The Life of Greece

V. SUNSET IN SICILY

The Hellenistic age faced east and south, and almost ignored the west. Cyrene prospered as usual, having learned that it is better to trade than to war; out of it, in this period, came Callimachus the poet, Eratosthenes the philosopher, and Carneades the philosopher. Greek Italy was worried and weakened by the double challenge of multiplying natives and rising Rome, while Sicily lived in daily fear of the Carthaginian power. Twenty-three years after the coming of Timoleon a rich man’s revolution suppressed the Syracusan democracy, and put the government into the hands of six hundred oligarchic families (320). These divided into factions, and were in turn overthrown by a radical revolution in which four thousand persons were killed and six thousand of the well to do were sent into banishment. Agathocles won dictatorship by promising a cancellation of debts and a redistribution of the land.⁵¹ So, periodically, the concentration of wealth becomes extreme, and gets righted by taxation or by revolution.

After forty-seven years of chaos, during which the Carthaginians repeatedly invaded the island, and Pyrrhus came, won, lost, and went, Syracuse by unmerited good fortune fell into the power of Hieron II, the most beneficent of the many dictators thrown up by the passions and turbulence of the Sicilian Greeks. Hieron ruled for fifty-four years, says the astonished Polybius, “without killing, exiling, or injuring a single citizen, which indeed is the most remarkable of all things.”⁵² Surrounded by all the means of luxury, he led a modest and temperate life, and lived to the age of ninety. On several occasions he wished to resign his authority, but the people begged him to retain it.⁵³ He had the good judgment to make an alliance with Rome, and thereby kept the Carthaginians at bay for half a century. He gave the city order and peace, and considerable freedom; he executed great public works, and without oppressive taxation left a full treasury at his death. Under his protection or patronage Archimedes brought ancient science to its culmination, and Theocritus sang, in the last perfect Greek, the loveliness of Sicily and the expected bounty of its king. Syracuse became now the most populous and prosperous city in Hellas.⁵⁴

Hieron amused his leisure by watching his artisans, under the supervision of Archimedes, construct for him a pleasure boat that embodied all the shipbuilding art and science of antiquity. It was half a stadium (407 feet) in length; it had a sport deck with a gymnasium and a large marble bath, and a shaded garden deck with a great variety of plants; it was manned by six hundred seamen in twenty groups of oars, and could carry in addition three hundred passengers or marines; it had sixty cabins, some with mosaic floors, and doors of ivory and precious woods; it was elegantly furnished in every part, and was adorned with paintings and statuary. It was protected against attack by armor and turrets; from each of the eight turrets great beams extended, with a hole at the end through which large stones could be dropped upon enemy vessels; throughout its length Archimedes constructed a great catapult capable of hurling stones of three talents’ weight (174 pounds), or arrows twelve cubits (eighteen feet) long. It could carry 3900 tons of cargo, and itself weighed a thousand tons. Hieron had hoped to use it in regular service between Syracuse and Alexandria; but finding it too large for his own docks, and extravagantly expensive to maintain, he filled it with corn and fish from Sicily’s abounding fields and seas, and sent it, vessels and contents, as a gift to Egypt, which was suffering an unusual dearth of corn.⁵⁵

Hieron died in 216. He had wished to establish a democratic constitution before his death, but his daughters prevailed upon his dotage to bequeath his power to his grandson.⁵⁶ Hieronymus turned out to be a weakling and a scoundrel; he abandoned the Roman alliance, received envoys from Carthage, and permitted them to become in effect the rulers of Syracuse. Rome, not abounding in corn, prepared to fight Carthage for the wealth of an island that had never learned to govern itself. All the Mediterranean world, like a decaying fruit, prepared to fall into the hands of a greater and more ruthless conqueror than Greek history had ever known.

CHAPTER XXVI

Books

I. LIBRARIES AND SCHOLARS

IN every field of Hellenistic life except the drama we find the same phenomenon—Greek civilization not destroyed but dispersed. Athens was dying, and the Greek settlements of the west, barring Syracuse, were in decay; but the Greek cities of Egypt and the East were at their material and cultural zenith. Polybius, a man of wide experience, historical knowledge, and careful judgment, spoke, about 148 B.C., of “the present day, when the progress of the arts and sciences has been so rapid”;¹ the words have a familiar ring. Through the dissemination of Greek as a common tongue a cultural unity was now established which would last in the eastern Mediterranean for nearly a thousand years. All men of education in the new empires learned Greek as the medium of diplomacy, literature, and science; a book written in Greek could be understood by almost any educated non-Greek in Egypt or the Near East. Men spoke of the oikoumene, or inhabited world, as one civilization, and developed a cosmopolitan outlook less stimulating but perhaps more sensible than the proud and narrow nationalism of the city-state.

For this enlarged audience thousands of writers wrote hundreds of thousands of books. We know the names of eleven hundred Hellenistic authors; the unknown are an incalculable multitude. A cursive script had developed to facilitate writing; indeed, as early as the fourth century B.C. we hear of systems of shorthand whereby “certain vowels and consonants can be expressed by strokes placed in various positions.”² Books were written on Egyptian papyrus until Ptolemy VI, hoping to check the growth of the library at Pergamum, forbade the export of the material from Egypt. Eumenes II countered by encouraging the mass production of the treated skins of sheep and calves, which had long been used for writing purposes in the East; and soon “parchment,” from the city and the name of Pergamum, rivaled paper as a vehicle of communication and literature.

Books having grown to such numbers, libraries became a necessity. These had existed before as the luxury of Egyptian or Mesopotamian potentates; but apparently Aristotle’s library was the first extensive private collection. We may conjecture its size and worth from the fact that he paid $18,000 for that part of it which he bought from Plato’s successor Speusippus. Aristotle bequeathed his books to Theophrastus, who bequeathed them (287) to Neleus, who took them to Scepsis in Asia Minor, where they were buried, says tradition, to escape the literary cupidity of the Pergamene kings. After almost a century of this damaging interment the volumes were sold about 100 B.C. to Apellicon of Teos, an Athenian philosopher. Apellicon found that many passages had been eaten away by the damp; he made new copies, filling in the gaps as intelligently as he could;³ this may explain why Aristotle is not the most fascinating philosopher in history. When Sylla captured Athens (86) he appropriated Apellicon’s library and transported it to Rome. There the Rhodian scholar Andronicus reordered and published the texts of Aristotle’s works⁴—an event almost as stimulating in the history of Roman thought as the rediscovery of Aristotle was to prove in the awakening of medieval philosophy.

