The Life of Greece

As inquisitiveness generates the science of Greece, so acquisitiveness establishes and dominates its economy. “Love of wealth wholly absorbs men,” says Plato, with the exaggeration usual in moralists, “and never for a moment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended.”⁵³ The Athenians are competitive animals, and stimulate one another with nearly ruthless rivalry. They are shrewd, and give the Semites a close run in cunning and stratagem; they are every bit as stiff-necked as the Biblical Hebrews, as pugnacious, obstinate, and proud. They bargain virulently in buying and selling, argue every point in conversation, and, when they cannot make war upon other countries, quarrel among themselves. They are not given to sentiment, and disapprove of Euripides’ tears. They are kind to animals and cruel to men: they regularly use torture upon unaccused slaves, and sleep heartily, to all appearances, after slaughtering a cityful of noncombatants. Nevertheless they are generous to the poor or the disabled; and when the Assembly learns that the granddaughter of Aristogeiton the tyrannicide is living in destitution on Lemnos, it provides funds to bring her to Athens and to give her a dowry and a husband. The oppressed and hunted of other cities find a sympathetic refuge in Athens.

In truth the Greek does not think of character in our terms. He aspires neither to the conscience of the good bourgeois, nor to the sense of honor of the aristocrat. To the Greek the best life is the fullest one, rich in health, strength, beauty, passion, means, adventure, and thought. Virtue is arete, manly—literally and originally, martial—excellence (Ares, Mars); precisely what the Romans called vir-tus, man-liness. The Athenian ideal man is the kalokagathos, who combines beauty and justice in a gracious art of living that frankly values ability, fame, wealth, and friends as well as virtue and humanity; as with Goethe, self-development is everything. Along with this conception goes a degree of vanity whose candor is hardly to our taste: the Greeks never tire of admiring themselves, and announce at every turn their superiority to other warriors, writers, artists, peoples. If we wish to understand the Greeks as against the Romans we must think of the French vs. the English; if we wish to feel the Spartan spirit as opposed to the Athenian we must think of the Germans vs. the French.

All the qualities of the Athenians come together to make their city-state. Here is the creation and summation of their vigor and courage, their brilliance and loquacity, their unruliness and acquisitiveness, their vanity and patriotism, their worship of beauty and freedom. They are rich in passions but poor in prejudices. Now and then they tolerate religious intolerance, not as a check upon thought but as a weapon in partisan politics, and as a bound to moral experimentation; otherwise they insist upon a degree of liberty that seems fantastically chaotic to their Oriental visitors. But because they are free, because, ultimately, every office is open to every citizen, and each is ruled and ruler in turn, they give half their lives to their state. Home is where they sleep; they live in the market place, in the Assembly, in the Council, in the courts, in the great festivals, athletic contests, and dramatic spectacles that glorify their city and its gods. They recognize the right of the state to conscript their persons and their wealth for its needs. They forgive its exactions because it gives more opportunity for human development than man has ever known before; they fight for it fiercely because it is the mother and guardian of their liberties. “Thus,” says Herodotus, “did the Athenians increase in strength. And it is plain enough, not from this instance only but from many examples, that freedom is an excellent thing; since even the Athenians, who, while they continued under the rule of dictators, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbors, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all.”⁵⁴

VI. PREMARITAL RELATIONS

In morality, as in alphabet, measures, weights, coinage, costume, music, astronomy, and mystic cults, classic Athens seems more Oriental than European. The physical basis of love is accepted frankly by both sexes; the love philters that anxious ladies brew for negligent men have no merely Platonic aim. Premarital chastity is required of respectable women, but among unmarried men after the ephebic period there are few moral restraints upon desire. The great festivals, though religious in origin, are used as safety valves for the natural promiscuity of humanity; sexual license on such occasions is condoned in the belief that monogamy may be more easily achieved during the balance of the year. No stigma is attached in Athens to the occasional intercourse of young men with courtesans; even married men may patronize them without any greater moral penalty than a scolding at home and a slightly tarnished reputation in the city.⁵⁸ Athens officially recognizes prostitution, and levies a tax upon its practitioners.⁵⁹

With a career so open to talent, harlotry becomes in Athens, as in most other cities of Greece, a well-plied profession with many specialties. The lowest order of them, the pornai, live chiefly at the Piraeus, in common brothels marked for the convenience of the public with the phallic symbol of Priapus. An obol secures admission to these houses, where the girls, so lightly clad that they are called gymnai (naked), allow their prospective purchasers to examine them like dogs in a kennel. A man may strike a bargain for any period of time, and may arrange with the madam of the house to take a girl to live with him for a week, a month, or a year; sometimes a girl is hired out in this way to two or more men, distributing her time among them according to their means.⁶¹ Higher than these girls in the affection of the Athenians are the auletrides, or flute-players, who, like the geisha of Japan, assist at “stag” entertainments, provide music and gaiety, perform dances artistic or lascivious, and then, if properly induced, mingle with the guests and spend the night with them.⁶² A few old courtesans may stave off destitution by developing training schools for such flute girls, and teaching them the science of cosmetic adornment, personal transfiguration, musical entertainment, and amorous dalliance. Tradition hands down carefully from one generation of courtesans to another, like a precious heritage, the arts of inspiring love by judicious display, holding it by coy refusal, and making it pay.⁶³ Nevertheless some of the auletrides, if we may take Lucian’s word for it from a later age, have tender hearts, know real affection, and ruin themselves, Camille-like, for their lovers’ sakes. The honest courtesan is an ancient theme hoary with the dignity of age.

The highest class of Greek courtesans is composed of the hetairai—literally, companions. Unlike the pornai, who are mostly of Oriental birth, the hetairai are usually women of the citizen class, who have fallen from the respectability or fled from the seclusion required of Athenian maids and matrons. They live independently, and entertain at their own homes the lovers whom they lure. Though they are mostly brunettes by nature, they dye their hair yellow in the belief that Athenians prefer blondes; and they distinguish themselves, apparently under legal compulsion, by wearing flowery robes.⁶⁴ By occasional reading, or attending lectures, some of them acquire a modest education, and amuse their cultured patrons with learned conversation. Thais, Diotima, Thargelia, and Leontium, as well as Aspasia, are celebrated as philosophical disputants, and sometimes for their polished literary style.⁶⁵ Many of them are renowned for their wit, and Athenian literature has an anthology of hetairai epigrams.⁶⁶ Though all courtesans are denied civil rights, and are forbidden to enter any temple but that of their own goddess, Aphrodite Pandemos, a select minority of the hetairai enjoy a high standing in male society at Athens; no man is ashamed to be seen with these; philosophers contend for their favors; and an historian chronicles their history as piously as Plutarch.⁶⁷

In such ways a number of them achieve a certain scholastic immortality. There is Clepsydra, so named because she accepts and dismisses her lovers by the hourglass; Thargelia, who, as the Mata Hari of her time, serves the Persians as a spy by sleeping with as many as possible of the statesmen of Athens;⁶⁸ Theoris, who consoles the old age of Sophocles, and Archippe, who succeeds her about the ninth decade of the dramatist’s life;⁶⁹ Archeanassa, who amuses Plato,⁷⁰ and Danae and Leontium, who teach Epicurus the philosophy of pleasure; Themistonoe, who practices her art until she has lost her last tooth and her last lock of hair; and the businesslike Gnathaena, who, having spent much time in the training of her daughter, demands a thousand drachmas ($1000) as the price of the young lady’s company for a night.⁷¹ The beauty of Phryne is the talk of fourth-century Athens, since she never appears in public except completely veiled, but, at the Eleusinian festival, and again on the feast of the Poseidonia, disrobes in the sight of all, lets down her hair, and goes to bathe in the sea.⁷² For a time she loves and inspires Praxiteles, and poses for his Aphrodites; from her, too, Apelles takes his Aphrodite Anadyomene.⁷³ So rich is Phryne from her loves that she offers to rebuild the walls of Thebes if the Thebans will inscribe her name on the structure, which they stubbornly refuse to do. Perhaps she asks too large an honorarium from Euthias; he revenges himself by indicting her on a charge of impiety. But a member of the court is one of her clients, and Hypereides, the orator, is her devoted lover; Hypereides defends her not only with eloquence but by opening her tunic and revealing her bosom to the court. The judges look upon her beauty, and vindicate her piety.⁷⁴

Lais of Corinth, says Athenaeus, “appears to have been superior in beauty to any woman that had ever been seen.”⁷⁵ As many cities as claimed Homer dispute the honor of having witnessed her birth. Sculptors and painters beg her to pose for them, but she is coy. The great Myron, in his old age, persuades her; when she disrobes he forgets his white hair and beard, and offers her all his possessions for one night; whereupon she smiles, shrugs her rounded shoulders, and leaves him statueless. The next morning, burning with readolescence, he has his hair trimmed, and his beard cut off; he puts on a scarlet robe and a golden girdle, a chain of gold around his neck and rings on all his fingers. He colors his cheeks with rouge, and perfumes his garments and his flesh. He seeks out Lais, and announces that he loves her. “My poor friend,” she replied, seeing through his metamorphosis, “you are asking me what I refused to your father yesterday.”⁷⁶ She lays up a great fortune, but does not refuse herself-to poor but comely lovers; she restores the ugly Demosthenes to virtue by asking ten thousand drachmas for an evening,⁷⁷ and from the well-to-do Aristippus she earns such sums as scandalize his servant;⁷⁸ but to the penniless Diogenes she gives herself for a pittance, being pleased to have philosophers at her feet. She spends her wealth generously upon temples, public buildings, and friends, and finally returns, after the custom of her kind, to the poverty of her youth. She plies her trade patiently to the end; and when she dies she is honored with a splendid tomb as the greatest conqueror that the Greeks have ever known.⁷⁹

VII. GREEK FRIENDSHIP

Stranger than this strange entente between prostitution and philosophy is the placid acceptance of sexual inversion. The chief rivals of the hetairai are the boys of Athens; and the courtesans, scandalized to the very depths of their pockets, never tire of denouncing the immorality of homosexual love. Merchants import handsome lads to be sold to the highest bidder, who will use them first as concubines and later as slaves;⁸⁰ and only a negligible minority of males think it amiss that the effeminate young aristocrats of the city should arouse and assuage the ardor of aging men. In this matter of genders Sparta is as careless as Athens; when Alcman wishes to compliment some girls he calls them his “female boy-friends.”⁸¹ Athenian law disfranchises those who receive homosexual attentions,⁸² but public opinion tolerates the practice humorously; in Sparta and Crete no stigma of any kind is attached to it;⁸³ in Thebes it is accepted as a valuable source of military organization and bravery. The greatest heroes in the fond remembrance of Athens are Harmodius and Aristogeiton, tyrannicides and lovers; the most popular in Athens in his day is Alcibiades, who boasts of the men who love him; as late as Aristotle “Greek lovers” plight their troth at the tomb of Iolaus, comrade of Heracles;⁸⁴ and Aristippus describes Xenophon, leader of armies and hardheaded man of the world, as infatuated with young Cleinias.⁸⁵ The attachment of a man to a boy, or of a boy to a boy, shows in Greece all the symptoms of romantic love—passion, piety, ecstasy, jealousy, serenading, brooding, moaning, and sleeplessness.⁸⁶ When Plato, in the Phaedrus, talks of human love, he means homosexual love; and the disputants in his Symposium agree on one point—that love between man and man is nobler and more spiritual than love between man and woman.⁸⁷ A similar inversion appears among the women, occasionally among the finest, as in Sappho, frequently among the courtesans; the auletrides love one another more passionately than they love their patrons, and the pornaia are hothouses of Lesbian romance.⁸⁸

How shall we explain the popularity of this perversion in Greece? Aristotle attributes it to fear of overpopulation,⁸⁹ and this may account for part of the phenomenon; but there is obviously a connection between the prevalence of both homosexuality and prostitution in Athens, and the seclusion of women. After the age of six the boys of Periclean Athens are taken from the gynaeceum in which respectable women spend their lives, and are brought up chiefly in companionship with other boys, or men; little opportunity is given them, in their formative and almost neutral period, to know the attractiveness of the tender sex. The life of the common mess hall in Sparta, of the agora, gymnasium, ‘and palaestra in Athens, and the career of the ephebos, show the youth only the male form; even art does not announce the physical beauty of woman until Praxiteles. In married life the men seldom find mental companionship at home; the rarity of education among women creates a gulf between the sexes, and men seek elsewhere the charms that they have not permitted their wives to acquire. To the Athenian citizen his home is not a castle but a dormitory; from morning to evening, in a great number of cases, he lives in the city, and rarely has social contacts with respectable women other than his wife and daughters. Greek society is unisexual, and misses the disturbance, grace, and stimulation that the spirit and charm of women will give to Renaissance Italy and Enlightenment France.

VIII. LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Romantic love appears among the Greeks, but seldom as the cause of marriage. We find little of it in Homer, where Agamemnon and Achilles frankly think of Chryseis and Briseis, even of the discouraging Cassandra, in terms of physical desire. Nausicaa, however, is a warning against too broad a generalization, and legends as old as Homer tell of Heracles and Iola, of Orpheus and Eurydice. The lyric poets, again, talk abundantly of love, commonly in the sense of amorous appetite; stories like that which Stesichorus tells of a maiden dying for love⁹⁰ are exceptional; but when Theano, wife of Pythagoras, speaks of love as “the sickness of a longing soul,”⁹¹ we feel the authentic note of romantic rut. As refinement grows, and superimposes poetry upon heat, the tender sentiment becomes more frequent; and the increasing delay that civilization places between desire and fulfillment gives imagination leisure to embellish the object of hope. Aeschylus is still Homeric in his treatment of sex; but in Sophocles we hear of “Love” who “rules at will the gods,”*⁹² and in Euripides many a passage proclaims Eros’ power. The later dramatists often describe a youth desperately enamored of a girl.⁹³ Aristotle suggests the real quality of romantic adoration when he remarks that “lovers look at the eyes of the beloved, in which modesty dwells.”⁹⁴

Such affairs in classic Greece lead rather to premarital relations than to matrimony. The Greeks consider romantic love to be a form of “possession” or madness, and would smile at anyone who should propose it as a fit guide in the choice of a marriage mate.⁹⁵ Normally marriage is arranged by the parents as in always classic France, or by professional matchmakers,⁹⁶ with an eye not to love but to dowries. The father is expected to provide for his daughter a marriage portion of money, clothing, jewelry, and perhaps slaves.⁹⁷ This remains to its end the property of the wife, and reverts to her in case of a separation from her husband—a consideration that discourages divorce by the male. Without a dowry a girl has little chance of marriage; therefore where the father cannot give it to her the relatives combine to provide it. Marriage by purchase, so frequent in Homeric days, has by this means been inverted in Periclean Greece: in effect, as Euripides’ Medea complains,⁹⁸ the woman has to buy her master. The Greek, then, marries not for love, nor because he enjoys matrimony (for he prates endlessly about its tribulations), but to continue himself and the state through a wife suitably dowered, and children who will ward off the evil fate of an untended soul. Even with these inducements he avoids wedlock as long as he can. The letter of the law forbids him to remain single, but the law is not always enforced in Periclean days; and after him the number of bachelors mounts until it becomes one of the basic problems of Athens.⁹⁹ There are so many ways of being amused in Greece! Those men who yield marry late, usually near thirty, and then insist upon brides not much older than fifteen.¹⁰⁰ “To mate a youth with a young wife is ill,” says a character in Euripides; “for a man’s strength endures, while the bloom of beauty quickly leaves the woman’s form.”¹⁰¹

A choice having been made, and the dowry agreed upon, a solemn betrothal takes place in the home of the girl’s father; there must be witnesses, but her own presence is not necessary. Without such a formal betrothal no union is valid in Athenian law; it is considered to be the first act in the complex rite of marriage. The second act, which follows in a few days, is a feast in the house of the girl. Before coming to it the bride and bridegroom, in their separate homes, bathe in-ceremonial purification. At the feast the men of both families sit on one side of the room, the women on the other; a wedding cake is eaten, and much wine is drunk. Then the bridegroom escorts his veiled and white-robed bride—whose face he may not yet have seen—into a carriage, and takes her to his father’s dwelling amid a procession of friends and flute-playing girls, who light the way with torches and raise the hymeneal chant. Arrived, he carries the girl over the threshold, as if in semblance of capture. The parents of the youth greet the girl, and receive her with religious ceremony into the circle of the family and the worship of its gods; no priest, however, takes any part in the ritual. The guests then escort the couple to their room with an epithalamion, or marriage-chamber song, and linger boisterously at the door until the bridegroom announces to them that the marriage has been consummated.

Besides his wife a man may take a concubine. “We have courtesans for the sake of pleasure,” says Demosthenes, “concubines for the daily health of our bodies, and wives to bear us lawful offspring and be the faithful guardians of our homes”:¹⁰² here in one startling sentence is the Greek view of woman in the classic age. Draco’s laws permit concubinage; and after the Sicilian expedition of 415, when the roll of citizens has been depleted by war and many girls cannot find husbands, the law explicitly allows double marriages; Socrates and Euripides are among those who assume this patriotic obligation.¹⁰³ The wife usually accepts concubinage with Oriental patience, knowing that the “second wife,” when her charms wear off, will become in effect a household slave, and that only the offspring of the first wife are accounted legitimate. Adultery leads to divorce only when committed by the wife; the husband in such case is spoken of as “carrying horns” (keroesses), and custom requires him to send his wife away.¹⁰⁴ The law makes adultery by woman, or by a man with a married woman, punishable with death, but the Greeks are too lenient to concupiscence to enforce this statute. The injured husband is usually left to deal with the adulterer as he will and can—sometimes killing him in flagrante delicto, sometimes sending a slave to beat him, sometimes contenting himself with a money indemnity.¹⁰⁵

For the man divorce is simple; he may dismiss his wife at any time, without stating the cause. Barrenness is accepted as sufficient reason for divorcing a wife, since the purpose of marriage is to have children. If the man is sterile, law permits, and public opinion recommends, the reinforcement of the husband by a relative; the child born of such a union is considered to be the son of the husband, and must tend his departed soul. The wife may not at will leave her husband, but she may ask the archons for a divorce on the ground of the cruelty or excesses of her mate.¹⁰⁶ Divorce is also allowed by mutual consent, usually expressed in a formal declaration to the archon. In case of separation, even where the husband has been guilty of adultery, the children remain with the man.¹⁰⁷ All in all, in the matter of sex relations, Athenian custom and law are thoroughly man-made, and represent an Oriental retrogression from the society of Egypt, Crete, and the Homeric Age.

