk, “ especially
as the Spartans were at that time rulers of the sea.” 1 For, as
Isocrates tells us, speaking more particularly of the years between 386 and
380, under Spartan rule “ the seas are infested with pirates.” 2 We
come on various instances, in the Greek speeches that survive for us, of men
being captured by pirates, and held to ransom, or dying of their wounds.
Curiously enough, in attacking the com- dealers, Lysias speaks of these risks.
The dealers “ are so glad to see your disasters, that they are the first to
hear of them from others or they make them up themselves—that the ships in the
Pontusare wrecked, or taken by the Spartans just as they set sail, or that the
marts are closed, or the treaty is to be renounced ... so that sometimes even
in time of peace we are besieged by them.” 3 The son of Sopaios,
however, and his ships escaped all these perils, passed Byzantium and the
Hellespont, picked up the three islands and Euboea, then Sunium ; and then, if
we may imagine it to be morning and borrow a description from the year 387, we
can picture him amid “ fishing-smacks and ferries full of men from the
islands,” and “ merchant-vessels laden some with wheat and others with
merchandise ”4 sailing down into the very centre of the world’s
commerce, the Peiraieus.
It might
be possible to conjecture some of his adventures there—his engagements with the
Pentecostologoi and other harbour officials, and then with the dealers, metics
mostly,6 who bought his wheat in such lots and parcels as the law
allowed, if they were being watched, or, otherwise, as they could. It is easy
to suppose him impressed with the variety and the business of the place—ships
in and out every day, loading and unloading every kind of cargo. Two things
1 Isocrates, Trapez. 35, 36. 2 Isocrates, Paneg. 115.
8 Lysias,
xxii. 14—Wilamowitz dates the speech 386.
* Xen. Hellenica, v. 1, 23.
6 Cf. Lysias, xxii. 5 ; and [Dem.]
xxxiv.
appear to
stand out, viz., that a very large part of the carrying trade of Greece was in
the hands of Athenian citizens or metics, and that the Peiraieus, in spite of
wars, though empires fell and war fleets were sunk, was and remained the great
place of exchange for the world’s business. A moment’s reflection on such
things as the place once held in Europe by the great fairs, the difference made
in commerce by railways1 and commercial travellers and the swift
transit of goods in sample and in bulk, and the large percentage of British
imports that come in to go out again very quickly, will suggest the significance
of a place to which all ships came. The Athenian oligarch, thirty years before,
had spoken of the gathering of imports from all the world, from Sicily to
Pontus and Egypt, and we have seen the list the comic poet made of them in 428.2
Corinth had learnt to the full the meaning of Hippias’ words, that a free
Athens would be her undoing. What is more, they that take the sword perish with
the sword, and thirty years of war had injured Corinth even if Sparta came out
mistress. In these very years (393 or 392) Corinth was united with Argos
—amalgamated in some way, very galling to the national feeling of a section of
the community, whose views Xenophon represents in vigorous language.3
Athens, as Isocrates boasts,4 stood open, a hospitable city for the
prosperous and the unfortunate, the most delightful of resorts for the one,
and for the other the safest of refuges ; " and furthermore as no people
has a land wholly self-sufficient, but some things fall short of what is
needed, and of others more than enough is produced, and there rose great
difficulty as to where to send the over-produce or to make good the deficiency,
she came to their aid in these difficulties too. For she made the Peiraieus a
mart (ifiiropiov) in the very midst of Greece, so that the commodities which it
is hard to gather from the rest of mankind, one thing, from this people and
1 Railways make and unmake ports. London, thanks
to railways, has killed a good many of her rivals of earlier days. Cf. Sir
Douglas Owen, Ocean Trade and Shipping, p. 9.
2 Hermippos, in Chapter II. p. 45.
3 See Chapter XII. p. 391. Xen. Hellenica, iv. 4,
6. The eventual rival of Athens for Mediterranean trade was Rhodes, and Rhodes
was scarcely twenty years old, as a single united city.
* Isocrates, Paneg. 41, 42.
another
elsewhere, if is easy to obtain one and all from her.” 1
The same
point is made by the author of the remarkable little tract on Revenues
(iropot.), which belongs to the first half of the fourth century—perhaps,
though this is doubtful, from the pen of Xenophon. One might reasonably think
Athens the very centre of Greece and of all the world; whoever would go from
one extreme end of Greece to the other must pass by Athens or sail by her (1,
6).2 Athens is the pleasantest and most -profitable city in the
world for trade (3, 1); her haven is easily made whatever wind blows (x, 7),
and it is convenient when you get there (3,1). / In most places when a ship
discharges she has to wait till she can get a return freight, for their local
currencies are not serviceable elsewhere ; but in Athens, there are return
freights of every kind to be had— everything that man needs, in short—and
moreover her currency is good everywhere, so the ship can unload and be off '
at once with cargo or cash, as the merchant pleases (3, 2).3
Athens
ought, the writer holds, to pay special attention to her metics, to abolish all
unprofitable limitations and disqualifications put on them, to do honour to
traders and ship-captains, whose ships or wares are remarkable, and to build
(virtually) hotels for them near the docks, and exchanges for their business in
suitable places, which might at once be ornamental and useful. For it is clear
to him that the more people frequent the place and settle, the more will be the
imports and exports,
1 See Aristotle, Pol. vii. 6, 4, 1327a, on a
city’s needs of exports and imports for herself ; “ those who make themselves a
market for the world only do so for the sake of revenue.”
2 Strabo, c. 286, claims this centrality in a
later day for Italy ; the civilization of Gaul and Spain shifted the world’s
commercial centre Westward, as the rise of the West Indies and America did it
again in the sixteenth century.
* Cf. Sir Douglas Owen, Ocean Trade and
Shipping, p. u :
“ Glasgow,
like Liverpool, is in a favoured position among the great cargo ports—as
compared, for example, with London—owing to the volume of her export trade ;
for a port which can supply an unladen ship with an outward cargo, instead of
sending her away in ballast to seek elsewhere, is a port which appeals to
owners.” On the previous page he shows how London, on the other hand, is what
Isocrates would call the einropiov for the tea trade, and supplies Glasgow and
Liverpool with their tea.
and with
them public revenues and expenditure—blessings for everybody. Metics might be
relieved from serving in the army with citizens, partly because they would
prefer the release, and partly—a touch of Greek feeling and a curious
revelation of how mixed the population was growing—“ it would be better if the
citizens served with one another, and did not have ranked with them, as now,
Lydians and Phrygians and Syrians and all sorts of barbarians ; for such are
many of the metics ” (2, 3). “ Athens above all cities in the world is that
which in the nature of things grows by peace ; if she were at peace, who would
not need her, beginning with ship- captains and merchants ? ” 1—and
he mentions people who are well supplied with grain, wine, sheep, financiers,
craftsmen, sophists, philosophers, and poets (5, 2, 3). And this brings us back
to the boast of Isocrates that Athens is the mistress who has taught the
teachers of all the world, till " Greek ” is now a term that connotes
culture as much as race.2 A later age was to see almost every
philosopher of note leave his native place and make Athens his home. One of the
greatest of them came, it was said, in charge of a cargo of purple—the
Phoenician Cypriot Zeno.3
A
community, that draws to itself the commerce and the culture of all the world,
will soon feel special needs and develop specialized industries and professions
to meet them. The one that at present most concerns us is banking. The bankers
began as money-changers—an expert business in itself, as we can realize, when
we remember that there were five main standards in currency among the Greek
states and endless local varieties, some, as we have seen, unnegotiable a few
miles away from the mints.4 Sparta still had iron “ spits ”— she had
plenty of the gold once forbidden and was quite eager for more, though she did
not coin it. At the other end of the scale at Bosporos, where gold was cheap
and came freely from Colchis and Armenia, gold staters were struck on a high
'On the
other hand, Aristotle (Pol. vii. 6, 1, 1327a) discusses a question of old
standing: Is a city benefited in the direction of good order by communication
with the sea, by a crowd of merchants coming and going ?
2 Paneg. 43.
8 Cf. E.
Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, p. 15. Diogenes Laertius, vii.
1 G. F.
Hill, Manual of Greek and Roman Coins, pp. 33-42.
standard.1
“ Many cities,” again, as Demosthenes says, “ use money quite openly debased
with brass and lead; ” 2 and we learn that the tyrant Dionysius,
like Polycrates before him, and like Napoleon after him with forged Russian
banknotes, tried this discreditable device.3 One of the
difficulties, with which Athens had to cope in her days of Empire, was the
restriction of the liberty of free coinage among her subjects. The Persian
Empire, as we have seen, had its own currency; the daric went everywhere. But
there were also Persian varieties. Phamabazos, we learn, about this time was
issuing staters with a fine portrait of himself and his name in Greek
characters, perhaps from the mint of Cyzicos.4 This city’s own gold
staters were one of the best known and most widely accepted currencies.
The
money-changers were a necessity, and their tables stood about the market—good
centres, it appears, for idlers and other students of human nature. Socrates on
trial will use, he says, the same sort of language “ which I have been accustomed
to speak in the market at the tables, where many of you have heard me.” 5
The Man of Petty Ambition, who, according to Theophrastus,6 has his
hair cut very frequently and keeps his teeth white, and affects other forms of
dandyism, frequents the tables of the money-changers in the market-place, and
buys things on commission for friends abroad—pickled olives to go to Byzantium,
and Laconian hounds for Cyzicos. By and by the money-changers began to attract
to themselves a business which the temples had so far had7—they
began to take money and other things on deposit; and this enabled them to
pursue money-lending on a larger scale and a broader basis. Banking began in
earnest, with all the apparatus of elaborately kept books, even down to
something very like letters of credit.8 It was not everybody who
took in the system
1 G. F.
Hill, Manual, p. 33. 2
Demosthenes, Timocr. 214.
3 Aristotle, Econ. ii. 2, 20, 1349a; Herodotus,
iii. 56; and G. F. Hill, Manual, pp. 16, 17.
4 See Chapter VII. p. 222 ; G. F. Hill,
p. 96.
6 Plato, Apol. 17c.
* Theophrastus, Characters, 7.
7 Xenophon left his share of the loot of the
Anabasis in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Anab. v. 3, 6).
8 The desire to avoid shipping of money
(Isocrates, Trapez. 36).
at a
flash; for, when Apollodorus prosecuted Timotheos, he took care to explain to
the court how it was that he could know so exactly the dates and details of the
transactions he was to unfold ; how bankers keep memoranda of the sums they pay
out and enter such items as for what this or that is paid, and to whom and on
whose account, so that they may know what is drawn and what deposited when
accounts are made up.1 The explanation, and the need for it, are
interesting. Some people knew all about it quite well—Theophrastus’ Boastful Man
will stand in the Deigma (a bazar in the Peiraieus) talking to foreigners of
the great sums which he has at sea ; he will discourse of the vastness of his
money-lending business and the extent of his personal gains and losses; and,
while thus drawing the long-bow, will send his boy to the bank, where he has a
drachma to his credit.2
The son of
Sopaios came to Athens, as we have seen, with a good deal of money and two
cargoes of wheat. It was the natural thing for him at once to look out a
banker, and he says that Pythodorus, the son of Phoenix,3
recommended Pasion to him, “ so'I used his bank.” The bank was an
old-established one, as banks went, and was very widely known throughout the
commercial world. It was in the Peiraieus, as one would expect, and it had been
the property of two men, Antisthenes and Archestratos, who had retired, though
Archestratos still lived and lent his successor in the business the guarantee
of his name, as we shall see. The successor had been, as very usually was the
case, a servant of the bank—in plain words, a slave—who had given good proof
that he was honest and capable. " And,” adds Demosthenes,4
" in the commercial world and the money market, that a man should have a
reputation for business faculties and should at the same time be honest is
considered a very remarkable thing.” Pasion had,
1 [Dem.] Timoth. 5. 2 Theophrastus, Characters, 6.
3 Isocrates, Trapez. 4. Pythodorus may have been
a Phoenician
arid not
the son of Phoenix. His own Greek name does not prove him a Greek. xP*}<T@m
is the technical term for being a client of a bank.
4 Demosthenes, pro Phorpn. 44.
in the
phrase of the day, presided at the table and managed 1— he had been
chief clerk, slave as he was. For, as will appear, a banker was much more
master of his own business when his employes were his slaves. If litigation
arose, the Athenian laws of evidence, with their markedly different treatment
of slave and free, sometimes left a loophole for a speedy manumission, which
might save the bank-clerk from torture and his employer from loss, while for
business purposes their relations would be very little changed. A good business
man, even if he were a slave, was a valuable and important person ; 2
and we can well believe that even before Pasion was manumitted he was a
well-known figure in commercial circles, whose features and whose mind would be
familiar to merchants and sea-captains all over the Greek world. What is more,
his knowledge of these men and his gift for divining or knowing their
characters and financial stability were among the most valuable assets of the
bank. The man was trusted far and wide, at once for his judgment and his
honesty ; he was set free in due course, and at last succeeded his masters as
banker himself. Politically he ranked with the metics as a resident alien.
So to
Pasion the son of Sopaios went and used his bank ; and his transactions, he
tells us, were on a large scale. He managed to get into difficulties with the
state in the matter of a merchant vessel, on which he had lent a good deal of
money ; for it was denounced as belonging to a Delian, and therefore liable to
confiscation as the property of an alien enemy in a time of war. He was foolish
enough to try to have the ship launched and away, and then found himself in
imminent risk of being put to death without trial. An old friend of his
father’s, whom he called in, refused assistance ; but Pasion helped him out and
produced Archestratos to be his surety in a sum of seven talents. From the fact
that he mentions the matter before an Athenian court, we may deduce that the
case was settled in his favour, but we may draw other inferences from the
episode than those he wishes.3 Against this we can set a
1 [Dem.] Steph. A. 33, KaSr/fievov <ai
StotKOVVTd eVt rrj Tpairi£y and Timoth. 17, 6 intKadrffxevos ini rfj
Tf)a7T€^ji; and Isocrates, Trapez. 12.
2 The manager of the elder Demosthenes’
sword-factory was a freedman (Demosthenes, Aphobos, A. 19).
8 Isocrates, Trapez. 42, 43 ; Meier-Schomann, Der Attische
Process,
small
service rendered by him, he says, to Pasion.1 Eisphora was
required—the special war-tax levied on property and paid by citizen and metic
alike—and epigrapheis, who seem to have been assessment commissioners, not
exactly state officials, were appointed. The son of Sopaios says he was one of
them, and interceded with his colleagues on behalf of Pasion. The occasion must
have been when Athens in autumn 395, though still without walls, made her bold
alliance with Thebes and sent her contingent to Haliartos, or when next year she
sent her troops to take part in the unhappy battle of Corinth.2 Both
episodes are mentioned by the son of Sopaios to prove that he really was
possessed of large sums,3 and was therefore worth robbing ; and this
brings us at once to his quarrel with Pasion. What follows is merely the
Bosporan’s narrative as set out for him by Isocrates, who had lost all his
property in the Peloponnesian War and was at present writing speeches for
litigants.4
He begins
by explaining to the court that it is his name and ■credit
that are at stake, for, great as the sum in dispute is, he has plenty of
property beside it. He further warns the court that a case against a banker is
always a difficult one, for banking transactions are made without witnesses,
and the great bankers have great influence, and their profession seems to
guarantee their honesty. Then he sets about telling his tale, and explains how
he came from the Pontus and began to deal with Pasion. Some time later, he
continues, there was a difficulty with Satyros ; Sopaios was denounced to him
as plotting a revolution, and his son in Athens as consorting with Bosporan
exiles, who in the nature of things were available for any conspiracy, of the
kind. Satyros at once arrested Sopaios, and sent word to his subjects resident
in Athens to seize what property the son of Sopaios might have and send himself
home at once a prisoner.—We may remark that the sending of such orders to
Athens shows how secure Satyros felt his relations with the Athenians to
be.—The son of Sopaios in this moment of difficulty turned to his banker, in
whom he
p. 298.
The independence of Delos at this time is confirmed by an inscription of 403
(see Hicks and Hill, Greek Hist. Inscr., No. 83).
1 Isocrates, Trapez. 41. 2 Xen. Hellenica,
iii. 5, 16 ; iv. 2, 10-23.
* Isocrates, Trapez. 41. 4 Isocrates, 15, Antidosis,
161.
had
implicit trust; and they devised a plan. Such property as was too conspicuous
to be concealed, was handed over to the agents of Satyros, while the Bosporan
denied that anything stood to his credit in Pasion's books, and alleged that,
on the contrary, he owed money to Pasion and to others. The device worked well
enough with the prince’s agents ; but by and by, when the young man proposed to
get away to Byzantium,— a town outside the range of Athens or Satyros, and
under the government of a Spartan harmost, and therefore a safe place for him
and not so very far, in case of need, from home,— Pasion, on being asked to
hand over the money, denied point- blank that there was any deposit at all. For
the banker knew that the Bosporan’s denial had been heard by many, and he
expected that, if the young man lingered in Athens, his surrender to Satyros’
people was certain ; if he returned to Pontus, that meant death as certainly ;
and if he chose to go anywhere else—let him go ; Pasion was rid of him, and
kept the money. The young man reflected that, if he denounced Pasion openly and
proclaimed the deal they had made, he would only involve himself and his family
the more, and he would not be any nearer the recovery of his own.
Then the
situation was suddenly and startlingly reversed. News came that Satyros had
been satisfied, and, in token of his reconciliation, had advanced Sopaios to
more important duties and had taken his daughter to be wife to his own son.
(One can only wonder whether this son was Leucon, who succeeded his father the
next year.) Pasion saw what would follow, and promptly " vanished ” his
slave bank-manager, Kittos, who knew too much about the transaction. The
Bosporan and his friend Menexenos came to the bank, and, as Pasion expected,
demanded the surrender of Kittos for examination ; and he was ready for them.
He alleged that the pair of them had corrupted Kittos, obtained six talents out
of the bank through him, and then “ vanished ” him themselves ; and he had
them off, there and then, “ grumbling and weeping ” as he went, to the
polemarch to give sureties for those six talents. The Bosporan went away to the
Pelo- ponnese to look for Kittos, but meanwhile Menexenos found him in Athens;
and then fresh shuffles began. Pasion first declared Kittos was a free man; and
then he changed tune
and
offered him for torture. “ So we chose our torturers and met him in the temple
of Poseidon ;1 and I demanded that they should flog Kittos and twist
him till he seemed to them to be telling the truth.” At that Pasion changed
again, and there were arguments. The torturers joined in the discussion, and
refused at last under the circumstances to torture Kittos (which was prudent,
if his status was doubtful), but they recognized that Pasion had handed him
over. Pasion now began to edge towards paying the money. A meeting in another
temple followed,—with tears and entreaties on Pasion’s part,—an arrangement,
another meeting, and an agreement, which was put in writing and the document
given to a Pheraean, Tyro. Meanwhile Menexenos brought a case against Pasion,
and began to demand Kittos on his own account; and Pasion came to the Bosporan
in a very humble strain to get that matter settled. Then he suddenly regained
his old confidence, and it proved that he had bribed Tyro’s slaves and secured
the agreement, and substituted for it a full discharge given to him in writing
by the son of Sopaios. After that the matter came before Satyros, who heard
both stories, Kittos appearing for Pasion in the character of a free man and a
citizen of Miletus. Satyros would pronounce no decision, for he saw Pasion
would pay no attention to it in Athens, but he recognized that injustice had
been done, charged the ship-captains to help the son of Sopaios, and himself
wrote a letter to the Athenian state, which, however, has not come down to us.
This is the plaintiff’s case.
What the
defence was, and what the verdict, we do not know. It looks as if the plaintiff
had learnt at the anacrisis, or preliminary hearing, that Pasion would urge
that the whole thing was a trumped-up affair and that the plaintiff was not a
person of substance at all. At least, the repeated insistence on his means
suggests so much. But we have not Pasion’s side of the story ; and stories told
to Greek law courts vary wonderfully as one hears them from one side and the
other,. Nor can we guess the verdict. Leucon succeeded Satyros next year, and,
even if he married the daughter of Sopaios, it did not interfere with his
maintaining the friendliest relations
1 The scene and the purpose and the personnel of
the meeting strike a modern rather oddly.
with
Athens through a long reign.1 Still we can deduce nothing from the
hypothetical indignation of a prince over the wrongs of a possible
brother-in-law, whom in any case he had never chosen. On the other hand, Pasion
for nearly a quarter of a century lived and managed his bank in the Peiraieus
with credit and success. He had among his clients some of the first names of
Athens, and if the speech of Isocrates had not survived no one would ever have
guessed that such scandals could possibly have been alleged against the head of
the banking profession. We can conjecture nothing from the survival of the
speech ; it is hard enough to guess why many extant speeches should have
survived at all, or who could have wished to keep or transcribe them.
Isocrates, it is true, set a value on his speeches, but he is emphatic in his
preference for themes of national interest.
There were
in Athens and elsewhere bankers who failed and went bankrupt, to the
indignation of the public.2 But Pasion prospered and won the
goodwill of the Athenians. As he was a metic, he could not invest his gains in
land until he was made an isoteles ; so he started a shield-factory, which
throve, as we shall see. It is interesting to find a decade or so earlier
another shield-factory in the Peiraieus owned by another famous family of
metics—the household of Cephalos, the friend of Socrates, and father of the orator
Lysias—who under the Thirty lost 700 shields and 120 slaves, and were ruined.3
Pasion’s reflections on the fact that he, once sold and bought as a slave, was
now owner of perhaps a hundred fellow human beings, might have been curious, if
he reflected at all. The father of Demosthenes (one of Pasion’s clients at the
bank, though he prudently dealt with two banks) owned a sword- factory, where
very fine swords were made with ivory handles,4 the sort of thing
that Alcaeus’ brother two hundred years before
'See
Demosthenes, Lept. 29 ff., especially § 32, where he says Athens annually has
from Leucon 400,000 medimnoi of wheat (medimnos= bushels).
2 [Dem.] Timoth. 68. Various names of bankrupt
bankers survive ; cf. pro Phorm. 50, 51 ; Steph. A. 63, 64 ; Apatur. 9,
Heracleides who absconded and hid.