The adventures of this collection suggest the debt that literature owes to the Ptolemies for establishing and maintaining, as part of the Museum, the famous Alexandrian Library. Ptolemy I began it, Ptolemy II completed it, and added a smaller library in the suburban sanctuary of Serapis. By the end of Philadelphus’ reign the number of rolls had reached 532,000—making probably 100,000 books in our sense of this word.⁵ For a time the enlargement of this collection rivaled the strategy of power in the affections of the Egyptian kings. Ptolemy III ordered that every book brought to Alexandria should be deposited with the Library; that copies should be made, the owner to receive the copy, the Library to retain the original. The same autocrat asked Athens to lend him the manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and deposited $90,000 as security for their return; he kept the originals, sent back copies, and told the Athenians to keep his money as a forfeit.⁶ The ambition to possess old books became so widespread that men arose who specialized in dyeing and spoiling new manuscripts to sell them as antiquities to collectors of first editions.⁷

The Library soon eclipsed the rest of the Museum in importance and interest. The office of librarian was one of the highest in the king’s gift, and included the obligation of tutoring the crown prince. The names of these librarians have been preserved, with variations, in different manuscripts; the latest list⁸ gives, as the first six, Zenodotus of Ephesus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Apollonius of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace; their diversity of origin suggests again the unity of Hellenistic culture. Quite as important as these was the poet and scholar Callimachus, who classified the collection in. a catalogue running to one hundred and twenty rolls. We picture a corps of copyists, presumably slaves, making duplicates of precious originals, and a hive of scholars separating the materials into groups. Some of these men wrote histories of various departments of literature or science, others edited definitive editions of the masterpieces, others composed commentaries on these texts for the enlightenment of laity and posterity. Aristophanes of Byzantium effected a literary revolution by separating the clauses and sentences of the ancient writings with capitals and marks of punctuation; and it was he who invented the accents that so disturb us in reading Greek. Zenodotus began, Aristophanes advanced, Aristarchus completed, the recension of the Iliad and the Odyssey, establishing the present text, and illuminating its obscurities in learned scholia. By the end of the third century the Museum, the Library, and their scholars had made Alexandria, in everything but philosophy, the intellectual capital of the Greek world.

Doubtless other Hellenistic cities had libraries. Austrian archeologists have exhumed the remains of an ornate municipal library at Ephesus, and we hear of a great library being consumed in the destruction of Carthage by Scipio. But the only one that evoked comparison with Alexandria’s was that of Pergamum. The kings of this transient state looked with enlightened envy upon the cultural enterprises of the Ptolemies. In 196 Eumenes II established the Pergamene Library, and brought to its halls some of the finest scholars of Greece. The collection grew rapidly; when Antony presented it to Cleopatra to replace that part of the Alexandrian Library which was burned in the uprising against Caesar in 48 B.C., it numbered some 200,000 rolls. Through this library, and the Attic taste of the Attalid kings, Pergamum became, towards the end of the Hellenistic period, the center of a purist school of Greek prose, which considered no word clean that had not come down from classic days. To the enthusiasm of these classicists we owe the preservation of the chef-d’oeuvres of Attic prose.

It was above all an age of intellectuals and scholars. Writing became a profession instead of a devotion, and generated cliques and coteries whose appreciation of talent varied inversely as the square of its distance from themselves. Poets began to write for poets, and became artificial; scholars began to write for scholars, and became dull. Thoughtful men felt that the creative inspiration of Greece was nearing exhaustion, and that the most lasting service they could render was to collect, shelter, edit, and expound the literary achievements of a bolder time. They established the methods of textual and literary criticism in almost all its forms. They tried to sift out the best from the mass of existing manuscripts, and to guide the reading of the people; they made lists of “best books,” the “four heroic poets,” the “nine historians,” the “ten lyric poets,” the “ten orators,” etc.⁹ They wrote biographies of great writers and scientists; they gathered and saved the fragmentary data which are now all that we know concerning these men. They composed outlines of history, literature, drama, science, and philosophy;¹⁰ some of these “short cuts to knowledge” helped to preserve, some replaced and unwittingly obliterated the original works that they summarized. Saddened by the degeneration of Attic Greek into the Orientalized “pidgin” Greek of their time, Hellenistic scholars compiled dictionaries and grammars, and the Library of Alexandria, in the manner of the French Academy, issued edicts on the correct usage of the ancient tongue. Without their learned and patient “ant industry” the wars, revolutions, and catastrophes of two thousand years would have destroyed even those “precious minims” which have been transmitted to us as the shipwrecked legacy of Greece.

II. THE BOOKS OF THE JEWS

Through all the turmoil of the time the Jews maintained their traditional love of scholarship, and produced more than their share of the lasting literature of the age. To this period belong some of the finest portions of the Bible. Near the close of the third century a Jewish poet (or poetess?) composed the lovely Song of Songs: here is all the artistry of Greek verse from Sappho to Theocritus, but with something undiscoverable in any Greek author of the time—an intensity of imagination, a depth of feeling, and an idealist devotion strong enough to welcome the body, as well as the soul, of love, and to turn the flesh itself into spirit. Partly in Jerusalem, mostly in Alexandria, partly in other cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Hellenistic Jews wrote—in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek—such masterpieces as Ecclesiastes, Daniel, part of Proverbs and Psalms, and most of the greater Apocrypha. They composed histories like Chronicles, novelettes like Esther and Judith, and idyls of family life like the Book of Tobit. The Soferim changed the Hebrew script from the old Assyrian to the square Syrian style, which has remained to this day.¹¹ Since most of the Jews in the Near East now spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew, the scholars explained the Scriptures in brief Aramaic Targums, or interpretations. Schools were opened for the study of the Torah, or Law, and the explanation of its moral code to growing youth; such explanations, commentaries, and illustrations, handed down from teacher to pupil across the generations, supplied in a later age most of the material of the Talmud.