IX. WOMAN

As surprising as anything else in this civilization is the fact that it is brilliant without the aid or stimulus of women. With their help the Heroic Age achieved splendor, the age of the dictators a lyric radiance; then, almost overnight, married women vanish from the history of the Greeks, as if to confute the supposed correlation between the level of civilization and the status of woman. In Herodotus woman is everywhere; in Thucydides she is nowhere to be seen. From Semonides of Amorgos to Lucian, Greek literature is offensively repetitious about the faults of women; and towards the close of it even the kindly Plutarch repeats Thucydides:¹⁰⁸ “The name of a decent woman, like her person, should be shut up in the house.”¹⁰⁹

This seclusion of woman does not exist among the Dorians; presumably it comes from the Near East to Ionia, and from Ionia to Attica; it is part of the tradition of Asia. Perhaps the disappearance of inheritance through the mother, the rise of the middle classes, and the enthronement of the commercial view of life enter into the change: men come to judge women in terms of utility, and find them especially useful in the home. The Oriental nature of Greek marriage goes with this Attic purdah; the bride is cut off from her kin, goes to live almost as a menial in another home, and worships other gods. She cannot make contracts, or incur debts beyond a trifling sum; she cannot bring actions at law; and Solon legislates that anything done under the influence of woman shall have no validity at law.¹¹⁰ When her husband dies she does not inherit his property. Even physiological error enters into her legal subjection; for just as primitive ignorance of the male role in reproduction tended to exalt woman, so the male is exalted by the theory popular in classic Greece that the generative power belongs only to man, the woman being merely the carrier and nurse of the child.¹¹¹ The older age of the man contributes to the subordination of the wife; he is twice her years when he marries her, and can in some degree mold her mind to his own philosophy. Doubtless the male knows too well the license allowed to his sex in Athens to risk his wife or daughter at large; he chooses to be free at the cost of her seclusion. She may, if properly veiled and attended, visit her relatives or intimates, and may take part in the religious celebrations, including attendance at the plays; but for the rest she is expected to stay at home, and not allow herself to be seen at a window. Most of her life is spent in the women’s quarters at the rear of the house; no male visitor is ever admitted there, nor does she appear when men visit her husband.

In the home she is honored and obeyed in everything that does not contravene the patriarchal authority of her mate. She keeps the house, or superintends its management; she cooks the meals, cards and spins the wool, makes the clothing and bedding for the family. Her education is almost confined to household arts, for the Athenian believes with Euripides that a woman is handicapped by intellect.¹¹² The result is that the respectable women of Athens are more modest, more “charming” to men, than their like in Sparta, but less interesting and mature, incapable of being comrades to husbands whose minds have been filled and sharpened by a free and varied life. The women of sixth-century Greece contributed significantly to Greek literature; the women of Periclean Athens contribute nothing.

Toward the end of the period a movement arises for the emancipation of woman. Euripides defends the sex with brave speeches and timid innuendoes; Aristophanes makes fun of them with boisterous indecency. The women go to the heart of the matter and begin to compete with the hetairai in making themselves as attractive as the progress of chemistry will permit. “What sensible thing are we women capable of doing?” asks Cleonica in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. “We do nothing but sit around with our paint and lipstick and transparent gowns, and all the rest of it.”¹¹³ From 411 onward female roles become more prominent in Athenian drama, and reveal the growing escape of women from the solitude to which they have been confined.

Through it all the real influence of woman over man continues, making her subjection largely unreal. The greater eagerness of the male gives woman an advantage in Greece as elsewhere. “Sir,” says Samuel Johnson, “nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more.”¹¹⁴ Sometimes this natural sovereignty is enhanced by a substantial dowry, or an industrious tongue, or uxorious affection; more often it is the result of beauty, or the bearing and rearing of fine children, or the slow fusion of souls in the crucible of a common experience and task. An age that can portray such gentle characters as Antigone, Alcestis, Iphigenia, and Andromache, and such heroines as Hecuba, Cassandra, and Medea, could not be unaware of the highest and the deepest in woman. The average Athenian loves his wife, and will not always try to conceal it; the funeral stelae reveal surprisingly the tenderness of mate for mate, and of parents for children, in the intimacy of the home. The Greek Anthology is vivid with erotic verse, but it contains also many a touching epigram to a beloved comrade. “In this stone,” says one epitaph, “Marathonis laid Nicopolis, and bedewed the marble chest with tears. But it was of no avail. What profit hath a man whose wife is gone, and who is left solitary on earth?”¹¹⁵

X. THE HOME

The Greek family, like the Indo-European household in general, is composed of the father, the mother, sometimes a “second wife,” their unmarried daughters, their sons, their slaves, and their sons’ wives and children and slaves. It remains to the end the strongest institution in Greek civilization, for both in agriculture and in industry it is the unit and instrument of economic production. The power of the father in Attica is extensive, but much narrower than in Rome. He can expose the newborn child, sell the labor of his minor sons and unwedded daughters, give his daughters in marriage, and, under certain conditions, appoint another husband for his widow.¹¹⁶ But he cannot, in Athenian law, sell the persons of his children; and each son, on marrying, escapes from parental authority, sets up his own home, and becomes an independent member of the gene.

The Greek house is unpretentious. The exterior is seldom more than a stout blank wall with a narrow doorway, dumb witnesses to the insecurity of Greek life. The material is sometimes stucco, usually sun-baked brick. In the city the houses are crowded together in narrow streets; often they rise to two stories, occasionally they are tenements housing several families; but nearly every citizen owns an individual home. Dwellings in Athens are small till Alcibiades sets a fashion of magnificence; there is a democratic taboo, reinforced by aristocratic precaution, against display; and the Athenian, living for the most part in the open air, does not endow the home with the significance and affection that it receives in colder zones. A rich house may have a colonnaded porch facing the street, but this is highly exceptional. Windows are a luxury, and are confined to the upper story; they have no panes, but may be closed with shutters, or screened with lattices against the sun. The entrance door is ordinarily made of double leaves, turning upon vertical pivots running into the threshold and the lintel. On the door of many well-to-do houses is a metal knocker, often in the form of a ring in a lion’s mouth.¹¹⁷ The entrance hallway, except in the poorer dwellings, leads into an aule, or uncovered court, commonly paved with stones. Around the court may run a columned portico; in the center may be an altar, or a cistern, or both, perhaps also adorned with columns, and paved with a mosaic floor. Light and air come to the house chiefly through this court, for upon it open nearly all the rooms; to pass from one room to another it is usually necessary to enter the portico or the court. In the shade and privacy of the court and the portico much of the family’s life is lived, and much of its work is done.

Gardens are rare in the city, and are confined to small areas in the court or behind the house. Country gardens are more spacious and numerous; but the scarcity of rain in summer, and the cost of irrigation, make gardens a luxury in Attica. The average Greek has no Rousseauan sensitivity to nature; his mountains are still too troublesome to be beautiful, though his poets, despite its dangers, intone many paeans to the sea. He is not sentimental about nature, so much as animistically imaginative; he peoples the woods and streams of his country with gods and sprites, and thinks of nature as not a landscape but a Valhalla; he names his mountains and rivers from the divinities that inhabit them; and instead of painting nature directly he draws or carves symbolic images of the deities that in his poetic theology give it life. Not till Alexander’s armies bring back Persian ways and gold will the Greek build himself a pleasure garden or “paradise.” Nevertheless, flowers are loved in Greece as much as anywhere, and gardens and florists supply them all the year round. Flower girls peddle roses, violets, hyacinths, narcissi, irises, myrtles, lilacs, crocuses, and anemones from house to house. Women wear flowers in their hair, dandies wear them behind the ear; and on festal occasions both sexes may come forth with flower garlands, lei-like, around the neck.¹¹⁸

The interior of the house is simple. Among the poor the floors are of hardened earth; as income rises this basis may be covered with plaster, or paved with flat stones or with small round stones set in cement, as in the Near East immemorially; and all this may be covered with reed mats or rugs. The brick walls are plastered and whitewashed. Heating, which is needed for only three months of the year, is furnished by a brazier whose smoke has to find a way out through the door to the court. Decoration is minimal; but at the end of the fifth century the homes of the rich may have pillared halls, walls paneled with marble or painted imitations of it, mural paintings and tapestries, and ceiling arabesques. Furniture is scanty in the average home—some chairs, some chests, a few tables, a bed. Cushions take the place of upholstery on chairs, but the seats of the rich may be carefully carved, and inlaid with silver, tortoise, or ivory. Chests serve as both closets and chairs. Tables are small, and usually three-legged, whence their name trapezai; they are brought in and removed with the food, and are hardly used for other purposes; writing is done upon the knee. Couches and beds are favorite objects for adornment, being often inlaid or elaborately carved. Leather thongs stretched across the bedstead serve as a spring; there are mattresses and pillows, and embroidered covers, and commonly a raised headrest. Lamps may be hung from the ceiling, or placed upon stands, or take the form of torches elegantly wrought.

The kitchen is equipped with a great variety of iron, bronze, and earthenware vessels; glass is a rare luxury, not made in Greece. Cooking is done over an open fire; stoves are a Hellenistic innovation. Athenian meals are simple, like the Spartan and unlike the Boeotian, Corinthian, or Sicilian; but when honored guests are expected it is customary to engage a professional cook, who is always male. Cooking is a highly developed art, with many texts and heroes; some Greek cooks are as widely known as the latest victor in the Olympic games. To eat alone is considered barbarous, and table manners are looked upon as an index of a civilization’s development. Women and boys sit at meals before small tables; men recline on couches, two on each. The family eats together when alone; if male guests come, the women of the family retire to the gynaeceum. Attendants remove the sandals or wash the feet of the guests before the latter recline, and offer them water to cleanse their hands; sometimes they anoint the heads of the guests with fragrant oils. There are no knives or forks, but there are spoons; solid food is eaten with the fingers. During the meal the fingers are cleaned with scraps or crumbs of bread; after it with water. Before dessert the attendants fill the cup of each guest from a krater, or mixing bowl, in which wine has been diluted with water. Plates are of earthenware; silver plate appears as the fifth century ends. Epicures grow in number in the fourth century; one Pithyllus has coverings made for his tongue and fingers so that he may eat food as hot as he likes.¹¹⁹ There are a few vegetarians, whose guests make the usual jokes and complaints; one diner flees from a vegetarian feast for fear that he will be offered hay for dessert.¹²⁰

Drinking is as important as eating. After the deipnon, or dinner, comes the symposion, or drinking together. At Sparta as well as at Athens there are drinking clubs whose members become so attached to one another that such organizations become potent political instruments. The procedure at banquets is complicated, and philosophers like Xenocrates and Aristotle think it desirable to set down laws for them.¹²¹ The floor, upon which uneaten material has been thrown, is swept clean after the meal; perfumes are passed around, and much wine. The guests may then dance, not in pairs or with the other sex (for usually only males are invited), but in groups; or they may play games like kottabos;* or they may match poems, witticisms, or riddles, or watch professional performers like the female acrobat in Xenophon’s Symposium, who tosses twelve hoops at once and then dances somersaults through a hoop “set all around with upright swords.”¹²² Flute girls may appear, play, sing, dance, and love as arranged for. Educated Athenians prefer, now and then, a symposium of conversation, conducted in an orderly manner by a symposiarch chosen by a throw of the dice to act as chairman. The guests take care not to break up the talk into small groups, which usually means small talk; they keep the conversation general, and listen, as courteously as their vivacity will permit, to each man in turn. So elegant a discourse as that which Plato offers us is doubtless the product of his brilliant imagination; but probably Athens has known dialogues as lively as his, perhaps profounder; and in any case it is Athenian society that suggests and provides the background. In that exciting atmosphere of free wits the Athenian mind is formed.

XI. OLD AGE

Old age is feared and mourned beyond wont by the life-loving Greeks. Even here, however, it has its consolations; for as the used-up body is returned like worn currency to the mint, it has the solace of seeing, before it is consumed, the fresh new life through which it cheats mortality. It is true that Greek history reveals cases of selfish carelessness or coarse insolence towards the old. Athenian society, commercial, individualistic, and innovating, tends to be unkind to old age; respect for years goes with a religious and conservative society like Sparta’s, while democracy, loosening all bonds with freedom, puts the accent on youth, and favors the new against the old. Athenian history offers several instances of children taking over their parents’ property without proof of imbecility in the elders;¹²³ but Sophocles rescues himself from such an action simply by reading to the court some passages from his latest play. Athenian law commands that sons shall support their infirm or aged parents;¹²⁴ and public opinion, which is always more fearful than the law, enjoins modesty and respect in the behavior of the young towards the old. Plato takes it for granted that a well-bred youth will be silent in the presence of his seniors unless he is asked to speak.”¹²⁵ There are in the literature many pictures of modest adolescence, as in the earlier dialogues of Plato or the Symposium of Xenophon; and there are touching stories of filial devotion, like that of Orestes to Agamemnon, and of Antigone to Oedipus.

When death comes, every precaution is taken that the soul of the departed shall be spared all avoidable suffering. The body must be buried or burned; else the soul will wander restlessly about the world, and will revenge itself upon its negligent posterity; it may, for example, reappear as a ghost, and bring disease or disaster to plants and men. Cremation is more popular in the Heroic Age, burial in the classic. Burial was Mycenaean, and will survive into Christianity; cremation apparently entered Greece with the Achaeans and the Dorians, whose nomad habits made impossible the proper care of graves. One or the other is so obligatory among Athenians that the victorious generals at Arginusae are put to death for allowing a severe storm to deter them from recovering and burying their dead.

Greek burial customs carry on old ways into the future. The corpse is bathed, anointed with perfumes, crowned with flowers, and dressed in the finest garments that the family can afford. An obol is placed between the teeth to pay Charon, the mythical boatman who ferries the dead across the Styx to Hades.* The body is placed in a coffin of pottery or wood; to “have one foot in the coffin” is already a proverb in Greece.¹²⁶ Mourning is elaborate: black garments are worn, and the hair, or part of it, is shorn as a gift for the dead. On the third day the corpse is carried on a bier in procession through the streets, while the women weep and beat their breasts; professional wailers or dirge singers may be hired for the occasion. Upon the sod of the covered grave wine is poured to slake the dead soul’s thirst, and animals may be sacrificed for its food. The mourners lay wreaths of flowers or cypress upon the tomb,”¹²⁷ and then return home to the funeral feast. Since the departed soul is believed to be present at this feast, sacred custom requires that “of the dead nothing but good” shall be spoken;¹²⁸ this is the source of an ancient saw, and perhaps of the unfailing lauds of our epitaphs. Periodically the children visit the graves of their ancestors, and offer them food and drink. After the battle of Plataea, where the Greeks of many cities have fallen, the Plataeans pledge themselves to provide for all the dead an annual repast; and six centuries later, in the days of Plutarch, this promise will still be performed.

After death the soul, separated from the body, dwells as an insubstantial shade in Hades. In Homer only spirits guilty of exceptional or sacrilegious offense suffer punishment there; all the rest, saints and sinners alike, share an equal fate of endless prowling about dark Pluto’s realm. In the course of Greek history a belief arises, among the poorer classes, in Hades as a place of expiation for sins; Aeschylus pictures Zeus as judging the dead there and punishing the guilty, though no word is said about rewarding the good.¹²⁹ Only rarely do we find mention of the Blessed Isles, or the Elysian Fields, as heavens of eternal happiness for a few heroic souls. The thought of the gloomy fate awaiting nearly all the dead darkens Greek literature, and makes Greek life less bright and cheerful than is fitting under such a sun.

CHAPTER XIV

The Art of Periclean Greece

I. THE ORNAMENTATION OF LIFE

“IT is beautiful,” says a character in Xenophon’s Economics,

to see the footgear ranged in a row according to its kind; beautiful to see garments sorted according to their use, and coverlets; beautiful to see glass vases and tableware so sorted; and beautiful, too, despite the jeers of the witless and flippant, to see cooking-pots arranged with sense and symmetry. Yes, all things without exception, because of symmetry, will appear more beautiful when placed in order. All these utensils will then seem to form a choir; the center which they unite to form will create a beauty that will be enhanced by the distance of the other objects in the group.¹

This passage from a general reveals the scope, simplicity, and strength of the esthetic sense in Greece. The feeling for form and rhythm, for precision and clarity, for proportion and order, is the central fact in Greek culture; it enters into the shape and ornament of every bowl and vase, of every statue and painting, of every temple and tomb, of every poem and drama, of all Greek work in science and philosophy. Greek art is reason made manifest: Greek painting is the logic of line, Greek sculpture is a worship of symmetry, Greek architecture is a marble geometry. There is no extravagance of emotion in Periclean art, no bizarrerie of form, no striving for novelty through the abnormal or unusual;* the purpose is not to represent the indiscriminate irrelevancy of the real, but to catch the illuminating essence of things, and to portray the ideal possibilities of men. The pursuit of wealth, beauty, and knowledge so absorbed the Athenians that they had no time for goodness. “I swear by all the gods,” says one of Xenophon’s banqueters, “that I would not choose the power of the Persian king in preference to beauty.”³

The Greek, whatever the romanticists of less virile ages may have fancied of him, was no effeminate esthete, no flower of ecstasy murmuring mysteries of art for art’s sake; he thought of art as subordinate to life, and of living as the greatest art of all; he had a healthy utilitarian bias against any beauty that could not be used; the useful, the beautiful, and the good were almost as closely bound together in his thought as in the Socratic philosophy.* In his view art was first of all an adornment of the ways and means of life: he wanted his pots and pans, his lamps and chests and tables and beds and chairs to be at once serviceable and beautiful, and never too elegant to be strong. Having a vivid “sense of the state,” he identified himself with the power and glory of his city, and employed a thousand artists to embellish its public places, ennoble its festivals, and commemorate its history. Above all, he wished to honor or propitiate the gods, to express his gratitude to them for life or victory; he offered votive images, lavished his resources upon his temples, and engaged statuaries to give to his gods or his dead an enduring similitude in stone. Hence Greek art belonged not to a museum, where men might go to contemplate it in a rare moment of esthetic conscience, but to the actual interests and enterprises of the people; its “Apollos” were not dead marbles in a gallery, but the likenesses of beloved deities; its temples no mere curiosities for tourists, but the homes of living gods. The artist, in this society, was not an insolvent recluse in a studio, working in a language alien to the common citizen; he was an artisan toiling with laborers of all degrees in a public and intelligible task. Athens brought together, from all the Greek world, a greater concourse of artists, as well as of philosophers and poets, than any other city except Renaissance Rome; and these men, competing in fervent rivalry and cooperating under enlightened statesmanship, realized in fair measure the vision of Pericles.

Art begins at home, and with the person; men paint themselves before they paint pictures, and adorn their bodies before building homes. Jewelry, like cosmetics, is as old as history. The Greek was an expert cutter and engraver of gems. He used simple tools of bronze—plain and tubular drills, a wheel, and a polishing mixture of emery powder and oil;⁵ yet his work was so delicate and minute that a microscope was probably required in executing the details, and is certainly needed in following them.⁶ Coins were not especially pretty at Athens, where the grim owl ruled the mint. Elis led all the mainland in this field, and towards the close of the fifth century Syracuse issued a dekadrachma that has never been surpassed in numismatic art. In metalwork the masters of Chalcis maintained their leadership; every Mediterranean city sought their iron, copper, and silver wares. Greek mirrors were more pleasing than mirrors by their nature can frequently be; for though one might not see the clearest of reflections in the polished bronze, the mirrors themselves were of varied and attractive shapes, often elaborately engraved, and upheld by figures of heroes, fair women, or gods.