3 Lysias, c. Eratosth. 17-19.
* Demosthenes, Aphobus, A. 10, 20, 30,
31.
had
brought from the far East.1 Aristophanes held that the influence of
these makers of warlike implements, like that of the manufacturers of armour
plate and gunpowder in modern times, was used against peace ; and he curses
them—may the shield-dealer be caught by pirates and made to eat raw barley.2
Whatever Pasion’s own views, he knew and met the opinions of the Demos. “ My
father,” says his son, “ gave you a thousand shields ; he was serviceable to
you in many ways, and of his own accord he volunteered to give you and did give
you five triremes, and himself supplied them with crews, and was trierarch
too.” So successful and prosperous every way was this former slave turned
banker.3 Plato has a savage word for this type of man—“ a shabby
fellow, who saves something out of everything and piles up a treasure- hoard
(Oriaavpoiroios avrjp); and the mass of men positively praise them for it.” 4
Pasion had
his reward, for " the Demos of the Athenians voted that Pasion be an
Athenian, and his descendants also, for the good services he has done the
city,” 6 “ for his good manhood shown to the Demos.” 6
His son not unreasonably magnifies the gift. There were others who thought the
Athenians far too apt to give it away to anybody and everybody. Theramenes
spoke of democrats who thought there would never be a fine democracy till they
had made citizens of every slave in the place and every beggar that from very
poverty would sell the city for a shilling.7 We have seen how
Archinos blocked the generous proposal of Thrasybulus to enfranchise all loyal
metics.8 Isocrates, fifty years later, laments the ease with which
the citizenship was given.9 “ We plume ourselves and think much,” he
says, “ of our being better born than other men, yet we are more ready to share
this nobility of ours with anyone who likes than the Triballians and Lucanians
their lowly birth.” In wars and in other ways the famous and great houses of
old have become extinct, and the fihratrics and rolls are full of people
1 See Chapter II. p. 40. 2 Aristophanes, Peace, 447.
8 Steph. A. 85. 4 Plato,
Rep. viii. 554A.
6 c. Neaeram, 2 ; c. Nicostr. 18. 8 c.
Neaeram, 89.
7 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 3* 48* 8
’AOijvaitov IloXtreta, 40*
• De Pace (355 B.C.), 50, 88, 89. ,
who have
no connexion with the city. “ Yet we should count happy, not the city that
lightly herds together a mass of citizens from all mankind, but that which
guards more than any other the race of them who founded her in the beginning.”
Yet he too would wish (it appears from the same pamphlet) to see the city full
of merchants and foreigners and metics. Pasion, no doubt, had meant all along
to achieve the citizenship and was glad to have it. It was of value to a banker
in various ways. His business involved a good deal of risk, and it was well to
have friends—especially to have the state as a friend.
One thing
that strikes a modern reader of the speeches that survive of those delivered in
commercial cases is the high rates of interest. A dowry is owed at the rate of
10 per cent per annum,1 or even 18 per cent.2 Apollodorus
mortgages a lodging-house at 16 per cent.3 Chrysippos lends a man
2000 drachmas on a voyage to Bosporos and back at 30 per cent; 4 but
here we touch the sea and the risks to ships sailing without chart or compass
over unlighted waters, with the constant dangers of piracy and war. The
understanding in such cases was that if the ship went down, the loan was lost.
In the speech against Zenothemis we have a story of an attempt to scuttle the
ship to be rid of the liability, while the borrowed money was safe in another
direction, and the goods, on which it had been borrowed, had never been in the
ship at all. International loans were not yet invented ; few people would have
taken the risk—governments 5 were too unstable, and to raise a tax
to pay interest to a foreigner in another city would have been to invite
trouble. Where state and municipality tended to coincide, municipal loans did
not occur. When Athens wanted a war-tax in a special hurry, she raised it by
proeisphora—by making the richest
1 Demosthenes, 30, Onetor. A. 7.
2 Demosthenes, 27, Aphobus, A. 17. I am told that
in the East generally interest is much higher to this day than anything great
commercial countries are accustomed to. It depends entirely on available
surplus. Ten per cent for money is quite common in Russia now.
8 [Dem.] S3, Nicosir. 13. *
[Dem.] c. Phorm. 23.
6 Not “
governments ” in the modern sense of “ ministries,” of course.
men in the
various demes pay eisphora for the whole deme, and permitting them, indeed
assisting them (if they preferred unpopularity), to recover from their
neighbours. A banker might, indeed, have foreign business of a semi-political sort,
as when Phormion’s ships were held up and Stephanos was sent off to Byzantium,
to negotiate for them.
Pasion
numbered among his clients some of the best known people in Athens—the
financier-statesman Agyrrhios, apparently, before he reached the top of his
fame ; Callistratus, conspicuous at home and in exile ; and (for our purposes
the most interesting of them) Timotheos the general, the son of the more famous
Conon. Timotheos, like some other great adventurers, lived a life that was
almost as courageous and various in its finances as it was in war and politics;
and Pasion stood by him again and again. For instance, in 374, Timotheos was on
the very verge of setting sail with a fleet from the Peiraieus, and found
himself in want of money. In a hurry he came to Pasion and begged a loan of
1351 drachmas, 2 obols—and would Pasion please pay it to his agent Antimachos.
Antimachos sent his clerk Autonomos for the money; and Phormion, the manager,
paid it, making a careful note of the date, the names, and the whole transaction.
Next year the situation was desperate. Timotheos was deposed from his command,
and was on trial, with Antimachos (who was actually put to death); his property
was all mortgaged, and he had borrowed from a man 1000 drachmas to pay debts to
a number of Boeotian trierarchs whose evidence he wanted at the trial—and so on
; and to Pasion he came again for money to settle with this creditor. Two great
foreigners came to plead for him at his trial, one being Jason, prince or
dynast of Pherae, a very great figure in the history of this period; and they
had to be entertained. A hundred drachmas were needed for this, which he had
from the bank, along with some tapestry (which was duly returned) and two
silver bowls (never returned, though they belonged to another client of the
bank, to whom 237 drachmas had to be paid in lieu of them).1
Timotheos was acquitted, but he
1 Theophrastus (Characters, 18) says that the
suspicious man, when he lends a cup, prefers to have a surety for its return.
was still
in such difficulties that the old Pasion did not press him, but next year
advanced a further 1750 drachmas to discharge the freight of a cargo of logs
from King Amyntas of Macedonia, which Timotheos used, when he got home again,
to build his house,—he had already a fine one with a tower of which
Aristophanes made fun.1 He was an expensive and sumptuous person,
and there is an anecdote .that, dining with Plato one day, he gracefully
indicated to his host that in preparing the menu he had chiefly thought of the
morrow.2 The aged Isocrates twenty years later told how this highmindedness,
suitable as it might be for a general, told against his popularity, and how he
himself had urged Timotheos to adopt a more gracious and conciliatory manner—“
and he said I was right, but he could not change his nature. Still he was a
gentleman indeed, and worthy of the city and of Greece.”3 ^
At the
time of the last loan to Timotheos, Pasion was beginning to feel his
age-i-" he found a difficulty in walking up to Athens, and his eye was
betraying him.” (It is such passages that bring home to a modem reader how few
of our ordinary conveniences of life the ancients had—when Socrates went down
to the Peiraieus, or Pasion up to the city, it was on foot.4) He
fell ill, and he transferred the bank and the shield-factory to his freedman B
Phormion on a lease—the rent to be two talents forty minae per annum, the
factory yielding a talent and the bank the rest. Phormion, as we have seen, was
already manager of the bank, and, it appears, was as good a servant to Pasion
as Pasion had been to his owners thirty years before. Phormion was, of course,
a metic. Among the liabilities of the bank were sums amounting to eleven
talents which had been lent out on real estate, on which Phormion as a foreigner
would not be able to distrain. This amount of mortgages, it appears, Pasion
took over himself, and was entered as owing the total eleven talents
1 Plutus, 180; Athenaeus, xii. 548A; Timoth. 36.
2 Athenaeus, x. 419. 8 Isocrates, Antid. 129-138.
4 Diogenes Laertius, vi. 2, says that
Antisthenes, the Cynic, lived in the Peiraieus and “every day walked up the
forty stades to hear
Socrates
”—about five miles.
5 Phorm. 4, fjfo] kuO’ eavrov ovn—his own master.
to the
bank. From now on his health declined. The Greeks thought meanly of trades that
kept a man sitting, and indoors all the day ; " they effeminate the body,
and make the soul much weaker still.” 1 Business, it seems generally
agreed, does not let a man have much exercise ; but Pasion’s faculties remained
pretty clear, though it suited his son later on to say that he lost them. He
was able, however, to give a fair account of the moneys owing to him—as
Timotheos was to find.2 In the year 370 Pasion died.
The
Athenians took a good deal of interest in the estates and wills of their
fellow-citizens, but, as Lysias says,3 “ you have often been
mistaken as to men’s property. . . . For instance, there was Ischomachus ;
while he lived, everybody, so I hear, supposed he would have more than seventy
talents ; but when he died his two sons did not get as much as ten talents each
” ; and so on through a gossiping list, which may be of more value to the modem
reader than to the orator’s contemporaries. For one thing, it serves to
emphasize the shifting of wealth from the great families of the fifth century
to new ones. Nicias and Callias had been supposed to be worth a hundred and two
hundred talents, but their descendants were possessed of scarcely a year’s
interest on such sums. After all this, it is remarkable to find that the
ex-slave Pasion actually did leave seventy talents, which his children and his
wife inherited. By way of comparison we may recall that the father of
Demosthenes left quite a comfortable fortune of fourteen talents, and Onetor
thirty.4 Pasion’s will has features which strike us strangely, but
in reality it was drawn up on quite conventional lines.6 The law of
Solon secured equality of treatment for all acknowledged legitimate sons; 6
and here there were two, Apollodorus aged twenty-four and probably already
married, and Pasicles aged ten. The elder had the
1 Xen.
Oecon. 4, 2. 2 Timoth.
42. 3 Lysias, xix. 46-52.
* Demosthenes, Aphobus, A. 5 ; Onetor. A.
10.
6 For a
delightful parody of the laws of inheritance see Aristophanes, Birds, 1641, on
the prospects of Herakles in case of Zeus’ death—very slight, for as he has not
been enrolled among the phratores, uncle Poseidon will succeed, and Athena will
be the iirU\r)pos. Solon’s law is cited.
6 The crucial
case is that of Mantias and Plango’s false oath (Demosthenes, xxxix. 6 ; xl.
48).
eldest
son’s complimentary portion—a lodging-house in this case. The lease of bank and
factory was to continue in Phor- mion’s hands till Pasicles came of age (at
eighteen); Phormion was to be one of his guardians and was not to start a bank
on his own account without leave of the two brothers. The widow Archippe, with
a dowry of three talents forty minae, was to marry Phormion.1
The last
clause annoyed Apollodorus exceedingly, both at the time and afterwards. But
Demosthenes has no difficulty in showing that itwas a thing very usually done
among bankers.2 Bankers were not yet gentlemen—they were mostly manumitted
slaves, and after all one was as good as another—and the arrangement was
generally a satisfactory one. It secured the manager of the concern for the
family, and in this case the manager was a man of proved capacity.3
What the widow thought, no one seems to have inquired, but the feelings of
widows, heiresses, and girls generally were not much consulted in Athens as to
such matters as marriage. It says a great deal that the marriage of an heiress
might be settled by a legal action between two competitive kinsmen.
So Pasion
was gone, and the destinies of his house, his bank, his factory, and his
fortune generally were committed to Phormion.
Phormion’s
advent to the family is described with savage particularity by Apollodorus.
Pasion bought him in the regular way at the regular place, the Anakeion or
temple of the Heavenly Twins. He might just as well have been bought by a cook
or anybody else, in which case he would have been taught the cookery trade or
whatever trade it might have been ; and he never would have become a great
banker at all. When he was brought home, Archippe (this is just an amiable
1 These details are collected from Phorm. 8-10,
34 ; Steph. A. 28, 32.
2Beloch,
Alt. Pol. 29, compares the passing of Aspasia to Lysicles on the death of
Pericles.
* Demosthenes, 36, Phorm. 30.
Demosthenes’ own father left his widow by will to the guardian, who took the
dowry but did not marry the lady (Demosthenes, 27, Aphobus, A. 5).
conjecture
by her son) showered the figs and cakelets over his head as he stood by the
hearth—a curious little ceremony of welcome for the newly bought, more welcome
perhaps to his fellow-slaves who scrambled for the sweetmeats than to himself.1
Phormion was a barbarian, as Apollodorus takes pains to emphasize—apparently
not a Syrian, but of what race we are not told.2 Pasion made a Greek
of him, and taught him letters and a banker’s business,3 but he was
never able to give him a good Greek accent 4—any more than he was
able to give his own son good business qualities or a good character, as
Demosthenes suggests.5
Archippe
isN:o us a dim figure. Nobody knows how Pasion came by her. A careless phrase
of the scholar Libanijjs (about 380 a.d.)
suggests that she may have been his mate in his days of slavery, but
this is only a guess, and at best it is perhaps open to doubt on physiological
grounds, as there were twenty six or seven years between the births of
Apollodorus and her youngest child, and Pasion was already a free man, a metic,
and a banker of high repute when Apollodorus was born. To suit his own
purposes, Apollodorus tried some years after her death to make out that she was
an heiress, which she certainly was not in the Athenian sense of the word. No
relatives of hers are alluded to in any of the speeches,6 and all
that she inherited was the gift of her first husband. It is doubtful whether
she was an Athenian citizen at any stage. Pasion was made one, and his sons by
her were included in the decree of the people, but this hardly covered
Archippe, for in that case she surely could not have been bequeathed to
Phormion.
Phormion
let a year or two pass, and then in 368, when Apollodorus was away with the
Athenian fleet as trierarch, he married Archippe. What followed the return of
Apollodorus, he shall tell us himself. " When I sailed home and realized
it and saw what was done, I was highly annoyed and took it
1 [Dem.] 45, Steph. A. 91 ; cf. Aristophanes,
Plutus, 768 (and the scholiast’s note) and 798.
2 Steph. A. 30, 73, 81, 86. 3 Steph. A. 72, 73.
* Steph. A. 30; cf. Phorm. 1. Derision of
some one’s pronunciation, Plato Comicus, Frag. 168 (Kock), 7
(Pickard-Cambridge) ; he failed to talk Attic, and would say 6\iov for oXtyox,
like many copyists of MSS. in later days.
6 Phorm.
44. 6 Apollodorus expressly says shehad none (Steph. B. 19).
very much
amiss. I could not bring a private suit against him—there were no trials of
private causes at that time, you had adjourned them all because of the war
[with Thebes]; so I entered with the thesmothetai a grafihe hybreos against him
[i.e. made a criminal instead of a civil charge of it, though the grounds are
obviously very vague]. But as time elapsed, and the case was put off several
times, as the courts were not sitting, my mother had children by him. And after
that (for the whole truth shall be told you, gentlemen) there were many kindly
overtures from my mother, as well as entreaties from Phormion here—a great deal
of talk, very moderate and very humble. But to make a long story short,” he
abruptly skips perhaps eighteen years and reaches the present time. Apollo-
dorus is a clumsy speaker, who handles grammar awkwardly, lets his sentences
straggle, and repeats himself ; but his public career had taught him it was
well to avoid the weak points of a case, and there were a good many weak points
in his quarrel with Phormion.
The
character of Apollodorus stands out very clearly. Demosthenes speaks of his “
shouting and shamelessness ” 1— which is an opponent’s harsh way of
describing personal defects admitted and lamented—“ For my part, men of Athens,
what with the nature of my countenance, and my quick walk and loud voice, I do
not count myself among those who are lucky in their physical endowment. These
things do me no good, and they annoy people, and injure me.” 2 The
Athenians disliked a quick walk—it was, according to one of their poets, the
mark of a vulgar mirjd to walk unrhythmically in the street,3 and
Aristotle himself says that the high-minded man moves slowly and has a deep
voice 4—there is nothing shrill or excited about him. (All the same,
Phormion need not sneak about the streets as he does, hugging the wall, with a
sour look on his face—it does not prove him modest—only a hater of men.6)
Apollodorus swaggered round in a chlamys (a woollen
1 Phorm.
61. 2 Steph. A. 77.
3 Alexis, ap. Athen. i. 21, iv yap vopifa rovto
t£>v ave\ev6ipa>v elvai, to (3adi£etv appvBfias ev rals oSots.
1 Aristotle, Ethics, iv. 8, 34, p. 1125a.
8 Steph. A.
68. Cf. Plato’s picture, drawn quite independently {Rep. viii. 555E). The men
of business, stooping as they walk, and
'cloak—the
sort of luxury affected by Alcibiades and Meidias *), with three attendants at
his heels 2—even passers-by could read dissipation in his face.3
He was a spendthrift and a braggart, who, so his enemies maintained, wasted his
money on hetairai and extravagance and gold paint, while he talked loud of his
services to the state. The last touch was true— Apollodorus is quite definite
about his liturgies, his trierarchies and eisphora, and the magnificent outfit
of the trireme committed to him, and its seaworthiness and efficiency ; 1
but he thought he was “ moderate in all his personal expenses.” 5 On
this point one curious detail may be noted which suggests that he was not
Pasion’s son for nothing ; he kept accounts, and did it with great method and
particularity, giving date and place and currency and rate of exchange.6
He married
the daughter of a man called Deinias, and we gradually pick up some
acquaintance with his wife’s relatives. The last we see of him is in a lawsuit,
in which he and his brother-in-law are engaged in indicting an enemy for an outrage
on propriety and religion.7 His wife’s cousin, Stephanos, was so
unnatural as to side with Phormion in the great suit, and was therefore capable
of every iniquity. In his early married life Apollodorus lived in the country,8
but he had no luck in his neighbours, whom he befriended—even ransoming one
from pirates, though he had to mortgage his lodging-house to do it.9
All the reward he got was treachery10—a false summons involving him
in a heavy fine—his orchard plundered and the vines and olives mutilated—a
small Athenian boy sent into his garden to pick the roses (they hoped that
Apollodorus would catch him and thrash him and lay himself open to a
pretending
not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert their sting—that
is, their money—-into some one else who is not on his guard against them, and
recover the parent sum many times multiplied into a family of children : and
so they make drone and pauper to abound in the State.—Yes, he said, there are
plenty of them—that is certain ” (Jowett).
1 Plut. Alcib. 23 ; and Demosthenes, Meidias,
133.
2 If he had had the luck to live a generation
later, one at least of them would have been a negro (Theophrastus, Characters,
7).
8 Phorm.
45. ■* Phorm.
39, 45 ; Polycles, 34, 7 ; Steph. A. 78.
6 Steph. A. 77. 6 Polycles, 30; 65. 7 c.
Neaeram.
s Nicostr.
4. 9 Nicostr. 6 ff. 10 Nicostr.
13-17.
charge of
assaulting a citizen)—and, finally, it came to fisticuffs by the quarries as he
walked up from the Peiraieus late one evening. To his wife, he assures the
court, he was deeply attached,1 and he was very anxious as to the
welfare and dowries of his daughters.2 It was horrible to think they
might go undowered and unmarried, when Stephanos could marry off their cousin
and give her 100 minas as her portion.3 One of them, however, found
a husband in her mother's brother, Theomnestos.4
But with
all his virtues and his neat account-books he ' failed to impress his father’s
executors, Phormion and Nicocles, and in 368, on his return from the
trierarchy, they insisted on the division of the estate in the interests of the
younger brother. To this Apollodorus agreed. Phormion still held a lease of the
bank and the factory, so the total rent of the two was each year divided
between the brothers, till Pasicles came of age (in 362) and the lease ran out.
Phormion received a complete discharge from all his liabilities to the pair of
them, and with it permission to have a bank of his own.5 The
brothers divided the last of the property, Apollodorus taking the factory
though it produced only a talent per annum against the bank’s one talent forty
minae, but, as Phormion pointed out, it was the safer business.6
Meantime,
in spite of the friction about Archippe’s marriage, Apollodorus, with the aid
of Phormion and the bank books, was busy in the law courts pursuing his
father’s debtors,7 and he was very successful. He recovered some
twenty talents, Phormion says, but Pasicles never had his full share ; 8
which may be a suppressed reason for Apollodorus taking the factory instead of
the bank. He acquired a strong taste for litigation, which he indulged. He did
not limit himself to private cases of his own, but embarked on public
prosecutions, of which Demosthenes mentions five and hints at more.9
He certainly did not lack courage.
The
Athenian court was substantially a mere section or panel of the sovereign
people—so many hundred of them, with an odd one added to prevent an equality of
votes, for
1 Polycles,
61. 2 Steph. A. 74. 3 Steph. A. 66.
4 Neaera, 2. 6 Phorm. 10. 6 Phorm. 11.
7 Phorm. 20, 21. 8 Phorm. 36. 3 Phorm. 53.
every one
had to vote and no one could avoid voting. There was no trained president—the
magistrate in charge was selected by lot; and there was no consultation before
the vote was taken, there could not well be.1 Quick and intelligent
as the Athenians were, their impatience of “ the strait-waist- coat of a legal
formula,” their want of legal training, and the universal instinct for equity,
whatever the law says, might lead to gross injustice—as gross perhaps as any of
which the purely legal mind is capable. Law, fact, justice, scurrility, pathos,
trierarchies, and dying mothers—anything might come in. In spite of the
assurance offered to the court that, while men will readily lie to an
arbitrator, it is not the same thing to do it “ looking in your faces,” 2
false witness and lying abounded; and when even false witnesses failed, we read
that the regular thing was to assure the court that “ you all know it,”
whatever the doubtful point might be.3 Appeals to popular passion
and political feeling could not in the nature of things be excluded. The law
might become “ dangerously volatile.” Again and again a speaker has to plead
for the maintenance of the law as the safeguard of everybody’s liberty. Some
friends, says a litigant about 400 B.C., advised me not to go to law, “ not
even if I have every confidence in my case ; for, said they, many things happen
in the law courts contrary to what a man would expect, and there is more fluke
than justice in your decisions.” 4 Sir Henry Maine once wrote—and
not without warrant—that “ neither the Greeks nor any society speaking and
thinking in their language ever showed the smallest capacity for producing a
philosophy of law.” Yet the Greeks—and by Greeks we chiefly mean the Athenians—were
the first people who conceived of a society based on the art of ruling by law,
a society that should in every detail rest on the idea of justice, equal and
free ; and with all that has to be said on the other side, Athens went a long
way in achieving this ideal.
In many
ways the most interesting and satisfactory of the surviving speeches of
Apollodorus is the one he delivered
1 The utmost was a few words with the people on
the nearest seats; cf. Polycles, 3.
8 [Dem.] c. Phorm. 19. 3
Demosthenes, Boeot. B. 53.
* Isocrates, 18, Callim. 9, 10.
when he
prosecuted Polycles to recover the costs of five months’ trierarchy. Here he
makes the minimum use of laws, of clap-trap appeals, and of those deductive
arguments which the rhetoricians called tekmeria. He tells a plain story, which
is most illuminative upon naval matters, life at sea, personal character, and
Athenian ways generally.
In
September 362 news reached Athens of a conjunction of doubtful and threatening
circumstances in the North Aegaean; in particular the merchants and
sea-captains were about to sail out of the Black Sea with their freights of
wheat, and the Byzantines were beginning to hold them up, wheat was growing
scarce in the Peiraieus, and the price rising. So the proposal was carried in
the Assembly that the trierarchs fit out a fleet for Thracian waters. Among the
trierarchs was Apollodorus.