By the close of the third century the scholars of the Great Assembly had completed the editing of the older literature, and had closed the canon of the Old Testament;¹² it was their judgment that the age of the prophets was ended, and that literal inspiration had ceased. The result was that many works of this epoch, full of wisdom and beauty, lost the chance of divine collaboration, and fell into the unfortunate category of Apocrypha.* The two books of Esdras may owe something of their literary excellence to King James’ translators; but these can hardly be credited with the touching account of how Esdras asked the angel Uriel to explain why the wicked prosper, the good suffer, and Israel is in bondage; to which the angel answers, in powerful similes and yet simple speech, that it is not given to the part to understand or judge the whole.

The prologue of Ecclesiasticus describes it as a Greek translation, completed in 132, of discourses written in Hebrew two generations before by the translator’s grandfather, Jesus the son of Sirach. This Joshua ben Sirach was both a scholar and a man of affairs; after seeing something of the world through travel he had settled down to make his home a school for students; and to them he delivered these essays on the wisdom of life.¹³ He denounces the rich Jews who have abandoned their faith to cut a better figure in the Gentile world; he warns youth against the courtesans who wait for it everywhere; and he offers the Law as still the best guide amid the evils and pitfalls of the world. But he is no puritan. Unlike the Chasidim he has a good word to say for harmless pleasure; and he protests against the mystics who reject medicine on the ground that all maladies, having come from God, can be cured by God alone. The book is rich in epigrams, of which the most renowned brings together the rod and the child. “The number of whippings laid to his account,” said Renan, “must be incalculable.”¹⁴ It is a noble book, wiser and kinder than Ecclesiastes.

In the twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus we are told that “Wisdom is the first product of God, created from the beginning of the world.” Here and in the first chapter of Proverbs are the earliest Hebrew forms of the doctrine of the Logos—Wisdom as a “demiurge,” or intermediate creator, delegated by God to design the world. This hypostatizing of Wisdom as personified intelligence becomes a dominating idea of Jewish theology in the last centuries before Christ. Alongside of it runs increasingly the conception of personal immortality. In the Book of Enoch, written apparently by several authors in Palestine between 170 and 66 B.C., the hope of heaven has become a vital need; the success of wicked power and the misfortunes of a pious and loyal people could no longer be borne unless that hope might be entertained; without it life and history seemed to be the work of Satan rather than of God. A Messiah will come who will establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and will reward the virtuous with everlasting happiness after death.

In the Book of Daniel the whole terror of the age of Antiochus IV finds a voice. About 166, when the faithful had been persecuted to the death for their beliefs, and ever larger enemies were advancing upon the Maccabean band, one of the Chasidim, probably, undertook to rekindle the courage of the people by describing the sufferings and prophecies of Daniel in the days of Nebuchadrezzar in Babylon. Copies of the book passed secretly among the Jews; it was given out as the work of a prophet who had lived three hundred and seventy years before, had borne greater trials than any Jew under Antiochus, had emerged victorious, and had predicted a like triumph for his race. And even if the virtuous and faithful found indifferent fortune here, their reward would come at the Last Judgment, when the Lord would welcome them into a heaven of unending happiness, and plunge their persecutors into everlasting hell.

All in all, the extant Jewish writings of this period may be described as a mystic or imaginative literature of instruction, edification, and consolation. To the Jews of earlier ages life itself had been enough, and religion was not a flight from the world but a dramatization of morals by the poetry of faith; a powerful God, ruling and seeing all things, would reward virtue and punish vice in this existence on earth. The Captivity had shaken this belief, the restoration of the Temple had renewed it; it broke down under the bludgeoning of Antiochus. Pessimism now had a clear field; and in the writings of the Greeks the Jews found the most eloquent exposures of the injustices and tragedies of life. Meanwhile Jewish contact with Persian ideas of heaven and hell, of a struggle between good and evil, and the final triumph of good, offered an escape from the philosophy of despair, and perhaps the ideas of immortality that had come down from Egypt to Alexandria, and those that had animated the mysteries of Greece, co-operated to inspire in the Jews of the Greek and Roman periods that consoling hope which bore them up through all the vicissitudes of their Temple and their state. From these Jews, and from the Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks, the idea of eternal reward and punishment would flow down into a new and stronger faith, and help it to win a disintegrating world.

III. MENANDER

Like the other arts, the drama enjoyed in this age its greatest quantitative prosperity. Every city, almost every third-rate town, had its theater. The actors, better organized than ever, were in great demand, enjoyed high fees, and lived with characteristic superiority to the morals of their time. Dramatists continued to turn out tragedies, but, whether by accident or good taste, tradition has covered them with oblivion’s balm. The mood of Hellenistic Athens, like ours today, preferred the lighthearted, lightheaded, sentimental, happy-ending stories of the New Comedy. Of this, too, only fragments remain; but we have some discouraging samples of it in the pilferings of Plautus and Terence, who composed their plays by translating and adapting Hellenistic comedies. The high concerns of state and soul that aroused Aristophanes are in the New Comedy put aside as too perilous for the literary neck; usually the theme is domestic or private, and traces the devious roads by which women are led to generosity, and men nevertheless to matrimony. Love enters upon its triumphant career as master of the boards; a thousand damsels in distress cross the stage, but achieve honor and wedlock in the end. The old phallic dress is abandoned, and the old phallic bawdiness; but the story circles narrowly about the virginity of the leading lady, and virtue plays as small a role in it as in our daily press. Since the actors wore masks, and the number of masks was limited, the comic dramatist wove his plots of intrigue and mistaken identity around a few stock characters whom the audience was always delighted to recognize—the cruel father, the benevolent old man, the prodigal son, the heiress mistaken for a poor girl, the bragging soldier, the clever slave, the flatterer, the parasite, the physician, the priest, the philosopher, the cook, the courtesan, the procuress, and the pimp.