The potters carried on the forms and methods of the sixth century, with their traditional banter and rivalry. Sometimes they burnt into the vase a word of love for a boy; even Pheidias followed this custom when he carved upon the finger of his Zeus the words, “Pantarkes is fair.”⁷ In the first half of the fifth century the red-figure style reached its apex in the Achilles and Penthesilea vase, the Aesop and the Fox cup in the Vatican, and the Berlin Museum Orpheus among the Thracians. More beautiful still were the white lekythoi of the midcentury; these slender flasks were dedicated to the dead, and were usually buried with them, or thrown upon the pyre to let their fragrant oils mingle with the flames. The vase painters ventured into individuality, and sometimes fired the clay with subjects that would have startled the staid masters of the Archaic age; one vase allows Athenian youths to embrace courtesans shamelessly; another shows men vomiting as they come from a banquet; other vases do what they can for sex education.⁸ The heroes of Periclean vase painting—Brygus, Sotades, and Meidias—abandoned the old myths, and chose scenes from the life of their times, delighting above all in the graceful movement of woman and the natural play of the child. They drew more faithfully than their predecessors: they showed the body in three-quarters view as well as in profile; they produced light and shade by using thin or thick solutions of the glaze; they modeled the figures to show contours and depth, and the folds of feminine drapery. Corinth and Sicilian Gela were also centers of fine vase painting in this age, but no one questioned the superiority of the Athenians. It was not the competition of other potters that overcame the artists of the Ceramicus; it was the rise of a rival art of decoration. The vase painters tried to meet the attack by imitating the themes and styles of the muralists; but the taste of the age went against them, and slowly, as the fourth century advanced, pottery resigned itself to being more and more an industry, less and less an art.

II. THE RISE OF PAINTING

Four stages vaguely divide the history of Greek painting. In the sixth century it is chiefly ceramic, devoted to the adornment of vases; in the fifth it is chiefly architectural, giving color to public buildings and statues; in the fourth it hovers between the domestic and the individual, decorating dwellings and making portraits; in the Hellenistic Age it is chiefly individual, producing easel pictures for private purchasers. Greek painting begins as an offshoot of drawing, and remains to the end a matter essentially of drawing and design. In its development it uses three methods: fresco, or painting upon wet plaster; tempera, or painting upon wet cloth or boards with colors mixed with the white of eggs; and encaustic, which mixed the colors with melted wax; this is as near as antiquity comes to painting in oils. Pliny, whose will to believe sometimes rivals that of Herodotus, assures us that the art of painting was already so advanced in the eighth century that Candaules, King of Lydia, paid its weight in gold for a picture by Bularchus;⁹ but all beginnings are mysteries. We may judge the high repute of painting in Greece from the fact that Pliny gives it more space than to sculpture; and apparently the great paintings of the classic and Hellenistic periods were as much discussed by the critics, and as highly regarded by the people, as the most distinguished specimens of architecture or statuary.¹⁰

Polygnotus of Thasos was as famous in fifth-century Greece as Ictinus or Pheidias. We find him in Athens about 472; perhaps it was the rich Cimon who procured him commissions to adorn several public buildings with murals.* Upon the Stoa, which thereafter was called Poecile, or the Painted Portico, and which, three centuries later, would give its name to the philosophy of Zeno, Polygnotus depicted the Sack of Troy—not the bloody massacre of the night of victory, but the somber silence of the morning after, with the victors quieted by the ruin around them, and the defeated lying calm in death. On the walls of the temple of the Dioscuri he painted the Rape of the Leucippidae, and set a precedent for his art by portraying the women in transparent drapery. The Amphictyonic Council was not shocked; it invited Polygnotus to Delphi, where, in the Lesche, or Lounge, he painted Odysseus in Hades, and another Sack of Troy. All these were vast frescoes, almost empty of landscape or background, but so crowded with individualized figures that many assistants were needed to fill in with color the master’s carefully drawn designs. The Lesche mural of Troy showed Menelaus’ crew about to spread sail for the return to Greece; in the center sat Helen; and though many other women were in the picture, all appeared to be gazing at her beauty. In a corner stood Andromache, with Astyanax at her breast; in another a little boy clung to an altar in fear; and in the distance a horse rolled around on the sandy beach.¹² Here, half a century before Euripides, was all the drama of The Trojan Women. Polygnotus refused to take pay for these pictures, but gave them to Athens and Delphi out of the generosity of confident strength. All Hellas acclaimed him: Athens conferred citizenship upon him, and the Amphictyonic Council arranged that wherever he went in Greece he should be (as Socrates wished to be) maintained at the public expense.¹³ All that remains of him is a little pigment on a wall at Delphi to remind us that artistic immortality is a moment in geological time.

About 470 Delphi and Corinth established quadrennial contests in painting as part of the Pythian and Isthmian games. The art was now sufficiently advanced to enable Panaenus, brother (or nephew) of Pheidias, to make recognizable portraits of the Athenian and Persian generals in his Battle of Marathon. But it still placed all figures in one plane, and made them of one stature; it indicated distance not by a progressive diminution of size and a modeling with light and shade, but by covering more of the lower half of the farther figures with the curves that represented the ground. Towards 440 a vital step forward was taken. Agatharchus, employed by Aeschylus and Sophocles to paint scenery for their plays, perceived the connection between light and shade and distance, and wrote a treatise on perspective as a means of creating theatrical illusion. Anaxagoras and Democritus took up the idea from the scientific angle, and at the end of the century Apollodorus of Athens won the name of skiagraphos, or shadow painter, because he made pictures in chiaroscuro—i.e., in light and shade; hence Pliny spoke of him as “the first to paint objects as they really appeared.”¹⁴

Greek painters never made full use of these discoveries; just as Solon frowned upon the theatrical art as a deception, so the artists seem to have thought it against their honor, or beneath their dignity, to give to a plane surface the appearance of three dimensions. Nevertheless it was through perspective and chiaroscuro that Zeuxis, pupil of Apollodorus, made himself the supreme figure in fifth-century painting. He came from Heracleia (Pontica?) to Athens about 424; and even amid the noise of war his coming was considered an event. He was a “character,” bold and conceited, and he painted with a swashbuckling brush. At the Olympic games he strutted about in a checkered tunic on which his name was embroidered in gold; he could afford it, since he had already acquired “a vast amount of wealth” from his paintings.¹⁵ But he worked with the honest care of a great artist, and when Agatharchus boasted of his own speed of execution, Zeuxis said quietly, “I take a long time.”¹⁶ He gave away many of his masterpieces, on the ground that no price could do them justice; and cities and kings were happy to receive them.

He had only one rival in his generation—Parrhasius of Ephesus, almost as great and quite as vain. Parrhasius wore a golden crown on his head, called himself “the prince of painters,” and said that in him the art had reached perfection.¹⁷ He did it all in lusty good humor, singing as he painted.¹⁸ Gossip said that he had bought a slave and tortured him to study facial expression in pain for a picture of Prometheus;¹⁹ but people tell many stories about artists. Like Zeuxis he was a realist; his Runner was portrayed with such verisimilitude that those who beheld it expected the perspiration to fall from the picture, and the athlete to drop from exhaustion. He drew an immense mural of The People of Athens, representing them as implacable and merciful, proud and humble, fierce and timid, fickle and generous—and so faithfully that the Athenian public, we are informed, realized for the first time its own complex and contradictory character.²⁰

A great rivalry brought him into public competition with Zeuxis. The latter painted some grapes so naturally that birds tried to eat them. The judges were enthusiastic about the picture, and Zeuxis, confident of victory, bade Parrhasius draw aside the curtain that concealed the Ephesian’s painting. But the curtain proved to be a part of the picture, and Zeuxis, having himself been deceived, handsomely acknowledged his defeat. Zeuxis suffered no loss of reputation. At Crotona he agreed to paint a Helen for the temple of Lacinian Hera, on condition that the five loveliest women of the city should pose in the nude for him, so that he might select from each her fairest feature, and combine them all in a second goddess of beauty.²¹ Penelope, too, found new life under his brush; but he admired more his portrait of an athlete, and wrote under it that men would find it easier to criticize him than to equal him. All Greece enjoyed his conceit, and talked about him as much as of any dramatist, statesmen, or general. Only the prize fighters outdid his fame.

III. THE MASTERS OF SCULPTURE

1. Methods

None the less painting remained slightly alien to the Greek genius, which loved form more than color, and made even the painting of the classic age (if we may judge it from hearsay) a statuesque study in line and design rather than a sensuous seizure of the colors of life. The Hellene delighted rather in sculpture: he filled his home, his temples, and his graves with terracotta statuettes, worshiped his gods with images of stone, and marked the tombs of his departed with stelae reliefs that are among the commonest and most moving products of Greek art. The artisans of the stelae were simple workers who carved by rote, and repeated a thousand times the familiar theme of the quiet parting, with clasped hands, of the living from the dead. But the theme itself is noble enough to bear repetition, for it shows classic restraint at its best, and teaches even a romantic soul that feeling speaks with most power when it lowers its voice. These slabs show us the dead most often in some characteristic occupation of life—a child playing with a hoop, a girl carrying a jar, a warrior proud in his armor, a young woman admiring her jewels, a boy reading a book while his dog lies content but watchful under his chair. Death in these stelae is made natural, and therefore forgivable.

More complex, and supreme in their kind, are the sculptural reliefs of this age. In one of them Orpheus bids a lingering farewell to Eurydice, whom Hermes has reclaimed for the nether world;²² in another Demeter gives to Triptolemus the golden grain by which he is to establish agriculture in Greece; here some of the coloring still adheres to the stone, and suggests the warmth and brilliance of Greek relief in the Golden Age.²³ Still more beautiful is The Birth of Aphrodite, carved on one side of the “Ludovisi Throne”* by an unknown sculptor of presumably Ionian training. Two goddesses are raising Aphrodite from the sea; her thin wet garment clings to her form and reveals it in all the splendor of maturity; the head is semi-Asiatic, but the drapery of the attendant deities, and the soft grace of their pose, bear the stamp of the sensitive Greek eye and hand. On another side of the “throne” a nude girl plays the double flute. On a third side a veiled woman prepares her lamp for the evening; perhaps the face and garments here are even nearer to perfection than on the central piece.

The advance of the fifth-century sculptor upon his forebears is impressive. Frontality is abandoned, foreshortening deepens perspective, stillness gives place to movement, rigidity to life. Indeed, when Greek statuary breaks through the old conventions and shows man in action, it is an artistic revolution; rarely before, in Egypt or the Near East, or in pre-Marathon Greece, has any sculpture in the round been caught in action. These developments owe much to the freshened vitality and buoyancy of Greek life after Salamis, and more to the patient study of motile anatomy by master and apprentice through many generations. “Is it not by modeling your works on living beings,” asks Socrates, sculptor and philosopher, “that you make your statues appear alive? . . . And as our different attitudes cause the play of certain muscles of our body, upwards or downwards, so that some are contracted and some stretched, some wrung and some relaxed, is it not by expressing these efforts that you give greater truth and verisimilitude to your works?”²⁴ The Periclean sculptor is interested in every feature of the body—in the abdomen as much as the face, in the marvelous play of the elastic flesh over the moving framework of the bones, in the swelling of muscles, tendons, and veins, in the endless wonders of the structure and action of hands and ears and feet; and he is fascinated by the difficulty of molding the extremities. He does not often use models to pose for him in a studio; for the most part he is content to watch the men stripped and active in the palaestra or on the athletic field, and the women solemnly marching in the religious processions, or naturally absorbed in their domestic tasks. It is for this reason, and not through modesty, that he centers his studies of anatomy upon the male, and in his portraits of women substitutes the refinements of drapery for anatomical detail—though he makes the drapery as transparent as he dares. Tired of the stiff skirts of Egypt and archaic Greece he loves to show feminine robes agitated by a breeze, for here again he catches the quality of motion and life.

He uses almost any workable material that comes to his hand—wood, ivory, bone, terra cotta, limestone, marble, silver, gold; sometimes, as in the chryselephantine statues of Pheidias, he uses gold on the raiment and ivory for the flesh. In the Peloponnesus bronze is the sculptor’s favorite material, for he admires its dark tints as well adapted to represent the bodies of men tanned by nudity under the sun; and—not knowing the rapacity of man—he dreams that it is more durable than stone. In Ionia and Attica he prefers marble; its difficulty stimulates him, its firmness lets him chisel it safely, its translucent smoothness seems designed to convey the rosy color and delicate texture of a woman’s skin. Near Athens the sculptor discovers the marble of Mt. Pentelicus, and observes how its iron content mellows with time and weather into a vein of gold glowing through the stone; and with the obstinate patience that is half of genius he slowly carves the quarries into living statuary. When he works in bronze the fifth-century sculptor uses the method of hollow casting by the process of cire perdu, or lost wax: i.e., he makes a model in plaster or clay, overlaps it with a thin coat of “wax, covers it all with a mold of plaster or clay perforated at many points, and places the figure in a furnace whose heat melts the wax, which runs out through the holes; then he pours molten bronze into the mold at the top till the metal fills all the space before occupied by the wax; he cools the figure, removes the outer mold, and files and polishes, lacquers or paints or gilds, the bronze into the final form. If he prefers marble he begins with the unshaped block, unaided by any system of pointing;* he works freehand, and for the most part guides himself by the eye instead of by instruments;²⁵ blow by blow he removes the superfluous until the perfection that he has conceived takes shape in the stone, and, in Aristotle’s phrase, matter becomes form.

His subjects range from gods to animals, but they must all be physically admirable; he has no use for weaklings, for intellectuals, for abnormal types, or for old women or men. He does well with the horse, but indifferently with other animals. He does better with women, and some of his anonymous masterpieces, like the meditative young lady holding her robe on her breast in the Athens Museum, achieve a quiet loveliness that does not lend itself to words. He is at his best with athletes, for these he admires without stint, and can observe without hindrance; now and then he exaggerates their prowess, and crosses their abdomens with incredible muscles; but despite this fault he can cast bronzes like that found in the sea near Anticythera, and alternatively named an Ephebos, or a Perseus whose hand once held Medusa’s snake-haired head. Sometimes he catches a youth or a girl absorbed in some simple and spontaneous action, like the boy drawing a thorn from his foot.* But his country’s mythology is still the leading inspiration of his art. That terrible conflict between philosophy and religion which runs through the thought of the fifth century does not show yet on the monuments; here the gods are still supreme; and if they are dying they are nobly transmuted into the poetry of art. Does the sculptor who shapes in bronze the powerful Zeus of Artemisium† really believe that he is modeling the Law of the World? Does the artist who carves the gentle and sorrowful Dionysus of the Delphi Museum know, in the depths of his inarticulate understanding, that Dionysus has been shot down by the arrows of philosophy, and that the traditional features of Dionysus’ successor, Christ, are already previsioned in this head?

2. Schools

If Greek sculpture achieved so much in the fifth century, it was in part because each sculptor belonged to a school, and had his place in a long lineage of masters and pupils carrying on the skills of their art, checking the extravagances of independent individualities, encouraging their specific abilities, disciplining them with a sturdy grounding in the technology and achievements of the past, and forming them, through this interplay of talent and law, into a greater art than often comes to genius isolated and unruled. Great artists are more frequently the culmination of a tradition than its overthrow; and though rebels are the necessary variants in the natural history of art, it is only when their new line has been steadied with heredity and chastened with time that it generates supreme personalities.

Five schools performed this function in Periclean Greece: those of Rhegium, Sicyon, Argos, Aegina, and Attica. About 496 another Pythagoras of Samos settled at Rhegium, cast a Philoctetes that won him Mediterranean fame, and put into the faces of his statues such signs of passion, pain, and age as shocked all Greek sculptors till those of the Hellenistic period decided to imitate him. At Sicyon Canachus and his brother Aristocles carried on the work begun a century earlier by Dipoenus and Scyllis of Crete-Callon and Onatas brought distinction to Aegina by their skill with bronze; perhaps it was they who made the Aegina pediments. At Argos Ageladas organized the transmission of sculptural technique in a school that reached its apex in Polycleitus.

Coming from Sicyon, Polycleitus made himself popular in Argos by designing for its temple of Hera, about 422, a gold and ivory statue of the matron goddess, which the age ranked second only to the chryselephantine immensities of Pheidias.* At Ephesus he joined in a competition with Pheidias, Cresilas, and Phradmon to make an Amazon for the temple of Artemis; the four artists were made judges of the result; each, the story goes, named his own work best, Polycleitus’ second best; and the prize was given to the Sicyonian.†²⁷ But Polycleitus loved athletes more than women or gods. In the famous Diadumenos (of which the best surviving copy is in the Athens Museum) he chose for representation that moment in which the victor binds about his head the fillet over which the judges are to place the laurel wreath. The chest and abdomen are too muscular for belief, but the body is vividly posed upon one foot, and the features are a definition of classic regularity. Regularity was the fetish of Polycleitus; it was his life aim to find and establish a canon or rule for the correct proportion of every part in a statue; he was the Pythagoras of sculpture, seeking a divine mathematics of symmetry and form. The dimensions of any part of a perfect body, he thought, should bear a given ratio to the dimensions of any one part, say the index finger. The Polycleitan canon called for a round head, broad shoulders, stocky torso, wide hips, and short legs, making all in all a figure rather of strength than of grace. The sculptor was so fond of his canon that he wrote a treatise to expound it, and molded a statue to illustrate it. Probably this was the Doryphoros, or Spear Bearer, of which the Naples Museum has a Roman copy; here again is the brachycephalic head, the powerful shoulders, the short trunk, the corrugated musculature overflowing the groin. Lovelier is the Westmacott Ephebos of the British Museum, where the lad has feelings as well as muscles, and seems lost in a gentle meditation on something else than his own strength. Through these figures the canon of Polycleitus became for a time a law to the sculptors of the Peloponnesus; it influenced even Pheidias, and ruled till Praxiteles overthrew it with that rival canon of tall, slim elegance which survived through Rome into the statuary of Christian Europe.