The duties
of a trierarch were very extensive. In theory the state provided the ship, her
tackle and equipments, sails, rope, and the like ;1 it furnished the
crew of rowers (vavrai, spiral, trKrjpwixa, or Tpirjpdpj^/ui) and supplied
wages (/ua-0o<s) and rations (cnrtjpeaiov) for them. It also p^id the
marines (imftaTai) about ten in number. The petty officers—stewards,
boatswains, carpenters, and above all, pilots and steersmen— the trierarch
found for himself and paid them himself. A crown was sometimes offered to the
trierarch who first had his trireme in order and at the quayside.
But much,
which the state was required by the laws to provide, it was the experience of
trierarchs that they had to see to for themselves ; and so Apollodorus found.
For example, a good deal might depend on the age of the ship. Ships were built
of timber not quite seasoned because of the difficulty of bending it to the
needful curves.2 The ship was given some time to dry and her timbers
to settle, and then the seams had to be calked. The trireme went a good deal
out of repair if she were long afloat or long laid up.3 What amount
of
1 [Dem.] 51, Cor. Trier. 5 ; Euerg. et Mnes. 26.
Cf. Polycles, 34; Dittenberger, Sylloge 2, No. 153.
2 Cecil Torr, Ancient Ships, p. 34.
* Cf. the venomous attack of Lysias on
Thrasybulus for sailing to the Hellespont in 389 with old ships, “ the dangers
to be yours, and the profits to come to his friends ” (Lysias, 28, c. Brgocl.
4).
cleaning
the bottoms needed, how much new timber, calking and repairing generally might
have to be done, no man could well predict; and I do not know whether the
trierarchs or the superintendents of the docks had to do this work. In any case
the trierarch had to sail on the ship—“ taking the risk of sailing on her in
person ” 1—and this would tempt him to see for himself that she was
in good condition. The same applied to the sails and ropes—the trierarch had
better look well after them himself, as Apollodorus did. Here is his story. “
When the rowers enrolled by the demesmen did not come to me, or just a few and
those incapable, I sent them away, and mortgaged my property and borrowed
money, and so was the first to have my ship manned with the best rowers I could
get, by giving bounties and advance pay to each of them on a large scale.
Moreover, I fitted out the ship with my own tackle, etc., from end to end, and
took none of what the state supplied, and I decorated it with the utmost
possible beauty, more expensively than the other trierarchs.”
He was
never done with trouble with his rowers. He treated them well, but twice over
almost the whole crew of them deserted, especially when in the course of duty
he was sent back to the Peiraieus (§ ii).
His own high-class rowers were not so keen on staying with him as poorer hands
; they were everywhere sure of a job. The successor appointed to take over his
ship refused to do so for five months, in spite of appeals and demands.
Polycles on one occasion talked to Apollodorus about the way in which he had
inanaged his ship— “ Have you so outdone everybody in wealth that you alone of
the trierarchs must have your own tackle and gold decorations ? Who could put
up with your lunacy and extravagance—a crew utterly spoiled, accustomed to no
end of advance pay, to immunities from the ordinary ship duties, and to washing
in a bath—marines in luxury, and the ship’s servants too with full pay ? You’ve
taught the whole expedition bad ways, and you’re very largely to blame for the
soldiers being worse behaved with all the other trierarchs ; they want the same
as yours.” Apollodorus answered with spirit and moderation that if Polycles did
not like his men, if he would only take over the ship (as he was legally bound
to do)he might find his own rowers,
1 Polycles,
59.
marines
and all, if he liked, who would sail with him for nothing.
“ But in
any case take over the ship.”
The
service was very hard, and he draws a striking picture of his work in convoying
wheat-ships across open sea, “ about the setting of the Pleiades.” One night
especially he describes, which they spent riding at anchor (instead of being
beached) without food or sleep, expecting to be attacked ; and on top of all
there was a gale with thunder and rain.1 He found the government
careless, the allies helpless, and the generals unsound. He was detailed, for
instance, to go to a certain port; but he learnt on the way that it was to pick
up an exile—an illegal act—and he refused. There was remonstrance, but he was
backed up by his steersman who would take orders from nobody else—“ Apollodorus
is the trierarch and is liable for all he does ; I get my wages from him, and
I’ll sail where he tells me.”
The
expense was enormous. Lysias tells us of trierarchs whom it cost 80 or 100
minas.2 Apollodorus was kept short— once for eight consecutive
months—of the men’s pay, and had to pay them himself as best he could. His
voyage is punctuated with borrowings and mortgages for the purpose. In this he
says he was much helped by being known to be the son of Pasion.3 His
story serves to explain why the rich felt so bitterly about these
state-services or liturgies. Lysias mentions a man who was seven times trierarch,
several times had to furnish a tragic chorus, and often to pay eisphora—the
expense running up in all to nine talents two thousand drachmas. 4
Isocrates declaims on the misery of life involved by the multitude of commands
and liturgies and all the troubles involved by them.6 The oligarch
in Theophrastus’ Characters (29) cries out: " When will they be done
ruining us with these public services and trierarchies ? How hateful the whole
breed of demagogues is ! Theseus was the beginning of the city’s troubles, when
he made one city out of twelve and let down the monarchy. And it served him
right that he was their first , victim ! ” Another type of oligarch took
another line and ' would say at every public Assembly, and in every other place
too : “ We are the people who perform the public services,
1 Polycles, 22, 23. 2 Lysias, 19, Aristoph.
42, 43. 3 Polycles, 56
‘ Lysias, 19, Aristoph. 57, 58. 6
Isocrates, 8, de Pace, 128.
we are the
payers of proeisphora for you, we are the rich! ” But Theophrastus’ Boastful
Man (6) did better still; he would reckon up in public how much he spent in
relieving distress during the famine (330-326 B.C.), and “ add that he does not
count any of the trierarchies or public services he has performed.”
When
Apollodorus reached Athens after his seventeen months of the fleet, he found
his mother dying. Six days later she was dead, and troubles with Phormion began
again. Apollodorus made certain demands ; four private arbitrators were chosen
to go into them ; and Phormion paid what was asked for the sake of peace.
Apollodorus for the second time gave his stepfather a full discharge. He also
accepted a fourth share of Archippe’s estate, and thereby admitted the legality
of her second marriage and the legitimacy of his halfbrothers. Phormion
received the citizenship in 360, and for some years he was left in peace by
Apollodorus. With Pasicles he seems always to have managed very well.
Apollodorus
was already a public character,1 and it was apparently now that he
prosecuted the generals he had discovered to be " unsound.” One of them
was put to death.' In 350 he did the state a more useful service. He was a
member of the Boule or Council, and as such he carried first the Boule and then
the Assembly with him in a resolution that the Demos should decide whether the
balance of money in the hands of the administration should go to the Theoric
fund or to the War chest. It was the policy of Demosthenes that the War chest
should come first, and the Demos voted so. Apollodorus had as councillor sworn
to take the best counsel for the Athenian Demos, and he supposed Demos was
entitled to do as Demos pleased with his own. But an informer, Stephanos by
name, prosecuted him on a charge of illegality, producing false witness to a
long outstanding debt to the Treasury, and pleading for a fine of 15 talents.
Apollodorus’ whole fortune
1 Cf. the
picture drawn by Plato of the. democratic man {Rep. viii. 561D): " Often
he is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever
comes into his head. . . . His life has neither law nor order. . . .” All this
description was written before the floruit of Apollodorus, but his life was “
motley and manifold and an epitome of the lives of many.”
at the
time was only about three, so that it was indeed fortunate that the court was
content to fine him one talent only ; that was serious enough. Pasion’s seventy
talents—or Apollodorus’ 1 share of them—had sadly diminished in
twenty years.
It was now
that Apollodorus committed the crowning folly of his career. He saw Phormion
prosperous, and he conceived the notion that there was something wrong in the
slave doing so well, while things went ill with the master. In an evil hour he
brought an action against Phormion to recover twenty talents—the property of Pasion
left in the bank and unclaimed, or at least unrecovered, these twenty years and
more. By this time Phormion was tired of his stepson, and he turned to
Demosthenes. The law permitted a special form of plea, a demurrer
(irapaypa^rj),\.o bar the action, and on this paragraphe the defendant had the
first word. Phormion mounted the bema and said something or other, concluding
very much as Diony- sodorus did in another case : "I have said all I can.
I should like one of my friends to speak for me. This way, Demosthenes.” It
appears from Aeschines that such a call for Demosthenes was liable to be echoed
by the whole court.1
As a great
deal of this chapter has been drawn from the speech Demosthenes wrote for
Phormion, there is no need to go over the facts again. The speech was a short
one.
“ Pour out
the water,” says the speaker at the end, indicating that the water clock
(clepsydra) allowed more time than the case needed. On two main legal points
the defence rested— a twenty years’ interval exceeded by fifteen years the
period within which such an action as Apollodorus’ was legal—a technicality
perhaps. Very well, then : twice over Apollodorus had given Phormion a full
discharge. On either point Apollodorus was wrecked. But an Athenian court did
not care for law so abruptly used, so the orator went over the facts of the
case with a masterly lucidity and force, demolishing as he went what he knew
would be the case of the plaintiff. Pasion’s papers had been destroyed ? But
Apollodorus accepted them when the estate was divided; he allowed them to pass
when Pasicles came of age ; he used them in all those
1
Aeschines, in Ctes. 203 : ‘‘Let no one count it a merit to himself, if, when
Ctesiphon asks whether he shall call Demosthenes, he is the first to shout, ‘
Call him ! call him ! ’ ”
many
lawsuits ; and Pasicles, the other brother, is entirely satisfied. The marriage
of Archippe ? It was the usage of bankers, and Apollodorus by accepting a
fourth part of her estate had admitted it was right. Pasion’s will a forgery? Then
how came Apollodorus by the elder son’s presbeia, the lodging-house ? For
twenty years the will has been accepted. No, the real ground of the action is
that Apollodorus is a waster and means to blackmail a man who owes his position
to his character, his industry and integrity. The speech is, as Schafer says, a
masterpiece with its portrayal of character and its ethical warmth.
The court,
despite the heliastic oath to hear both sides alike, refused to hear
Apollodorus at all. He was met with shouts of Karapet,—the famous cry that
Philocleon uses in the Wasps1— and he came down. He did not carry a
fifth of the votes, and so became liable to a penalty, payable to Phormion, of
an obol on the drachma, a sixth of the sum claimed, which on twenty talents
came to three talents forty minae. Whether Phormion ever got it, or how he got
it, we are not told.
Apollodorus,
however, was not yet done. He prosecuted one of Pasion’s witnesses for perjury,
a man called Stephanos, but not the Stephanos of the prosecution of 350. How
his conviction could materially have affected the main issue it is hard to see.
But Apollodorus does not confine himself to Stephanos ; he takes his chance of
explaining to a law court his case against Phormion, and it is a very bad one.
The will was a forgery, because to make such a will Pasion must have been mad,
and a madman could not make a valid will. He uses an absurd verbal juggle hard
to represent in English : an adopted son was in Attic Greek called made, and a
man so made had some limitations of freedom in making a will; Pasion was a made
citizen—made so by law. Archippe, he maintained, was an heiress, which was
untrue. A pitiful set of sophistries takes on a still more unpleasant character
when he accuses Phormion of having seduced his mother, and dismisses Pasicles
from consideration by the surmise that Pasicles may prove to have been the
first of Phormion’s sins against the family. After this one loses sympathy for
Apollodorus.
We are not
told how the case ended, but we can surely
1 Aristophanes, Wasps, 979.
guess. And
here Phormion goes out of our story. An inscription relative to docks, which
is dated by Dittenberger between 334-3 and 331-0, mentions an Archippos, son of
Phormion of Peiraieus ;—the names strongly suggest a son of Phormion the banker
in the Peiraieus and his wife Archippe. We know.no more of them.
Of
Apollodorus we hear again. A few years after his failure against Phormion he
brought an action against a certain Neaera, alleged to be the wife of the
Stephanos who had prosecuted him for illegality. But wife of an Athenian she
could not be, for she was an alien ; and for passing herself off as wife of a
citizen, she is liable to be sold as a slave ; and for that Apollodorus pleads.
She was, he says, a foreigner and a ketaira, and her daughter another of the
trade, twice palmed off on citizens as an Athenian girl and twice repudiated.
He goes relentlessly through the whole story of the wretched women, from the
purchase of Neaera, with six others, by a woman skilled in these matters,
emphasizing point after point, shame and sale and shame again, bringing in
well-known names as he goes, Lysias and Chabrias for instance, and citing witnesses
for each squalid episode. State religion is involved too, for Phano, the
daughter, had been the wife of the King Archon (till he found her out and drove
her off), and as such she had performed the sacred rites of the Queen on the
city’s behalf. The speech ends with evidence to a challenge made to Stephanos
to submit Neaera’s slave-women to torture on the point of the parentage of
Stephanos’ children, and a final plea to the court to remember that the gods—“
those gods against whom the defendants have sinned—will see how each man of you
votes ; so vote justly, and avenge the gods and yourselves as well.” How this
case ended, we have to confess, as in so many instances, we do not know. With
it Apollodorus passes out of history.
It is not
perhaps very often in history that we are able to follow the fortunes of a
single family with much detail over fifty or sixty years. Yet when we can, what
light may be thrown on the society whose history we are studying ! None of the
leading figures in this chapter is of any great importance, yet their story
takes us into the streets and bazars and courts and counting-houses of Athens,
and gives us a new background
and a new
sense for the world in which those greater figures moved whom we know elsewhere
as framers of a great language and makers of history. In this city Socrates and
Plato lived, and when Plato spoke and wrote of the money-making man, and his
aims and spirit and influence, it is far from inconceivable that some of his
impressions, some of the impulses that drove him to think of the matter, came
from this house of great bankers, whose son and stepson may in his turn have
contributed something to the picture of the Democratic man. But we must be just
to Apollodorus, for he was public-spirited and had enough intelligence t6 share
some of the ideals of Demosthenes. If his life was disorderly and his spirit
quarrelsome, me tic as he was by origin, he was a true Athenian in these
matters, and better than most in his readiness to serve the country of which he
was " a citizen by public vote.” Perhaps they were not far wrong who held
that the more metics Athens drew to herself the better. At all events, it was
of such men that the great cities of the following age were formed, and
Alexandria, Pergamus, and Antioch have made gifts to mankind too great to allow
us to dismiss them with the easy contempt of an Athenian gentleman.
COUNTRY
LIFE
WHEN
Xenophon left Athens for the camp of Cyrus, it was probably with little thought
that he was bidding farewell to his country and his people for ever.1
Yet, as we have already seen, the death of Cyrus left him with the rest of the
Ten Thousand stranded in the heart of the Persian kingdom ; and, when at last
the way to the sea was found, he felt himself still involved in the fortunes of
his fellow-soldiers, and so he passed with them into the service of Sparta,
then at war with Persia or with one Persian satrap and another. So far there
was little to provoke much comment in Athens. He had not exactly been a soldier
in the army of Cyrus as he says, and when Agesilaos started for Asia, Athens
and Sparta were nominally at peace. But in 395 the chance came to be
independent of Sparta, and the Athenians, though at great risk, took it and
joined in an alliance with Thebes. Before long the European situation was such
that the recall of Agesilaos was inevitable. He brought back with him what
still held together of the Ten Thousand ; and the former “ commander of the
Cyreians ” 2 had nothing to do but go with them. Under this modest
phrase (in a story of the year 398 B.C.) it has long been understood that
Xenophon indicated himself. Even if he were no longer their commander, his
position was a very difficult one—he was by now a personal friend of Agesilaos,
but the king was coming home again to fight Athens among the allies of the
Thebans. At Coroneia in August, 394, Agesilaos defeated the Thebans and their
allies in battle, and Xenophon,
1 It has been discussed whether he may have paid
a visit to Athens between leaving Seuthes and serving under Thib'ron. If he
did, it was a mere passing visit, but even so the evidence for it is very slight,
if it is more than mere surmise.
2 Hellenica, iii. 2, 7.
it would
appear, was present. He had never had any liking for Thebes, and it would have
seemed natural to suppose that he fought as usual at the head of his Cyreians,
but that he expressly states that “ Herippidas was in charge of mercenaries.” 1
The phrase may seem ambiguous, though perhaps to a close reader of the story it
should be quite explicit. Whether we take it as a small piece of tacit defence
or not, for the rest he maintains complete silence about himself till we find
him an exile at Scillus. The date and the grounds of his being exiled are alike
unknown to us. Perhaps he was already an exile.2 But even so, the
verdict of a sympathetic French critic will appeal to many : “ however it be,
even if we eliminate the aggravating circumstances which are neither proved nor
probable, the mere fact of his presence at Coroneia remains to revolt our
conscience and our reason together.” 3 .
In any
case, the Athenians seem to have had some such feeling about him, and they
passed a decree of exile against him—a fact which, I think, tells against the
sceptical opinion held by some modem readers that Xenophon was not really a
conspicuous figure in the great march to the sea. It would be difficult to blame
them for this step if Xenophon really fought at Coroneia. Even if the decree
preceded the battle, it was not altogether unnatural in view of what we surmise
of Xenophon’s antecedents 4 and of his very prominent and outstanding
position in the story of the last seven years’ relations between Greece and
Persia. At the same time, when we consider the feeling of the Greeks and what
they tolerated in exiles, who fought and intrigued savagely and relentlessly
against their native cities,—as in the case of Alcibiades, to look no
further,—Xenophon, if he had fought against Athens at all, might have claimed
the pardon of his contemporaries with some title to it—in which case posterity
would have, I think, to be slow in giving judgment against him. But it is
1 Hellenica, iv. 3, 15, igevayei gtvinov (no
article). Plutarch definitely says Xenophon napijv avros t& ’Ayr)criX.aco trvvayavi^ojievos
(Agesil. 17), i.e. fought in the battle.
5 Grote, viii. 478, believes decidedly that
Xenophon was banished after Coroneia. Croiset has the same view.
3 A. Croiset, X6nophon, p. 120.
4 His very moderate friendship for
democracy, and the possibility of his service under the Thirty. Cf. Beloch, Gr.
Gesch. ii. 472.
not proved
that he fought against his country; and in any case, whether he was or was not
as yet an exile, his position, due to no very clear fault of his own, was
embarrassing and ambiguous. However, like Thucydides, he was to be an exile—and
posterity in both cases has been the gainer. Xenophon mentions the fact twice—once
in describing Scillus, where he lived an actual exile, and once in speaking of
his preparations to leave Seuthes, when he says definitely that he was not yet
an exile.1 This last fact is surely fatal to the theory of later
Greek writers that he was exiled for taking part in an expedition against the
Great King.
Throughout
Greek history, at least till Alexander threw open the East and the new cities
rose, it is plain that an exile was committed to a very difficult and insecure
life. Brilliant as his career had been, Athens had discarded Xenophon, and
Sparta did not care for foreigners. From his own narrative it is plain that he
must have had enough of mercenaries. So a military career was closed to him,
even if he wished it, and when we next find him, it is settled in some
contentment in a village of Elis on an estate of his own. When he describes his
abode and its surrounding country, he says the Spartans gave him the place.
They apparently took it from the Eleians during or after the campaigns described
by Xenophon in the Hellenica,2 which are dated variously
between 401 and 398. More strictly speaking, Sparta secured “ autonomy ” for
the Triphylian towns, but in any case Elis was dispossessed of the land, and by
and by Xenophon was settled there.
Xenophon
lived at Scillus, it would appear, for rather more than twenty years. Then the
battle of Leuctra shook the Spartan power to pieces, and Messenians, Arcadians,
and Eleians came by their own again. Xenophon and his sons, according to one
story, had to fly, and found refuge in Corinth ; 3 but guides in
Elis told Pausanias 4 that Xenophon appealed
1 Xen. Anab. v. 3, 7 ; vii. 7, 57. Pausanias, v.
6, 4 (for the expedition against the friendly Persian King) ; Dio Chrysostom,
vii. 1; Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 7, § 51 (for Laconism). It may be noted that
there are those who think Thucydides, already an exile, was present on the
Spartan side as a spectator at the battle of Mantineia, August, 418 ; cf.
Grundy, Thuc. p. 38.
2 Hellenica,
iii. 2, 21-31.
8 Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 8, § 53. * Pausanias, v. 6, 4.
\
\
to the
Olympic Council and, “ obtaining forgiveness from the Eleians, lived without
molestation in Scillus,” and in fact died and was buried there. But perhaps the
guides were more eager to keep a literary celebrity than contemporaries a hunting
gentleman who was conspicuously a friend of the Spartans.
Xenophon
makes a very happy digression in the Anabasis, when he is speaking of the
division of spoils, to tell us how he managed about that part of the tithe for
Apollo and Artemis which was entrusted to him. Artemis’ portion he left for the
time with her temple-keeper Megabyzos at Ephesus. Afterwards, he says,1
“ when Xenophon was in exile and was living by now at Scillus near Olympia,
settled there by the Lacedaemonians, Megabyzos came to Olympia to see the
festival, and handed over to him his deposit. Xenophon took it and bought for
the goddess a plot of ground where the god indicated. A river called Selinus,
it happened, ran through the plot, just as at Ephesus a river Selinus runs by
the temple of Artemis. In both streams there are fish ana .shellfish. On the
estate at Scillus there is hunting of all the beasts of chase there are. He
built an altar and a temple with the dedicated money, and ever after tithed the
fruits of the land and made a sacrifice to the goddess, and all the citizens
and neighbours with their wives took part in the festival. The goddess herself
provided the banqueters with meat, loaves, wine, and sweetmeats, with portions
of the victims from the sacred pasture and of the animals killed in hunting.
For Xenophon’s boys and those of the other citizens made a hunt for the
festival; and grown men, too, who wished, joined in. The game was taken partly
from the sacred ground itself and partly from Pholoe, boars and gazelles and
deer. The spot is on the road from Lacedaemon to Olympia, about twenty stades
(two and a half miles) from the temple of Zeus in Olympia. In the dedicated
ground there is meadow-land, and hills covered with forest, well fitted to rear
pigs, goats, cattle, and horses. Even the sumpter animals of the visitors to
the festival have their entertainment. Round the temple is a grove of fruit
trees planted. The temple is modelled after that in Ephesus—a small copy of it;
and the image is a copy in cypress-wood of the golden one in Ephesus. Beside
the temple 1 Anab. v. 3, 7-13.
is a stele
with these words : ‘ The place is sacred to Artemis. He that holds it and
enjoys the fruits thereof shall sacrifice the tithe of it year by year. From
the residue he shall keep in order the temple. If any man fail in this, the
goddess will look to it.’ ”
The
passage shows us the man—with his piety—his gift for arrangement and love of
order—his interest in hunting— his neighbourliness—and, perhaps one might add,
his attention to diet, ample but not luxurious. “ So there,” says Diogenes
Laertius,1 “ he continued—hunting and entertaining his friends and
writing history ” ; and there can be little doubt that with these and other
interests, hardly less keen, he must have enjoyed life. And yet, there is a
touch of the tragic in it.2 It is not the life he had chosen. The
great career in the East with Cyrus for his friend is gone. He will not see the
Attic deme of his boyhood again, the hills where he first hunted, the fields
where he learnt to love farming. Sparta took little notice of foreigners or
their admiration. So a man who had dreamed of doing great things himself has to
settle down to picture them—great deeds done by others, by heroes he has known
in the body, by dream-heroes he has fashioned in his brain. But perhaps even so
he was doing more than he thought or hoped; for not every writer of books could
boast of having set on fire with a passion that never died while life lasted,
such men as Zeno and Alexander.