The masters of this comedy of manners in third-century Athens were Philemon and Menander. Of Philemon hardly anything survives except the echo of his renown. The Athenians liked him better than Menander, and gave him more prizes; but Philemon had raised to high excellence the art of organizing a claque. Posterity, being ignored in the subsidy, reversed the judgment, and gave the crown to Menander’s bones. This Congreve of Athens was a nephew of the fertile dramatist Alexis of Thurii, the pupil of Theophrastus, and the friend of Epicurus; from them he learned the secrets of drama, philosophy, and tranquillity. He almost realized Aristotle’s ideal: he was handsome and rich, contemplated life with serenity and understanding, and took his pleasures like a gentleman. He was an inconstant lover, content to repay Glycera’s devotion by touching her name with immortality. When Ptolemy I invited him to Alexandria he sent Philemon in his stead, saying, “Philemon has no Glycera”; Glycera, who had suffered much, rejoiced at having triumphed over a king.¹⁵ Thereafter, we are assured, he lived faithfully with her until, at the age of fifty-two, he died of a cramp while swimming at the Piraeus (292).¹⁶

His first play, as if announcing a new epoch, appeared in the year that followed Alexander’s death. Thereafter he wrote one hundred and four comedies, eight of which won the first prize. Some four thousand lines remain, all in brief fragments except for a papyrus discovered in Egypt in 1905; this contains half of the Epitrepontes, or The Arbitrants, and has lowered Menander’s reputation. We shall waste our reproaches if we complain that the themes of these plays are as monotonous as those of Greek sculpture, architecture, and pottery; we must remind ourselves that the Greeks judged a work not by the story it told—which is a child’s criterion—but by the manner of its telling. What the Greek mind relished in Menander was the neat polish of his style, the philosophy concentrated in his wit, and so realistic a portrayal of common scenes that Aristophanes of Byzantium asked, “O Menander, O Life, which of you imitated the other?”¹⁷ In a world that had fallen forfeit to soldiers nothing remained, in Menander’s view, but to contemplate human affairs as a spectator indulgent but uninvolved. He notes the vanities and vacillations of woman, but concedes that the average wife is a blessing. The action of The Arbitrants turns in part upon a rejection of the double standard;¹⁸ and of course one play is about the virtuous prostitute who, like Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias, refuses the man whom she loves in order to get him respectably married to a profitable wife.¹⁹ Lines that are now proverbs appear in the fragments, like “Evil communications corrupt good manners” (quoted by St. Paul²⁰), and “Conscience makes cowards of the bravest men”;²¹ some credit Menander with the original of Terence’s famous line—Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto—“I am a man, and consider nothing human to be alien to me.” Occasionally we come upon jewels of insight, as in “Everything that dies dies by its own corruption; all that injures is within”;²² or in these typical verses, prophetic of Menander’s early death:

Whom the gods love, die young; that man is blest

Who, having viewed at ease this solemn show

Of sun, stars, ocean, fire, doth quickly go

Back to his home with calm uninjured breast.

Be life or short or long, ‘tis manifest

Thou ne’er wilt see things goodlier, Parmeno,

Than these; then take thy sojourn here as though

Thou wert some playgoer or wedding guest,

The sooner sped, the safelier to thy rest.

Well-furnished, foe to none, with strength at need,

Shalt thou return; while he who tarries late

Faints on the road out-worn, with age oppressed,

Harassed by foes whom life’s dull tumults breed;

Thus ill dies he for whom death long doth wait.²³

IV. THEOCRITUS

When Philemon died (262) Greek comedy, and in large measure Athenian literature, died with him. The theater flourished, but it produced no masterpieces that time or scholarship thought fit to preserve; and the repetition of old comedies—chiefly those of Menander and Philemon—more and more crowded out original productions. As the third century ended, the spirit of the gay society that had generated the New Comedy died away, and was replaced in Athens by the serious mood of the philosophical schools. Other cities, Alexandria in particular, tried to transplant the dramatic art, but failed.

The great Library and the scholars whom it had attracted set the tone of Alexandrian literature. Books had to meet the tastes of a learned and critical audience, sophisticated by science and history. Even poetry became erudite, and tried to cover up the poverty of its fancy with recondite allusions and subtle turns of phrase. Callimachus wrote dead hymns to dead gods, pretty epigrams that sparkled for a day, judicious eulogies like The Lock of Berenice, and a didactic poem on Causes (Aitia) which contained much learned lore from geography, mythology, and history, and one of the earliest love stories in literature. Acontius, hero of this tale, is incredibly handsome, and Cydippe is painfully beautiful; they fall in love at first sight, are opposed by their money-minded parents, threaten suicide, half die of broken hearts, and finally end the romance with marriage; this is the story that a million poets and novelists have told since then, and which a million more will tell. It must be added, however, that in one of his epigrams Callimachus returned to more orthodox Greek tastes:

Drink now, and love, Democrates;

for we Shall not have wine and boys eternally.²⁴

His only rival in his century was his pupil Apollonius of Rhodes. When the student poached upon the master’s verses and competed for the favor of the Ptolemies, the two men quarreled in life and print, and Apollonius returned to Rhodes. He proved his courage by writing, in an age that preferred brevity; a very passable epic, the Argonautica. Callimachus dismissed it with an epigram—“A big book is a big evil”—of whose truth the reader may find an instance at close hand. In the end Apollonius was rewarded; he received the coveted appointment of librarian, and even persuaded some of his contemporaries to read his epic. It still survives, and contains an excellent psychological study of Medea’s love; but it is not indispensable to a modern education.*

The rise of pastoral poetry betrays almost statistically the growth of an urban civilization. The Greeks of earlier centuries had said little about the beauty of the countryside because most of them had once lived on farms or near them, and knew the lonely hardships, as well as the quiet beauty, of rural life. Doubtless the Alexandria of the Ptolemies was as hot and dusty as Alexandria is today, and the Greeks who lived in it looked back with idealizing memory upon the hills and fields of their motherland; the great city was just the place to breed bucolic poetry. Thither came, about 276, a confident young man with the pleasant name of Theocritus. He had begun life in Sicily, and had continued it in Cos; he had returned to Syracuse to seek the patronage of Hieron II, and had failed; but he could never forget the beauty of Sicily, its mountains and flowers, its coasts and bays. He moved to Alexandria, composed a panegyric on Ptolemy II, and won the passing favor of the court. For some years he seems to have lived amid royalty and scholarship, while his melodious pictures of country life made him popular among the sophisticates of the capital. His Praxinoa describes the terror of Alexandria’s crowded streets:

O Heavens, what a mob! I can’t imagine

How we’re to squeeze through, or how long it’ll take;

An ant-heap is nothing to this hurly-burly . . .

O Gorgon, darling, look!—what shall we do?

The royal cavalry! Don’t ride us down!