Myron mediated between the Peloponnesian and the Attic schools. Born at Eleutherae, living at Athens, and (says Pliny²⁸) studying for a while with Ageladas, he learned to unite Peloponnesian masculinity with Ionian grace. What he added to all the schools was motion: he saw the athlete not, like Polycleitus, before or after the contest, but in it; and realized his vision so well in bronze that no other sculptor in history has rivaled him in portraying the male body in action. About 470 he cast the most famous of athletic statues—the Discobolos or Discus Thrower.* The wonder of the male frame is here complete: the body carefully studied in all those movements of muscle, tendon, and bone that are involved in the action; the legs and arms and trunk bent to give the fullest force to the throw; the face not distorted with effort, but calm in the confidence of ability; the head not heavy or brutal, but that of a man of blood and refinement, who could write books if he would condescend. This chef-d’oeuvre was only one of Myron’s achievements; his contemporaries valued it, but ranked even more highly his Athena and Marsyas† and his Ladas. Athena here is too lovely for the purpose; no one could guess that this demure virgin is watching with calm content the flaying of the defeated flutist. Myron’s Marsyas is George Bernard Shaw caught in an unseemly but eloquent pose; he has played for the last time, and is about to die; but he will not die without a speech. Ladas was an athlete who succumbed to the exhaustion of victory; Myron portrayed him so realistically that an old Greek, seeing the statue, cried out: “Like as thou wert in life, O Ladas, breathing forth thy panting soul, such hath Myron wrought thee in bronze, stamping on all thy body thine eagerness for the victor’s crown.” And of Myron’s Heifer the Greeks said that it could do everything but moo.²⁹

The Attic or Athenian school added to the Peloponnesians and to Myron what woman gives to man—beauty, tenderness, delicacy, and grace; and because in doing this it still retained a masculine element of strength, it reached a height that sculpture may never attain again. Calamis was still a little archaic, and Nesiotes and Critius, in casting a second group of Tyrannicides, did not free themselves from the rigid simplicity of the sixth century; Lucian warns orators not to behave like such lifeless figures. But when, about 423, Paeonius of Thracian Mende, after studying sculpture at Athens, made for the Messenians a Nike, or Victory, he touched heights of grace and loveliness that no Greek would reach again until Praxiteles; and not even Praxiteles would surpass the flow of this drapery, or the ecstasy of this motion.*

3. Pheidias

From 447 to 438 Pheidias and his aides were absorbed in carving the statues and reliefs of the Parthenon. As Plato was first a dramatist and then became a dramatic philosopher, so Pheidias was first a painter and then became a pictorial sculptor. He was the son of a painter, and studied for a while under Polygnotus; from him, presumably, he learned design and composition, and the grouping of figures for a total effect; from him, it may be, he acquired that “grand style” which made him the greatest sculptor in Greece. But painting did not satisfy him; he needed more dimensions. He took up sculpture, and perhaps studied the bronze technique of Ageladas. Patiently he made himself master of every branch of his art.

He was already an old man when, about 438, he formed his Athene Parthenos, for he depicted himself on its shield as aged and bald, and not unacquainted with grief. No one expected him to carve with his own hands the hundreds of figures that filled the metopes, frieze, and pediments of the Parthenon; it was enough that he superintended all Periclean building, and designed the sculptural ornament; he left it to his pupils, above all to Alcamenes, to execute the plans. He himself, however, made three statues of the city’s goddess for the Acropolis. One was commissioned by Athenian colonists in Lemnos; it was of bronze, a little larger than life, and so delicately molded that Greek critics considered this Lemnian Athena the most beautiful of Pheidias’ works.*³⁰ Another was the Athene Promachos, a colossal bronze representation of the goddess as the warlike defender of her city; it stood between the Propylaea and the Erechtheum, rose with its pedestal to a height of seventy feet, and served as a beacon to mariners and a warning to enemies.† The most famous of the three, the Athene Parthenos, stood thirty-eight feet high in the interior of the Parthenon, as the virgin goddess of wisdom and chastity. For this culminating figure Pheidias wished to use marble, but the people would having nothing less than ivory and gold. The artist used ivory for the visible body, and forty-four talents (2545 lbs.) of gold for the robe;³² furthermore, he adorned it with precious metals, and elaborate reliefs on the helmet, the sandals, and the shield. It was so placed that on Athena’s feast day the sun would shine through the great doors of the temple directly upon the brilliant drapery and pallid face of the Virgin.‡

The completion of the work brought no happiness to Pheidias, for some of the gold and ivory assigned to him for the statue disappeared from his studio and could not be accounted for. The foes of Pericles did not overlook this opportunity. They charged Pheidias with theft, and convicted him.§ But the people of Olympia interceded for him, and paid his bail of forty (?) talents, on condition that he come to Olympia and make a chryselephantine statue for the temple of Zeus;³⁴ they were glad to trust him with more ivory and gold. A special workshop was built for him and his assistants near the temple precincts, and his brother Panaenus was commissioned to decorate the throne of the statue and the walls of the temple with paintings.³⁵ Pheidias was enamored of size, and made his seated Zeus sixty feet high, so that when it was placed within the temple critics complained that the god would break through the roof if he should take it into his head to stand up. On the “dark brows” and “ambrosial locks”³⁶ of the Thunderer, Pheidias placed a crown of gold in the form of olive branches and leaves; in the right hand he set a small statue of Victory, also in ivory and gold; in the left hand a scepter inlaid with precious stones; on the body a golden robe engraved with flowers; and on the feet sandals of solid gold. The throne was of gold, ebony, and ivory; at its base were smaller statues of Victory, Apollo, Artemis, Niobe, and Theban lads kidnaped by the Sphinx.³⁷ The final result was so impressive that legend grew around it: when Pheidias had finished, we are told, he begged for a sign from heaven in approval; whereupon a bolt of lightning struck the pavement near the statue’s base—a sign which, like most celestial messages, admitted of diverse interpretations.* The work was listed among the Seven Wonders of the World, and all who could afford it made a pilgrimage to see the incarnate god. Aemilius Paullus, the Roman who conquered Greece, was struck with awe on seeing the colossus; his expectations, he confessed, had been exceeded by the reality.³⁸ Dio Chrysostom called it the most beautiful image on earth, and added, as Beethoven was to say of Beethoven’s music: “If one who is heavyladen in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortune and sorrow in life, and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this image, he would forget all the griefs and troubles that befall the life of man.”³⁹ “The beauty of the statue,” said Quintilian, “even made some addition to the received religion; the majesty of the work was equal to the god.”⁴⁰

Of Pheidias’ last years there is no unchallenged account. One story pictures him as returning to Athens and dying in jail;⁴¹ another lets him stay in Elis, only to have Elis put him to death in 432;⁴² there is not much to choose between these denouements. His pupils carried on his work, and attested his success as a teacher by almost equaling him. Agoracritus, his favorite, carved a famous Nemesis; Alcamenes made an Aphrodite of the Gardens which Lucian ranked with the highest masterpieces of statuary,†⁴³ The school of Pheidias came to an end with the fifth century, but it left Greek sculpture considerably further advanced than it had found it. Through Pheidias and his followers the art had neared perfection at the very moment when the Peloponnesian War began the ruin of Athens. Technique had been mastered, anatomy was understood, life and movement and grace had been poured into bronze and stone. But the characteristic achievement of Pheidias was the attainment and definitive expression of the classic style, the “grand style” of Winckelmann: strength reconciled with beauty, feeling with restraint, motion with repose, flesh and bone with mind and soul. Here, after five centuries of effort, the famed “serenity” so imaginatively ascribed to the Greeks was at least conceived; and the passionate and turbulent Athenians, contemplating the figures of Pheidias, might see how nearly, if only in creative sculptury, men for a moment had been like gods.

IV. THE BUILDERS

1. The Progress of Architecture

During the fifth century the Doric order consolidated its conquest of Greece. Among all the Greek temples built in this prosperous age only a few Ionic shrines survive, chiefly the Erechtheum and the temple of Nike Apteros on the Acropolis. Attica remained faithful to Doric, yielding to the Ionic order only so far as to use it for the inner columns of the Propylaea, and to place a frieze around the Theseum and the Parthenon; perhaps a tendency to make the Doric column longer and slenderer reveals a further influence of the Ionic style. In Asia Minor the Greeks imbibed the Oriental love of delicate ornament, and expressed it in the complex elaboration of the Ionic entablature, and the creation of a new and more ornate order, the Corinthian. About 430 (as Vitruvius tells the tale) an Ionian sculptor, Callimachus, was struck by the sight of a basket of votive offerings, covered with a tile, which a nurse had left upon the tomb of her mistress; a wild acanthus had grown around the basket and the tile; and the sculptor, pleased with the natural form so suggested, modified the Ionic capitals of a temple that he was building at Corinth, by mingling acanthus leaves with the volutes.⁴⁴ Probably the story is a myth, and the nurse’s basket had less influence than the palm and papyrus capitals of Egypt in generating the Corinthian style. The new order made little headway in classic Greece; Ictinus used it for one isolated column in the court of an Ionic temple at Phigalea, and towards the end of the fourth century it was used for the choragic monument of Lysicrates. Only under the elegant Romans of the Empire did this delicate style reach its full development.

All the Greek world was building temples in this period. Cities almost bankrupted themselves in rivalry to have the fairest statuary and the largest shrines. To her massive sixth-century edifices at Samos and Ephesus Ionia added new Ionic temples at Magnesia, Teos, and Priene. At Assus in the Troad Greek colonists raised an almost archaic Doric fane to Athena. At the other end of Hellas Crotona built, about 480, a vast Doric home for Hera; it survived till 1600, when a bishop thought he could make better use of its stones.⁴⁵ To the fifth century belong the greatest of the temples at Poseidonia (Paestum), Segesta, Selinus, and Acragas, and the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus. At Syracuse the columns still stand of a temple raised to Athena by Gelon I, and partly preserved by its transformation into a Christian church, At Bassae, near Phigalea in the Peloponnesus, Ictinus designed a temple of Apollo strangely different from his other masterpiece, the Parthenon; here the Doric periptery enclosed a space occupied by a small naos and a large open court surrounded by an Ionic colonnade; and around the interior of this court, along the inner face of the Ionic columns, ran a frieze almost as graceful as the Parthenon’s, and having the added virtue of being visible.*

At Olympia the Elian architect Libon, a generation before the Parthenon, raised a rival to it in a Doric shrine to Zeus. Six columns stood at each end, thirteen on either side; perhaps too stout for beauty, and unfortunate in their material—a coarse limestone coated with stucco; the roof, however, was of Pentelic tiles. Paeonius and Alcamenes, Pausanias tells us,⁴⁶ carved for the pediments powerful figures† portraying on the eastern gable the chariot race between Pelops and Oenomaus, and on the western gable the struggle of Lapiths and centaurs. The Lapiths, in Greek legend, were a mountain tribe of Thessaly. When Pirithous, their king, married Hippodameia, daughter of King Oenomaus of Pisa in Elis, he invited the centaurs to the wedding feast. The centaurs dwelt in the mountains about Pelion; Greek art represented them as half man and half horse, possibly to suggest their untamed woodland nature, or because the centaurs were such excellent horsemen that each man and his mount seemed to be one animal. At the feast these horsemen got drunk, and tried to carry off the Lapith women. The Lapiths fought bravely for their ladies, and won. (Greek art never tired of this story, and perhaps used it to symbolize the clearing of the wilderness from wild beasts, and the struggle between the human and the bestial in man.) The figures on the east pediment are archaically stiff and still; those on the west seem hardly of the same period, for though some of them are crude, and the hair is stylized in ancient fashion, they are alive with action, and show a mature grasp of sculptural grouping. Startlingly beautiful is the bride, a woman of no fragile slenderness, but of a full-bodied loveliness that quite explains the war. A bearded centaur has one arm around her waist, one hand upon her breast; she is about to be snatched from her nuptials, and yet the artist portrays her features in such calm repose that one suspects him of having read Lessing or Winckelmann; or perhaps, like any woman, she is not insensitive to the compliment of desire. Less ambitious and massive, but more delicately finished, are the extant metopes of the temple, recounting certain labors of Heracles; one, wherein Heracles holds up the world for Atlas, stands out as a work of complete mastery. Heracles here is no abnormal giant, rock-ribbed with musculature, but simply a man of full and harmonious development. Before him is Atlas, whose head would adorn the shoulders of Plato. At the left is one of Atlas’ daughters, perfect in the natural beauty of healthy womanhood; perhaps the artist had some symbolism in mind when he showed her gently helping the strong man to bear the weight of the world. The specialist finds some faults of execution and detail in these half-ruined metopes; but to an amateur observer the bride, and Heracles, and the daughter of Atlas, are as near to perfection as anything in the history of sculptural relief.

2. The Reconstruction of Athens

Attica leads all Greece in the abundance and excellence of its fifth-century building. Here the Doric style, which tends elsewhere to a bulging corpulence, takes on Ionian grace and elegance; color is added to line, ornament to symmetry. On a dangerous headland at Sunium those who risked the sea raised to Poseidon a shrine of which eleven columns stand. At Eleusis Ictinus designed a spacious temple to Demeter, and under Pericles’ persuasion Athens contributed funds to make this edifice worthy of the Eleusinian festival. At Athens the proximity of good marble on Mt. Pentelicus and in Paros encouraged the artist with the finest of building materials. Seldom, until our periods of economic breakdown, has a democracy been able or willing to spend so lavishly on public construction. The Parthenon cost seven hundred talents ($4,200,000); the Athene Parthenos (which, however, was a gold reserve as well as a statue) cost $6,000,000; the unfinished Propylaea, $2,400,000; minor Periclean structures at Athens and the Piraeus, $18,000,000; sculpture and other decoration, $16,200,000; altogether, in the sixteen years from 447 to 431, the city of Athens voted $57,600,000 for public buildings, statuary, and painting.⁴⁷ The spread of this sum among artisans and artists, executives and slaves, had much to do with the prosperity of Athens under Pericles.

Imagination can picture vaguely the background of this courageous adventure in art. The Athenians, on their return from Salamis, found their city almost wholly devastated by the Persian occupation; every edifice of any value had been burned to the ground. Such a calamity when it does not destroy the citizens as well as the city, makes them stronger; the “act of God” clears away many eyesores and unfit habitations; chance accomplishes what human obstinacy would never allow; and if food can be found through the crisis, the labor and genius of men create a finer city than before. The Athenians, even after the war with Persia, were rich in both labor and genius, and the spirit of victory doubled their will for great enterprise. In a generation Athens was rebuilt; a new council chamber rose, a new prytaneum, new homes, new porticoes, new walls of defense, new wharves and warehouses at a new port. About 446 Hippodamus of Miletus, chief town-planner of antiquity, laid out a new Piraeus, and set a new style, by replacing the old chaos of haphazard and winding alleys with broad, straight streets crossing at right angles. On an elevation a mile northwest of the Acropolis unknown artists raised that smaller Parthenon known as the Theseum, or temple of Theseus.* Sculptors filled the pediments with statuary and the metopes with reliefs, and ran a frieze above the inner columns at both ends. Painters colored the moldings, the triglyphs, metopes, and frieze, and made bright murals for an interior dimly lit by light shining through marble tiles.†

The finest work of Pericles’ builders was reserved for the Acropolis, the ancient seat of the city’s government and faith. Themistocles began its reconstruction, and planned a temple one hundred feet long, known therefore as the Hecatompedon. After his fall the work was abandoned; the oligarchic party opposed it on the ground that any dwelling for Athena, if it was not to bring bad luck to Athens, must be built upon the site of the old temple of Athene Polias (i.e., Athena of the City), which the Persians had destroyed. Pericles, caring nothing about superstitions, adopted the site of the Hecatompedon for the Parthenon, and, though the priests protested to the end, went on with his plans. On the southwestern slope of the Acropolis his artists erected an Odeum, or Music Hall, unique in Athens for its cone-shaped dome. It offered a handle to conservative satirists, who thenceforth referred to Pericles’ conical head as his odeion, or hall of song. The Odeum was built for the most part of wood, and soon succumbed to time. In this auditorium musical performances were presented, and the Dionysian dramas were rehearsed; and there, annually, were held the contests instituted by Pericles in vocal and instrumental music. The versatile statesman himself often acted as a judge in these competitions.

The road to the summit, in classical days, was devious and gradual, and was flanked with statues and votive offerings. Near the top was a majestically broad flight of marble steps, buttressed with bastions on either side. On the south bastion Callicrates raised a miniature Ionic temple to Athena as Nike Apteros, or the Wingless Victory.* Elegant reliefs (partly preserved in the Athens Museum) adorned the external balustrade with figures of winged Victories bringing to Athens their far-gathered spoils. These Nikai are in the noblest style of Pheidias, less vigorous than the massive goddesses of the Parthenon, but even more graceful in motion, and more delicate and natural in their protrayal of drapery. The Victory tying her sandals deserves her name, for she is one of the triumphs of Greek art.

At the top of the Acropolis steps Mnesicles built, in elaboration of Mycenaean pylons, an entrance with five openings, before each of which stood a Doric portico; these colonnades in time gave to the whole edifice their name of Propylaea, or Before the Gates. Each portico carried a frieze of triglyphs and metopes, and was crowned with a pediment. Within the passageway was an Ionic colonnade, boldly inserted within a Doric form. The interior of the northern wing was decorated with paintings by Polygnotus and others, and contained votive tablets (pinakes) of terra cotta or marble; hence its name of Pinakotheka, or Hall of Tablets. A small south wing remained unfinished; war, or the reaction against Pericles, put a stop to the work, and left an ungainly mass of beautiful parts as a gateway to the Parthenon.

Within these gates, on the left, was the strangely Oriental Erechtheum. This, too, was overtaken by war: not more than half of it was finished when the disaster of Aegospotami reduced Athens to chaos and poverty. It was begun after Pericles’ death, under the prodding of conservatives who feared that the ancient heroes Erechtheus and Cecrops, as well as the Athena of the older shrine, and the sacred snakes that haunted the spot, would punish Athens for building the Parthenon on another site. The varied purposes of the structure determined its design, and destroyed its unity. One wing was dedicated to Athene Polias, and housed her ancient image; another was devoted to Erechtheus and Poseidon. The naos or cella, instead of being enclosed by a unifying peristyle, was here buttressed with three separate porticoes. The northern and eastern porches were upheld by slender Ionic columns as beautiful as any of their kind.* In the northern porch was a perfect portal, adorned with a molding of marble flowers. In the cella was the primitive wooden statue of Athena, which the pious believed had fallen from heaven; there, too, was the great lamp whose fire was never extinguished, and which Callimachus, the Cellini of his time, had fashioned of gold and embellished with acanthus leaves, like his Corinthian capitals. The south portico was the famous Porch of the Maidens, or Caryatids.† These patient women were descended, presumably, from the basket bearers of the Orient; and an early caryatid at Tralles, in Asia Minor, betrays the Easternprobably the Assyrian—origin of the form. The drapery is superb, and the natural flexure of the knee gives an impression of ease; but even these substantial ladies seem hardly strong enough to convey that sense of sturdy and reliable support which the finest architecture gives. It was an aberration of taste that Pheidias would probably have forbidden.

3. The Parthenon

In 447 Ictinus, aided by Callicrates, and under the general supervision of Pheidias and Pericles, began to build a new temple for Athene Parthenos. In the western end of the structure he placed a room for her maiden priestesses, and called it the room “of the virgins”—ton parthenon; and in the course of careless time this name of a part, by a kind of architectural metaphor, was applied to the whole. Ictinus chose as his material the white marble of Mt. Pentelicus, veined with iron grains. No mortar was used; the blocks were so accurately squared and so finely finished that each stone grasped the next as if the two were one. The column drums were bored to let a small cylinder of olivewood connect them, and permit each drum to be turned around and around upon the one below it until the meeting surfaces were ground so smooth that the division between drums was almost invisible.⁴⁹

The style was pure Doric, and of classic simplicity. The design was rectangular, for the Greeks did not care for circular or conical forms; hence there were no arches in Greek architecture, though Greek architects must have been familiar with them. The dimensions were modest: 228 × 101 × 65 feet. Probably a system of proportion, like the Polycleitan canon, prevailed in every part of the building, all measurements bearing a given relation to the diameter of the column.⁵⁰ At Poseidonia the height of the column was four times its diameter; here it was five; and the new form mediated successfully between Spartan sturdiness and Attic elegance. Each column swelled slightly (three quarters of an inch in diameter) from base to middle, tapered toward the top, and leaned toward the center of its colonnade; each corner column was a trifle thicker than the rest. Every horizontal line of stylobate and entablature was curved upward towards its center, so that the eye placed at one end of any supposedly level line could not see the farther half of the line. The metopes were not quite square, but were designed to appear square from below. All these curvatures were subtle corrections for optical illusions that would otherwise have made stylobate lines seem to sink in the center, columns to diminish upward from the base, and corner columns to be thinner and outwardly inclined. Such adjustments required considerable knowledge of mathematics and optics, and constituted but one of those mechanical features that made the temple a perfect union of science and art. In the Parthenon, as in current physics, every straight line was a curve, and, as in a painting, every part was drawn toward the center in subtle composition. The result was a certain flexibility and grace that seemed to give life and freedom to the stones.