A modern
traveller will tell us more of the outward scene.3 " On
emerging from the defile, a new extent of low country presents itself, richly
wooded and well watered. This is the vale of the Alpheus. We coast for some
distance along the northern base of the same mountain, the declivities of which
on this side are of the finest description of rock scenery, beautifully clothed
with forest-trees and evergreens. Every half-mile gushes a copious fountain of
pure water from the roots of gigantic planes, forming so many tributaries to
the sacred stream that flows in the vale below. The features of
1 Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 8, § 52.
2 On this see Ivo Bruns, Lit. Portrdt, p. 414.
3 W. Mure, Journal of a- Tour in Greece, vol. ii.
p. 273 (1842). E. N. Gardiner, Greek Athletic Sports (1910), p. 36, says that
in old days the vegetation was far more luxuriant than now.
the
landscape now gradually undergo a complete change. The common deciduous oak
gives place to the ilex, and soon after to the black round-headed pine, which
covers the country on each side of the river in scattered groups, to some
distance north of the plain of Olympia. The soil becomes sandy, and the
hillocks and rocky eminences which enliven the surface of the valley assume a
variety of fantastical forms, often presenting so close a resemblance to ruined
forts or towns that the illusion is scarcely dispelled till the traveller
reaches the spot. This region is described by Pausanias as precisely similar in
character in his own age. In the midst of it, on the left bank of the river, a
few miles to the east of Olympia, was Scillus.”
Such was
the place—a little out of the world in general, but at festival-time a centre
of life, a centre where there gathered Greeks of all sorts from every Greek
land and settlement, men with every kind of interest from athletics to
politics and philosophy—two or three miles only from Xenophon’s home.1
What that
home was like—or what he wished it to be— we can read in his little book the
Oeconomicos—a work with a charm of its own, and unique in being the one
presentment that we have of country life in Classical Greece. It has never
lacked admirers. Cicero did it into Latin, Ruskin (with the co-operation of two
friends) into English. It was the foundation on which Ruskin built all his
studies in Political Economy, his biographer and editor tells us.2
It shows “ the ideal of domestic life.”
The fabric
of the story is simple. Socrates, after some talk with Critobulus, tells him
how he met a real halos kagathos, and then narrates their conversation. It was
not otherwise known that Socrates had so much interest in fields and farms and
their cultivation, and most readers feel that for the larger part of the book
the real Socrates is a far-away memory, though there are flashes of some one
very like him from time to time. The centre of the book is the kalos kdgathos,
Ischomachus, and he is led on to do most of the talking, never dreaming it was
all to be reported. He is, as
1 Cf. Grote, viii. 480.
2 Collected Works, vol. xxxi., Bibliotheca
Pastorum.
Grote
says, translating the word of Socrates, " the model of an Athenian
gentleman, and the life he lives”—“it is the life of an English lord,” cries a
French critic.1 Perhaps he is a little like Sir Roger de Coverley,
but of a more robust intelligence. While Xenophon regrettably has to live in
Elis, Ischomachus has his home in Attica, and his biographer has his eye on his
own country. What is more, he means his book to be read there, and in his own
perfectly clear but unobtrusive way he calls attention to certain matters of
importance.
The father
of Ischomachus was a man of the same sort as his son—“ he would never let me
buy a farm in good condition ; but if he chanced on one idle or unplanted
either through the neglect or the incompetence of the owners, he would advise
me to buy it. A cultivated estate, he said, cost a lot of money and allowed of
no improvement; and that took away the pleasure, for he held that to see
whatever you owned steadily improving was a great joy.” He made big profits out
of it, and besides it was his hobby—it gave him something to do.2
The same interest Ischomachus had, and it was perhaps to his passion for
agriculture that he owed a good deal of his health and energy, for he lives a
strenuous life.3 Socrates remarks that at one and the same time he
manages to combine a recipe for health and strength with efficiency for war and
the advancement of his fortune. This is true, for Ischomachus says quite
frankly he wishes to be rich—it is a pleasant thing to be able to honour the
gods in the grand style, to help a friend in need, and " so far as lies in
my power, not to leave my city unadorned with anything wealth can supply.” 4
He is always master of the situation —never bullies, is never worried—but by a
kind of dogged gentleness and persuasiveness he carries his point. He has a
knack of being obeyed and of being obeyed intelligently; he makes his people
see what is wanted, he treats them as reasonable creatures, and makes them
think. If he has a defect, it is that, in M. Hemardinquer’s phrase, he is “ un
peu trop sermonneur ” — “ the Greeks,” he says, " and Xenophon above all,
cannot bring themselves to be right and to be done
1 Hemardinquer, La
Cyropedie, p. 116.
2 Oecon. 20, 22—2S
: ottios ?^01 0 ti troioiy
Spa kqi atpeXovfievos ijSotro.
3 Oecon. 11, 14. * Oecon. 11, 9-
with it.” 1
Sometimes the people round him must have found him a shade too improving, and
done absurd or silly things just as relief from being so steadily reasonable. ,
We have
seen already that there actually was a historical Ischomachus who might have
talked with Socrates, of whom Lysias tells us in a speech, dated 387, that as
long as he lived everybody reckoned he must be worth more than seventy talents,
but when he died his two sons hardly inherited ten talents apiece.2
But Xenophon seems to have taken his name for his own purposes, and made an
ideal figure of what he would have wished himself to be. There is no dark line
in the picture, and he has all the good qualities we recognize in Xenophon—order,
piety, control, persuasion, kindness, and sweet temper—and perhaps some of his
foibles. Ischomachus, we might even say, is Cyrus—the Cyrus of the Cyropaedeia—
in domestic life—a republican Cyrus who has gone back like a Washington to his Mount
Vernon.
More
interesting in some ways than Ischomachus is his wife, for here we are given a
glimpse inside a real Athenian home of what we might call the upper middle
classes. The age saw woman given a new place altogether in Tragedy, but neither
there nor in Comedy could we expect to see the real domestic life. Aristophanes
has many allusions to the daily round, the baby, the Thracian “ slavey,” the
drinking habits of married women, and much that is vulgar and worse :
They dye
their wools With boiling tinctures, in the ancient style.
. You
won’t find them, I warrant, in a hurry Trying new plans. . . .
They roast
their barley sitting, as of old :
They on
their heads bear burdens, as of old :
They keep
their Thesmophoria, as of old:
They
victimize their husbands, as of old :
They buy
themselves sly dainties, as of old :
They love
their wine unwatered, as of old : 3
1 Hemardinquer, La
Cyropedie, p. 114.
2 Lysias, xix. 46
; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. v. § 872. Dakyns, vol. iii. p. Ii, cites Plut. Moralia,
iii. 1, p. 79 (Wytt.), for a chance meeting between Ischomachus and Aristippus
at Olympia, and a discussion about Socrates, which led Aristippus to go to
Athens. Cf. p. 322.
3 Ecclesiaziusae, 215, tr. B. B. Rogers. The
point about carrying things on their heads was that men did not. Cf. Herodotus,
ii. 35, on
and so on.
He gives, when it suits him, the vulgar, popular, comic view of married women,
and sums it up in a proverb : “ Neither with them—hang them !—nor without
them.” 1 Apollodorus—not one of the finer spirits of Athens—reminds
a popular court of, the distinctions they all drew : “ Hetairai we have for
pleasure, concubines for daily bodily comfort, wives for the production of
legitimate children and in order to have a reliable guard of one’s belongings.”
2 In the great Funeral Speech Pericles gives his ideal for the
Athenian matron in a sentence : “ If I am to speak of womanly virtues to those
of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in one short
admonition : To a woman not to show more weakness than is natural to her sex
is a great glory, and not to be talked about for good or evil among men.” 3
And then .he leaves the subject. It was the popular view, but everybody knew
that it did not represent the ideal of Pericles himself. “ Silence,” said
Sophocles in the Ajax, “ is a woman’s glory ” ; but, adds Aristotle, “ this is
not equally the glory of man.” 4
Girls’
education hardly existed in the honest homes of Athens. “ You married your
wife,” says Socrates to Crito- bulus, " didn’t you ? wheil she was a very
young girl, and had seen and heard the very least that was possible ? ” 5
And Critobulus admits it. “ What chance had she of knowing anything,” says
Ischomachus a few pages later of his own wife, “ when she was not yet fifteen
when she came !to me, and all her life before the utmost care had been taken of
her, so that she might see as little as possible, hear as little as possible,
and ask as few questions as possible ? Don’t you think one should be satisfied
if all her knowledge consists in knowing how to take wool and make a garment of
it, and if she has seen how the spinning tasks are assigned to the slave- women
? For, as regards the belly and so on, Socrates, she had been very well
trained—and I think that means a great deal in training man or woman.” 6
“ How could I help you ? ” the contrasts of Egypt, where this is reversed. Cf.
p. 17. For this general character of women, cf. the speaker in Plato, Laws, 781
a, b, stealth and dishonesty.
1 Lysistrata, 1039, oure trvv navaXiBpounv ovt avev jravaXedpav.
2 Neaera, 122. 3 Thuc. ii. 45 (Jowett).
* Sophocles, Ajax, 293 ; Aristotle, Pol.
i. 13, 11, p. 1260a.
6 Xen.
Oecon. 3, 13. ' Oecon. 7, 5, 6.
the poor
child asks him, " what power have I ? No, it all depends on you. My
business, my mother said, was to be modest.” 1 . It seems a limited
training, even if in addition she did pick up a few notions about paint and
cosmetics.
Aristophanes
lets us see that sometimes a girl of good family came out of doors at one or
another public religious function, taking part in mysteries she did not
understand, and sometimes perhaps had better not:
Bore at seven the mystic casket ;
Was, at ten, our Lady’s miller ;
Then the yellow Brauron bear ;
Next (a maiden tall and stately With a string of figs to wear)
Bore in pomp the holy Basket.2
Ischomachus
says nothing of all this—indeed implies that in the case of his wife there had
been none of it.
But it is
clear already that, as might have been expected in a society where everything
was being submitted to question and remodelled by reason, the doubt was
expressed whether this training of girls was sufficient or even right at
all—whether the type of woman it bred was all that could be. made of the
material—whether a wife had best be secluded, dull and uncompanionable (“ Is
there anybody,” asks Socrates, " to whom you entrust more serious matters
than to your wife—or to whom you talk less ? ” 3)—whether the wife
might not be as well educated and as companionable as the hetaira. And then it
would seem that more fundamental questions still were asked, for all those so
far mentioned imply that woman is a sort of adjunct to man, a complementary
nature. Is woman really a mere complement to man ? What is her
<j>v<n?, seeing that to-day in Athens everybody talks about Nature—what
is woman’s nature ? The parodies of Aristophanes of this feminist movement,
the sympathetic interest in it shown by Plato, the very care and seriousness
with which
1 Oecon. 7, 14, o-axfipovetv—it has the two suggestions of chaste and
sensible. Ischomachus in reply takes up the latter.
a Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 641, B. B. Rogers.
“Yellow” because she wore a saffron robe, crowded out by exigencies of English
verse. What even domestic rites might be is shown in Acharnians, 241 ff.
3 Oecon. 3, 12.
Aristotle
refutes the doctrine that man’s nature and woman’s are the same,1
show alike how much in earnest the people were who raised the questions. “
Well,” says Socrates, as he watches the dancing-girl twirling and catching
hoops as she dances,2 “ the girl shows that woman’s nature is no
worse than man’s. So any one of you who has a wife may boldly teach her to be
what he wishes of her.” “ And what,” asks Antisthenes in his ad hominem way, “
what of Xanthippe, of women past, present, and future, most crabbed and curst ?
” Socrates has a ready answer ; but then the girl starts somersaults into and
out of a hoop set with swords, and Socrates returns to his point that courage
can be taught—if a woman can learn it like this. And Antisthenes suggests that
the Syracusan, her owner, might exhibit the girl to the whole city (for a fee)
and teach all the Athenians the art of facing the spears of the enemy at close
quarters. So in earnest and in jest the question is debated ; and even
Aristophanes, who makes game of the movement, contrives absent-mindedly to put
on his stage— he does it twice—a woman capable of broad outlook and wide
interests, equal to forming large plans, to starting and controlling a great
organization, able to speak well and sensibly of woman’s contribution to the
state 3—but of course it is all fun and nonsense, and he ends off
his plays in frolic and obscene absurdities—which proves how ridiculous the
whole thing is. But Plato and Antisthenes did not think it ridiculous, and they
were, each in his own way, ready to remodel human life from top to bottom on
the basis of the equality of the sexes.
Plato in
the Fifth Book of his Republic is quite explicit as to what an ideal society
requires in this matter of woman’s education' and he does not shrink from what
follows. He does not recognize any fundamental difference between men and women
except sex. Dogs, male and female, are used alike in hunting—the males are
stronger, it is true, but huntsmen do not regard the rearing of puppies as
labour enough for the females (451 d). Is there any pursuit or art of civic
life in regard to which the nature of a woman differs from a man's nature ?
(455A). “ Need I waste time in speaking of the art of weaving, and the
management of pancakes and preserves,
1 See Ivo Bruns, Frauenemanzipation, in Vortrdge u.
Aufsatze.
8 Xen.
Symp. 2, 8-13. 8 In the Lysistrata, and the Ecclesiazusae.
in which
womankind does really appear to be great, and in which for her to be beaten by
a man is of all things the most absurd ? ” (455D).1 So much for
woman’s sphere ; a woman as well as a man may be a physician, a musician, a
philosopher, or have a turn for gymnastic and military exercises. If the
difference consists only in the woman bearing and the man begetting, this does
npt amount to a proof that the education for both should not be the same
(454E). And Plato would give them the same education—music, gymnastic, and the
art of war (452a), though he expects that shallow wits will find something
ridiculous in the sight of women naked in the palaestra, wrestling with
men—especially if they are old and wrinkled (452B); still it is only a matter
of custom. When he has once established this equality of sexes, he proceeds to
his famous community of wives and the abolition of the family. Women will still
be allowed to suckle the babies, it would seem, but care will be taken that
none of them knows which is her own.
What the
women thought of the established order—or what they would have thought of
Plato’s plan—was not inquired. Plato was not less indifferent to the likes and
dislikes of individuals than the most conservative traditionalist of his day.
Euripides, however, in his Medea 2 puts in unmis- takeable
language the feelings of some of the women. Of all things, says Medea, that
have life and understanding woman is the most miserable. It is money that makes
marriage—and the man is lord of her body, whoever he is ; good or bad, she
cannot refuse him. She knows nothing whatever of what he will be, when she
leaves her home. If she manages herself well, and he lives with her content,
her lot is happy; if not, she had better die. The man can find satisfaction
outside, if he is unhappy at home ; not she. But she has a quiet life at home,
free from peril, and he must face the ranks of spearmen ! Fools ! I had rather
thrice face battle, shield on arm, than once bear a child. Euripides was
counted among the ancients a hater of( woman,3 and
certainly his characters say a good deal against the sex.4 But it is
one thing to recognize
1 Jowett’s
translation. 2 Eur. Medea,
230-251,
3 Aristophanes,
Thesm. 383-458.
* See Decharme, Euripide et
Vesprit de son theatre, pp. 133 ff., for a discussion of this—a rather trivial
treatment of it, though there is
that
woman’s lot is hard or even unjust—another thing to enjoy the emancipated type,1
ill-trained to begin with, and not better balanced now for a sudden swing to
another extreme, the victim of theories and fancies, nationalist, individualist,
anarchist.
But let us
turn from this babel to the quiet house at Scillus or the house of Ischomachus,
whichever it is. “ Greek Iove- poetry,” it has been said by a modem scholar,
the author of a brilliant book on Greek genius, “ is not the love-poetry of the
Brownings,”2 and it is difficult to imagine what Ischomachus or his
chronicler would have made of a passage that began :
O lyric Love, half angel and
half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire.
Their
wives rather probably could not read or write. None of them, one can believe,
would have seen much in the Vita Nuova ; and perhaps they would have preferred
something simpler to the Phaedrus. Ischomachus did not consciously marry in
order “ to realize himself ” like a modern philosopher, nor like the plain man
of to-day because he “ liked the girl.” It was rather a well-thought-out
selection of a partner, for reasons financial, social, and what we might call
eugenic. He tells her quite frankly that they are partners, and very quickly
gets down to business. But he does it with tenderness and grace—she was only
fourteen, he tells Socrates ; and his words imply that he thought of her as a
shy little wild bird, for he waited, he said, “ till she was tamed and would
come to his hand.” 3 He and her parents, he told her, had been
seeking the same thing—the best possible partner in house and children ; and so
he had chosen her, and her parents had chosen him. 1
Ischomachus
now explains to his wife how they can help each other. He does not quote Plato
to her and formally disavow his ideas, but modem readers and perhaps ancient
readers have thought that Xenophon had Plato in mind. For something in his
remark (on p. 154) that Greek woman by training and social conditions was in
fact beneath Greek man.
1 Cf.
Hippolytus, 640.
2 R. W. Livingstone, Greek Genius,
pp. 81, 82.
3 Oecon. 7, IO, ejrel fj8r] fioi
x^po^rjS rjv <a'i eTenddtrevTO ware SiaKeyeadai. If my rendering is too
sentimental, Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon does not fail in that way.
it is
explained to the little wife1 that the gods had thought out their
device very carefully when they made the pair called male and female—with
intent that both should have the utmost good and comfort out of their
fellowship. There are children to produce—to keep the race from dying out, and
to look after their parents in old age. Man again is not like the animal— the
instinct that developed the house has altered everything. God made the man’s
body to bear heat and cold and hardship, the outdoor things, and to the woman
he gave the duties of home, the care of the babies he put into her very nature,
and “ gave her a larger gift of loving babies than he did to the man ” (7, 24).
God gave them both memory and carefulness, for the common good of both—it would
be hard to say which has most of these. And just because their natures are not
every way alike, they need each other more. What God has ordained, custom has
established ; and, what is more, God's laws implanted in nature, maintain themselves
and avenge themselves. So he tells his wife she is to be the queen bee in their
hive ; for the queen bee keeps all the others busy, knows all they do,
safeguards and manages all that is stored up, sees to the “weaving ” of the
cells and the nurture of the- young, and when the time comes sends forth the
swarm. “ Shall I have to do all this ? ” she asks. Yes, he tells her, and adds
like a man, that there is another duty too, one she may not like—if any of the
slaves fall sick, she will have to nurse them and tend them till they are well.
“ By Zeus,” says the little wife, “ I shall like that best of all—if they will
be grateful for it and be friendlier than before.” “ I was delighted at her
answer,” Ischomachus tells Socrates.2 '
A French
critic asks, with some humour, if Ischomachus in all this talk with Socrates
has not the air of revealing to us a new discovery—that woman can be
intelligent, that the gods have given her memory and other faculties.3
There have been witty women who have held that this has always been to men a
startling discovery, that it still is. The main point of interest, however, is
the attitude of Xenophon to the marriage question. He holds, as Dr. Adam says,4
“ the orthodox Greek
1 Oecon. 7, 18 ff., 7roA.11 dieo-Kefi/ievas. 2 Oecon. 7, 37, 38.
8 Masqueray, Euripide et ses
idSes, p. 301.
* Note on Plato, Rep. v. 453.
view ” on
the subject. The critic’s words suggest some limitation of outlook in
Xenophon, as if the view were outgrown. It was the view to which Aristotle
recurred; affection, he said, would be “ watery ” in that Republic of
Plato’s—there would be no reason for any so-called father there caring for his
so-called son, for “ what is common to the greatest number has the least care
bestowed upon it ” ; it would be better to be somebody’s real cousin than a son
after this fashion ; “ and there is another point that we must not ignore, that
long time and the experience of years deserves attention.” 1 On this
last reflection a famous German scholar cries out as being “ somewhat
rhetorical,” as being “ the standing and staple argument of all conservative
minds against subversive innovations — an argument which appeals to us, with
our greatly extended ethnographic and historical perspective, far less forcibly
than to past generations.” 2 Yes, but here the ethnographic and
historical perspective more and more confirms Xenophon and Aristotle as the
marriage customs and experience of races and ages are made known to us. How
much better indeed to be even a cousin of somebody than live in that loveles^
machine-made hell of a Republic! How much better, Aristotle suggests in his
Ethics, to be the real husband or wife of somebody! “ Friendship
(<f>iXla) between man and woman seems established in nature ; for man by
nature is more apt to form such a union of two than a state, for a household
comes before a state and is more fundamental ; while procreation is a faculty
shared with the animals. With all other beings this is the limit of their
association. Human beings live together not only for the production of
children, but for all the purposes of life. As soon as man and woman unite, a
distribution of functions (or tasks epya) takes place ; some are proper to the
man, some to the woman ; aence they help each other, each contributing their
own gifts. Thus it is that use and pleasure are both found in this friend
1 These sentences come from the Politics, ii.,
between pp. 1261 b and 1264a; in order from c. 4, 7 ; c. 3, 4 ; c. 3, 7 ; c. 5,
16.
2Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, iii. 120. It is curious how
to some minds Trjv Srpvjxo8a>pov Qparrav KaTayiyaprifrat suggests progress
and emancipation.
ship . . .
and children are an additional bond of union between them.” 1
All this
is very useful and philosophical, it may be said, but to-day we look for more
enthusiasm, more passion, in these things—some element of romance ; we find it
in Euripides; Ischomachus seems too well balanced for a modem lover. Perhaps
modern lovers could do with more balance. But this element of romance appears
with surprising power in another work of Xenophon’s, which was read a great
deal more between the Renaissance and the French Revolution than it is to-day.