Eunoa, get out of the way!²⁶

How could a man with the soul of a poet and memories of Sicily be happy in such an environment? He praised the King for bread, but fed his spirit on fancies of his native island, and perhaps of Cos; he envied the simple life of the shepherd pacing with his placid animals grassy slopes overlooking sunny seas. In this mood he perfected the idyl—the eidyllion or little picture—and gave it the connotation that it keeps today, of a rustic cameo or a poetic tale. Only ten of the thirty-two pieces that have come down to us from Theocritus are pastoral poetry; but these have set a halfrural stamp upon the name that covers them all. Here at last nature entered Greek literature, not as a goddess merely, but as the living and lovable features of the earth. Never before had Greek literature conveyed so feelingly the secret sense of kinship that stirs the soul with gratitude and affection for rocks and streams, water and soil and sky.

But another theme reaches even more deeply into the heart of Theocritus—romantic love. He is still a Greek, indites two lyrics (xii and xxix) to homosexual friendship, and tells with vivid sentiment the story of Heracles and Hylas (xiii)—how the giant, “who withstood the ferocity of the lion, loved a youth and taught him like a father everything by which he might become a good and illustrious man; nor would he leave the lad at dawn, or noon, or evening, but sought continually to fashion him after his own heart, and to make him a right yoke-fellow with him in mighty deeds.” A more famous idyl (i) rehearses Stesichorus’ tale of Daphnis the Sicilian shepherd, who piped and sang so well that legend made him the inventor of bucolic (i.e., cow-tending) poetry. For a while Daphnis watched his herd, and envied their amorous play. When the first hair had sprouted on his lip a divine nymph fell in love with him, and had him for her mate. But as the price of her favors, she made him swear that he would never love another woman. He tried hard to keep his vow, and succeeded till a king’s daughter became enamored of his youth and gave herself to him in the fields. Aphrodite saw it, and revenged her fellow goddess by making Daphnis waste away with unrequited love. As he died he bequeathed his pipe to Pan in a song to which the narrator adds a haunting refrain:

“Master, approach; take to thee this fair pipe

Bedded in wax that breathes of honey still,

Bound at the lips with twine. For Love has come

To hale me off unto the house of Death.”

Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song.

“Now let the briar and the thistle flower

With violets, and the fair narcissus bloom

On junipers; let all things go awry,

And pines grow pears, since Daphnis is for death.

Let stags pursue the hounds, and from the hills

The screeching owls outsing the nightingales.”

Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song.

So said he then—no more. And Aphrodite

Was fain to raise him; but the Destinies

Had spun his thread right out. So Daphnis went

Down-stream; the whirlpool closed above his head,

The head of him whom all the Muses loved,

Of him from whom the Nymphs were not estranged.

Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song.²⁷

The second idyl continues the theme of love, but in a fiercer mood. Simaetha, maid of Syracuse, seduced and deserted by Delphis, seeks to command his love by filters and charms; if she fails she is resolved to poison him. Standing under the stars she tells Selene, goddess of the moon, with what hot jealousy she saw Delphis walking with his comrade.

Scarce had we reached the midpoint of the road by the dwelling of Lycon,

Delphis when I beheld with Eudanippus advancing:

Blonder of cheek and chin were the youths than yellowing ivy,

Yea, and their breasts far brighter of sheen than thou, O Selene,

Showing they just had come from the noble toil of the wrestlers.

Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.

I, when I saw, how I raged, how the flame took hold of my bosom, Burned my love-lost heart! My beauty waned, and no longer

Watched I the pomp as it passed; nor how I returned to my homestead

Knew I, for some fell bane, some parching disease had undone me.

Ten days, stretched on my bed, and ten nights dwelt I in anguish.

Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.

Often the bloom of my flesh grew dry and yellow as dye-wood, Yea, and the hairs of my head fell off, and of all that I once was Naught but skin was left, and bones; and to whom did I not turn, Whose road left I unsought where an old crone chanted a lovecharm? Still no solace I found, and time sped ever a-flying.

Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.

The third idyl introduces us to the nymph Amaryllis, and her unattainable charms; the fourth to the shepherd Corydon, the seventh to the poetic goatherd Lycidas—names destined to be invoked by a thousand poets again from Virgil to Tennyson. These rustics are idealized, and speak the most exquisite Greek; any one of them can sing hexameters lovelier than Homer’s; but we learn to accept their incredible gifts as a tolerable convention when we surrender to the plaintive lilt of their songs. Theocritus redeems their reality with the smell of their jackets and the occasional obscenity of their thoughts; a lusty vein of humor salts their sentiment, and makes them men. All in all, this is the most perfect Greek poetry written after Euripides, the only extant Hellenistic verse that has the breath of life.

V. POLYBIUS

If the Hellenistic age inspired but one great poet, it produced an unprecedented quantity and variety of prose. It invented the imaginary conversation, the essay, and the encyclopedia; it continued the tradition of writing brief and vivid biographies; and in the Roman sequel Greek literature would add the sermon and the novel. Oratory was a dying mode, for it had depended upon the game of politics, litigation before popular courts, and the democratic right to talk. The letter became a favorite vehicle, for both communication and literature; now were established the epistolary forms and phrases that we find in Cicero, and even the famous exordium dear to our grandfathers: “Hoping that this finds you as well as it leaves me.”²⁸

Historiography flourished. Ptolemy I, Aratus of Achaea, and Pyrrhus of Epirus wrote memoirs of their campaigns, establishing a tradition that culminated in Caesar. The Egyptian high priest Manetho wrote in Greek an Aigyptiaka, or Annals of Egypt, which bundled the Pharaohs somewhat arbitrarily into those dynasties that classify them to this day. Berosus, high priest of the Chaldeans, dedicated to Antiochus I a history of Babylon based upon the cuneiform records. Megasthenes, ambassador of Seleucus I to Chandragupta Maurya, startled the Greek world, about 300, with a book on India. “There is among the Brahmans,” said a suggestive passage, “a sect of philosophers who . . . hold that God is the Word, by which they mean not articulate speech but the discourse of reason”;²⁹ here again was that doctrine of Logos which was destined to make such an impress upon Christian theology. Timaeus af Tauromenium (Taormina), having been exiled from Sicily by Agathocles (317), traveled widely in Spain and Gaul, and then settled down in Athens to write a history of Sicily and the West. He was an industrious student, so anxious to include everything that some of his rivals called him “an old ragpicker.”³⁰ He labored to arrive at an accurate chronology, and hit upon the scheme of dating events by Olympiads. He criticized his predecessors severely, and was lucky enough to die before seeing the brutal attack made upon his work by Polybius.³¹