Above the plain architrave ran an alternating series of triglyphs and metopes. In the ninety-two metopes were high reliefs recounting once more the struggle of “civilization” against “savagery” in the wars of Greeks and Trojans, Greeks and Amazons, Lapiths and centaurs, giants and gods. These slabs are clearly the work of many hands and unequal skills; they do not match in excellence the reliefs of the cella frieze, though some of the centaur heads are Rembrandts in stone. In the gable pediments were statuary groups carved in the round and in heroic size. In the east pediment, over the entrance, the spectator was allowed to see the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus. Here was a powerful recumbent “Theseus,”* a giant capable of philosophical meditation and civilized repose; and a fine figure of Iris, the female Hermes, with drapery clinging and yet blown by the wind—for Pheidias considers it an ill wind that does not disturb some robe. Here also was a majestic “Hebe,” the goddess of youth, who filled the cups of the Olympians with nectar; and here were three imposing “Fates.” In the left corner four horses’ heads—eyes flashing, nostrils snorting, mouths foaming with speed—announced the rising of the sun, while in the right corner the moon drove her chariot to her setting; these eight are the finest horses in sculptural history. In the west pediment Athena contested with Poseidon the lordship of Attica. Here again were horses, as if to redeem the forked absurdity of man; and reclining figures that represented, with unrealistic magnificence, Athens’ modest streams. Perhaps the male figures are too muscular, and the female too spacious; but seldom has statuary been grouped so naturally, or so skillfully adjusted to the narrowing spaces of a pediment. “All other statues,” said Canova, with some hyperbole, “are of stone; these are of flesh and blood.”

More attractive, however, are the men and women of the frieze. For 525 feet along the top of the outer wall of the cella, within the portico, ran this most famous of all reliefs. Here, presumably, the youths and maids of Attica are bearing homage and gifts to Athena on the festival day of the Panathenaic games. One part of the procession moves along the west and north sides, another along the south side, to meet on the east front before the, goddess, who proudly offers to Zeus and other Olympians the hospitality of her city and a share of her spoils. Handsome knights move in graceful dignity on still handsomer steeds; chariots support dignitaries, while simple folk are happy to join in on foot; pretty girls and quiet old men carry olive branches and trays of cakes; attendants bear on their shoulders jugs of sacred wine; stately women convey to the goddess the peplos that they have woven and embroidered for her in long anticipation of this holy day; sacrificial victims move with bovine patience or angry prescience to their fate; maidens of high degree bring utensils of ritual and sacrifice; and musicians play on their flutes deathless ditties of no tone. Seldom have animals or men been honored with such painstaking art. With but two and a quarter inches of relief the sculptors were able, by shading and modeling, to achieve such an illusion of depth that one horse or horseman seems to be beyond another, though the nearest is raised no farther from the background than the rest.⁵¹ Perhaps it was a mistake to place this extraordinary relief so high that men could not comfortably contemplate it, or exhaust its excellence. Pheidias excused himself, doubtless with a twinkle in his eye, on the ground that the gods could see it; but the gods were dying while he carved.

FIG. 1—Hygiaea, Goddess of Health

Athens Museum

(See page 499)

FIG. 2—The Cup-Bearer

From the Palace of Minos.

Heracleum Museum

(See page 20)

FIG. 3—The “Snake Goddess”

Boston Museum

(See page 17)

FIG. 4—Wall Fresco and “Throne of Minos”

Heracleum Museum

(See page 18)

FIG. 5—A Cup from Vaphio

Athens Museum

(See page 32)

FIG. 6—Mask of “Agamemnon”

Athens Museum

(See page 32)

FIG. 7—Warrior, from temple of Aphaea at Aegina

Munich Glyptothek

(See page 95)

FIG. 8—Theater of Epidaurus

(See page 96)

FIG. 9—Temple of Poseidon

Paestum

(See page 109)

FIG. 10—A Krater Vase, With Athena and Heracles

Louvre, Paris

(See page 220)

FIG. 11—The Portland Vase

British Museum

(See page 616)

FIG. 12—The François Vase

Archeological Museum, Florence

(See page 219)

FIG. 13—A Kore, or Maiden

Acropolis Museum, Athens

(See page 222)

FIG. 14—The “Choiseul-Gouffie?

Apollo”

Acropolis Museum, Athens

(See page 222)

FIG. 15—Pericles

British Museum

(See page 248)

FIG. 16—Epicurus

Metropolitan Museum, New York

(See page 644)

FIG. 17—Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes

Naples Museum

(See page 319)

FIG. 18—“Birth of Aphrodite”

From the “Ludovisi Throne.” Museo delle Terme, Rome

(See page 319)

FIG. 19—“Ludovisi Throne,” Right Base

Museo delle Terme, Rome

(See page 319)

FIG. 20—“Ludovisi Thronem,” Left Base

Museo delle Terme, Rome

(See page 319)

FIG. 21—The Diadumenos.

Roman copy, after Polycleitus (?)

Athens Museum

(See page 322)

FIG. 22—Apollo Sauroctonos.

Roman copy, after Praxiteles (?)

Louvre, Paris

(See page 496)

FIG. 23—The Discus Thrower. Roman copy, after Myron (?)

Museo delle Terme, Rome

(See page 323)

FIG. 24—The “Dreaming Athena”

An anonymous relief, probably of the fifth century.

Acropolis Museum, Athens

(See page 319)

FIG. 25—The Rape of the Lapith Bride

From the west pediment of the temple of Zeus. Olympia Museum

(See page 328)

FIG. 26—Stela of Damasistrate

Athens Museum

(See page 318)

FIG. 27—Heracles and Atlas

Metope from the temple of Zeus. Olympia Museum

(See page 328)

FIG. 28—Nike Fixing Her Sandal

From the temple of Nike Apteros. Acropolis Museum, Athens

(See page 331)

FIG. 29—Propylaea and temple of Nike Apteros

(See page 331)

FIG. 30—The Charioteer of Delphi

Delphi Museum

(See page 221)

FIG. 31—A Caryatid from the Erechtheum

British Museum

(See page 332)

FIG. 32—The Parthenon

(See page 332)

FIG. 33—Goddesses and “Iris”

East pediment of the Parthenon. British Museum

(See page 333)

FIG. 34—“Cecrops and Daughter”

West pediment of the Parthenon. British Museum

(See page 334)

FIG. 35—Horsemen, from the West Frieze of the Parthenon

British Museum

(See page 334)

FIG. 36—Sophocles

Lateran Museum, Rome

(See page 391)

FIG. 37—Demosthenes

Vatican, Rome

(See page 478)

FIG. 38—A Tanagra Statuette

Metropolitan Museum, New York

(See page 492)

FIG. 39—The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

A reconstruction. After Adler

(See page 494)

FIG. 40—Relief from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

British Museum

(See page 494)

FIG. 41—The “Aphrodite of Cnidus”

Vatican, Rome

(See page 495)

FIG. 42—The Nike of Paeonius

Olympia Museum

(See page 324)

FIG. 43—The Hermes of Praxiteles

Olympia Museum

(See page 496)

FIG. 44—Head of Praxiteles’ Hermes

Olympia Museum

(See page 496)

FIG. 45—The Doryphoros of Polycleitus.

As reproduced by Apollonius

Naples Museum

(See page 323)

FIG. 46—Head of Meleager.

Roman copy, after Scopas (?)

Villa Medici, Rome

(See page 497)

FIG. 47—Head of a Girl, from Chios

Boston Museum

(See page 499)

FIG. 48—The Apoxyomenos. A Roman copy, after Lysippus (?)

Vatican, Rome

(See page 498)

FIG. 49—The Raging (or Dancing) Maenad

Roman copy, after Scopas (?)

Dresden Albertinum

(See page 498)

FIG. 50—A Daughter of Niobe

Banca Comercial, Milan

FIG. 51—The Aphrodite of Cyrene

Museo delle Terme. Rome

FIG. 52—The Demeter of Cnidus

British Museum

(See page 499)

FIG. 53—Altar of Zeus at Pergamum

A reconstruction. State Museum, Berlin

(See page 618)

FIG. 54—Frieze from the Altar of Zeus at Pergamum

State Museum, Berlin

(See page 623)

FIG. 55—The Battle of Issus. Mosaic found at Pompeii

Naples Museum

(See page 620)

FIG. 56—The Laocoön

Vatican, Rome

(See page 622)

FIG. 57—The Farnese Bull

Naples Museum

(See page 623)

FIG. 58—The “Alexander” Sarcophagus

Constantinople Museum

(See page 623)

FIG. 59—The Aphrodite of Melos

Louvre, Paris

(See page 624)

FIG. 60—The Venus de’ Medici

Uffizi Gallery, Florence

(See page 624)

FIG. 61—The “Victory of Samothrace”

Louvre, Paris

(See page 624)

FIG. 62—Hellenistic Portrait Head

Naples Museum

FIG. 63—The “Old Market Woman”

Metropolitan Museum, New York

(See page 626)

FIG. 64—The Prize Fighter

Museo delle Terme, Rome

Beneath the seated deities of the frieze was the entrance to the inner temple. The interior was relatively small; much of the space was taken up by two double-storied Doric colonnades that supported the roof, and divided the naos into a nave and two aisles; while in the western end Athene Parthenos blinded her worshipers with the gold of her raiment, or frightened them with her spear and shield and snakes. Behind her was the Room of the Virgins, adorned with four columns in the Ionic style. The marble tiles of the roof were sufficiently translucent to let some light into the nave, and yet opaque enough to keep out the heat; moreover, piety, like love, deprecates the sun. The cornices were decorated with careful detail, surmounted with terra-cotta acroteria, and armed with gargoyles to carry off the rain. Many parts of the temple were painted, not in subdued colors but in bright tints of yellow, blue, and red. The marble was washed with a stain of saffron and milk; the triglyphs and parts of the molding were blue; the frieze had a blue background, the metopes a red, and every figure in them was colored.⁵² A people accustomed to a Mediterranean sky can bear and relish brighter hues than those that suit the clouded atmosphere of northern Europe. Today, shorn of its colors, the Parthenon is most beautiful at night, when through every columned space come changing vistas of sky, or the ever worshipful moon, or the lights of the sleeping city mingling with the stars.*

Greek art was the greatest of Greek products; for though its masterpieces have yielded one by one to the voracity of time, their form and spirit still survive sufficiently to be a guide and stimulus to many arts, many generations, and many lands. There were faults here, as in all that men do. The sculpture was too physical, and rarely reached the soul; it moves us more often to admire its perfection than to feel its life. The architecture was narrowly limited in form and style, and clung across a thousand years to the simple rectangle of the Mycenaean megaron. It achieved almost nothing in secular fields; it attempted only the easier problems of construction, and avoided difficult tasks like the arch and the vault, which might have given it greater scope. It held up its roofs with the clumsy expedient of internal and superimposed colonnades. It crowded the interior of its temples with statues whose size was out of proportion to the edifice, and whose ornamentation lacked the simplicity and restraint that we expect of the classic style.*

But no faults can outweigh the fact that Greek art created the classic style. The essence of that style—if the theme of this chapter may be restated in closing—is order and form: moderation in design, expression, and decoration; proportion in the parts and unity in the whole; the supremacy of reason without the extinction of feeling; a quiet perfection that is content with simplicity, and a sublimity that owes nothing to size. No other style but the Gothic has had so much influence; indeed, Greek statuary is still the ideal, and until yesterday the Greek column dominated architecture to the discouragement of more congenial forms. It is good that we are freeing ourselves from the Greeks; even perfection becomes oppressive when it will not change. But long after our liberation is complete we shall find instruction and stimulus in that art which was the life of reason in form, and in that classic style which was the most characteristic gift of Greece to mankind.

CHAPTER XV

The Advancement of Learning

THE cultural activity of Periclean Greece takes chiefly three forms-art, drama, and philosophy. In the first, religion is the inspiration; in the second it is the battleground; in the third it is the victim. Since the organization of a religious group presumes a common and stable creed, every religion sooner or later comes into opposition with that fluent and changeful current of secular thought that we confidently call the progress of knowledge. In Athens the conflict was not always visible on the surface, and did not directly affect the masses of the people; the scientists and the philosophers carried on their work without explicitly attacking the popular faith, and often mitigated the strife by using the old religious terms as symbols or allegories for their new beliefs; only now and then, as in the indictments of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, Diagoras of Melos, Euripides, and Socrates, did the struggle come out into the open, and become a matter of life and death. But it was there. It ran through the Periclean age like a major theme, played in many keys and elaborated in many variations and forms; it was heard most distinctly in the skeptical discourses of the Sophists and in the materialism of Democritus; it sounded obscurely in the piety of Aeschylus, in the heresies of Euripides, even in the irreverent banter of the conservative Aristophanes; and it was violently recapitulated in the trial and death of Socrates. Around this theme the Athens of Pericles lived its mental life.

I. THE MATHEMATICIANS

Pure science, in fifth-century Greece, was still the handmaiden of philosophy, and was studied and developed by men who were philosophers rather than scientists. To the Greeks higher mathematics was an instrument not of practice but of logic, directed less to the conquest of the physical environment than to the intellectual construction of an abstract world.

Popular arithmetic, before the Periclean period, was almost primitively clumsy.* One upright stroke indicated 1, two strokes 2, three 3, and four 4; 5, 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000 were expressed by the initial letter of the Greek word for the number—pente, deka, hekaton, chilioi, myrioi. Greek mathematics never achieved a symbol for zero. Like our own it betrayed its Oriental origin by taking from the Egyptians the decimal system of counting by tens, and from the Babylonians, in astronomy and geography, the duodecimal or sexagesimal system of counting by twelves or sixties, as still on our clocks, globes, and charts. Probably an abacus helped the people with the simpler calculations. Fractions were painful for them: to work with a complex fraction they reduced it to an accumulation of fractions having I as their common numerator; so was broken down into .¹

Of Greek algebra we have no record before the Christian era. Geometry, however, was a favorite study of the philosophers, again less for its practical value than for its theoretical interest, the fascination of its deductive logic, its union of subtlety and clarity, its imposing architecture of thought. Three problems particularly attracted these mathematical metaphysicians: the squaring of the circle, the trisection of the angle, and the doubling of the cube. How popular the first puzzle became appears in Aristophanes’ Birds, in which a character representing the astronomer Meton enters upon the stage armed with ruler and compasses, and undertakes to show “how your circle may be made a square”—i.e., how to find a square whose area will equal that of a given circle. Perhaps it was such problems as these that led the later Pythagoreans to formulate a doctrine of irrational numbers and incommensurable quantities.* It was the Pythagoreans, too, whose studies of the parabola, the hyperbola, and the ellipse prepared for the epochal work of Apollonius of Perga on conic sections.² About 440 Hippocrates of Chios (not the physician) published the first known book on geometry, and solved the problem of squaring the lune.† About 420 Hippias of Elia accomplished the trisection of an angle through the quadratrix curve.³ About 410 Democritus of Abdera announced that “in constructing lines according to given conditions no one has ever surpassed me, not even the Egyptians;”⁴ he almost made the boast forgivable by writing four books on geometry, and finding formulas for the areas of cones and pyramids.⁵ All in all, the Greeks were as excellent in geometry as they were poor in arithmetic. Even into their art geometry entered actively, making many forms of ceramic and architectural ornament, and determining the proportions and curvatures of the Parthenon.

II. ANAXAGORAS

It was part of the struggle between religion and science that the study of astronomy was forbidden by Athenian law at the height of the Periclean age.⁶ At Acragas Empedocles suggested that light takes time to pass from one point to another.⁷ At Elea Parmenides announced the sphericity of the earth, divided the planet into five zones, and observed that the moon always has its bright portion turned toward the sun.⁸ At Thebes Philolaus the Pythagorean deposed the earth from the center of the universe, and reduced it to the status of one among many planets revolving about a “central fire.”⁹ Leucippus, pupil of Philolaus, attributed the origin of the stars to the incandescent combustion and concentration of material “drawn onward in the universal movement of the circular vortex.”¹⁰ At Abdera Democritus, pupil of Leucippus and student of Babylonian lore, described the Milky Way as a multitude of small stars, and summarized astronomic history as the periodical collision and destruction of an infinite number of worlds.¹¹ At Chios Oenopides discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic.^11a Nearly everywhere among the Greek colonies the fifth century saw scientific developments remarkable in a period almost devoid of scientific instruments.

But when Anaxagoras tried to do similar work at Athens he found the mood of the people and the Assembly as hostile to free inquiry as the friendship of Pericles was encouraging. He had come from Clazomenae about 480 B.C., at twenty years of age. Anaximenes so interested him in the stars that when someone asked him the object of life he answered, “The investigation of sun, moon, and heaven.”¹² He neglected his patrimony to chart the earth and the sky, and fell into poverty while his book On Nature was acclaimed by the intelligentsia of Athens as the greatest scientific work of the century.