The heroines of the Cyropaedeia are married women—presumably married with as
little personal choice as the wife of Ischomachus. Cyrus warns his young Median
friend Araspas that fire and passion are not things to play with ; 2
Araspas believes love to be voluntary ; a matter of choice, of the will —and he
finds somehow that he has no choice; Pantheia is so beautiful and so gracious.3
But Pantheia’s love and passion are all for Abradatas, her husband, absent or
present, living or dead. And we seem to be in the presence of one of Homer’s
women, beautiful, loyal, and womanly—till she slays herself over Abradatas’
body, and we realize that we are in the age of Euripides. Till one knows the
love story of Abradatas and Pantheia, it is premature to say that Xenophon does
not understand passion. One of the surprising things about him is the number of
fields of literature where he is a pioneer, and perhaps no one would have
guessed that the author of the Anabasis would give Greece perhaps its first,
and perhaps also its best, romance. Nor is Pantheia the only lady of romance in
his pages. “ So when they got home,” we read, “ they talked of Cyrus—one of his
wisdom, another of his endurance, of his gentleness another, and there was one
who spoke of his beauty and his height. And then Tigranes asked his wife : What
do you say, Armenia, did you think him beautiful ? No, by Zeus, she said, I wasn’t
looking at him. Not at Cyrus ? he said ; at whom then ? At him, she said, who
offered his own life to save me from slavery ; ” and that was Tigranes.4
In the Symposium,6 too, we read of passionate attachment between the
Homeric enthusiast, Niceratos, and his wife—per-
1 Ethics, viii. 12, 7, p. 1161 a. 2 Cyrop. vii. 1, 4-17.
8 Cyrop.
vii. 1, 18. * Cyrop. iii. 1, 41. 6 Symp. 8, 3.
haps that Homeric education, of which we heard, did make a kalos kagathos
of a man on this side of life, too. Cyrus himself, in the story—a deviation of
some significance perhaps from Persian practice—has only one wife, his cousin—“
she whom you often carried in your arms, when you were a boy in our house ; and
whenever anyone asked her whom she would marry, it was always Cyrus ” 1—and
she herself crowns him, a scene almost mediaeval in tone.®
The Greeks were quite frank in stating that the object of marriage 3—though,
Aristotle says, not the only one—is the production of children. Xenophon
himself is our authority for the remarkable usages of Sparta in this matter—the
relaxation of monogamy between friends in order to the procreation of big and
healthy children ; but what he thought of it seems indicated in his conclusion.
“ About the production of children such was the legislation of Lycurgus, the
very antithesis of all other peoples, and whether it has produced for Sparta
men of greater height and greater strength, let him who will inquire for
himself.” Much as he admired Spartan discipline, it looks as if he was critical
at this point. His own feeling is shown in the words he attributes to Socrates,
when the old man is explaining to his son how much a home owes to the mother—on
the care a man takes of his pregnant wife who is carrying his children, and the
forethought he exercises for the unborn, and on the mother’s weariness and risk
of life, on her care of the baby when it comes, not because of any good it has
done her, not as if it knew who its friend was or could say what it wanted ;
she has to guess herself what will help it and please it, and so the labour of
years begins and goes on without any knowledge that there will be any return
for it. “ And how much annoyance do you think you have given her from babyhood
up^in voice and actions, and peevishness ? and how much pain, too, when you
have been sick ? ” 4 The man who writes in this way knows—and it is
only experience that gives the knowledge—the value of family life. Even if he
is didactic, it is clear that he has learnt from his wife,
1 Cyrop. viii. 5, 19. 2 Cf. H6mardinquer, La Cyroptdie, p. 126.
“Aristotle,
Pol. vii. 16, 5-10, p. 1335a, on the ages within which men and women are best
adapted to this end.
4 Mem. ii. 2, 5-7.
23
and found that she has lessons to teach him that outweigh some of
Plato’s. The house at Scillus shows a side of Greek life and character not much
emphasized in the books ancient or modern, yet full of significance. Homes were
homes, even if Pericles and Aristophanes emphasized other things than mere
affection of married people and their commonplace interest in the new baby.
Plutarch in a later day shows us Greek life at Chaeroneia, and Dio Chrysostom
among the squatters on Euboea, very much from the same angle as Xenophon.
The wife of Ischomachus only appears, we have to remember, in the fragments
of her conversation which her husband quotes to Socrates, but it is possible
to see some character in her. If she was very carefully screened from the
world in her mother’s home, it would seem she learnt no evil there—she is pure
and gentle and kind-hearted. She answers her husband now and again with
spirit—and it delights him. She makes him think well of women. She told him he
was wrong if he supposed he was laying a task on her in giving her charge of
the household—not to have such a charge would trouble her more. " I
suppose,” he says to Socrates, “ it comes naturally to a good woman to prefer
to take care of her children rather than neglect them, and in the same way to
take care of possessions too, whose charm lies in their being one’s own.” 1
When, as a young Greek girl might, she got herself up with powder and rouge and
high heels, a few words from him led her to see there was a kind of falsity in
it; and, seeing in a flash what it was she liked in him, she was done with such
vanities for ever.2 After this it is amazing to find the great Cyrus
tolerant of drugs to make the eye bright and other little devices to improve
the complexion.3 That Napoleon III used rouge at Sedan with a
purpose is another thing. The little wife, however, ventured to ask Ischomachus
if he could suggest anything to improve her looks,4 and he suggested
activity in all her duties; it would mean appetite, and thence would come
health and good complexion. A life of sitting still in dignity was fatal to
good looks.5
1 Oecon. g, 18-19. 2 Oecon. 10, 2-8.
8 Cyrop. viii. 1, 41. 1 Oecon. 10, 9.
6 Croiset, X&nophon, p. 176, says
the passage reminds the reader of
The chapter on tidiness, one feels, takes the reader right into the
household at Scillus. Ischomachus, we read, came home and asked for something
or other, and his wife blushed all over and was evidently troubled. She did not
know where it was. So a discourse follows, which, we may be sure, was often
heard at Scillus on the advantages of order. Think of a chorus and what order
means there—or an army, and Ischomachus is quite carried away, till if dates
allowed we could believe he had travelled with the Ten Thousand himself
—hoplites all in rank, cavalry, light-armed, bbwmen, slingers— tens of
thousands of them all in rank, advancing in silence —or a ship of war, and this
sets Ischomachus off on another series of reminiscences of the great Phoenician
merchant ship in the most incredible good order, with everything conceivable
that a ship would want stowed with consummate neatness in the smallest possible
compass, and the steersman’s mate knew where every single thing was, could lay
his hand on it in an instant, as easily as you could spell Socrates, and would
refresh his memory by inspection to see that all was handy— “ for, when God
sends a tempest, you can’t go looking for things. God threatens and chastens
stupid people.” Yes, he told his wife all about the ship and enforced the
lesson— “ how beautiful it looks ”—let us pause to recall what we know of the
great word kalos and all it carries of beauty and moral worth and grandeur—“
how beautiful it looks when the boots and shoes are all set out in order,
whatever size and shape they are.” And with this inimitable and characteristic
sentence we may perhaps leave the training of the wife of Ischomachus, for it
was, as we know, successful. Perhaps it is easier to train a paper wife than a
real one. At least, it has been said that the beauty of people in books is that
you can shut the book, and people in books can be very charming and obliging.
If we smile now and then as we listen to Ischomachus, we must not lose
sight of the value of the book. Life might be very hard for a little Athenian
wife, and Xenophon urged that by kindness and courtesy and good-humour a
husband could do a great deal to win that love and confidence which
those
statues of Pheidias in whose remains even yet “ life and strength shine with
sovereign beauty.”
make a marriage happy. No doubt tidiness helps in this, but then it is
only one aspect of that consideration for others, which Xenophon says Socrates
always taught, and which he preaches himself on many a pleasant page.
Of Xenophon’s own wife we only know what Diogenes Laertius quotes from
Demetrius of Magnesia, and it is a curious sentence. When Xenophon went to
Scillus “ there followed him—or went with him—a wife too, called Philesia.” 1
The verb is peculiar—it may imply that she came from Asia ; and the noun is
odd—yvvaiov. The word is used in Attic affectionately and contemptuously—in
Aristophanes it might be both—“ wifie.” If she was a foreigner, Xenophon could
not have contracted a legal Athenian marriage with her, which might perhaps
help to explain why he settled in Corinth after 471. It suggests a question,
too, of wide bearing : By what law or laws were those increasingly numerous
Greeks married whom we find in every city of the Mediterranean and of the
kingdoms of Alexander’s successors ? Marriage laws must have differed endlessly
in the old Greek cities ; what form did the general " law of Nature ” take
in the new foundations ?
When we come to Xenophon’s sons we seem to be on firmer ground.2
They were two, and apparently twins, for they were called the Dioscuri.3
One of them lived to serve and fall in the Athenian ranks at Mantineia in 362.
This was Gryllos, and his gallant death and his father’s name called attention
to him, and Aristotle is quoted as the authority for the fact that
very many men wrote encomiums and epitaphs on him—“ partly for his father’s
sake,” a clause which it is pleasant to read. The other son, Diodorus, was less
distinguished ; in later days he had a son called Xenophon whose sole
distinction, a slight one, seems to have been that he was prosecuted on some
charge or other by somebody.
No one can doubt that Xenophon must have rejoiced in having sons. At all
events, no Greek writer, who has reached us, took such trouble or showed such
sympathy in drawing
1 Diogenes
Laertius, ii. 6, 8, § 52.
1 On this, Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6, 8-10, §§
52-55.
3 The name
Diodorus makes this almost certain—at least for those who know the evidence on
twin cults and practices relative to twins, collected by Dr. Rendel Harris. -
the character of a natural boy. There is nothing in Greek literature that
approaches the boy Cyrus in the first book of the Cyropaedeia ; the only thing
like it is the actual letter of a boy, Theon, found of late years among papyri.1
Cyrus is drawn as a manly, natural little fellow—full of spirit and observation
and friendliness, quite at home with people and modest too—" perhaps he
was a bit of a chatterbox,” adds Xenophon, and explains that as partly due to
his education— for he had to be ready to give a reason for whatever he did— and
he was keen on understanding things, and used to ask questions. He was a shrewd
little lad, and always ready with an answer. “ But all his chattering left the
impression not of forwardness, but of simplicity and warm-heartedness, so that
one would sooner listen to him than sit and have him silent.” The man who wrote
that passage evidently loved boys, and as evidently meant to bring Socratic
principles into the education of his own.
We are told that Agesilaos suggested he should send his boys to Sparta to
be trained,2 and he clearly liked many features in the Spartan
training. The boys grew up manly and modest, they knew how to behave in the
streets, their whole deportment spoke of discipline—and it showed that the male
sex is as capable as the female, more capable in fact, of sobriety and
quietness, for here were boys whom you found more bashful than girls 3—and
yet physically hard and fit— quite unlike the impudent young Athenians whom
Isocrates describes.4 Probably Xenophon had reasons for keeping his
boys near him which he did not tell Agesilaos. An exile was always and
everywhere an exile ; nothing had the stamp of permanence on it in Greece at
that time ; and as the seaman said to Ischomachus, " You can’t go looking
for things in a storm.” The storm broke in 371, and Xenophon hurried his sons,
with a few slaves, off to Lepreon southward, escaping
1 G. Milliga n, Selections from the Greek Papyri,
No. 42, from Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, i. p. 185 f.; and
Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East.
2 Plut. Agesilaus, 20. 8 Lac. Resp. 3, 4-5.
1
Isocrates, Areop. 48-49. On the other hand, Isocrates notices that the Spartans
are so wanting in education and culture (<f>iko<ro<j>Las) that
they do not even leaxn their letters (Panath. 209). The author of Hippias
Major, 285 c, says not many of them can count, S>s tiros elnfiv.
himself northward to Elis, and joining them at Lepreon as soon as he
could ; and then, as we saw, they all got off to Corinth.
Discipline, order, and the Socratic method were the foundations of the
upbringing his boys had, of that we may be sure— and hunting. Xenophon believed
that training is the secret of sound mind and sound body—aamlv is his word.1
All that is honourable or good in a man depends on practice—
acricr)T(i—self-control (aaxfipoo-uvr)) most of all. He believed with Theognis,
a rather old-fashioned and aristocratic poet:2
Good from
the good thou’lt learn; but comrades base
What sense
thou hast, are certain to efface.
Could courage be taught ? Here he falls back on Socrates. Socrates, he
says, recognized great differences of natural endowment in regard to courage,
but held that here also training tells. The Macedonians a generation later bore
down the Greeks—a nation of hunters triumphant over a race of athletes. Xenophon’s
passion for hunting was no doubt helped by his recognition of the training
that hunting in the wild carried with it— observation, patience, cunning, the
gift of knowing your quarry and its ways and nature, unflagging energy, and
interest always alert. As we have seen, his boys hunted—and " men who
wished hunted with them ”3; one man, for certain, we can guess.
" Even when I was a little boy,” says Pheraulas, a Persian of the people,4
“ I would snatch up a hunting-knife whenever I saw one ; and it was nobody, but
just nature, I maintain, that taught me how to hold it. I wasn’t taught to do
it ; they used to try to prevent me ; but it was like some other things that
nature set me doing, in spite of my father and mother. By Zeus, I used to hack
with that knife—everything I could get a chance at. It wasn’t merely natural,
like walking and running—it was fun, splendid fun I thought it.” The parents,
of course, were on the side of safety, but one of them had a quiet satisfaction
of his own when he caught Gryllos with the hunting-knife ; he must put it down,
of course; but— he’ll make a hunter. And he did. And if, like Pheraulas, the
boy had a natural handiness with his fists—they need not always
1 Mem. i. 2, ig, and 23. 2 Theognis, 35, 36.
3 Anab. v. 3, 10. * Cyrop. ii. 3, 7-10.
be used on Diodorus. This seems to be brought out by a chapter in the
Memorabilia, where two brothers (with twin-like names) disagree, and Socrates
talks to one of them about friendship between brothers—you two are like a pair
of hands made by God to help each other; and two brothers are a much more
useful pair than a pair of hands or a pair of eyes.1 Brothers must
be special friends. Probably the family knew this story well, and the other
story about Socrates teaching his son to be gentle with his mother2—"
even if her tongue did make you wish yourself dead.” Manners, too, were
watched—Socrates had spoken of table manners from time to time, of the consideration
that is due to others in this matter, of tolerance for bad manners in others,
of the art of putting up with things— “ just think that yoii are perhaps harder
to please than the slaves.” Xenophon, like Alexander after him, was impressed
with the manners and breeding of the Persian gentleman, and recommended them
with an explicitness that moves a smile.3 With all this we have to
remember that the grave, stately, and strict father, with all his stories of
Socrates, could tell other stories — nobody like him — thrilling stories of
battle and adventure, such as made Plutarch centuries later say that he all but
shows you the actual thing, till you feel you are in the thick of it, your
heart beating, sharing the danger, so vivid it all is.4 And
sometimes the tales gleamed with fun, when he told of King Seuthes and his
Thracian suppers, or of Cyrus and the butler.
“ No,” says Ischomachus to Socrates, " I did not begin to teach my
wife before I sacrificed and prayed that for me teaching and her taught all
might turn out for the best.” “And did your wife join with you in these
sacrifices and prayers ? ” “ Why, yes ; she did, with many a prayer to the gods
that she might become what she ought to be.” 6 These simple
sentences show how that piety, shown by Xenophon in every emergency on the
march through Asia, finds a place in the more ordinary and everyday affairs of
Scillus. The Memo
1 Mem. ii. 3, 1-19. Cf. also Cyrop. viii. 7,
14-16.
2 Mem. ii. 2, 1-14.
3 Cyrop. v. 2, 17 ; and viii. 1, 42, on spitting,
blowing the nose, staring.
4 Plut.
Artax. 8, on Cunaxa. 6
Oecon. 7,
7-8.
rabilia
are full of the same thought of the goodness and kindness of the gods and man's
duty to wait on them. In Xenophon’s story of the greater Cyrus, it has been
pointed out, there is no jealous Nemesis waiting to crush greatness because it
is great.1 Cyrus is loyal to heaven, and heaven is loyal to him—that is all. It is
a simple faith, and one which has made men great. Xenophon will go to the gods
in the great perplexities of the march, and in the little affairs of crops and
cattle.2 He.would not have been so hard upon " the noble Hesiod
” as some of his fellow-students were, according to Plato in the Republic ;3
it would have seemed quite natural to him that bees and sheep and other
blessings should be multiplied to the righteous, and he believed he had
Socrates with him in this conviction. Shallow natures hold this faith, but they
sometimes lose it when Eleians recapture Scillus ; deeper ones have held it,
too, and not lost it. And when it comes to the last and greatest difficulty of
all, " for my part, my sons, I have never yet been persuaded that the
soul, so long as it is in a mortal body, lives, and when it leaves it, dies;
for I see that it is the presence of the soul within them that makes these
mortal bodies live. Nor could anyone ever persuade me that the soul loses sense
when it leaves the senseless body; no, but when it is let loose, unmingled and
pure, I think it must be then that it reaches its highest wisdom. . . . Even if
it is not so, if the soul lingers and dies with the body, yet fear the gods who
abide for ever, who see all, whose is all power, who uphold this universe
undiminished, ageless, unerring, unspeakable for its beauty and grandeur—fear
them and do nothing impious or unholy, no, nor think it. And after the gods,
respect mankind, the whole race of men new every generation. ... I have been a
lover of men all my life.” So says the dying Cyrus, and the thoughts are
Xenophon’s.
The Greek household, beside parents and children, contained slaves, and
they might be many. We are told that a Spartan friend sent Xenophon a lot of
captives from Dardanus, when he was settled at Scillus. Ischomachus accordingly
has a good deal to say about them. They shirked, stole, drank, and struck up
irregular unions. One of the wife’s duties was to see “ that the slaves do not
breed without our leave,” though
1 H6mardinquer, La
Cyropidie, 286. 1 Oecon. 5,20. 3 Rep. ii. 363A.
Ischomachus (like Aristotle later on) saw that to have children of their
own made good slaves more loyal at once.1 That is his line
throughout—treat the slave like a human being, teach him—if you can teach dogs
to fetch and carry and turn somersaults, you can teach men and women—trust him
and be good to him, and let him see that you are just, and he will be your
friend and play fair by you.2 The same discovery was made by some
masters of negroes in the Southern States in days before the war, who said they
never had trouble with their negroes, and that they did not run away.3
Slavery, as Homer and Euripides saw, kills personality, but Ischomachus saw
that it paid to keep it alive, even if kindliness were not a motive with him.
This gives a strange look to the defence of the eunuch system put into the
mouth of the great Cyrus,4 who in this case for once treats men
simply as tools. It is not quite in character, but the passage may be an
apology for an Oriental practice, which the Greeks did not like, and which they
might think a blot on the hero’s nature. The defence fails and rather
emphasizes the blot. Ischomachus is a great deal shrewder and more humane.
A large part of the Oeconomicus is taken up with farming— clearly a theme
in which Xenophon was interested deeply, but here we need not perhaps follow
him. It will be more interesting to ask what library he had at Scillus, for it
is plain that he read a great deal in his years there and at Corinth— and not
merely old books, but new ones. For it has been brought out that he read
Plato’s dialogues as they appeared ; he knew more or less what Antisthenes was
doing in books; and he read and studied Isocrates. Isocrates and he had
belonged to the same deme, they were about the same age, and they may have
known each other as boys. Their tastes were widely different—one can hardly
imagine Isocrates hunting or riding over a farm—still less among the Kurds and
the snow. But Xenophon, it has been noticed, is curiously susceptible to style,
and when Isocrates in 373 struck out a new path in literature with his
Evagoras, Xenophon realized its significance,
1 Oecon. 9, 5. Cf. Aristotle, Oecon. i. 5.
2 Oecon. chapters 12 to 14 generally.
8 Booker
Washington, Story of the Negro.
* Cyrop. vii. 5, 60-65.
and traces of its influence have been noticed in others of his books and
not in the Agesilaos alone. Of the many books he wrote, constant use has been
made in this and the preceding chapters. The fashion in education has taken us
elsewhere to-day, not always to our advantage. If what has been written here
will send any reader back to Xenophon’s own pages, he will find what we have
lost by neglecting one of the strongest, sanest, most wholesome, and delightful
writers of ancient Greece.
UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN ?
HERE are points in history where Imagination loves
to rest—great battles that alter the face of the world
or turn for ever the current of mankind's thinking— great discoveries
like those of Columbus and his contemporaries which change every factor in
human affairs by bringing in new ones of vaster scope—great men who sum up a
nation’s life or the spirit of a people and an epoch in themselves, or, by the
questions they raise, or the forces of personality which they liberate or
evoke, give humanity new outlook and new insight. In the story of the Greek
race three moments stand out—one a battle of a few hours fought and won at
Salamis, the second the fifteen years of the rule of Pericles, the third the
short reign of Alexander—and all of them fall within the brief period of a
hundred and sixty years. Pericles and Alexander are names that stand for ideas
utterly divergent, and two generations span the interval between the men.
Every age is an age of transition, but somehow in few does the transition
seem so swift and so complete as here. We pass to a pew world, with wider
horizons than men ever dreamed could be. Every value we have learnt in
politics, in philosophy, in religion, in everything, is revised, and often, it
would seem, inverted. Democracy loses its empire and is relegated, like a
disgraced pasha in modem Turkey, to the control of a parish. Monarchy and
chivalry are in the ascendant, and never more brilliant. New cities rise,
which, without knowing it, negate everything it was supposed a city should be.
The great philosophers are still busy with their ideal states, which are now
further from realization than the Bird City of Aristophanes ; and mankind
turns for practical guidance to other teachers who care little for the state
and a great deal for the universe and the individual. In religion, disguised
mono-
theisms begin to capture the minds of serious men with a new appeal; and
the old cults of the city-gods survive for old acquaintance’ sake, and
interest not the pious but the antiquaries. 'All this in a century ! Sparta
launched war upon the Greek world to win the freedom of every Greek town and
city ; she crushed Athens and carried off a victory she little deserved; and in
half a century all Greece is controlled by ldngs, and all the freedom the
cities in general keep is to plan their streets and mismanage their finances.
Where the city is built round a fortress, it is a different story, chequered
with uneven dashes of freedom and slavery. To this end had autopolitanism, if
such a word may be developed,—the passionate demand for local independence to
the utmost,—brought its votaries.
The war-cry with which a nation embarks upon a war may have little
relation to the facts of the world ; it may be a mere chimera, a madness—like
that “ passion ” that sent Athens to Sicily—or a fancy fetched from a
dead-and-gone past—or a catchword without real meaning but with an appeal,
ready and compulsive, for those who do not think. Did Sparta ever mean to make
all Greeks “ citizens of themselves,” every Greek city a law to itself ? The
smaller cities thought so, hoped so, and fought to win this freedom. But
Salamis long before had marked the close of the era in which their fancies
lived. Fifty years and more of the rule of Athens, years of progress all over
the world, had made impossible such a return to the days before Salamis. New
ideals, new necessities, new nations, a new balance of powers had come in, and
there could be no going back. The Peloponnesian War altered much and it left
problems, the first glance at which would show any thinking man that the
war-cry of the victors was a cry for the impossible and the undesirable.
Three things stand out in the situation of the Greek peoples at the end
of the Peloponnesian War. First of all, there is the fact perpetually
emphasized by the commercial advisers of Athens, that Athens is in the middle
of the world. This was true, for the known world, and the civilized world, now
extended almost as far to the West, as hitherto to the East and to the South.