The greatest of the Hellenistic historians, and the only Greek fit to make a triad with Herodotus and Thucydides, was born at Megalopolis, in Arcadia (208). His father, Lycortas, was one of the leading men of the Achaean League, being ambassador to Rome in 189 and strategos in 184. The boy was brought up in the odor of politics, was trained as a soldier under Philopoemen, fought in the Roman campaign against the Gauls in Asia Minor, was associated with his father on an embassy to Egypt (181), and was made the League’s hipparchos, or commander of the cavalry, in 169.³² He paid for his prominence: when the Romans punished the League for supporting Perseus against them they took a thousand leading Achaeans to Rome as hostages, and Polybius was among them (167). For sixteen years he suffered exile, and at times, he tells us, “utter loss of spirit and paralysis of mind.”³³ But the younger Scipio befriended him, introduced him to the Scipionic circle of educated Romans, and persuaded the Senate, when it was scattering the other exiles throughout Italy, to let Polybius live with him in Rome. He accompanied Scipio on many campaigns, gave him valuable military advice, explored for him the coasts of Spain and Africa, and stood beside him at the burning of Carthage (146). He had received his freedom in 151, and in 149 he was employed as the representative of Rome in arranging a modus vivendi between the cities of Greece and their distant master, the Roman Senate. He must have performed this ungrateful task well, for several cities honored him with monuments—though one can never tell in what tense man’s gratitude is felt. Having lived through sixty full years of action, he retired to write a Treatise on Tactics, a Life of Philopoemen, and his immense Histories. He died like a gentleman by falling from his horse as he was returning from a hunt, at the age of eighty-two.

No man ever wrote history from a wider background of education, travel, and experience. His work was conceived on a grand scale, and proposed to tell the story, not only of Greece but of “the whole world” (i.e., the Mediterranean nations) from 221 to 146 B.C. “Such is the plan I propose; but all depends upon Fortune’s granting me a life long enough to execute it.”³⁴ He rightly felt that the center of political history, in the period which he covered, lay in Rome; he gave his book unity by making Rome the focus of its events, and studying with a diplomat’s curiosity the methods by which Rome, with British casualness, had mastered the Mediterranean world.³⁵ He admired the Romans intensely, for he had seen them in their greatest epoch, and had known chiefly the best of them in Scipio’s group; they had, he felt, just those qualities that were fatally lacking in Greek character and government. Himself an aristocrat, and befriended by aristocrats, he had no sympathy with what seemed to him mere mob rule in the later stages of Greek democracy. Political history appeared to him to be a repetitious cycle of monarchy (or dictatorship), aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and monarchy. The best escape from this cycle, he thought, was through a “mixed constitution” like that of Lycurgus or Rome—an enfranchised but limited citizenry choosing its own magistrates, but checked by the power of a continuous and aristocratic senate.³⁶ It was from this viewpoint that he wrote down the record of his times.

Polybius is “the historians’ historian” because he is as interested in his method as in his subject. He likes to talk about his plan of procedure, and philosophizes at every opportunity. Humanly he pictures his own qualifications as ideal. He insists that history should be written by those who have seen—or have directly consulted others who have seen—the events to be described. He denounces Timaeus for having relied on his ears rather than his eyes, and tells with pride of his own travels in search of data, documents, and geographical veracity; he reminds us how, in returning from Spain to Italy, he crossed the Alps by the same pass that Hannibal had used, and how he went down into the very toe of Italy to decipher an inscription left by Hannibal in Brutium.³⁷ He proposes to make his history as accurate as “the magnitude of the work and its comprehensive treatment” will allow;³⁸ and he succeeds, so far as we can say, better than any other Greek except Thucydides. He argues that the historian should have been a man of affairs, versed in the actual processes of statesmanship, politics, and war; otherwise he will never understand the behavior of states or the course of history.³⁹ He is a realist and a rationalist; he pierces the moral phrases of diplomats to the actual motives of policy. It amuses him to observe how easily men can be deceived, singly or en masse, and even repeatedly by the same tricks.⁴⁰ “What is good,” says a scandalous presage of Machiavelli, “very seldom coincides with what is advantageous, and few are those who can combine the two and adapt them to each other.”⁴¹ He accepts the Stoic theology of a Divine Providence, but he merely pities the popular cults of his day, and smiles at stories of supernatural intervention.⁴² He recognizes the role of chance in history, and the occasional efficacy of great men,⁴³ but he is resolved to lay bare the factual and often impersonal chain of causes and effects, so that history may be a lantern of understanding held up to the present and the future.⁴⁴ “There is no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past”; and “the soundest education and training for a life of active politics is the study of history”;⁴⁵ “it is history, and history alone, which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of affairs.”⁴⁶ The best method of history, he thinks, will be that which sees the life of a nation as an organic unity, and weaves the story of each part into the life history of the whole. “He who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a just view of history as a whole is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace.”⁴⁷

Of the forty books into which Polybius divided his Histories, time has preserved five, and the epitomists have rescued substantial fragments of the rest. It is a great pity that the execution of this vast conception is marred by degenerate Greek, peevish critiques of other historians, an almost exclusive preoccupation with politics and war, and an absurd segmentation of the narrative into Olympiads, giving the history of all the Mediterranean nations in each four-year period, and leading to exasperating digressions and a baffling discontinuity. Sometimes, as in the story of Hannibal’s invasion, Polybius mounts to drama and eloquence, but he reacts so strongly against the florid rhetoric popular among his immediate predecessors that he makes it a point of honor to be dull.⁴⁸ “No one,” said an ancient critic, “ever read him through.”⁴⁹ The world has almost forgotten him; but historians will long continue to study him because he was one of the greatest theorists and practitioners of historiography; because he dared to take a wide view and write a “universal history”; and because, above all, he understood that mere facts are worthless except through their interpretation, and that the past has no value except as our roots and our illumination.