It carried on the traditions and speculations of the Ionian school. The universe, said Anaxagoras, was originally a chaos of diverse seeds (spermata), pervaded by a nous, or Mind, tenuously physical, and akin to the source of life and motion in ourselves. And as mind gives order to the chaos of our actions, so the World Mind gave order to the primeval seeds, setting them into a rotatory vortex,* and guiding them toward the development of organic forms.¹³ This rotation sorted the seeds into the four elements—fire, air, water, and earth—and separated the world into two revolving layers, an outer one of “ether,” and an inner one of air. “In consequence of this violent whirling motion, the surrounding fiery ether tore away stones from the earth, and kindled them into stars.”¹⁴ The sun and the stars are glowing masses of rock: “The sun is a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnesus.”¹⁵ When their revolving motion wanes, the stones of the outer layer fall upon the earth as meteors.¹⁶ The moon is an incandescent solid, having on its surface plains, mountains, and ravines;¹⁷ it receives its light from the sun, and is of all heavenly bodies the nearest to the earth.¹⁸ “The moon is eclipsed through the interposition of the earth . . . the sun through the interposition of the moon.”¹⁹ Probably other celestial bodies are inhabited like the earth; upon them “men are formed, and other animals that have life; the men dwell in cities, and cultivate fields as we do.”²⁰ Out of the inner or gaseous layer of our planet successive condensations produced clouds, water, earth, and stones. Winds are due to rarefactions of the atmosphere produced by the heat of the sun; “thunder is caused by the collision of clouds, and lightning by their friction.”²¹ The quantity of matter never changes, but all forms begin and pass away; in time the mountains will become the sea.²² The various forms and objects of the world are brought into being by increasingly definite aggregations of homogeneous parts (homoiomeria)²³ All organisms were originally generated out of earth, moisture, and heat, and thereafter from one another.²⁴ Man has developed beyond other animals because his erect posture freed his hands for grasping things.²⁵

These achievements—the foundation of meteorology, the correct explanation of eclipses, a rational hypothesis of planetary formation, the discovery of the borrowed light of the moon, and an evolutionary conception of animal and human life—made Anaxagoras at once the Copernicus and Darwin of his age. The Athenians might have forgiven him these apergus had he not neglected his nous in explaining the events of nature and history; perhaps they suspected that this nous, like Euripides’ deus ex machina, was a device for saving the author’s skin. Aristotle notes that Anaxagoras sought natural explanations everywhere.²⁶ When a ram with a single horn in the center of its forehead was brought to Pericles, and a soothsayer interpreted it as a supernatural omen, Anaxagoras had the animal’s skull cleft, and showed that the brain, instead of filling both sides of the cranium, had grown upward towards the center, and so had produced the solitary horn.²⁷ He aroused the simple by giving a natural explanation of meteors, and reduced many mythical figures to personified abstractions.²⁸

The Athenians took him good-humoredly for a time, merely nicknaming him nous.²⁹ But when no other way could be found of weakening Pericles, Cleon, his demagogic rival, brought a formal indictment of impiety against Anaxagoras on the charge that he had described the sun (still to the people a god) as a mass of stone on fire; and pursued the case so relentlessly that the philosopher, despite Pericles’ brave defense of him, was convicted.* Having no taste for hemlock, Anaxagoras fled to Lampsacus on the Hellespont, where he kept himself alive by teaching philosophy.† When news was brought to him that the Athenians had condemned him to death, he said, “Nature has long since condemned both them and me.”³³ He died a few years later, aged seventy-three.

The backwardness of the Athenians in astronomy was reflected in their calendar. There was no general Greek calendar: every state had its own; and each of the four possible points for beginning a new year was adopted somewhere in Greece; even the months changed their names across frontiers. The Attic calendar reckoned months by the moon, and years by the sun.³⁴ As twelve lunar months made only 360 days, a thirteenth month was added every second year to bring the calendar into harmony with the sun and the seasons.³⁵ Since this made the year ten days too long, Solon introduced the custom of having alternate months of twenty-nine and thirty days, arranged into three weeks (dekades) of ten (occasionally nine) days each;³⁶ and as an excess of four days still remained, the Greeks omitted one month every eighth year. In this incredibly devious way they at last arrived at a year of 365 ¼ days.‡

Meanwhile a modest degree of progress was made in terrestrial science. Anaxagoras correctly explained the annual overflow of the Nile as due to the spring thaws and rains of Ethiopia.³⁸ Greek geologists attributed the Straits of Gibraltar to a cleaving earthquake, and the Aegean isles to a subsiding sea.³⁹ Xanthus of Lydia, about 496, surmised that the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were formerly connected at Suez; and Aeschylus noted the belief of his time that Sicily had been torn asunder from Italy by a convulsion of the earth.⁴⁰ Scylax of Caria (521-485) explored the whole coast of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. No Greek seems to have dared so adventurous a voyage of discovery as that which the Carthaginian Hanno, with a fleet of sixty ships, led through Gibraltar some 2600 miles down the west coast of Africa (ca. 490). Maps of the Mediterranean world were common in Athens at the end of the fifth century. Physics, so far as we know, remained undeveloped, though the curvatures of the Parthenon show considerable knowledge of optics. The Pythagoreans, towards 450, announced the most lasting of Greek scientific hypotheses—the atomic constitution of matter. Empedocles and others expounded a theory of the evolution of man from lower forms of life, and described the slow advance of man from savagery to civilization.⁴¹

III. HIPPOCRATES

The epochal event in the history of Greek science during the Periclean age was the rise of rational medicine. Even in the fifth century Greek medicine was in large measure bound up with religion, and the treatment of disease was still practiced by the temple priests of Asclepius. This temple therapy used a combination of empirical medicine with impressive ritual and charms that touched and released the imagination of the patient; possibly hypnosis and some form of anesthesia were also employed.⁴² Secular medicine competed with this ecclesiastical medicine. Though both groups ascribed their origin to Asclepius, the profane Asclepiads rejected religious aids, made no claim to miraculous cures, and gradually placed medicine upon a rational basis.

Secular medicine, in fifth-century Greece, took form in four great schools: at Cos and Cnidus in Asia Minor, at Crotona in Italy, and in Sicily. At Acragas Empedocles, half philosopher and half miracle man, shared medical honors with the rational practitioner Acron.⁴³ As far back as 520 we read of the physician Democedes, who, born at Crotona, practiced medicine in Aegina, Athens, Samos, and Susa, cured Darius and Queen Atossa, and returned to spend his last days in the city of his birth.⁴⁴ At Crotona, too, the Pythagorean school produced the most famous of Greek physicians before Hippocrates. Alcmaeon has been called the real father of Greek medicine,⁴⁵ but he is clearly a late name in a long line of secular medicos whose origin is lost beyond the horizons of history. Early in the fifth century he published a work On Nature (peri physeos)—the usual title, in Greece, for a general discussion of natural science. He, first of the Greeks, so far as we know, located the optic nerve and the Eustachian tubes, dissected animals, explained the physiology of sleep, recognized the brain as the central organ of thought, and defined health Pythagoreanly as a harmony of the parts of the body.⁴⁶ At Cnidus the dominating figure was Euryphron, who composed a medical summary known as the Cnidian Sentences, explained pleurisy as a disease of the lungs, ascribed many illnesses to constipation, and became famous for his success as an obstetrician.⁴⁷ An unmerry war raged between the schools of Cos and Cnidus; for the Cnidians, disliking Hippocrates’ penchant for basing “prognosis” upon general pathology, insisted upon a careful classification of each ailment, and a treatment of it on specific lines. In the end, by a kind of philosophical justice, many of the Cnidian writings found their way into the Hippocratic Collection.

As we see Hippocrates in Suidas’ thumbnail biography, he appears as the outstanding physician of his time. He was born in Cos in the same year as Democritus; despite their far-separated homes the two became great friends, and perhaps the “laughing philosopher” had some share in the secularization of medicine. Hippocrates was the son of a physician, and grew up and practiced among the thousands of invalids and tourists who came to “take the waters” in the hot springs of Cos. His teacher, Herodicus of Selymbria, formed his art by accustoming him to rely upon diet and exercise rather than upon drugs. Hippocrates won such repute that rulers like Perdiccas of Macedon and Artaxerxes I of Persia were among his patients; and in 430 Athens sent for him to try his hand at staying the great plague. His friend Democritus shamed him by completing a century, while the great physician died at the age of eighty-three.

Nothing in medical literature could be more heterogeneous than the collection of treatises anciently ascribed to Hippocrates. Here are textbooks for physicians, counsels for laymen, lectures for students, reports of researches and observations, clinical records of interesting cases, and essays by Sophists interested in the scientific or philosophical aspects of medicine. The forty-two clinical records are the only examples of their kind for the next seventeen hundred years; and they set a high standard of honesty by confessing that in sixty per cent of the cases the disease, or the treatment, proved fatal.⁴⁸ Of all these compositions only four are by general consent from the pen of Hippocrates—the “Aphorisms,” the “Prognostic,” the “Regimen in Acute Diseases,” and the monograph “On Wounds in the Head”; the remainder of the Corpus Hippocraticum is by a variety of authors ranging from the fifth to the second century B.C.⁴⁹ There is a fair amount of nonsense in the assortment, but probably not more than the future will find in the treatises and histories of the present day. Much of the material is fragmentary, and takes a loose aphoristic form verging now and then upon Heracleitean obscurity. Among the “Aphorisms” is the famous remark that “Art is long, but time is fleeting.”⁵⁰

The historical role of Hippocrates and his successors was the liberation of medicine from both religion and philosophy. Occasionally, as in the treatise on “Regimen,” prayer is advised as an aid; but the page-by-page tone of the Collection is a resolute reliance upon rational therapy. The essay on “The Sacred Disease” directly attacks the theory that ailments are caused by the gods; all diseases, says the author, have natural causes. Epilepsy, which the people explained as possession by a demon, is not excepted: “Men continue to believe in its divine origin because they are at a loss to understand it. . . . Charlatans and quacks, having no treatment that would help, concealed and sheltered themselves behind superstition, and called this illness sacred in order that their complete ignorance might not be revealed.”⁵¹ The mind of Hippocrates was typical of the Periclean time spirit—imaginative but realistic, averse to mystery and weary of myth, recognizing the value of religion, but struggling to understand the world in rational terms. The influence of the Sophists can be felt in this move for the emancipation of medicine; and indeed, philosophy so powerfully affected Greek therapy that the science had to fight against philosophical as well as theological impediments. Hippocrates insists that philosophical theories have no place in medicine, and that treatment must proceed by careful observation and accurate recording of specific cases and facts. He does not quite realize the value of experiment; but he is resolved to be guided by experience.⁵²

The natal infection of Hippocratic medicine with philosophy appears in the once famous doctrine of “humors.” The body, says Hippocrates, is compounded of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile; that man enjoys the most perfect health in whom these elements are duly proportioned and mingled; pain is the defect or excess of one “humor,” or its isolation from the rest.⁵³ This theory outlived all the other medical hypotheses of antiquity; it was abandoned only in the last century, and perhaps survives by transmigration in the doctrine of hormones or glandular secretions today. Since the behavior of the “humors” was considered subject to climate and diet, and the most prevalent ailments in Greece were colds, pneumonia, and malaria, Hippocrates (?) wrote a brief treatise on “Airs, Waters, Places” in relation to health. “One may expose oneself confidently to cold,” we are told, “except after eating or exercise. . . . It is not good for the body not to be exposed to the cold of winter.”⁵⁴ The scientific physician, wherever he settles, will study the effects, upon the local population, of the winds and the seasons, the water supply and the nature of the soil.

The weakest point in Hippocratic medicine was diagnosis. There was, apparently, no taking of the pulse; fever was judged by simple touch, and auscultation was direct. Infection was understood in the case of scabies, ophthalmia, and phthisis.⁵⁵ The Corpus contains excellent clinical pictures of epilepsy, epidemic parotitis, puerperal septicemia, and quotidian, tertian, and quartan fevers. There is no mention in the Collection of smallpox, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, or syphilis; and no clear mention of typhoid fever.⁵⁶ The treatises on “Regimen” move towards preventive medicine by advocating “prodiagnosis”—an attempt to catch the first symptoms of a disease, and nip it in the bud.⁵⁷ Hippocrates was particularly fond of “prognosis”: the good physician, he believed, will learn by experience to foresee the effects of various bodily conditions, and be able to predict from the first stages of a disease the course that it will follow. Most diseases reach a crisis in which either the illness or the patient comes to an end; the almost Pythagorean calculation of the day on which the crisis should appear was a characteristic element of Hippocratic theory. If in these crises the natural heat of the body can overcome the morbid matter and discharge it, the patient is cured. In any cure nature—i.e., the powers and constitution of the body—is the principal healer; all that the physician can do is to remove or reduce the impediments to this natural defense and recuperation. Hence Hippocratic treatment makes little use of drugs, but depends chiefly upon fresh air, emetics, suppositories, enemas, cupping, bloodletting, fomentations, ointments, massage, and hydrotherapy. The Greek pharmacopoeia was reassuringly small, and consisted largely of purgatives. Skin troubles were treated with sulphur baths, and by administering the oil of dolphin livers.⁵⁸ “Live a healthy life,” Hippocrates advises, “and you are not likely to fall ill, except through epidemic or accident. If you do fall ill, proper regimen will give you the best chance of recovery.”⁵⁹ Fasting was often prescribed, if the strength of the patient allowed; for “the more we nourish unhealthy bodies the more we injure them.”⁶⁰ In general “a man should have only one meal a day, unless he have a very dry belly.”⁶¹

Anatomy and physiology made slow progress in Greece, and owed much of this to the examination of animal entrails in the practice of augury. A little brochure “On the Heart,” in the Hippocratic Collection, describes the ventricles, the great vessels, and their valves. Syennesis of Cyprus and Diogenes of Crete wrote descriptions of the vascular system, and Diogenes knew the significance of the pulse.⁶² Empedocles recognized that the heart is the center of the vascular system, and described it as the organ by which the pneuma, or vital breath (oxygen?), is carried through the blood vessels to every part of the body.⁶³ The Corpus, following Alcmaeon, makes the brain the seat of consciousness and thought; “Through it we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good.”⁶⁴

Surgery was still for the most part an unspecialized activity of advanced general practitioners, though the armies had surgeons on their staffs.⁶⁵ The Hippocratic literature describes trephining operations, and its treatment for dislocations of shoulder or jaw are “modern” in everything except anesthesia.⁶⁶ A votive tablet from the temple of Asclepius at Athens shows a folding case containing scalpels of various forms.⁶⁷ The little museum at Epidaurus has preserved for us ancient forceps, probes, scalpels, catheters, and specula essentially like those that are used today; and certain statues there are apparently models illustrating methods for reducing dislocations of the hip.⁶⁸ The Hippocratic treatise “On the Physician” gives detailed directions for the preparation of the operating room, the arrangement of natural and artificial light, the cleanliness of the hands, the care and use of instruments, the position of the patient, the bandaging of wounds, etc.⁶⁹

It is clear from these and other passages that Greek medicine in Hippocrates’ days had made great advances, technically and socially. Heretofore Greek physicians had migrated from city to city as need called them, like the Sophists of their time or the preachers of our own. Now they settled down, opened iatreia—“healing places,” or offices—and treated patients there or at the patients’ homes.⁷⁰ Women physicians were numerous, and were usually employed for diseases of their sex; some of them wrote authoritative treatises on the care of the skin and the hair.⁷¹ The state exacted no public examination of prospective practitioners, but required satisfactory evidence of an apprenticeship or tutelage to a recognized physician.⁷² City governments reconciled socialized with private medicine by engaging doctors to attend to public health, and to give medical treatment to the poor; the best of’ such state physicians, like Democedes, received two talents ($12,000) a year.⁷³ There were, of course, many quacks and, as always, an inexhaustible supply of omniscient amateurs. The profession, as in all generations, suffered from its dishonest or incompetent minority;⁷⁴ and like other peoples the Greeks revenged themselves upon the uncertainties of medicine by jokes almost as endless as those that wreak their vengeance upon marriage.

Hippocrates raised the profession to a higher standing by his emphasis on medical ethics. He was a teacher as well as a practitioner, and the famous oath ascribed to him may have been designed to ensure the loyalty of the student to his instructor.*

The Hippocratic Oath

I swear by Apollo Physician, by Asclepius, by Hygiaea, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture. To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other instruction to my own sons, to the sons of my teacher, and to indentured pupils who have taken the physician’s oath, but to nobody else. I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein. Into whatsoever houses I enter I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets. Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain forever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I transgress it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.⁷⁶

The physician, Hippocrates adds, should maintain a becoming exterior, keeping his person clean and his clothing neat. He must always remain calm, and must make his behavior inspire the patient with confidence.⁷⁷ He must

keep a careful watch over himself, and . . . say only what is absolutely necessary. . . . When you enter a sick man’s room, bear in mind your manner of sitting, reserve, arrangement of dress, decisive utterance, brevity of speech, composure, bedside manners . . . selfcontrol, rebuke of disturbance, readiness to do what has to be done. . . . I urge you not to be too unkind, but to consider carefully your patient’s superabundance or means. Sometimes give your services for nothing; and if there be an opportunity of serving a stranger who is in financial straits, give him full assistance. For where there is love of man, there is also love of the art.⁷⁸

If, in addition to all this, the physician studies and practices philosophy, he becomes the ideal of his profession; for “a physician who is a lover of wisdom is the equal of a god.”⁷⁹

Greek medicine shows no essential advance upon the medical and surgical knowledge of Egypt a thousand years before the various Fathers of Medicine; in the matter of specialization the Greek development seems to have fallen short of the Egyptian. From another point of view we must hold the Greeks in high esteem, for not until the nineteenth century of our era was any substantial improvement made upon their medical practice or theory. In general, Greek science went as far as could be expected without instruments of observation and precision, and without experimental methods. It would have done better had it not been harassed by religion and discouraged by philosophy. At a time when many young men in Athens were taking up with enthusiasm the study of astronomy and comparative anatomy, the progress of science was halted by obscurantist legislation, and the persecutions of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Socrates; while the famous “turning around” of Socrates and the Sophists from the external to the internal world, from physics to ethics, drew Greek thought from the problems of nature and evolution to those of metaphysics and morals. Science stood still for a century while Greece succumbed to the charms of philosophy.

CHAPTER XVI

The Conflict of Philosophy and Religion

I. THE IDEALISTS

THE age of Pericles resembled our own in the variety and disorder of its thought, and in the challenge that it offered to every traditional standard and belief. But no age has ever rivaled that of Pericles in the number and grandeur of its philosophical ideas, or in the vigor and exuberance with which they were debated. Every issue that agitates the world today was bruited about in ancient Athens, and with such freedom and eagerness that all Greece except its youth was alarmed. Many cities—above all, Sparta—forbade the public consideration of philosophical problems, “on account of the jealousy and strife and profitless discussions” (says Athenaeus) “to which they give rise.”¹ But in Periclean Athens the “dear delight” of philosophy captured the imagination of the educated classes; rich men opened their homes and salons in the manner of the French Enlightenment; philosophers were lionized, and clever arguments were applauded like sturdy blows at the Olympic games.² When, in 432, a war of swords was added to the war of words, the excitement of the Athenian mind became a fever in which all soberness of thought and judgment was consumed. The fever subsided for a time after the martyrdom of Socrates, or was dissipated from Athens to other centers of Greek life; even Plato, who had known the very height and crisis of it, became exhausted after sixty years of the new game, and envied Egypt the inviolable orthodoxy and quiet stability of its thought. No age until the Renaissance would know such enthusiasm again.

Plato was the culmination of a development that began with Parmenides; he played Hegel to Parmenides’ Kant; and though he scattered condemnation lavishly, he never ceased to reverence his metaphysical father. In the little town of Elea, on the western coast of Italy, 450 years before Christ, there began for Europe that philosophy of idealism which was to wage through every subsequent century an obstinate war against materialism.* The mysterious problem of knowledge, the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, between the unseen real and the unreal seen, was flung into the caldron of European thought, and was to boil or simmer there through Greek and medieval days until, in Kant, it would explode again in a philosophical revolution.