Eighty years of Athenian trade Westward, forty or fifty years of internal peace
in Asia Minor, the unity of the old empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt under the
peace-
ful control of Persia, must have added in a degree incalculable to us to
the population and the wealth of the whole world, both East and West, but
especially Westward. The historians have chronicled the wars for us,—short wars
and local wars, though there were too many of them,—but have they emphasized
enough the significance to mankind of the cessation of Assyrian raiding, the
opening and settlement of the western shores of the Mediterranean, and the
steady movements of commerce over a very great sea freer than ever before from
pirates and vastly more familiar to mariner and pilot ? The rise of great
cities like Syracuse and Carthage, Capua and Massilia, the trading energies of
the Carthaginian, the Etruscan, and the Greek on every western shore with a
hinterland—everything points to a new Western world that must react on the
Aegaean, yes, and on the Euxine, and on the Levant generally. The West grows
richer and richer in men and cities, industries, arts, and gold and silver. If
there had been no changes whatever in the cities and islands of old Greece and
Ionia, the reaction of this great new West must have been felt; but there were
great changes in the ancient homes of the race.
In the next place, it is safe to say that the war left every Greek state
(with the exception, perhaps, of Thebes) weaker in many ways. Twenty-seven
years taken from industry and given to destruction did not increase the
national wealth. The losses of life were enormous, and the loss of energy and
hope and spirit in the peoples is hardly to be computed. Sparta, it might be
urged, came out of the war stronger—she gained empire and she had amassed
stores of gold 1 so great as to make conservative Spartans uneasy.
The power of a single Spartan had never been greater.2 But Sparta
had lost men, and there was no way of replacing them—she could not and she
would not adopt citizens as other states did, not even from among her subject
neighbours the Perioeci. There was no Apollodorus class in Lacedaemon. Nor did
the captured gold in the long run add to her strength—it was unremunera- tive ;
it developed no industry, no commerce. From this
1 Cf.
[Plato] Alcib. 1. 122 e; Hippias
Major, 283 d; Xen. Lac. Rep.
14, 3, Spartans once forbidden to own gold, now swaggering over it ;
Poseidonios, Frag. 41, ap. Athenaeus, vi. 233 f
; Plut. Lysander, 18.
1 Cf. Isocrates, Archid. 52, and Paneg. 111; and
Xen. Anab. vi. 6, 12.
time we may date the rise of the heiress, a new figure in Spartan life,
who, as later observers noticed,1 weakened the state ; for
properties became massed in feminine hands, and Spartan men lost their national
status through want of even the little needed to maintain their “
contributions.”
Poverty, as we are now learning to see, was always a near neighbour in a
Greek state—poverty that very quickly reached the verge of endurance and then
took on the most horrible guise. We know in various ways how it reached Sparta,
and Isocrates reiterates with emphasis its pressure on Greek 1 fe generally.2
It was poverty, he insists, that drove men abroad in shoals to find a living in
military service with the foreigner, even with the barbarian. Lysias and
Aristophanes are witnesses, as we have seen, to the penury of Athens, of the
treasury, and the individual. Two men stand out as advocates of the plan that
was to solve many of the difficulties of poverty, but it was not till
half-Hellenized kings replaced oligarchies and democracies that the colonial
proposals of Xenophon and Isocrates were put into action, and with success.
But, in the meantime, no state would attempt such a plan—perhaps even the means
to initiate it were wanting. Xenophon’s Ten Thousand would rather kill him;
than settle at the back of beyond, Heaven knows where, at the far end of the
Euxine. Alexander planted his men on the Jaxartes and at the foot of Hindu
Kush, and there they had to stay.
Thirdly, the war had not made relations between Greek states any easier.
Even the allies of Sparta soon felt they had helped to win her too complete a
victory. Yet co-operation was more than ever needed, for each state and every
state was relatively smaller and weaker in a world of larger populations and
greater wealth. The most serious call to some kind of united action was the
awakening of Persia, which after forty years of inaction, content with an
agreement with Athens, had once more intruded into Greek politics with a policy
that seemed, like many things Persian, shifting and uncertain, but was in fact
successful in bringing all the Greeks together “ to
1 Aristotle (Pol. ii. 9, 14-15, 1270 a) says
nearly two-fifths of the country are held by women.
2 Isocrates, Paneg. 168, 174; Archid. 64-68;
Letter to Archi- damos, 8
the gates of the King.” 1 So we find a weakened Greece
struggling with poverty at home and face to face abroad, East and West, with
Oriental powers conscious of new opportunities for the subjection of the
Hellenic world.
These are the great factors always present in the period from 404 to
359—the growth of the nations in population and wealth, the decline of Greece
in both, and the heightened impossibility of concerted Greek action. The
promised goal of autonomy for every town was by now an absurdity ; it was still
talked of, it was put into practice, but never for any other purpose than to
weaken a rival power. The real guiding . principles of the age are to be looked
for elsewhere. Three types of government with more than a small local outlook
are to be recognized. There is, of course, the Empire or Hegemony of a Greek
city-state. Sparta took it over from Athens at the end of the war, and managed
it very badly— with an amount of oppression and exasperation for everybody that
soon made enemies of all her allies. Athens tried to revive the glories of her
old Confederacy with some accommodation to the newer ideas of the period. And
then Thebes broke for ever the power of Sparta, and introduced fresh elements
of confusion everywhere. One aspect of the work of Thebes comes pleasantly to
the modem student. Whatever her motive—and it was frankly the crippling of
Sparta—she gave freedom to two oppressed nationalities of the Peloponnese, the
Arcadians, and the Messenians. These liberated races give us two striking
examples of another type of government, which was now beginning to be tried in
a quiet way in a good many corners of Greece, and which had a great future—
Federalism. But so far the federal governments of Greece were weak, and the
system had a rival in a new variety of monarchy. All round the Greek world we
find kingddhis springing up, with a good deal of actual power and the promise
of more. The coming of the Prince is heralded throughout the whole period ; and
with Philip he came—to rule till 1776. It is surprising to a reader who knows
the fifth-century literature to finH how monarchical the fourth century, apart
from the popular orators, has become. Away from the bema no one seems to have
had much enthusiasm for Democracy, and 1 Polybius,
vi. 49.
perhaps even in an Athenian assembly the Funeral Speech of Pericles would
by now have been impossible.
The problem was one of leadership. The city-state failed to retain the
hegemony of the Greek world; the federal league hardly attempted it; and before
Philip princely government had not so wide an outlook. But whatever the power
was to be that should unite the world, certain qualifications, it was growingly
clear, were necessary. First of all, the dominant power must have a strong hold
upon the tools of war. War was growing to be every year more of a specialist’s
business. The fifth century hardly saw a successful siege of a town of any
dimensions; Sparta notoriously never attempted it. But in the fourth century
the siege is a great feature of war,1! and siege engines come in.
National levies in the older Greece are disliked, and war is carried on by
mercenaries. In the fifth century even Archidamos, king of Sparta, is represented
by Thucydides as saying that war is not so much an affair of arms as of finance
2—a saying borne out by the course of the Peloponnesian War, in
which victory was to fall to the power that could longest keep up the
rebuilding of lost fleets, and, till Persia stepped in, that power was Athens,
and afterwards it was Sparta.3 In the fourth century war cost still
more money 4—especially as the range widened over which it might be
carried on. It was in Sicily that the new features of war first showed
themselves, and Sicily saw the first successful Greek prince emerge from the
new conditions. But the great money power of the world was still Persia. As
early as 380 Isocrates laments that the King uses Greek troops against
Evagoras.5 A few years later his friend, the Athenian general,
Timotheos, entered the King’s service, but this was hardly unfitting for the
son of Conon.
1 The reader of Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander
will want no references, for this statement.
a Thuc. i.
83, 2.
3 There is a good remark in Plutarch’s Alcib. 35,
on the difficulties of a general contending against people with the Great King
as xopijyos. This is just, even if the King was as slack as the author of
Hellenica Oxyrhynchia says (14, '2).
* Isocrates (Evag. 60) says Artaxerxes
spent 15,000 talents on his war against Evagoras. His satraps may have had some
of it.
e
Isocrates, Paneg. 135.
No one could compete in wealth with the King of Persia, and whatever was
to be bought, he could buy—ships, soldiers, politicians.
But as important as wealth for the hegemony of the Greek world was some
clear, strong, and wide outlook in the ruler, whether demos, or council, or
prince. Whoever was to rule must have enough political intelligence and insight
to realize the unity of the world and the other new elements in the situation
before him. Most men are limited in outlook and intelligence ; the Greeks were
becoming very limited—a Nemesis not unfamiliar among the sons of great or
successful parents. The time comes when political contrivances, that have been
necessary and inevitable in their day, are outworn and grow dangerous. State
sovereignty made the United States of America possible ; to-day few foreigners
who watch its operations would say that it could not be greatly reduced with
advantage.1 The Greek’s local attachments stood in the way of his
sympathies and his power of grasping a world- situation.
In the third place, the future ruler must be able to secure that mankind
should not recede in culture and civilization. He must have an intelligent
feeling for the great achievements of Greek genius. Pericles was right; Athens
had been, and was, an education of mankind, and he who was to rule and guide
mankind must be trustee for this splendid heritage. Such a task meant some
depth of nature, a capacity not quickly found in Spartan, Theban, or Roman.
The fourth qualification for the new ruler—perhaps the hardest to
find—was some power of enlisting the ruled, of winning at least their consent
if not their co-operation. The Greek race, said Aristotle, lying between Europe
and Asia., and sharing the spiritual gifts of both, “ if it could be formed
into one state, would be able to rule the world.” 2 The first thing
on which Isocrates insists, if Athens in 380, or if Philip
1 Immigration from Europe into the Eastern
States, and the settlement by colonists from them of the Western States,
together with the relegation of slavery to the past, have dimmed the old
traditions and associations that made State right a passion.
2 Aristotle, Pol. vii. 7, 3, 13276. Thucydides
had made a similar remark about the Scythians (ii. 97).
24
in 346, can be induced to lead a crusade against Persia, is the
reconciliation of the Greek world within itself—and “ by now,” he says in 346,
" I know they are levelled down together by misfortunes, and will choose
the advantages of concord,” and Philip can manage it, he alone.1
The difficulties to be overcome were obvious. Greece was doubly
disintegrated—“ We quarrel about the Cyclades,, and abandon all those Greek
cities of Asia, all those resources, to the King.” 2 No Greek
city-state could long trust its neighbour—no, nor by now its citizens. Faction
and fury had always marked Greek politics, but they had at least implied a
certain patriotism; now, the citizens simply went away and settled where
business took them, or enlisted by the thousand under the Persian—satrap,
prince, or King. In a sense, it was an armed particularism, too ; for the land
was studded with rock-fortresses, here an Acropolis, there an Acrocorinthus, a
Cadmeia, which gave the cities a military significance, useless in offensive
warfare, fatally effective in defensive ; and where mercenary soldiers were
everywhere available, even a small town could be amazingly strong just for the
short time that might be critical.3 Phamabazos rebuilt the Long
Walls of Athens, because he saw that a fortress in Attica linked with the sea
would be irreducible by the Spartans for ever, unless he gave them a fleet,
which he did not mean to do, and thus their hegemony would be so shaken as to
be ineffective except for Persian purposes. He was right.4 “ There
is nothing easier for the Persian,” says Isocrates, “ than to find means to
keep us from ever leaving off to fight against one another. ... It is perfectly
plain and easy ; it is impossible ever to have a secure peace unless we join in
a common war against the barbarians, impossible for the Greeks to be of one
mind till we draw our advantages from the same sources and take our risks
against the same people.” 6 The last sentence is not obscure to
anyone who
1
Isocrates, Philip, 40, 41. a
Isocrates, Paneg. 136.
3 Cf. the advice given by Conon to Pharnabazos
about the island and sea-board cities in 393 (Xen. Hellenica, iv. 8, 2).
* Xen. Hellenica, iv. 8, 9.
6
Isocrates, Paneg. 134, 173. Cf. Panath. 160, with its picture of separate Greek
embassies at Susa intriguing against each other.
remembers the thirty thousand archers that drove Agesilaos out of Asia.1
If this pleasantry about the coinage served to salve Spartan pride, it reveals
at once the strength of the Persian King and the weakness of Sparta. No Greek
power controlled so many “ archers,” and no Greek state could resist them.
But if these were the obstacles to Greek union, other things, as we have
seen, worked for it. Culture, it was more and more felt, had no provincialisms.
The Greek name was less a sign of blood/ than of mind; it belonged to those who
thought and felt in the Greek way—a universal term for the highest humanity.2
Commerce, too, even if the cultured despised it, was another bond of union,
fusing races in every port of the Mediterranean already, as it was to do on a
larger scale in Alexandria and Antioch; There was clearly, too, a sense widely
prevalent that the old city-state ideals had failed—a feeling that they were
hardly worth contending for; the career of Demosthenes is a witness to this,
for his whole life was a protest against it. And there was a nobler sense, too,
that Greeks were Greeks. War between Greeks, Plato taught,® was unnatural—it
was madness and folly, said Isocrates;4 and Aristophanes had said so
before either of them.5
It was for freedom that the Greek world had fought; and it was believed
at the moment that the day, which saw the returned exiles level the Long Walls
of Athens to the music of flute-girls, was to be the First Day of Greek
Freedom. The first question now was, whether freedom and Spartan hegemony were compatible.
Our chief authorities for this period are Xenophon and Isocrates. It is
freely made a matter of reproach against Xenophon that he was a friend of
Sparta—Freeman hurls “ renegade ” at him whenever it comes into his head ;
renegade he was not, but up to a certain point he did admire Sparta and her
institutions and some of her men. This admiration makes his story more
significant; and his long residence in the Peloponnese, not far from a
sanctuary of truce, his intimacy
1 Plut.
Ariax. 20. Cf. p. 223. 2 Isocrates, Paneg. 50.
’ Plato,
Rep. v. 470. . 4
Isocrates, Paneg. 133 fj
6
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, 1128 f.
with Spartan leaders, and his exclusion in large measure from Athenian
sources of information, all contribute to bring into his pages a fullness and
freshness of detail about Peloponnesian matters that we find nowhere else. Much
that he tells of Elis, let us say, or Phleious or Sicyon, is perhaps in itself
of little significance in the world’s history; these were small and unimportant
places, but they stood in close relations with a great power, and everything
that illuminates Sparta’s methods at this period is of value to the historian
who wishes to understand the world’s course. The fact also holds good here too,
that whenever Xenophon has a real story to tell, it is always interesting ; and
here, as in other parts of his writings, he takes us on to ground untrodden by
the Athenians and their friends.
Sparta, it is generally recognized, had become under the Lycurgean system
essentially an armed camp. Her constant tperil was, as we have .seen, the Helot
population, and most of her institutions were designed to safeguard her in this
quarter.1 Apart from Tarentum, the story of whose founding is very
obscure, Sparta had no colonies. All her expansion had been at the cost of her
neighbours, adding field to field,2 everything as it were within a
ring fence, and that very carefully guarded. Foreign influences, ideas of
freedom, should not reach the Helots ; there was no Messenian nation. Outside
her actual domain Sparta was faced with difficulties in the Peloponnese itself.
She could not keep out liberal ideas, democracy, and the love of freedom ; and
several communities of the Peloponnese were conspicuously democratic in
sentiment and government—Argos, Mantineia, and Elis, while even in more loyal
and friendly states the poison worked, as the story of Sicyon shows.3
Quite apart from the danger this meant among the Helots, it bore upon Sparta’s
hegemony of the world. For, when she led her troops out, it was usually by one
road—over the mountains northward into Arcadia, past Tegea, Mantineia, and
Orchomenos, and then round eastward past Phleious to the Isthmus of Corinth.
The early relations of Sparta
1 Thuc. iv. 80.
2 On the large holdings of land by Spartiates,
see Isocrates, Panath. 179, beyond what any other Greeks hold.
* Sicyon, Xen. Hellenica, vii. 1, 44-46.
with Tegea are described by Herodotus,1 in some very interesting
chapters. The great Democratic alliance engineered by Alcibiades after the
Peace of Nicias is set forth by Thucydides. It was a failure, and collapsed as
a result of one of the many battles of Mantineia ; but Sparta remembered it,
for she had a long memory and never let anything slip, even if she had to wait.
In the forty years now under survey Sparta was twice in a position of
triumph and power which left her her hands free to improve her arrangements at
home. The victory of 404 was followed by the resolve to “ discipline ” Elis.
The land was ravaged more than once, till the drunken democrat leader
Thrasydaios sobered down and accepted Sparta’s terms. The fortifications of
Phea and Cyllene were dismantled, and autonomy was given to all the communes
and townships ; the temple of Olympian Zeus was left to the men of Elis, and
peace and an alliance established.2 Autonomy once more is the
watchword, but once more it is the watchword with the qualification familiar to
us in Thucydides—“ conveniently for the Spartans.” 3 Involved in the
story is a sub-plot; Xenias, who was said to measure his father’s money by the
bushel, conceived the hope of an agreement with Sparta, and with his friends
set about a massacre of the democrat party, and killed a man very like
Thrasydaios. But that hero was elsewhere drunk, asleep, and safe. His partisans
found him, swarmed about him " like bees round a queen,” and the tide
turned, and the oligarchic faction had to fly to the Spartans. It is likely
enough that, after Thrasydaios had negotiated his peace, they came back and
drove him out. It is interesting to note in passing the frequent imputation at
this period of drunkenness to democrat leaders; Cleophon addressed the Ecclesia
drunk, we are told,4 and Isocrates suggests that in Athens a
drunkard always seems a more loyal democrat than a man who does not get tipsy.8
It looks very like mere oligarchic slander—the only way in which some people
could account for democratic principles by now. They make no such allegations
as to the leaders in old days.
1
Herodotus, i. 65-68. s Xen.
Hellenica, iii. 2, 21-31.
8 Thuc. i.
144, Tois AaKcSai/iOVioir fniTtfSeias avTOvofietcr0M.
4 ’Adr/valav
iloXima, 34, 3. 6
Isocrates, de Pace, 13.
Again, in 386 the Peace of Antalkidas gave Sparta a fresh triumph over
foes abroad and freedom to look nearer home. They sent orders to the Mantineians
to take down their walls— otherwise they would look on them as enemies, for
they had noticed a good deal that was suspicious, viz. grain exports to Argos,
a refusal of military service on the pretext of some sacred truce or other,
and, in short, a general envy of Sparta, and pleasure in her misfortunes.1
Not unnaturally the demand was refused, and a siege followed, one of the few in
which Spartans were successful. They dammed up the river which flowed through
the city, just where it left the walls ; the town was flooded, and its
foundations began to give way. The terms of surrender were stiffened by the new
demand that the city should be broken up into villages. The old exiled Spartan
king, Pausanias, who lived there, interceded with his son and successor for the
friends of Argos, who were allowed to go with their lives. But “ the walls were
destroyed and Mantineia distributed into four villages as of old. At first they
were annoyed at having to leave their houses and build other ones ; but when
the people of substance found themselves living nearer their farms among the
villages and in enjoyment of aristocratic government, and rid of the wearisome
demagogues, they began to be pleased.” 2 The Spartans sent to each
of these villages a xenagos, a military officer to levy contingents, which were
raised far more readily, Xenophon says, under the new system than under the
democracy. This was “ autonomy convenient to the Spartans.” Isocrates, writing
shortly after the event, puts it differently—“ When the peace was made, they
destroyed the city of the Mantineians ” ; 3 and looking back at it
in after years (355) he sums up the story and points to the results—“ they
abused the Peloponnese and filled it with revolutions and wars. What city was
there which they did not attack ? ”—Elis, Corinth, Mantineia, he runs over,
Phleious and Argos—" they never left
1 Xen.
Hettenica, v. 2, 1-2.
a Xen.
Hellenica, v. 2, 7. How ready they were to be done with the village system and
to rebuild their walls in 371, in spite of the friendly suggestions of
Agesilaos to delay, he tells in a more convincing section (vi. 5, 3-5).
8
Isocrates, Paneg. 126.
off ill-treating the rest and preparing for themselves the defeat at
Leuctra. Some say that defeat was the cause of Sparta’s trouble ; they are
wrong. It was not because of Leuctra that their allies hated them, it was the
outrages of the years before it that brought Leuctra upon them.” 1
How men felt about the Spartans in the Peloponnese is brought out by
Xenophon’s story of the plot of Kinadon, a disfranchised Spartiate (about
398-397).2 “ He took me,” said the informer, “ to the edge of the
market-place and told me to count how many Spartiates were in the market. I
counted— king, ephors, gerusia, and others, about forty. Why did you tell me to
count them, Kinadon ? said I. And he answered : These reckon as your enemies,
and the rest—all the rest, four thousand and more—your allies; ” and the same
on country roads and on the farms—one Spartiate, one enemy, and everybody else
an ally—helots, neodamodes, inferiors, and perioeci; 3 "for
wherever among these there was talk at all about Spartiates, not a man of them
could conceal that he would like to eat them raw ”—the old proverbial Greek
phrase with which Zeus twitted Hera about the Trojans. So much for Spartan rule
at home and in the Peloponnese.
With these principles and no more faculty than this for winning the
consent of the ruled, Sparta undertook to rule the Greek world at large. Empire
of the sea, says Isocrates, playing on the word apyj), was to them the
beginning of misfortunes ; they found power a very hetaira, charming and
ruinous.4 The war, as said above, had left Sparta weakened, and her
government, as Polybius pointed out, had never been designed for empire abroad.
" As long,” he says,5 “ as their ambition was confined to
governing their immediate neighbours, or even the Peloponnesians only, they
could manage with the resources and supplies of Laconia itself, having all the
material of war ready to hand, and being able without much expenditure of time
to return home or convey provisions with them. But directly they took in hand
to dispatch naval ex
1
Isocrates, de Pace, 99, 100. a
Xen. Hellenica, iii. 3, 4—11.
a Perioecic
towns, says Isocrates (Panath. 179), are called poleis, but in reality have
less power than Athenian demes.
1 Isocrates, de Pace, 101, 103. So too Polybius,
vi. 50.
6 Polybius, vi. 49 (Shuckburgh’s
translation, slightly altered).
peditions, or to go on campaigns on land outside the Pelopon- nese, it
was evident that neither their iron currency, nor their use of crops for
payment in kind, would be able to supply them with what they lacked if they,
abode by the legislation of Lycurgus ; for such undertakings required as well a
currency universally accepted and goods from abroad. So they were compelled to
go to the gates of the Persians, to lay tribute on the islanders, and exact
silver from all the Greeks.” Between 404 and 393 Sparta saw her navy
decline—it had been built with Persian gold, for Persia’s purposes ; Persia
wanted it no more, and a Persian fleet under Conon destroyed it.