CHAPTER XXVII

The Art of the Dispersion

I. A MISCELLANY

THE decline of Greek civilization was longest deferred in the sphere of art. Here the Hellenistic age bears comparison, not only in fertility but even in originality, with any period in history. Certainly the minor arts suffered no deterioration. Skilled workers in wood, ivory, silver, and gold were scattered throughout the expanded Greek world. The engraving of gems and coins now reached its highest excellence; as far east as Bactria Hellenized kings lavished art upon their currency, and in the west the dekadrachma of Hieron II might be defended as the finest coin in numismatic record. Alexandria became famous for its goldsmiths and silversmiths, whose artistry rivaled the faultless style of its poets; for its delightful cameos—precious stones or shells carved in colored relief; for its blue or green faience, its skillfully glazed pottery, its delicately designed and many-colored glass. The Portland Vase, very likely a product of Alexandria, shows this art at its best: elegant figures cut into a layer of milk-white glass superimposed upon a body of blue glass; this is, so to speak, the Josiah Wedgwood masterpiece of antiquity.*

Music remained popular in all classes of the population. Scales and modes changed in the direction of refinement and novelty;¹ transient discords were admitted into harmony; instruments and compositions increased in complexity.² Towards 240, at Alexandria, the old “pipes of Pan” were enlarged into an organ of bronze pipes; and about 175 Ctesibius improved this into an organ operated by a combination of water and air and enabling the player to control vast waves of sound. We know nothing more of its construction; but we shall see how rapidly it developed, in Roman days, into the organ of Christian and modern times.³ Instruments were combined into orchestras, and semisymphonic performances of purely instrumental music, sometimes in five movements, were given in the theaters of Alexandria, Athens, and Syracuse.⁴ Professional virtuosos rose to great prominence, and to a social standing commensurate with their high fees. About 318 Aristoxenus of Taras, a pupil of Aristotle, wrote a small treatise, Harmonics, which became the classic ancient text in musical theory. Aristoxenus was a very serious man, and like most philosophers he did not enjoy the music of his time. Athenaeus represents him as saying, in words that many generations have heard: “We also, since the theaters have become completely barbarized, and since music has become utterly ruined and vulgar—we, being but a few, will recall to our minds, sitting by ourselves, what music used to be.”⁵

The architecture of the Hellenistic age cannot impress us, for time has leveled it away with indiscriminate hostility. And yet we know, from literature and the remains, that the Greek building art spread its sway in this period from Bactria to Spain. The mutual influence of Greece and the Orient brought in a mixture of styles: the colonnade and the architrave invaded inner Asia, while the arch, the vault, and the cupola entered the West; even so ancient an Hellenic center as Delos raised Egyptian and Persian capitals. The Doric order seemed too stern and stiff for an age that loved refinement and ornament; it gave ground city by city, while the ornate Corinthian style advanced to its highest excellence. The secularization of art kept pace with the secularization of government, law, morals, letters, and philosophy; stoas, porticoes, market places, courts, assembly rooms, libraries, theaters, gymnasiums, and baths began to crowd out the temples, and regal or private palaces gave a new outlet to Greek design and decoration. Domestic interiors were adorned with paintings, statues, and wall reliefs. Private gardens surrounded the more palatial homes. Royal parks, gardens, lakes, and pavilions were built in the capitals, and were usually opened to public use. Town planning developed as a sister art to architecture; streets were laid out on Hippodamus’ rectangular scheme, with main avenues as wide as thirty feet—an ample width for horse-and-chariot days. Smyrna boasted of paved thoroughfares,⁶ but presumably most Hellenistic streets were trampled dirt, and knew all the vicissitudes of mud.

Fine buildings developed beyond any precedent. At Athens, in the second century, the lofty Corinthian columns of the Olympieum were set up, and the general design of the extended edifice, the most magnificent in Athens, was kid down by the Roman architect Cossutius—a strange inversion of Rome’s usual dependence upon the artists of Greece. Livy described this temple of the Olympian Zeus as the only structure he had seen that could be a fit dwelling for the god of gods.⁷ Sixteen columns of it stand—the most beautiful existing specimens of the Corinthian style. At Eleusis the dying piety of Athens and the genius of Philon completed the majestic temple of the Mysteries which Pericles had begun on a site already sacred in Mycenaean times; only fragments are left, but some of them show Greek design and carving still at their best. At Delos the French have excavated the ground plan of Apollo’s sanctuary, and have revealed a city once crowded with edifices devoted to commerce or the protection of a hundred Greek or foreign gods. At Syracuse Hieron II raised many impressive buildings, and restored and enlarged the extant municipal theater; to this day we may read his name on its stones. In Egypt the Ptolemies adorned Alexandria with edifices that gave the city a reputation for beauty, but no sign of them survives. Ptolemy III erected at Edfu a temple which is the noblest architectural relic of the Grecian occupation, and his successors built or rebuilt the temple of Isis at Philae. In Ionia new homes were given to the gods at Miletus, Priene, Magnesia, and elsewhere; the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus was finished about 300 B.C. A still vaster fane was raised by the architects Paeonius and Daphnis at Didyma, near Miletus, in honor of Apollo (332 B.C.—A.D. 41); some drums of the superb Ionic columns still remain. At Pergamum Eumenes II made his capital the talk of Greece by building, among many noble structures, that famous Altar to Zeus which the Germans exhumed in 1878, and have skillfully reconstructed in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin. A majestic flight of steps mounted between two porticoes to a spacious colonnaded court; and around one hundred and thirty feet of the base ran a frieze as supreme in its period as that of the Mausoleum in the fourth century, or the Parthenon in the fifth. Never had Greece been so handsomely adorned; and never had the enthusiasm of its citizens and the skill of its artists transformed with such splendor so many habitations of men.

II. PAINTING

Painting is usually the last great art to mature in a civilization; in the early stages of a culture it is subordinated to religious architecture and statuary, and it acquires independence only when private life and private wealth invite the decoration of the home or the commemoration of a name. The death of democracy having weakened the sense of the state, the individual returned to domestic consolations. Rich men built themselves palatial residences, and gave high fees to artists who could adorn a fountain or brighten a wall. Alexandria used painting on glass as one form of mural ornament; all Hellenistic cities employed for this purpose movable panels of wood; princes and magnates preferred to have immense pictures painted on detachable marble slabs. Pausanias describes a prodigious number of paintings seen by him in his tour of Greece, but nothing of this flourishing art has cheated time except some faded tints on pottery or stone. We are left to guess at its quality from the pale and middling copies found at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome.