As Kant was “awakened” by Hume, so Parmenides was aroused to philosophy by Xenophanes; perhaps his was one of many minds stirred by Xenophanes’ declaration that the gods were myths, and that there was only one reality, which was both world and God. Parmenides studied with the Pythagoreans also, and absorbed something of their passion for astronomy. But he did not lose himself in the stars. Like most Greek philosophers he was interested in living affairs and the state; Elea commissioned him to draw up for it a code of laws, which it liked so well that its magistrates were thenceforth required to decide all cases by that code.³ Possibly as a recreational aside in a busy life he composed a philosophical poem On Nature, of which some 160 verses survive, enough to make us regret that Parmenides did not write prose. The poet announces, with a twinkle in his eye, that a goddess has delivered to him a revelation: that all things are one; that motion, change, and development are unreal—phantasms of superficial, contradictory, untrustworthy sense; that beneath these mere appearances lies an unchanging, homogeneous, indivisible, indissoluble, motionless unity, which is the only Being, the only Truth, and the only God. Heracleitus said, Panta rei, all things change; Parmenides says, Hen ta panta, all things are one, and never change. At times, like Xenophanes, he speaks of this One as the universe, and calls it spheroidal and finite; at times, in an idealistic vision, he identifies Being with Thought, and sings, “One thing are Thinking and Being,”⁴ as if to say that for us things exist only in so far as we are conscious of them. Beginning and end, birth and death, formation and destruction, are of forms only; the One Real never begins and never ends; there is no Becoming, there is only Being. Motion, too, is unreal, it assumes the passage of something from where it is to where there is nothing, or empty space; but empty space, Not Being, cannot be; there is no void; the One fills every nook and cranny of the world, and is forever at rest.†

It was not to be expected that men would listen patiently to all this; and apparently the Parmenidean Rest became the target of a thousand metaphysical assaults. The significance of Parmenides’ subtle follower, Zeno of Elea, lay in an attempt to show that the ideas of plurality and motion were, at least theoretically, as impossible as Parmenides’ motionless One. As an exercise in perversity, and to amuse his youth, Zeno published a book of paradoxes, of which nine have come down to us, and of which three will suffice. First, said Zeno, any body, in order to move to point A, must reach B, the middle of its course toward A; to arrive at B it must reach C, the middle of its course toward B; and so on to infinity. Since an infinity of time would be required for this infinite series of motions, the motion of any body to any point is impossible in a finite time. Second, as a variant of the first, swift-footed Achilles can never overtake the leisurely tortoise; for as often as Achilles reaches the point which the tortoise occupied, in that same moment the tortoise has moved beyond that point. Third, a flying arrow is really at rest; for at any moment of its flight it is at only one point in space, that is, is motionless; its motion, however actual to the senses, is logically, metaphysically unreal.*⁵

Zeno came to Athens about 450, perhaps with Parmenides, and set the impressionable city astir by his skill in reducing any kind of philosophical theory to absurd consequences. Timon of Phlius described

The two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who,

Say what one would, would argue it untrue.⁸

This pre-Socratic gadfly was (in the relative sense which our ignorance of the past compels us to give to such phrases) the father of logic, as Parmenides was for Europe the father of metaphysics. Socrates, who denounced Zeno’s dialectical method,⁹ imitated it so zealously that men had to kill him in order to have peace of mind. Zeno’s influence upon the skeptical Sophists was decisive, and in the end it was his skepticism that triumphed in Pyrrho and Carneades. In his old age, having become a man “of great wisdom and learning,”¹⁰ he complained that the philosophers had taken too seriously the intellectual pranks of his youth. His final escapade was more fatal to him: he joined in an attempt to depose the tyrant Nearches at Elea, was foiled and arrested, tortured and killed.¹¹ He bore his sufferings bravely, as if to associate his name so soon with the Stoic philosophy.

II. THE MATERIALISTS

As Parmenides’ denial of motion and change was a reaction against the fluid and unstable metaphysics of Hercleitus, so his monism was a counterblast to the atomism of the later Pythagoreans. For these had developed the number theory of their founder into the doctrine that all things are composed of numbers in the sense of indivisible units.¹² When Philolaus of Thebes added that “all things take place by necessity and by harmony,”¹³ everything was ready for the Atomic school in Greek philosophy.

About 435 Leucippus of Miletus came to Elea, and studied under Zeno; there, perhaps, he heard of the number atomism of the Pythagoreans, for Zeno had aimed some of his subtlest paradoxes at this doctrine of plurality.¹⁴ Leucippus finally settled in Abdera, a flourishing Ionian colony in Thrace. Of his direct teaching only one fragment remains: “Nothing happens without a reason, but all things occur for a reason, and of necessity.”¹⁵ Presumably it was in answer to Zeno and Parmenides that Leucippus developed the notion of the void, or empty space; in this way he hoped to make motion theoretically possible as well as sensibly actual. The universe, said Leucippus, contains atoms and space and nothing else. Atoms tumbling about in a vortex fall by necessity into the first forms of all things, like attaching itself to like; in this way arose the planets and the stars.¹⁶ All things, even the human soul, are composed of atoms.

Democritus was the pupil or associate of Leucippus in developing the atomistic philosophy into a rounded system of materialism. His father was a man of wealth and position in Abdera;¹⁷ from him, we are told, Democritus inherited a hundred talents ($600,000), most of which he spent in travel.¹⁸ Unconfirmed stories send him as far as Egypt and Ethiopia, Babylonia, Persia, and India.¹⁹ “Among my contemporaries,” he says, “I have traveled over the largest portion of the earth in search of things the most remote, and have seen the most climates and countries, and heard the largest number of thinkers.”*²⁰ At Boeotian Thebes he stopped long enough to imbibe the number atomism of Philolaus.²² Having spent his money he became a philosopher, lived simply, devoted himself to study and contemplation, and said, “I would rather discover a single demonstration” (in geometry) “than win the throne of Persia.”²³ There was some modesty in him, for he shunned dialectic and discussion, founded no school, and sojourned in Athens without making himself known to any of the philosophers there.²⁴ Diogenes Laertius gives a long list of his publications in mathematics, physics, astronomy, navigation, geography, anatomy, physiology, psychology, psychotherapy, medicine, philosophy, music, and art.²⁵ Thrasyllus called him pentathlos in philosophy, and some contemporaries gave him the very name of Wisdom (sophia).²⁶ His range was as wide as Aristotle’s, his style as highly praised as Plato’s.²⁷ Francis Bacon, in no perverse moment, called him the greatest of ancient philosophers²⁸

He begins, like Parmenides, with a critique of the senses. For practical purposes we may trust them; but the moment we begin to analyze their evidence we find ourselves taking away from the external world layer after layer of the color, temperature, flavor, savor, sweetness, bitterness, and sound that the senses lay upon it; these “secondary qualities” are in ourselves or in the total process of perception, not in the objective thing; in an earless world a falling forest would make no noise, and the ocean, however angry, would never roar. “By convention (nomos) sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.”²⁹ Hence the senses give us only obscure knowledge, or opinion; genuine knowledge comes only by investigation and thought. “Verily, we know nothing. Truth is buried deep. . . . We know nothing for certain, but only the changes produced in our body by the forces that impinge upon it.”³⁰ All sensations are due to atoms discharged by the object and falling upon our sense organs.³¹ All senses are forms of touch.³²

The atoms that constitute the world differ in figure, size, and weight; all have a tendency downward; in the resultant rotatory motion like atoms combine with like and produce the planets and the stars. No nows, or intelligence, guides the atoms, no Empedoclean “love” or “hate” assorts them, but necessity—the natural operation of inherent causes—rules over all.³³ There is no chance; chance is a fiction invented to disguise our ignorance.³⁴ The quantity of matter remains always the same; none is ever created, none ever destroyed;³⁵ only the atom combinations change. Forms, however, are innumerable; even of worlds there is probably an “infinite” number, coming into being and passing away in an interminable pageantry.³⁶ Organic beings arose originally from the moist earth.³⁷ Everything in man is made of atoms; the soul is composed of tiny, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. Mind, soul, vital heat, vital principle, are all one and the same thing; they are not confined to men or animals, but are diffused throughout the world; and in man and other animals the mental atoms whereby we think are distributed throughout the body.*³⁸

Nevertheless these fine atoms that constitute the soul are the noblest and most wonderful part of the body. The wise man will cultivate thought, will free himself from passion, superstition, and fear, and will seek in contemplation and understanding the modest happiness available to human life. Happiness does not come from external goods; a man “must become accustomed to finding within himself the sources of his enjoyment.”⁴² “Culture is better than riches. . . . No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.”⁴³ Happiness is fitful, and “sensual pleasure affords only a brief satisfaction”; one comes to a more lasting content by acquiring peace and serenity of soul (ataraxia), good cheer (euthumia), moderation (metriotes), and a certain order and symmetry of life (biou symmetria)).⁴⁴ We may learn much from the animals—“spinning from the spider, building from the swallow, singing from the nightingale and the swan”;⁴⁵ but “strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in man.”⁴⁶ So, like the heretics of Victorian England, Democritus raises upon his scandalous metaphysics a most presentable ethic. “Good actions should be done not out of compulsion but from conviction; not from hope of reward, but for their own sake. . . . A man should feel more shame in doing evil before himself than before all the world.”⁴⁷

He illustrated his own precepts, and perhaps justified his counsels, by living to the age of a hundred and nine, or, as some say, to merely ninety, years.⁴⁸ Diogenes Laertius relates that when Democritus read in public his most important work, the megas diakosmos, or Great World, the city of Abdera presented him with a hundred talents ($600,000); but perhaps Abdera had depreciated its currency. When someone asked the secret of his longevity, he answered that he ate honey daily, and bathed his body with oil.⁴⁹ Finally, having lived long enough, he reduced his food each day, determined to starve himself by easy degrees.⁵⁰ “He was exceedingly old,” says Diogenes,⁵¹

and appeared to be at the point of death. His sister lamented that he would die during the festival of the Thesmophoria, which would prevent her from discharging her duties to the goddess. So he bade her be of good cheer, and to bring him hot loaves (or a little honey⁵²) every day. And by applying these to his nostrils he kept himself alive over the festival. But when the three days of the feast were passed he expired without any pain, as Hipparchus assures us, having lived one hundred and nine years.

His city gave him a public funeral, and Timon of Athens praised him.⁵³ He founded no school; but he formulated for science its most famous hypothesis, and gave to philosophy a system which, denounced by every other, has survived them all, and reappears in every generation.

III. EMPEDOCLES

Idealism offends the senses, materialism offends the soul; the one explains everything but the world, the other everything but life. To merge these half-truths it was necessary to find some dynamic principle that could mediate between structure and growth, between things and thought. Anaxagoras sought such a principle in a cosmic Mind; Empedocles sought it in the inherent forces that made for evolution.

This Leonardo of Acragas was born in the year of Marathon, of a wealthy family whose passion for horse racing gave no promise of philosophy. He studied for a while with the Pythagoreans, but in his exuberance he divulged some of their esoteric doctrine, and was expelled.⁵⁴ He took very much to heart the notion of transmigration, and announced with poetic sympathy that he had been “in bygone times a youth, a maiden, and a flowering shrub; a bird, yes, and a fish that swims in silence through the deep sea.”⁵⁵ He condemned the eating of animal food as a form of cannibalism; for were not these animals the reincarnation of human beings?⁵⁶ All men, he believed, had once been gods, but had forfeited their heavenly place by some impurity or violence; and he was certain that he felt in his own soul intimations of a prenatal divinity. “From what glory, from what immeasurable bliss, have I now sunk to roam with mortals on this earth!”⁵⁷ Convinced of his divine origin, he put golden sandals upon his feet, clothed his body with purple robes, and crowned his head with laurel; he was, as he modestly explained to his countrymen, a favorite of Apollo; only to his friends did he confess that he was a god. He claimed supernatural powers, performed magic rites, and sought by incantations to wrest from the other world the secrets of human destiny. He offered to cure diseases by the enchantment of his words, and cured so many that the populace half believed his claims. Actually he was a learned physician fertile in suggestions to medical science, and skilled in the psychology of the medical art. He was a brilliant orator; he “invented,” says Aristotle,⁵⁸ the principles of rhetoric, and taught them to Gorgias, who peddled them in Athens. He was an engineer who freed Selinus from pestilence by draining marshes and changing the courses of streams.⁵⁹ He was a courageous statesman who, though himself an aristocrat, led a popular revolution against a narrow aristocracy, refused the dictatorship, and established a moderate democracy.⁶⁰ He was a poet, and wrote On Nature and On Purifications in such excellent verse that Aristotle and Cicero ranked him high among the poets, and Lucretius complimented him with imitation. “When he went to the Olympic games,” says Diogenes Laertius, “he was the object of general attention, so that there was no mention made of anybody else in comparison with him.”⁶¹ Perhaps, after all, he was a god.

The 470 lines that survive give us only hazardous intimations of his philosophy. He was an eclectic, and saw some wisdom in every system. He deprecated Parmenides’ wholesale rejection of the senses, and welcomed each sense as an “avenue to understanding.”⁶³ Sensation is due to effluxes of particles proceeding from the object and falling upon the “pores” (poroi) of the senses; therefore light needs time to come from the sun to us.⁶⁴ Night is caused by the earth intercepting the rays of the sun.⁶⁵ All things are composed of four elements—air, fire, water, and earth. Operating upon these are two basic forces, attraction and repulsion, Love and Hate. The endless combinations and separations of the elements by these forces produce the world of things and history. When Love or the tendency to combine is dominant, matter develops into plants, and organisms take higher and higher forms. Just as transmigration weaves all souls into one biography, so in nature there is no sharp distinction between one species or genus and another; e.g., “Hair and leaves and the thick feathers of birds, and the scales that form on tough limbs, are the same thing.”⁶⁸ Nature produces every kind of organ and form; Love unites them, sometimes into monstrosities that perish through maladaptation, sometimes into organisms capable of propagating themselves and meeting the conditions of survival.⁶⁹ All higher forms develop from lower forms.⁷⁰ At first both sexes are in the same body; then they become separated, and each longs to be reunited with the other.*⁷¹ To this process of evolution corresponds a process of dissolution, in which Hate, or the force of division, tears down the complex structure that Love has built. Slowly organisms and planets revert to more and more primitive forms, until all things are merged again in a primeval and amorphous mass.⁷² These alternating processes of development and decay go on endlessly, in each part and in the whole; the two forces of combination and separation, Love and Hate, Good and Evil, fight and balance each other in a vast universal rhythm of Life and Death. So old is the philosophy of Herbert Spencer.⁷³

The place of God in this process is not clear, for in Empedocles it is difficult to separate fact from metaphor, philosophy from poetry. Sometimes he identifies deity with the cosmic sphere itself, sometimes with the life of all life, or the mind of all mind; but he knows that we shall never be able to form a just idea of the basic and original creative power. “We cannot bring God near so as to reach him with our eyes and lay hold of him with our hands. . . . For he has no human head attached to bodily members, nor do two branching arms dangle from his shoulders; he has neither feet nor knees nor any hairy parts. No; he is only mind, sacred and ineffable mind, flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts.”⁷⁴ And Empedocles concludes with the wise and weary counsel of old age:

Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil. Then are they borne away; like smoke they vanish into air; and what they dream they know is but the little that each hath stumbled upon in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all that they have learned the whole. Vain fools! For what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man.⁷⁵

In his last years he became more distinctly a preacher and prophet, absorbed in the theory of reincarnation, and imploring his fellow men to purge away the guilt that had exiled them from heaven. With the assorted wisdom of Buddha, Pythagoras, and Schopenhauer he warned the human race to abstain from marriage, procreation,⁷⁶ and beans.⁷⁷ When, in 415, the Athenians besieged Syracuse, Empedocles did what he could to help its resistance, and thereby offended Acragas, which hated Syracuse with all the animosity of kinship. Banished from his native city, he went to the mainland of Greece and died, some say, in Megara.⁷⁸ But Hippobotus, says Diogenes Laertius,⁷⁹ tells how Empedocles, after bringing back to full life a woman who had been given up for dead, rose from the feast that celebrated her recovery, disappeared, and was never seen again. Legend said that he had leaped into Etna’s fiery mouth so that he might die without leaving a trace behind him, and thereby confirm his divinity. But the elemental fire betrayed him; it flung up his brazen slippers and left them, like heavy symbols of mortality, upon the crater’s edge.⁸⁰

IV. THE SOPHISTS

It is a reproof to those who think of Greece as synonymous with Athens, that none of the great Hellenic thinkers before Socrates belonged to that city, and only Plato after him. The fate of Anaxagoras and Socrates indicates that religious conservatism was stronger in Athens than in the colonies, where geographical separation had broken some of the bonds of tradition. Perhaps Athens would have remained obscurantist and intolerant to the point of stupidity had it not been for the growth of a cosmopolitan trading class, and the coming of the Sophists to Athens.

The debates in the Assembly, the trials before the heliaea, and the rising need for the ability to think with the appearance of logic and to speak with clarity and persuasion, conspired with the wealth and curiosity of an imperial society to create a demand for something unknown in Athens before Pericles—formal higher education in letters, oratory, science, philosophy, and statesmanship. The demand was met at first not by the organization of universities but by wandering scholars who engaged lecture halls, gave there their courses of instruction, and then passed on to other cities to repeat them. Some of these men, like Protagoras, called themselves sophistai—i.e., teachers of wisdom.⁸¹ The word was accepted as equivalent to our “university professor,” and bore no derogatory connotation until the conflict between religion and philosophy led to conservative attacks upon the Sophists, and the commercialism of certain of them provoked Plato to darken their name with the imputations of venal sophistry that now cling to it. Perhaps the general public entertained a vague dislike for these teachers from their first appearance, since their costly instruction in logic and rhetoric could be bought only by the well to do, and gave these an advantage in trying their cases before the courts.⁸² It is true that the more famous Sophists, like most skilled practitioners in any field, charged all that their patrons could be persuaded to pay; this is the final law of prices everywhere. Protagoras and Gorgias, we are told, demanded ten thousand drachmas ($10,000) for the education of a single pupil. But lesser Sophists were content with reasonably moderate fees; Prodicus, famous throughout Greece, asked from one to fifty drachmas for admission to his courses.⁸³

Protagoras, the most renowned of the Sophists, was born in Abdera a generation before Democritus. In his lifetime he was the better known of the two, and the more influential; we surmise his repute from the furore created by his visits to Athens.*⁸⁴ Even Plato, who was not often intentionally fair to the Sophists, respected him, and described him as a man of high character. In the Platonic dialogue that is named after him Protagoras makes a much better showing than the argumentative young Socrates; here it is Socrates who talks like a Sophist, and Protagoras who behaves like a gentleman and a philosopher, never losing his temper, never jealous of another’s brilliance, never taking the argument too seriously, and never anxious to speak. He admits that he undertakes to teach his pupils prudence in private and public matters, the orderly management of home and family, the art of rhetoric or persuasive speaking, and the ability to understand and direct affairs of state.⁸⁶ He defends his high fees by saying that it is his custom, when a pupil objects to the sum asked, to agree to receive as adequate whatever amount the pupil may name as just in a solemn statement before some sacred shrine⁸⁷—a rash procedure for a teacher who doubted the existence of the gods. Diogenes Laertius accuses him of being the first to “arm disputants with the weapon of sophism,” a charge that would have pleased Socrates; but Diogenes adds that Protagoras “was also the first to invent that sort of argument which is called Socratic”⁸⁸—which might not have pleased Socrates.