Another fatal weakness of the system of Lycurgus was that it bred nothing
but soldiers. The Spartan harmost, of whom Lysander himself said that he did
not understand how to rule freemen, was a typical product of Spartan education
—simply unintelligent of everything, as incapable as a Turk of comprehending how
the minds of men move or that they do move at all. A city, Aristotle said,1
must have quality and quantity—“ by quality I mean freedom, wealth, education,
good birth ; by quantity, superiority of numbers.” Sparta failed in both
directions—she had not the training, the quickness and variety of mind that
free institutions alone can give, any more than she had wealth or numbers.
Every Greek dreaded the Spartan ; none liked him. What Kinadon had pointed out
to the conspirator in the Spartan market, held all over the world. Only those
stuck to her who could by her means alone enjoy the tyrannical rule of a clique
over their fellow-citizens ; and these “ decarchies ” of Lysander notoriously
shattered what goodwill Sparta had won by ending the Athenian Empire.2
Yet another source of weakness for Sparta was a want of clear policy
regarding her Empire. Athens with a negligible minority had had a consistent
plan in dealing with her allies and dependants—as consistent as the changing
face of human things will allow—a plan that developed, but in a way that could
be foreseen. Sparta was the prey of parties. Lysander played for his own hand;
King Pausanias countered him when he could—generally for the good of Greece ;
boards of
1 Aristotle, Pol. iv. 12, 1, 1296 6.
2 On the decarchies, see Isocrates, Paneg.
110-114.
ephors seem to have come and gone, watching, supporting, or checking king
and general as they chose ; and meanwhile there were plots and counterplots—“
it is said,” reports Aristotle, “ that at Sparta Lysander attempted to
overthrow the monarchy, and King Pausanias the ephoralty.” 1
Lysander saw Sparta renounce his scheme of decarchies, and Pausanias was
finally exiled—nominally for failing to rescue Lysander’s dead body without a
truce.2 Sparta at last got a real head in Agesilaos, but not a good
one.
Ten years of Spartan supremacy saw Corinth and Thebes united with Athens
against her. Representatives of these cities had wished in 404 to destroy
Athens altogether—a few years showed them how needful she was. The movement
which drew the cities together against Sparta reached its height, when the
quarrel between Sparta and Persia became open and obvious. The Persian King had
genuine grievances. Persian subsidies had carried Sparta through the latter
half of the Peloponnesian War to her victory; and then, in the civil war
between the princes, Sparta had countenanced and supported the one who fell,
the usurper. In a series of bargains made at Miletus in the years 412-411,
Sparta had with some haggling virtually abandoned the Greeks of Asia Minor to
Persia.3 So long as Cyrus was in control of Persian policy in the
West and in friendly relations with Sparta through Lysander, no question had
arisen ; Lysander had organized his decarchies in the cities, and Cyrus
tolerated it. But when Cyrus had fallen, the Asiatic Greeks were assigned to
Tissa- phemes, who had negotiated the third treaty of Miletus. It has been
suggested 4 that the cities were still held by oligarchies friendly
to Sparta ; which meant some understanding between the democratic parties and
Persia—the victory of democrat or of Persian would be a triumph for both, and
equally a blow to Sparta. That Sparta realized this and began to trim, seems to
follow from Xenophon’s statement that the ephors abolished
1 Aristotle, Pol. v. 1, 10, 1301 b.
2 Xen. Hellenica, iii. S, 25. For Pausanias’
literary occupations in exile, see a damaged passage in Strabo, c. 366. See
also Pausanias, iii. 5, 1-6.
8 The three
treaties are in Thuc. viii. 18, 37, 58.
* By Eduard Meyer, Theopomps Hellenika,
p. 113.
the decarchies. But now Tissaphemes moved, and the oligarchs of her own
creation appealed to Sparta for protection against the Persians to whom Sparta
had ceded them by a treaty which was the basis of her present position of
power. It was an awkward situation. Sparta tried to meet it by an embassy “
forbidding ” Tissaphemes to take active steps against the cities. But the
satrap could read the situation too, and he replied by besieging Cyme. Sparta
could do nothing now but make war—not on the King, but on Tissaphemes. The
loose texture of the Persian Empire saved such a distinction from absurdity.
The Spartan war on Persia achieved the restoration of Athens. Phamabazos,
a more active spirit than Tissaphemes, went up to Susa and got the easy-going
King interested in the project of a fleet. It may be that the Spartan
government had some wind of this, before the Syracusan Herodas brought Greece
news of the three hundred Persian ships preparing.1 At all events,
they told Thibron, their commander, to attempt Caria, the possession of which
would have controlled any Persian attack in Aegaean waters.2 But
neither Thibron nor his successors were in a position to do anything effective.
The country was enormous, and they lacked cavalry ; and the enemy avoided
general actions. The two satraps were rivals, and neither of them was very
sorry to see the other occupied with the Greek marauders. But the manoeuvre, by
which Tissaphemes headed Derkylidas into the satrapy of Pharna- bazos,
converted the " war against Tissaphemes ” into open war with Persia.3
Derkylidas maintained himself, moved about, and had some successes. He, too,
was told to attempt Caria, but the two satraps met him and began negotiations,
which had to receive the sanction of the King and of Sparta. In reality, these
negotiations could not have been meant to achieve anything, but Phamabazos
needed time to get his fleet in order.4
Then came the definite news in 396 that Persia was really preparing a
fleet, and it waked anxiety in Sparta. Lysander, however, remembered the
successful return of the Ten Thou-
1 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 1. 2 Meyer, Theopomps
Hellenika, p. 9.
8 Judeich, Kleinas. Stud. p. 45.
4 Xen. Hellenica, ii. 2, 18-20, and
Judeich, op. cit. p. 52, See also Isocrates, Paneg. 142.
sand, and reckoned that the Greeks had' fleet enough to face the Persian
navy. The result was the invasion of Asia by Agesilaos.1
It seems quite clear that Agesilaos crossed the Aegaean with the very
largest intentions—“ he had great hopes that he would take the King.” 2
An earlier king of Sparta, who was reckoned mad, had declined such a venture ;3
but there were still in Asia the Greek mercenaries who had gone to the King’s
very gates and had all but taken the King ; why should they not go up again and
do it ? 4 Agesilaos revealed to Tissaphernes another object—the
autonomy (much-used word) of the Greek cities in Asia, and they made another
truce, to see what the King would sayJ* But the solemn sacrifice, which
Agesilaos had wanted to perform in the style of Agamemnon at Aulis, surely
suggested a larger purpose 8— Agamemnon had not been content to make
truces to see if Priam would allow a few towns to govern themselves. No, the
Greek world took the great venture seriously. Jason, according to Polydamas in
Xenophon, said he thought the Great King would be easier to conquer than
Greece, and added that he remembered that the Great King had been reduced to
dreadful straits (ei? 7rav d^Uero) by Agesilaos.7 Isocrates believed
the thing could be done—and for years urged it upon his countrymen, and then on
Philip ; the only reason he saw for the failure of Agesilaos was that the
Spartan had two aims, the reduction of the King and the restoration of friends
of his own to cities which had exiled them,* and the latter purpose involved so
much trouble and confusion that there was no chance of doing anything against
the barbarian.9 In other words, Sparta had lost the goodwill of
Greece. Agesilaos himself explained his retreat, as we have seen, by the thirty
thousand “ archers ” sent to Greece.10
1 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 2. 2 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 5, 1.
3 Cleomenes, Herodotus, v. 49 ft. ‘ Xen.
Hellenica, iv. 1, 41.
6 Xen.
Hellenica, iii. 4, 5-6.
6 Xen. Hellenica, iii. 4, 3-4; his anger
with the Boeotarchs who stopped it.
7 Xen. Hellenica, vi. 1, 12.
8 A curious but illuminating commentary
on the Spartan demand for the autonomy of the cities.
8
Isocrates, Philip, 87. 10 Plut.
Agesilaos, 20.
This subsidy has been put in a very odious light by Xenophon as
virtually a bribe. The unknown contemporary historian, whose fragments were
found at Oxyrhynchos, maintains that the gold was not the cause of the war,
though some say so, not knowing that all the men concerned had been at enmity
for a long while with the Spartans, and were on the look-out for some means of
bringing on war.1 War, as we have seen, was more and more a matter
of finance, and this subsidy sent by Tithraustes made it possible for the
Spartans to be embroiled in Europe, while the Persian fleet under Conon really
got to work after its many hindrances. And so it fell out. Agesilaos was
recalled. Conon won the battle of Cnidos, and the Athenian Long Walls rose
again. The old idea of Tissaphemes had prevailed in the hands of his rival— to
keep the Greek powers level and balanced.2
Let us sum up what this war between Sparta and Persia has brought out.
Persia has won the victory by successful use of the Spartan engine—the appeal
to particularism. Greece is divided by Persia, and Persia triumphs, just as
Sparta divides and triumphs over the Peloponnese; and another instance is added
to the list of those who urge Greece to union by showing her what she suffers
from division. For the moment it is the triumph of Persia and of particularism.
But some prophetic hints of the future appear. The plan of a bold, strong blow
at the heart of Persia was formed and was tried. It failed, but it was
remembered and quoted, and it would be tried again. And through the failure and
the confusion we get a gleam of a prince and a hero. Agesilaos was not a very
great man ; he was a hard, narrow, cunning, capable Spartan with no great
gifts, no real statesmanship, no moral depth, only the near outlook of an
old-time Spartan king—not a great soldier even—a politician of energy and
ambition on old lines and a low plane ; yet he captured the interest of
Xenophon, for there was something of. a man about him, something soldierly,
something of a prince, and his career seemed to show that some day a prince
might achieve a final victory over Persia.
1 Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 2, 1, 2; col. i., ii. He
declines into the suggestion that the politicians had an interest in a state of
war existing.
2 Thuc. viii. 57> ouXero inavurovv. See
Chapter VII. p. 226.
In spite of some victorious battles, the next few years were a time of
difficulty for Sparta, till in 387 her envoy, Antalkidas, came down from Susa
with a new and final instrument for the humiliation of the Greeks—that “ King’s
Peace ” which was made in the spring of 386. The words of this document deserve
quotation. “ King Artaxerxes thinks it just that the cities in Asia shall be
his, and of the islands ClazOmenai and Cyprus. All the other Greek cities,
little and great, he allows to be autonomous, except Lemnos and Imbros and
Scyros, and these as of old shall belong to the Athenians. And whichever party
does not accept this peace, on them I will make war with those who agree to it,
both on land and on sea, with ships and with money.” 1
The peace is a landmark in Greek history. That it proclaimed from the
house-tops the bankruptcy of the city-state, while by a peculiar irony of fate
it made the autonomy of all Greek cities the fundamental article of the
settlement, is the striking verdict of a Canadian scholar.2 And for
years the Spartans lorded it over Greece as the champions and representatives
of the King’s Peace. What the Greeks thought of it we can read in the Panegyric
of Isocrates written at or about the time—in Polybius—in Plutarch. Once, says
Isocrates,3 Athens was leader of Greece, and drove the Persian off
the sea and off the Aegaean coast; " but now it is he who manages Greek
affairs, gives his orders as to what is to be done, and all but appoints
quarter-masters in the cities. ... Is he not arbiter of war ? manager of peace
? ... do we not go sailing away to him, as to a master, to tell tales of one
another ? and call him Great King as if we were his captives ? ” “In that peace
of Antalkidas,” wrote Polybius,4 the Spartans “ sold and betrayed
the Greek cities to get money to procure themselves lordship over the Greeks.”
“ A peace, if we can call that peace,” says Plutarch,5 “ which was
an outrage, a betrayal of Greece; no war ever brought an end laden with more
dishonour to the vanquished.” Antalkidas, he says, using a favourite phrase
from Herodotus, “ danced away Leonidas and Callicratidas up there among the
Persians ” ; “the glory
1 Xen. Hellenica, v. 1, 31.
s W. S.
Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, p. 6.
3 Paneg. 120, 121.
* Polybius, vi. 49. 5 Plut. Avtax. 21, 22.
of Sparta perished before Leuctra.” It was Athens, says Beloch, who had
brought in the barbarian, meaning in 393 ; it would be more just to say Sparta
in 408. If it is urged in reply to this charge of the betrayal of Greece that
the fifty years between the return of Antalkidas from Susa and the succession
of Alexander to the throne of Macedon saw a wide diffusion of Greek influence in
Asia Minor,1 this was, no doubt, a great gain to mankind in the long
run ; but we may remember that, when Callias negotiated his far more honourable
agreement at Susa, in the days of Pericles and of the Athenian Empire, the
Greek cities of the coast were reunited to their hinterland, and the
penetration of Asia by Greek ideas began again, and no shame went with it. The
“ King’s Peace ” humiliated Greece.
Meanwhile the Peace promised Sparta the aid of Persia in applying her
Peloponnesian methods on a wider scale. Every one who wished to disorganize and
divide Greece turned naturally to her. Acanthus invoked her against the rising
confederacy of Olynthos, and with the aid of Amyntas of Macedon she effected
its disruption and the ruin of the cities —destroying Greek life and opening
the door to Amyntas’ successor, in her jealousy of anything like union among
Greeks. Polydamas of Pharsalos invited her to destroy the power which Jason was
consolidating, but in this .instance Sparta declined to intervene—in view of
all she was doing,2 but she encouraged Polydamas to do his best.
Elsewhere there was even a new violence in Spartan procedure — the successful
seizure of the Cadmeia, the attempt to seize the Peiraieus, had little excuse
even in the lax morality of Greek politics. But the comment of Agesilaos makes
all other needless. There was some indignation in Sparta against Phoebidas for
seizing the Cadmeia ; but, said Agesilaos, “ if he had done what was harmful to
Sparta, he deserved to be punished ; but if what was to her advantage—well,
there was an ancient custom that permitted such experiments.” 3
1 Chapter VII.
p. 220.
2 It is also
possible that Jason’s power, being more consolidated than that of a group of
federated cities, would have been more difficult to deal with—none of the
fissures in it that every Greek union displayed.
* Xen.
Hellenica, V. 2, 32, ra roiavra avToirxedta£etv.
The attitude of Sparta to every other Greek state hopelessly wrecked any
chance she might have had of an effective headship of Greece. The victory of
Cnidos in 394 was popular, and seemed to mark an epoch ; Theopompus, the
historian, made it the term of his work which concluded the history of
Thucydides.1 It was the end of Spartan rule of the sea, and Conon
and Phamabazos “ went sailing round among the islands and the towns on the
seaboard, driving out the Laconian harmosts, and encouraging the cities with
the promise that th§y would not fortify their citadels, but would leave them
autonomous”2 — and, as the case of Rhodes suggests, democracies.3
Some of the cities, Diodorus says, kept their freedom and some joined Conon.4
“ He was the first,” says Demosthenes, “ to give the city something to say
about hegemony to the Spartans,” 6 and he quotes the phrase from the
inscription set upon Conon’s honour to the effect that “he set free the allies
of the Athenians.” It is a fine phrase—strikingly like that coined in 404 when
the Athenian walls were demolished on the First Day of Freedom. Once more the
delusive words—Freedom and Autonomy.
From now onward Athens began to hold her own and to re-gather
allies—Mitylene, Byzantium, Chios. An Athenian inscription,8 pieced
together out of fragments, commemorates the treaty with Chios—making “ the
Chians allies for (eV)7 freedom and autonomy ” ; "if any attack
the Athenians, the Chians shall lend aid to the utmost of their power ; and if
any attack the Chians, the Athenians shall lend aid to the utmost of their
power ” ; and " the alliance shall be for all time.” The treaty lays down
significantly that they " shall keep the peace and the friendship and the
oaths and the existing agreement, which the King swore and the Athenians and
the Spartans and the rest of the Greeks.”
In the winter of 379-378 the Thebans managed to get the Spartans out of
their Cadmeia.8 Some little time later,
-1
Diodorus, xiv. 84. a Xen.
Hellenica, iv. 8, 1.
8 Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, c. 10; E. Meyer, Theopomps
Hellenika,
P- 75* Diodorus, xiv. 84. 5
Demosthenes, Lept. 68.
* Hicks and Hill, No. 98. 7 Or “ on the basis of.”
8 Xen. Hellenica,
v. 4, 2-12 ; and Plut. Pelopidas.
Sphodrias, a Spartan commander, raided the Peiraieus. He was tried for
this at Sparta—and acquitted through the intervention of Agesilaos ; he was
guilty of wrongdoing, the king admitted, but his career had been that of a
loyal Spartan, and it was hard to kill such a man—Sparta needed soldiers of his
stamp.1 The two events threw Athens and Thebes together, and next
year a great forward step was taken—a reconstitution of the Confederacy of
Delos. For two or three years a “ speech ” of Isocrates had been before the
world, the pamphlet Panegyricos, his masterpiece which “ cheapened every other
teacher of philosophy.”8 The orator was the close friend of
Timotheos, the son of Gonon, and it has been supposed that the programme set
forward was not conceived without some understanding with the leading spirits
of Athens.3 Briefly its proposals are the union of Greece, a crusade
against Persia, and all by the willing co-operation of all Greeks under the
headship of Athens. It is difficult to measure at such a distance of time the
effect of the work of a professor upon national history; but the last century
showed, in the crucial cases of1 Fichte and Treitschke, and perhaps
Seeley, the power of the chair in national thought. It could not yet be
seriously proposed in Athens or elsewhere that any city should declare a
Panhellenic crusade against Persia. The very terms on which Athens admitted
allies to her new league recognized the King’s Peace and excluded the King’s
subjects. But the close conjunction of the brilliant programme and the actual
reconstitution of the Confederacy is significant; Greece began to seek union,
and under the leadership of Athens.4
It is not our task here to follow the fortunes of this second
Confederacy, but its constitution and ideals and its fate all bear upon the
matter in hand—the change that is coming over the Greek world. Eduard Meyer
holds that it was bound to fail—
1 Xen.
Hellenica, v. 4, 32,
a So he
told Philip thirty-four years after (Philip, 84). More in the same vein (Antid.
57, 61, 87). Who would not be a patriot that read the Panegyric ? asks
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Isocrates, c. 5, § 544).
* Cf. Plut. Vit. 837 c.
4 Wilamowitz, Ar. und Athen. ii. 381,
and E. Meyer, Gr. Gesch. v. § 923, speak with emphasis of the part played by
the speech—without this preparation of public opinion the Confederacy would
have been unthinkable.
it looked backward to the past; it was a restoration, and like all
restorations it aimed at a theoretical ideal, ignoring the actual; right and
might were unevenly divided in it—all had rights, one alone had any
considerable might; it must fail. This is not altogether just. There is no
denying that the inspiration came from the past. Every Athenian, who thought
of the project in 377, remembered the Confederacy that began to fall to pieces
in 413, whether he was old enough to have witnessed that evil day or not. It
was very like the old Confederacy again—with Persia honourably recognized ;
that was involved in what Cleon once called “the conditions under which we
live.” But it has another aspect—it was something of a step toward Federalism.
And it touched the actual very closely in the statement of its aims—“ that the
Spartans may allow the Greeks to continue in peace, free and autonomous, and in
secure enjoyment of their own lands.” 1 The lines were carefully
drawn to exclude those features of the former league that had lent themselves
to oppression and had meant inequality. There were to be no “ cleruchies ”—the
resolution proposed in the Ecclesia by Aristoteles, and carried, forbade any
Athenian to buy, acquire, or take in mortgage any house or land in any
territory of the allies on any excuse or in any way.2 It would even
appear from a sentence in a speech of Isocrates of the year 373 that Athenians
actually renounced any such possessions which they held at the time.3
So one of the great grievances of the allies in the old days was done away
with, and “ tribute ” (<j>opo<i) went with it in the same resolution.
No magistrate and no garrison should be placed in any allied town ; every
community should have complete Home Rule, “free and autonomous, with whatever
constitution it shall choose.” Such was to be the freedom of the allies of
Athens.
For the general purposes of the Confederacy and the safeguarding of its
freedom, its government was to be vested in what to-day we should call two
houses—the Athenian Ecclesia and a Synedrion, or council, of allies sitting in
Athens. The Synedroi of the Allies are already mentioned in the resolution of
Aristoteles. Each state, whatever its size, was to have one vote, just as each
of the United States of America sends two
1 Hicks and
Hill, No. 101, 1. 9. 2 Hicks and Hill, No. 101,1. 36.
* Isocrates, Plataicos, 44.
25
senators to Washington.1 This Federal Council gave its opinion
on questions of foreign policy, war, peace, alliances— the placing of a
garrison in an allied town, the use of the funds of the League—and it might try
any Athenian who broke the law by acquiring property in an allied state. The
institution of such a Council shows one of the tendencies of the age. Long ago
Thales had urged some sort of federal combination upon the attention of the
Ionians ;2 and in the later years of the Peloponnesian War,
Aristophanes had advocated closer relations with the allies—something, again,
in the federal way; but the war had gone too far, and the allies were thinking
of freedom, nor did Athens entertain the idea. But now, as we shall see,
Federalism was in the air, and the second Confederacy is essentially a
compromise between the old Empire, somewhat disguised perhaps, and the new
Federation.
The Confederacy never reached the brilliance or the power of the former
one. Compromise was in its charter—it was not the old Empire with a clearly
recognized headship; it was not a new League on the lines of strict equality ;
it had at once too much head and not enough. Points no doubt were clear to the
allies which time has dimmed for us, but many points in such an undertaking are
obscured of set purpose at first or only come to light afterwards ; the exact
relations of the parties in a confederacy are always difficult to determine.
Athens and America have had to fight to determine one point—can a member of a
confederacy withdraw when it pleases, whether the rest consent or not ? And
what, a Greek would ask, is autonomy or freedom, if it cannot ? Consent is one
of the first difficulties in the story of this league as of every other that
Greeks made.
Behind the problem of consent was another—finance. Tribute had been
abolished—the word was odious; but funds were needed, and the Athenian
statesman Callistratos invented the happy term Contribution (<riWa£t?),
which avoided some associations. But whoever arranged the con
1 Diodorus, xv. 28.
2 Hesodotus, i. I70, Thales inikevt cv
j3ov\fvrripiov *la>vas inTrjtrdai, to fie elvai iv Tito' Titov yap /xitrov
ftvai 'ltovlijs. ras 8e a\Xas nokias oi/ceo/ievar fij]8iv rjtra-ov vofit£eo,0ai
KaTarrtp el hrjfxoi chv. A sort Of unity was imposed on Ionia by Artaphrenes
(Herodotus, vi. 42).
tributions, whatever share each state represented in the Federal Council
may have had in fixing or assessing them, they were alter all taxes, and no one
wanted to pay them. Cities would pay them to Phocion, his biographer tells us,
for they trusted him ; and Isocrates says that Timotheos alone among the
Athenian generals managed to get through without complaints against Athens—“
while he was general you cannot find that there were revolts, nor changes of
constitutions, nor massacres, nor exiles, nor any other of the irremediable
evils.” The praise of Timotheos is a revelation of troubles—the ^orator writes
in 353 with the Social War in his memory. The contributions failed—they
produced wars and ruinous expenditure. Athenian armies were composed of
mercenaries—men without cities, runaway slaves, the clotted rascality of
everywhere, always ready to desert for higher pay ; and these soldiers
plundered wherever they went, and “ we have to do despite to our own allies and
wring tribute out of them, to provide the pay for these common enemies of
mankind ” ; so says Isocrates, pleading for the Peace of 355 ; they get the
loot, and the state gets the ill will.1 Their generals, as
Demosthenes says, go off on private wars of their own where they and their
soldiers have better chances of plunder.2 The Confederacy had, it
appears, no federal executive ; Athens supplied what was needed in that way,
with the advantage of control and the disadvantage of unpopularity, and in the
long run the latter outweighed the former.