It was but one of his many distinctions that he founded European grammar and philology. He treated of the right use of words, says Plato,⁸⁹ and was the first to distinguish the three genders of nouns, and certain tenses and moods of verbs.⁹⁰ But his chief significance lay in this, that with him, rather than with Socrates, began the subjective standpoint in philosophy. Unlike the Ionians he was less interested in things than in thought—i.e., in the whole process of sensation, perception, understanding, and expression. Whereas Parmenides rejected sensation as a guide to truth, Protagoras, like Locke, accepted it as the only means of knowledge, and refused to admit any transcendental—suprasensual—reality. No absolute truth can be found, said Protagoras, but only such truths as hold for given men under given conditions; contradictory assertions can be equally true for different persons or at different times.⁹¹ All truth, goodness, and beauty are relative and subjective; “man is the measure of all things—of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not.”⁹² To the historical eye a whole world begins to tremble when Protagoras announces this simple principle of humanism and relativity; all established truths and sacred principles crack; individualism has found a voice and a philosophy; and the supernatural bases of social order threaten to melt away.

The far-reaching skepticism implicit in this famous pronouncement might have remained theoretical and safe had not Protagoras applied it for a moment to theology. Among a group of distinguished men in the home of the unpopular freethinker, Euripides, Protagoras read a treatise whose first sentence made a stir in Athens. “With regard to the gods I know not whether they exist or not, or what they are like. Many things prevent our knowing: the subject is obscure, and brief is the span of our mortal life.”⁹³ The Athenian Assembly, frightened by that ominous prelude, banished Protagoras, ordered all Athenians to surrender any copies they might have of his writings, and burned the books in the market place. Protagoras fled to Sicily, and, story tells us, was drowned on the way.⁹⁴

Gorgias of Leontini carried on this skeptical revolution, but had the good sense to spend most of his life outside of Athens. His career was typical of the union between philosophy and statesmanship in Greece. Born about 483, he studied philosophy and rhetoric with Empedocles, and became so famous in Sicily as an orator and a teacher of oratory that in 427 he was sent by Leontini as an ambassador to Athens. At the Olympic games of 408 he captivated a great crowd by an address in which he appealed to the warring Greeks to make peace among themselves in order to face with unity and confidence the resurrected power of Persia. Traveling from city to city, he expounded his views in a style of oratory so euphuistically ornate, so symmetrically antithetical in idea and phrase, so delicately poised between poetry and prose, that he had no difficulty in attracting students who offered him a hundred minas for a course of instruction. His book On Nature sought to prove three startling propositions: (1) Nothing exists; (2) if anything existed it would be unknowable; and (3) if anything were knowable the knowledge of it could not be communicated from one person to another.*⁹⁵ Nothing else remains of Gorgias’ writings. After enjoying the hospitality and fees of many states he settled down in Thessaly, and had the wisdom to consume most of his great fortune before his death.⁹⁶ He lived, as all authorities assure us, to at least one hundred and five; and an ancient writer tells us that “though Gorgias attained to the age of one hundred and eight, his body was not weakened by old age, but to the end of his life he was in sound condition, and his senses were those of a youth.”⁹⁷

If the Sophists together constituted a scattered university, Hippias of Elis was a university in himself, and typified the polymath in a world where knowledge was not yet so vast as to be clearly beyond the grasp of one mind. He taught astronomy and mathematics, and made original contributions to geometry; he was a poet, a musician, and an orator; he lectured on literature, morals, and politics; he was an historian, and laid the foundations of Greek chronology by compiling a list of victors at the Olympic games; he was employed by Elis as an envoy to other states; and he knew so many arts and trades that he made with his own hands all his clothing and ornaments.⁹⁸ His work in philosophy was slight but important: he protested against the degenerative artificiality of city life, contrasted nature with law, and called law a tyrant over mankind.⁹⁹ Prodicus of Ceos carried on the grammatical work of Protagoras, fixed the parts of speech, and pleased the elders with a fable in which he represented Heracles choosing laborious Virtue instead of easy Vice.¹⁰⁰ Other Sophists were not so pious: Antiphon of Athens followed Democritus into materialism and atheism, and defined justice in terms of expediency; Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (if we may take Plato’s word for it) identified right with might, and remarked that the success of villains cast doubt upon the existence of the gods.”¹⁰¹

All in all, the Sophists must be ranked among the most vital factors in the history of Greece. They invented grammar and logic for Europe; they developed dialectic, analyzed the forms of argument, and taught men how to detect and practice fallacies. Through their stimulus and example reasoning became a ruling passion with the Greeks. By applying logic to language they promoted clarity and precision of thought, and facilitated the accurate transmission of knowledge. Through them prose became a form of literature, and poetry became a vehicle of philosophy. They applied analysis to everything; they refused to respect traditions that could not be supported by the evidence of the senses or the logic of reason; and they shared decisively in a rationalist movement that finally broke down, among the intellectual classes, the ancient faith of Hellas. “The common opinion” of his time, says Plato, derived “the world and all animals and plants . . . and inanimate substances from . . . some spontaneous and unintelligent cause.”¹⁰² Lysias tells of an atheistic society that called itself the kakodaimoniotai, or Devils’ Club, and deliberately met and dined on holydays set apart for fasting.¹⁰³ Pindar, at the opening of the fifth century, accepted the oracle of Delphi piously; Aeschylus defended it politically; Herodotus, about 450, criticized it timidly; Thucydides, at the end of the century, openly rejected it. Euthyphro complained that when in the Assembly he spoke of oracles, the people laughed at him as an antiquated fool.¹⁰⁴

The Sophists must not be blamed or credited for all of this; much of it was in the air, and was a natural result of growing wealth, leisure, travel, research, and speculation. Their role in the deterioration of morals was likewise contributory rather than basic; wealth of itself, without the aid of philosophy, puts an end to puritanism and stoicism. But within these modest limits the Sophists unwittingly quickened disintegration. Most of them, barring a thoroughly human love of money, were men of high character and decent life; but they did not transmit to their pupils the traditions or the wisdom that had made or kept them reasonably virtuous despite their discovery of the secular origin and geographical mutability of morals. Their colonial derivation may have led them to underestimate the value of custom as a peaceful substitute for force or law in maintaining morality and order. To define morality or human worth in terms of knowledge, as Protagoras did a generation before Socrates,¹⁰⁵ was a heady stimulus to thought, but an unsteadying blow to character; the emphasis on knowledge raised the educational level of the Greeks, but it did not develop intelligence as rapidly as it liberated intellect. The announcement of the relativity of knowledge did not make men modest, as it should, but disposed every man to consider himself the measure of all things; every clever youth could now feel himself fit to sit in judgment upon the moral code of his people, reject it if he could not understand and approve it, and then be free to rationalize his desires as the virtues of an emancipated soul. The distinction between “Nature” and convention, and the willingness of minor Sophists to argue that what “Nature” permitted was good regardless of custom or law, sapped the ancient supports of Greek morality, and encouraged many experiments in living. Old men mourned the passing of domestic simplicity and fidelity, and the pursuit of pleasure or wealth unchecked by religious restraints.¹⁰⁶ Plato and Thucydides speak of thinkers and public men who rejected morals as superstitions, and acknowledged no right but strength. This unscrupulous individualism turned the logic and rhetoric of the Sophists into an instrument of legal chicanery and political demagogy, and degraded their broad cosmopolitanism into a cautious reluctance to defend their country, or an unprejudiced readiness to sell it to the highest bidder. The religious peasantry and the conservative aristocrats began to agree with the common citizen of the urban democracy that philosophy had become a danger to the state.

Some of the philosophers themselves joined in the attack upon the Sophists. Socrates condemned them (as Aristophanes was to condemn Socrates) for making error specious with logic and persuasive with rhetoric, and scorned them for taking fees.¹⁰⁷ He excused his ignorance of grammar on the ground that he could not afford the fifty-drachma course of Prodicus, but only the one-drachma course, which gave merely the rudiments.¹⁰⁸ In an ungenial moment he used a merciless and revealing comparison:

It is believed among us, Antiphon, that it is possible to dispose of beauty or of wisdom alike honorably or dishonorably; for if a person sells his beauty for money to anyone that wishes to purchase it, men call him a male prostitute; but if anyone makes a friend of a person whom he knows to be an honorable and worthy admirer, we regard him as prudent. In like manner those who sell their wisdom for money to any that will buy, men call sophists, or, as it were, prostitutes of wisdom; but whoever makes a friend of a person whom he knows to be deserving, and teaches him all the good that he knows, we consider him to act the part which becomes a good and honorable citizen.¹⁰⁹

Plato could afford to agree with this view, being a rich man. Isocrates began his career with a speech Against the Sophists, became a successful professor of rhetoric, and charged a thousand drachmas ($1000) for a course.¹¹⁰ Aristotle continued the attack; he defined a Sophist as one who “is only eager to get rich off his apparent wisdom,”¹¹¹ and accused Protagoras of “promising to make the worse appear the better reason.”¹¹²

The tragedy was deepened by the fact that both sides were right. The complaint about fees was unjust: short of a state subsidy no other way was then open to finance higher education. If the Sophists criticized traditions and morals it was, of course, with no evil intent; they thought that they were liberating slaves. They were the intellectual representatives of their time, sharing its passion for the free intellect; like the Encyclopedists of Enlightenment France they swept away the dying past with magnificent élan, and did not live long enough, or think far enough, to establish new institutions in place of those that loosened reason would destroy. In every civilization the time comes when old ways must be re-examined if the society is to readjust itself to irresistible economic change; the Sophists were the instrument of this re-examination, but failed to provide the statesmanship for the readjustment. It remains to their credit that they powerfully stimulated the pursuit of knowledge, and made it fashionable to think. From every corner of the Greek world they brought new ideas and challenges to Athens, and aroused her to philosophical consciousness and maturity. Without them Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would have been impossible.

V. SOCRATES

1. The Mask of Silenus

It is pleasant to stand at last face to face with a personality apparently so real as Socrates. But when we consider the two sources upon which we must rely for our knowledge of Socrates we find that one of them, Plato, writes imaginative dramas, that the other, Xenophon, writes historical novels, and that neither product can be taken as history. “They say,” writes Diogenes Laertius, “that Socrates having heard Plato read the Lysis, cried out, ‘O Heracles! what a number of lies the young man has told about me!’ For Plato had set down a great many things as sayings of Socrates which he had never said.”¹¹³ Plato does not pretend to limit himself to fact; probably it never occurred to him that the future might have scant means of distinguishing, in his work, imagination from biography. But he draws so consistent a picture of his master throughout the Dialogues, from Socrates’ youthful timidity in the Parmenides and his insolent loquacity in the Protagoras to the subdued piety and resignation of the Phaedo, that if this was not Socrates, then Plato is one of the greatest character creators in all literature. Aristotle accepts as authentically Socratic the views attributed to Socrates in the Protagoras¹¹⁴ Recently discovered fragments of an Alcibiades written by Aeschines of Sphettos, an immediate disciple of Socrates, tend to confirm the portrait given in the earlier dialogues of Plato, and the story of the philosopher’s attachment to Alcibiades.¹¹⁵ On the other hand, Aristotle classes Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Banquet as forms of fiction, imaginary conversations in which Socrates becomes, more often than not, a mouthpiece for Xenophon’s ideas.*¹¹⁶ If Xenophon honestly played Eckermann to Socrates’ Goethe we can only say that he has carefully collected the master’s safest platitudes; it is incredible that so virtuous a man should have upset a civilization. Other ancient writers did not make the old sage into such a saint; Aristoxenus of Tarentum, about 318, reported, on the testimony of his father—who claimed to have known Socrates—that the philosopher was a person without education, “ignorant and debauched”;¹¹⁷ and Eupolis, the comic poet, rivaled his rival Aristophanes in abusing the great gadfly.¹¹⁸ Making due discount for polemic vitriol it is at least clear that Socrates was a man, hated and loved beyond any other figure of his time.

His father was a sculptor, and he himself was said to have carved a Hermes, and three Graces that stood near the entrance to the Acropolis.¹¹⁹ His mother was a midwife: it was a standing joke with him that he merely continued her trade, but in the realm of ideas, helping others to deliver themselves of their conceptions. One tradition describes him as the son of a slave;¹²⁰ it is improbable, for he served as a hoplite (a career open only to citizens), inherited a house from his father, and had seventy minas ($7000) invested for him by his friend Crito;¹²¹ for the rest he is represented as poor.¹²² He paid much attention to the training of the body, and was usually in good physical condition. He made a reputation for himself as a soldier during the Peloponnesian War: in 432 he fought at Potidaea, in 424 at Delium, in 42 2 at Amphipolis. At Potidaea he saved both the life and the arms of the young Alcibiades, and gave up in the youth’s favor his claim to the prize for valor; at Delium he was the last Athenian to give ground to the Spartans, and seems to have saved himself by glaring at the enemy; even the Spartans were frightened. In these campaigns, we are told, he excelled all in endurance and courage, bearing without complaint hunger, fatigue, and cold.¹²⁴ At home, when he condescended to stay there, he worked as a stonecutter and statuary. He had no interest in travel, and seldom went outside the city and its port. He married Xanthippe, who berated him for neglecting his family; he recognized the justice of her complaint,¹²⁵ and defended her gallantly to his son and his friends. Marriage disturbed him so little that he seems to have taken an additional wife when the mortality of males in the war led to the temporary legalization of polygamy.¹²⁸

All the world knows the face of Socrates. Judging precariously from the bust in the Museo delle Terme at Rome, it was not typically Greek;¹²⁹ its spacious spread, its flat, broad nose, its thick lips, and heavy beard suggest rather Solon’s friend of the steppes, Anacharsis, or that modern Scythian, Tolstoi. “I say,” Alcibiades insists, even while protesting his love, “that Socrates is exactly like the masks of Silenus, which may be seen sitting in the statuaries’ shops, having pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and there are images of gods inside them. I say also that he is like Marsyas the satyr. You will not deny, Socrates, that your face is that of a satyr.”¹³⁰ Socrates raises no objection; to make matters worse he confesses to an unduly large paunch, and hopes to reduce it by dancing.¹³¹

Plato and Xenophon agree in describing his habits and his character. He was content with one simple and shabby robe throughout the year, and liked bare feet better than sandals or shoes.¹³² He was incredibly free from the acquisitive fever that agitates mankind. Viewing the multitude of articles exposed for sale in the market place, he remarked, “How many things there are that I do not want!”¹³³—and felt himself rich in his poverty. He was a model of moderation and self-control, but all the world away from a saint. He could drink like a gentleman, and needed no timid asceticism to keep him straight.* He was no recluse; he liked good company, and let the rich entertain him now and then; but he made no obeisance to them, could get along very well without them, and rejected the gifts and invitations of magnates and kings.¹³⁵ All in all he was fortunate: he lived without working, read without writing, taught without routine, drank without dizziness, and died before senility, almost without pain.

His morals were excellent for his time, but would hardly satisfy all the good people who praise him. He “took fire” at the sight of Charmides, but controlled himself by asking if this handsome lad had also a “noble soul.”¹³⁶ Plato speaks of Socrates and Alcibiades as lovers, and describes the philosopher “in chase of the fair youth.”¹³⁷ Though the old man seems to have kept these amours for the most part Platonic, he was not above giving advice to homosexuals and hetairai on how to attract lovers.¹³⁸ He gallantly promised his help to the courtesan Theodota, who rewarded him with the invitation: “Come often to see me.”¹³⁹ His good humor and kindliness were so unfailing that those who could stomach his politics found it simple to put up with his morals. When he had passed away Xenophon spoke of him as “so just that he wronged no man in the most trifling affair. . . so temperate that he never preferred pleasure to virtue; so wise that he never erred in distinguishing better from worse . . . so capable of discerning the character of others, and of exhorting them to virtue and honor, that he seemed to be such as the best and happiest of men would be.”¹⁴⁰ Or, as Plato put it, with moving simplicity, he “was truly the wisest, and justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known.”¹⁴¹

2. Portrait of a Gadfly

Being curious and disputatious he became a student of philosophy, and was for a time fascinated by the Sophists who invaded Athens in his youth. There is no evidence that Plato invented the fact as well as the content of Socrates’ meetings with Parmenides, Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, and Thrasymachus; it is likely that he saw Zeno when the latter came to Athens about 450, and that he was so infected with Zeno’s dialectic that it never left him.¹⁴² Probably he knew Anaxagoras, if not in person then in doctrine; for Archelaus of Miletus, pupil of Anaxagoras, was for a time the teacher of Socrates. Archelaus began as a physicist and ended as a student of morals; he explained the origin and basis of morals on rationalistic lines, and perhaps turned Socrates from science to ethics.¹⁴³ By all these avenues Socrates came to philosophy, and thenceforth found his “greatest good in daily converse about virtue, examining myself and others; for a life unscrutinized is unworthy of a man.”* So he went prowling among men’s beliefs, prodding them with questions, demanding precise answers and consistent views, and making himself a terror to all who could not think clearly. Even in Hades he proposed to be a gadfly, and “find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise and is not.”¹⁴⁴ He protected himself from a similar cross-examination by announcing that he knew nothing; he knew all the questions, but none of the answers; he modestly called himself an “amateur in philosophy.”¹⁴⁵ What he meant, presumably, was that he was certain of nothing except man’s fallibility, and had no hard and fast system of dogmas and principles. When the oracle at Delphi, to Chaerephon’s alleged inquiry, “Is any man wiser than Socrates?” gave the alleged reply, “No one,”¹⁴⁶ Socrates ascribed the response to his profession of ignorance.

From that moment he set himself to the pragmatic task of getting clear ideas. “For himself,” he said, “he would hold discourse, from time to time, on what concerned mankind, considering what was pious, what impious; what was just, what unjust; what was sanity, what insanity; what was courage, what cowardice; what was the nature of government over men, and the qualities of one skilled in governing them; and touching on other subjects . . . of which he thought that those who were ignorant might justly be deemed no better than slaves.”¹⁴⁷ To every vague notion, easy generalization, or secret prejudice he pointed the challenge, “What is it?” and asked for precise definitions. It became his habit to rise early and go to the market place, the gymnasiums, the palaestras, or the workshops of artisans, and engage in discussion any person who gave promise of a stimulating intelligence or an amusing stupidity. “Is not the road to Athens made for conversation?” he asked.¹⁴⁸ His method was simple: he called for the definition of a large idea; he examined the definition, usually to reveal its incompleteness, its contradictoriness, or its absurdity; he led on, by question after question, to a fuller and juster definition, which, however, he never gave. Sometimes he proceeded to a general conception, or exposed another, by investigating a long series of particular instances, thereby introducing a measure of induction into Greek logic; sometimes, with the famous Socratic irony, he unveiled the ridiculous consequences of the definition or opinion he wished to destroy. He had a passion for orderly thinking, and liked to classify individual things according to their genus, species, and specific difference, thereby preparing for Aristotle’s method of definition as well as for Plato’s theory of Ideas. He liked to describe dialectic as the art of careful distinctions. And he salted the weary wastes of logic with a humor that died an early death in the history of philosophy.