The new League gave Athens once more a predominant position in the
Aegaean, but it was costly. Meanwhile Sparta was losing ground in her war with
Thebes, for Thebes was rising in power. As she rose, inter-state relations
readjusted themselves, and Athens and Sparta drew together. So at last the
proposal was made to have peace—once more on the basis of the King’s rescript.
And then came an enormous change. For Sparta forbade the Theban envoys to sign
for Boeotia, and they would sign on no other terms. The battle of Leuctra
followed (371), and Spartan ascendancy was gone for ever. Epameinondas invaded
the Peloponnese again and again, and new nations sprang up around Sparta—the
old
1 Isocrates, de Pace, 28, 46, 125. a
Demosthenes, 2, Olynth. 28.
communities of Arcadians and Eleians whom she had crushed, the forgotten
Messenians whom she had turned into Helots. New cities rose, and a new
nationalism inspired their builders —it was the King’s Peace with a vengeance,
every community autonomous, but not now “ conveniently for the Spartans,” and
never again.
The hegemony of Thebes need not long delay us. In spite of the interest
that the final collapse of Sparta, the great military gifts of Epameinondas,
and the revival of the nations in the Peloponnese awake, there are no new ideas
in Theban ascendancy. The main object is to secure what Sparta had lost and by
the same means—by the division of city from city, the real cause for the
liberation and reconstitution of Arcadia and Messenia—by garrisons, by
political propaganda, by reliance on Persia.1 There is nothing new
here—simply “ the reoccupation of lines proved twice already to be untenable,”
with Thebes' as “ the Prussia of Boeotia.” 2 Thebes contributed
little or nothing to the settlement of the real problems that vexed the Greek
world, and when her last great victory was won at Mantineia in 362 at the cost
of the life of her greatest citizen, there is nothing to add to the words with
which Xenophon ends his Hellenica—“ disorder and confusion became yet greater
after the battle than before in Greece. So far, then, let my story go ; what
follows may perhaps be another’s care.” It has been suggested that the battle
of Aegospotami was the real end of the Greek city- state ; the King’s Peace, with
its insistence on autonomy for everybody, is another date for marking that
event; but perhaps Xenophon’s is as good as any. The last experiment had been
made ; Greece had failed to unite herself, and there was no hope of it from
within. Inside of three years a prince ascended a foreign throne, who did it.
The rule of the city-state had failed, leaving behind it a record, for
ever amazing, of glory and incompetence, brilliance, power, and oppression. It
remains to us to look briefly at the new movements which are beginning to be
observed.
1 Cf. Isocrates, Philip, 53-55, on the meddling
and muddling of Thebes ; and Archid. 66, on the misery and disorder of the
Peloponnese.
2 W. S. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, p. 26. Beloch, Gr. Gesch. i. 290, on Epameinondas.
They will not hold us long, for detail is wanting, and even if it were
abundant, it is the idea, so far, rather than the execution of it that is
interesting.
The passion of every Greek city — the greater perhaps, the smaller the
city—was what we have called autopolitanism ; they would be " citizens of
themselves ” avroiroXiTat., make their own laws, choose their own magistrates,
and perhaps even stamp their own currency. But new conditions assert themselves
and bear down old traditions. The little community might not be safe in these
new times—it was too much at the mercy of neighbours near at hand or across the
sea, or even of chance fleets and the commanders of passing armies. Some kind
of union might be safer. So in several ways cautious attempts were made to find
that ideal union which should combine the safety of the whole and the maximum
of independence for the parts.
The first plan was what the Greeks called synoecism, the joining of
houses, or, in English, the combination of a number of small towns, hamlets, or
cantons into one city. Theseus, according to Athenian belief, was the first
author of this plan, and Athens was the city he made of many small items and
units. Another form of synoecism is that adopted by the birds in the play of
Aristophanes—they had never had city or town at all, and they begin with an
immense one. Something of this kind would seem to have been tried by the
Messenians, when the battle of Leuctra suddenly set them free from the Spartans
after centuries of helotage with no traditions and no local jealousies. The
great city-foundations of Alexander and his successors are still more like that
of the birds—a great founder, a h,uge wall, and citizens from everywhere. But
such foundations are obviously different from the attempts at union made by
existing communities.
Rhodes is the great example of successful work on these lines. - Toward
the end of the Peloponnesian War (408) the three cities of the island were
combined and a new city built, which took the island’s name and made it more
famous. Hippodamos of Miletos, who planned the Peiraieus when it was laid out,
is said to have designed the new Rhodes, but this is not certain.1
What matters more is, that, with ups and downs
1 See F. Haverfield, Ancient Town-Planning, pp.
31, 32.
of fortune, among Spartans, Athenians, Carians, and Persians, all
watchful and eager to rule city and island, Rhodes throve and had a significant
history—commerce, wealth, and even empire. She won herself ai. great position
among the contending kingdoms of the Successors, and developed a maritime law,
some part of which the Romans adopted. Nor was she without glory in art and
literature.
The story of Megalopolis, founded by the Arcadians when Sparta was
crushed at Leuctra, is not so glorious, for here complications came in. Arcadia
was not an island, and allies had always been at hand to foment the quarrels of
Mantineia and Tegea, and the factions of the parties in each of them and in
every other Arcadian commune ; and, as we have seen, the country was very much
at the disposal of Sparta. Lycomedes, the Arcadian statesman, dreamed of a new
age—a free and independent and united Arcadia. He planned a real Federal
Government with a wider scope than had yet been sought—a free and equal union
of the whole of Arcadia, the cities to be constituent free commonwealths,
neither subjects nor parishes, with a koivov or Federal Assembly—“ and whatever should be carried in the Koinon
should be valid for all the cities ”— Federal magistrates and a Federal army.1
How he managed to inspire the Arcadians with a new sense of nationality is told
by Xenophon. Xenophon had fought his way through Asia with an army largely
Arcadian and apt to be conscious that it was Arcadian, and his account of
Lycomedes has a tone of irony.2 Lycomedes, then, was a Mantineian,
of no great origin, but well-to-do and ambitious ; and he “ filled the
Arcadians with pride, telling them that they were the only people really native
to the Peloponnese, the only real children of the land, the largest tribe of Greece
and the strongest in physique— yes, and the most valiant, too, for whenever any
wished mercenary soldiers, they preferred Arcadians to all.3 The
Spartans liad never yet invaded Athens without them, and nowadays the Theban
never went without Arcadians to Sparta. . . . The Arcadians on hearing all this
were quite puffed up—they had the highest enthusiasm for Lycomedes ; he was
their one man {fiovov avBpa). So they appointed as magistrates the persons of
1 Freeman, Federal Government, pp. 155 ff.; Pausanias,
viii. 27.
2 Xen. Hellenica; vii. x, 23-25 ; cf. Anab. vi.
2,9 ff.; 3,1-9. 8Cf. p. 239.
his selection, and as a result of what followed the Arcadians grew great.
. . . Wherever they resolved to go, neither night, nor storm, nor distance, nor
mountain barrier stopped them.” Xenophon does not record the founding of
Megalopolis, but he mentions meetings and resolutions of the “ Ten Thousand,”
as people called the Koinon, and he alludes to " magistrates of the
Arcadians,” to " Aeneas of Stymphalos, general of the Arcadians,” the
tribal name replacing the old city-names. The fortunes of the Arcadians do not
concern us here, but their experiment was a striking one—the symbol of a new
age.
Other experiments were not quite so successful. What the Olynthians designed
we only learn from their worst enemies. Acanthian envoys came to Sparta and
denounced them for their endeavour to absorb their neighbours into an amalgamation
where all would use the same laws, and have mutual rights of holding property
in each other’s lands and cities as well as of intermarriage, and all should be
citizens together (avfnroXiTeveiv). The Acanthians and others preferred to be
" citizens of themselves,” and Sparta, as we have seen, joined them in
breaking up the Olynthian confederacy. It is not altogether clear whether the
Olynthians purposed a real federal union or some such absorption of neighbours
as Rome achieved in Latium and Athens long before in Attica. The sad touch
about King Amyntas of Macedon “ all but expelled from the whole of Macedonia ”
strikes the reader oddly, who is familiar with the events of later reigns in
those regions.1
The strangest union of all was that of Argos and Corinth, which it is
hard to understand from what is told us. Xenophon represents the views of the
opposition—Corinth was really being blotted off the map (d^avi^ofievtjv), the
boundary marks were gone, . Corinth was Argos, the Corinthians Argives, little
better than resident aliens or metics in their own city.2 It is a
curious illustration of the decline of Corinth in forty years. The Corinthians
had driven the Spartans to take the sword in 432 ; and they had perished with
the sword—
Sis
a,7r6\oiTo kcu aWos otis TotavTa ye pe£oi.
The incorporation of Corinth would have made a very strong power—for mainland
Greek purposes-rof Argos; but such a
1 Xen. Hellenica, v. 2, 11-19, the speech of the
Acanthians.
2 Xen. Hellenica, iv. 4. The union was in the
year 393 or 392.
new era as Rhodes saw was more easily attained on an island and by cities
with smaller pretensions.
A fragmentary inscription reveals another sort of union between cities.
Phocaea and Mitylene established a monetary union of some sort, each
covenanting to coin alternately. The fragment we possess of their agreement
deals with penalties upon the moneyer if his alloy contains too little gold or,
in the metaphor of that day, is “ too watery.” Such a convention falls very far
short of a political or federal union, but it indicates a factor making for
unity. The coins of Byzantium and Chalcedon show that these two cities must
have had a somewhat similar agreement.1 (
The most real examples of Federalism, however, seem to occur among the
Greek peoples reckoned backward and behind their neighbours—peoples who had
little urban life, but continued on old lines in communes and cantons. Little
is known of their systems and arrangements, but federal government of greater
or less extent, of one kind and another, would appear to have existed at this
time in Acamania, Epirus, Phocis, and Thessaly. In the period that follows that
under consideration, Phocis and Thessaly played great parts in shaping the
eventual destiny of Greece, but it was hardly as federal unions that they did
so. The great Leagues of Greece, the Achaean, and the Aetolian, belong to a
later age, and they too were developments among peoples whose cities were
relatively unimportant.
Summing up broadly such facts as these, we can clearly recognize the
emergence of a new tendency toward some kind of Federalism. Once more it means
that men were beginning to feel that the city-state, as they had known it,
whether small, compact, and autonomous, or large and imperial, was growing out
of date. It had served its time, but by now, bitterly as men resented anything
else, it was obsolescent. To emphasize it meant to retard the progress of the
world toward a goal, not yet seen, but divined, when the influence of Greece
among the nations should be greater and wider, but different. To reach that
goal Greece needed the union, which the federalists were quietly seeking in one
comer and another ; but she needed another sort of headship, more effective and
1 Hicks and
Hill, No. 94. Hill, Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins, pp. 103 ff.
more enlightened. And this brings us once more to the Prince.
Toward the end of the Peloponnesian War the attention of the Greeks was
called in a new way to Macedonia. The king had died in 413, and his legitimate
heirs had been swept aside—killed, it was said, in the most commonplace and
vulgar style—by an illegitimate member of the family.1 There was
nothing new in this among the outskirt peoples, but Archelaos was a forerunner
of greater men. He was a man of action, and with Athenian aid recovered the
national port of Pydna, and set about developing his kingdom. He trained an
army of hoplites and cavalry, he built fortresses all over his realm and laid
out straight roads, and acquired a military strength beyond the eight kings who
preceded him.2 And then he set about another task—the introduction
of Macedon into the circle of Greek culture. He built a palace and got Zeuxis
to come and paint in it for him. He invited the great poets of Greece to live
with him, and they came—Agathon of Athens, Timotheos of Miletus, and, most
amazing fact of all, Euripides, who, it, would appear, wrote the Bacchae at his
court. Hippocrates of Cos, the great physician, also came and settled. The king
instituted a national festival at Dion with gymnastic and musical contests in
the Greek style. He began to expand at the cost of his neighbours, but this the
Spartans, who were not heralds of Greek culture, stopped ; and then the king
was murdered in the Macedonian way in 399, and his kingdom was to be fought for
and held as might be by whoever of the family could get it, and it was forty
years before Macedon saw his like.
In Sicily something similar but perhaps even more striking had taken
place. Before the Peloponnesian War was over, Egesta, the city which had called
in the Athenians and launched them on their disastrous expedition against
Syracuse, was left in the direst need, and this time called in a more dangerous
national enemy.3 How far the Carthaginian invasion of Sicily
1 Plato, Gorg. 471 a, a vigorous passage by Polus, ironically urging on
Socrates that Archelaos must be miserable, but every Athenian envies him.
a Thuc. ii.
100.
8 Xen.
Hellenica, i. 1, 37 ; 5,21. Meltzner, Gesch. der
Karthager, i. p. 256.
was worked in concert with the Persian plans of intervention in the
Aegaean, it might be idle to guess. Carthage and Phoenicia can never have been
without communications, and even if there were no understanding between the
powers, any government as able as that of Carthage would have recognized an
opportunity so promising. Sicily was involved in a series of Punic wars and
sieges, and out of the chaos rose the tyrant Dionysius. In the course of a long
reign he had four wars with Carthage, generally crowned with victory. He built
up an empire of the sea and ruled Sicily and Southern Italy and the Adriatic,
with the regions about Ancona and Venice ; and he made Syracuse the foremost
military and naval power of the Greek world.1 His wars with his
siege engines and his armies of mercenaries marked a development in warfare.
Whatever might be said of his character and his treatment of other Greeks, it
remained that he stood for the Hellenic name, and in an age when the older
Greece was falling conspicuously under the control of the great King, he drove
back the Oriental in the West. Both Athens and Sparta courted him and sought
his friendship. He stood for culture too. The adventures of Plato at his court
are another story ; they do not quite show us the philosopher king. Dionysius
was a poet, rather —a tragic poet, who won prizes at Athens with his tragedies,
a victory for art tempered by diplomacy it may be, but grateful to a monarch
whose poems had been howled down at Olympia. What followed his death in Sicily
showed what he had been —a protagonist of the Greek—bloodstained and
unsatisfactory, but a champion of civilization, and effective for culture and
Hellenism as no democracy or oligarchy of the Greek world could ever hope to be
again.2
In the eastern Mediterranean a much more attractive figure meets us.3
At Salamis in Cyprus in the fifth century there still reigned the house of
Teucer, but a Phoenician exile, trusted by the Teucrid king, " cast forth
his benefactor and
1 Isocrates, Philip, 65 ; Archid. 44-45.
2 The reader may remark the contrast with what
Thucydides had written of tyrants of an earlier age (i. 17), though he already
makes something of an exception of Sicilian tyrants.
8 For what
follows about Evagoras, see Judeich, Kleinasiatische Studien, though his dates
are confused and wrong, as Meyer shows.
seized the kingdom himself . . and, wishing to secure himself, he
barbarized the city and enslaved the whole island to the Great King.” But in
process of time a boy was bom to the Teucrid house and named Evagoras. Disaster
befell the Phoenician rulers from one of their own family who tried to make all
sure by killing the young Teucrid. But he escaped, and then with fifty
followers (as those say who set the number at the highest) he came back, and,
by one of those chances familiar in the stories of the Successors of Alexander
and of the Presidents and Dictators in South America, he got into Salamis one
night by a postem in the wall and marched directly upon the palace. In the
confusion that followed the citizens looked on while the foreigner’s servants
fought the returning exile, but he beat them and “ won back for his race the
honours of their house and made himself tyrant of the city. . . . And all men
will own that of blessings god or man can give the greatest is a tyranny, the
most august, and above all others the prize of ambition.” Such is the romantic
story told by Isocrates,1 and such his reflection upon it, and both
seem to take us far from the Athens of Pericles.
The return of Evagoras may have been in 411; and the government of
Persia, always rather slipshod in its way, was preoccupied with the
Peloponnesian War, and then with a change of rulers and the rebellion of Cyrus
and one thing and another, so that the king of Salamis had perhaps twenty years
to set his kingdom in order. He was already a friend of the Athenians, and when
the great disaster befell them at Aegos- potami, Conon sailed away at once to
Salamis, and other refugees followed him. “ Many Greeks of good family (icaXol
Ka.rya.60l) came and settled in Cyprus considering the monarchic rule of Evagoras
lighter and more law-abiding than the constitutions they left behind them ” 2—Lysander’s
decarchies are possibly meant. Evagoras pursued a strong Hellenizing policy. “
He found the city thoroughly barbarized. Phoenician rule had excluded the
Greeks ; the arts were unknown ; there was no emporion, no harbour; ” 3
but Evagoras made a
1 Evag. 19-40. This glorification of a “tyrant”
contrasts strangely with the judgment of Thucydides (i. 17); but the two
writers are looking at different circumstances as well as from different
outlooks.
2 Isocrates, Evag. 51. 3 Isocrates, Evag. 47.
Greek city of it, fortified it, built a fleet, and so increased it that
it fell short of none among those of the Greeks. Greek became the fashion,
everybody was Philhellen—it was a matter of rivalry. Men took Greek wives, and
cultivated music and the higher studies of Athens. And when at last Spartan
tyranny and insolence provoked the Persian to action, Conon had a friend and
supporter in Evagoras in carrying through the great scheme of freedom to the
battle of Cnidos, and achieving Greek freedom and the restoration to Athens of
her old glory, or some part of it.1
After this came the wars between Evagoras and Artaxerxes, which,
following the example of Isocrates, we may lightly pass over, for the king of
Salamis was reduced at one time to terrible straits. Artaxerxes, we are told,
was more in earnest about this war than any other, and counted Evagoras a more
serious antagonist than Cyrus.2 The Persian operations were on an
enormous scale ; we read of forces of 300,000 men, and we are told that the war
cost the Great King 15,000 talents and more. But “ in the end Evagoras so sated
them with war, that though the tradition had always been that the King was
never reconciled to any that revolted till he had him a prisoner, they were
glad to make peace, and waived this law of theirs, and did not disturb the rule
of Evagoras.” 3 In three years the Persian King took away the Empire
of Sparta, but after ten years he left Evagoras master of what he had before
they went to war.4 So history is written for the sons of kings. In
plain fact, so far as we can put it together, the Persian, in Thucydides’
phrase, once more "tripped over himself,” and owed his disasters to the
curious independence with which his generals arranged their relations with the
enemy and with one another. None the less Evagoras died king of Salamis.
Now glance at the history of Greece. In the middle of this war or series
of wars in Cyprus the King’s Peace was sent down by Antalkidas, and in it the
King claimed Cyprus; and Sparta readily enough and Athens reluctantly had to
abandon the Cypriot Greeks. Think of the folly of abandoning such a man to the
barbarian ! is the cry of Isocrates at the time, especially when " of the
forces of Tiribazos the most serviceable of the
What was the moral of it ? Why could an Archelaos lift a state out of
barbarism, almost into Hellenism ? a Dionysius rescue the western Greek world
from Semitic Orientals ? an Evagoras alone and at bay wring peace out of an
Artaxerxes and maintain the Hellenism he had created ? and a Jason, a
Hecatomnos, a Maussollos—nay, a Mania and the princes of Panticapaeum—why is it
everywhere the same, while the fellow-citizens of Leonidas and Themistocles can
manage nothing but to thwart one another and worry and betray the rest of the
Greeks ?
Centuries later Tacitus tells us how the Romans, summing up the work of
Augustus, recognized that " no resource had been left for a distracted
country but the rule of one man.”They were right, and it was as
true of Greece in the period under our review. We need not rehearse the story
again. The superiority of monarchy in plan and action is discussed by Isocrates
in his Nicocles—it is evident, he says, at once if you will look at monarchy
and democracy in operation.3 The whole piece is a pamphlet in
defence of monarchy, but what it means in reality is brought out with the
utmost clearness in the " speech ” known as the Philip. It is an address
to Philip of Macedon, written in 346, and it is sent to him because of signal
advantages he alone possesses for the service of Greece. Other men, famous men,
are " under cities and laws,” with nothing possible for them but to do as
they are told; “ you alone have great. authority given you by Destiny—to
send ambassadors to whom you will, to receive them from whom you think fit, to
say what you think advantageous ; you are in possession of wealth moreover and
of power, such as no Greek ever had—the only things there are that can both
First of all, Philip must unite Greece, he must reconcile Argos, Sparta,
Thebes, and Athens, and all the rest will be at one—everything conspires to
help him, the disasters they all have Suffered, the advantage each will draw
from harmony. And then he must lead the united peoples on the long-delayed
crusade against the Persian. Jason won great glory by talking of this ; Philip
must do it—take the whole of the Persian Empire if he can; if not, then Asia
Minor, from Cilicia to Sinope, and found new cities there for the wandering and
broken men, whom poverty will never allow to rest, who plunder all they come
upon, who grow in numbers that threaten to make them as great a danger to
Greeks as to barbarians. A man of high spirit, who loves Greece, who sees
further than other men—a man like Philip—will use these roaming men against the
Persian, will win them land and plant them cities, rid them of poverty and make
them a bulwark for all Greece. In any case, he could set free the
Greek cities of Asia. Other men, as well as Philip, are descendants of
Herakles, but they were bom to live under laws and constitutions—they must love
each man that city where he dwells ; “ you as one
Isocrates, a pedant, a self-conscious stylist, a man of poor nature, has
somehow hit the world’s future as Demosthenes did not. Demosthenes loved the
city where he dwelt, and lived for her. It is hard to imagine anyone who (in
Longinus’ phrase) would choose to be Isocrates rather than Demosthenes ; but
the course of events fulfilled the dreams of the smaller man, so far as the
outward look of things went. Alexander and Alexandria embody his scheme of
things for Greece, but how different they were from what he dreamed ! What a
new world they made ! "All Greece ” becomes a world-wide “ country,” and
from the Nile westward to the Pacific all best minds of the ancient world and
the modem draw from her inspiration. But the inspiration comes from the men of
the city-states—the poets and the exiles, the dreamers of dreams— the people
men laughed at, whom they hated and drove out— who cherished impossible ideals
of freedom and of human character.
Great
treasure halls hath Zeus in heaven,
From
whence to men strange dooms be given,
Past hope
or fear ;
And the
end men looked for cometh not,
And a path
is there where no man thought;
So hath it
fallen here.