Greece continued to rank its painters as high as its sculptors and architects, perhaps higher. It paid them American commissions, and told a thousand fond stories about their lives. Ctesicles of Ephesus, failing to receive a desired boon from Queen Stratonice, painted her romping with a fisherman, exhibited the picture, and then took ship to safety; Stratonice, because “the likenesses of the two figures were so admirably expressed,” forgave him and let him, return.⁸ When Aratus took Sicyon he ordered all portraits of its past dictators destroyed; one dictator, Archestratus, had been shown by Melanthus (a fourth-century painter) beside his chariot, and so vividly that the artist Neacles entreated Aratus to spare the picture; Aratus consented, on condition that the figure of Archestratus be replaced by some less offensive form.⁹ Protogenes, says Strabo, painted a satyr with a partridge so realistically that live partridges called to it; the painter finally blotted out the bird so that people might appreciate the excellence of his satyr.¹⁰ The same artist, Pliny tells us, applied four coats of paint to his most famous picture, lalysus (supposed founder of the town of that name in Rhodes), so that when time wore out the uppermost layer the colors might still be fresh and clear. Vexed by his inability to represent with sufficient verisimilitude the foam that dripped from the mouth of lalysus* dog, Protogenes lost his temper and hurled a sponge at the picture, willing to destroy it; the sponge, of course, struck just at the right place, and, when it fell, left a blotch of color marvelously like the foam of a panting hound. When Demetrius Poliorcetes besieged Rhodes he refrained from setting fire to the town lest this painting be destroyed. During the siege Protogenes continued at work in his village studio, in the direct line of the Macedonian advance. Demetrius sent for him and asked why he had not, like the other villagers, taken refuge within the city walls. “Because I know,” answered Protogenes, “that you are waging war with the Rhodians, and not with the arts.” The King assigned a guard to protect him, and neglected the siege to watch the artist work.¹¹

Hellenistic painters knew the tricks of perspective, foreshortening, lighting, and grouping. Though they used landscapes only as background and decoration, and rendered them (if we may judge from the Pompeian copies) in a lifeless and conventional way, they at least realized the existence of nature, and brought it into art at the same time that Theocritus was importing it into poetry. But they were so interested in man and all his works that they had little time for trees and flowers. Their predecessors had painted only the gods and the rich; the Hellenistic artists were fascinated by anything human, and discovered that an ugly subject might make a beautiful painting, or at least a handsome fee. They turned to common life with a Dutch zest, and delighted in picturing barbers, cobblers, prostitutes, seamstresses, donkeys, deformed men, or peculiar animals. To these genre pictures they added representations of still life—cakes and eggs, fruit and vegetables, fish and game, wine and all the paraphernalia of its ancient ritual. Sosus of Pergamum amused his contemporaries by imitating, in a deceptively realistic floor mosaic, an unswept floor still littered with the leavings of a feast.¹² The sedate were scandalized, and denounced these glorifiers of common things as pornographoi and rhyparographoi—portrayers of obscenity and filth. In Thebes the representation of ugly objects was forbidden by law.¹³

Certain larger masterpieces of the age were rescued not from anonymity but from oblivion by the lava of Vesuvius. A fresco found at Ostia is apparently a weak copy of a Hellenistic original; we know it as The Aldobrandini Wedding from the Italian family to which it belonged before it found a place in the Vatican. Aphrodite, Rubensianly robust, warms up the courage of the timid bride while the bridegroom, needing no prodding, waits impatiently beside the couch; finer than these central personages is a graceful woman playing some hymeneal strain on a faded lute. A Pompeian mural, traced uncertainly to a third-century Greek original, shows Achilles, with Patroclus beside him, angrily surrendering Briseis to Agamemnon’s lust. The figures in these paintings seem to our wont and taste more ample than beautiful; we are accustomed to less body and longer legs; but it must be conceded that ancient artists knew Greek men and women better than we shall ever know them. Time has taken the bloom from these works; only an act of historical imagination can restore the brilliance and freshness that doubtless were once the admiration of multitudes and kings.

More impressive are certain Roman mosaics that have apparently been derived from Hellenistic paintings. Mosaic was an old art in Egypt and Mesopotamia; the Greeks took it over, and lifted it to the peak of its history. A painting was divided by lines into little squares, and tiny cubes of marble were so colored that when put together they reproduced the picture in a form surprisingly durable; several mosaics, though trodden by innumerable feet through many centuries, still retain their color and tell their ancient tale. The Battle of Issus, found in the House of the Faun at Pompeii, and dubiously connected with a fourth-century Greek painting by Philoxenus,* is composed of approximately 1,500,000 stones, each some two or three millimeters square, the whole mosaic measuring eight by sixteen feet. It was badly injured by the earthquake and eruption that overwhelmed Pompeii in A.D. 79, but enough remains to attest the skill and vigor of the work. Alexander, black and disheveled with the heat and filth of war, is leading the attack, and has ridden his Bucephalus to within a few feet of the chariot that carries Darius. A Persian grandee has flung himself between the kings, and has received Alexander’s lance in his body. Darius, ignoring his own danger—for the conqueror’s next lance is aimed at him—leans from his chariot towards his fallen friend, his face full of anxiety and grief. Persian cavalrymen rush up to rescue their ruler, and Alexander’s weapon stays poised in the air. The representation of complex emotions in Darius’ face is the outstanding accomplishment of the work; but the most attractive head in the composition is that of Alexander’s horse. There is no greater mosaic than this.

III. SCULPTURE

Never has statuary been more abundant than in the Hellenistic age. Temples and palaces, homes and streets, gardens and parks were crowded with it; every phase of human life, and many aspects of the plant and animal world, were represented in it; portrait busts immortalized for a moment dead heroes and living celebrities; at last even abstractions like Fortune, Peace, Calumny, or the Nick of Time, became concrete in stone. Eutychides of Sicyon, a pupil of Lysippus, molded for Antioch a famous Tyche, or Fortune, to serve as the incarnation of the city’s soul and hope. The sons of Praxiteles—Timachus and Cephisodotus—carried on the refined tradition of Athenian sculpture; and in the Peloponnesus Damophon of Messene scaled the heights of fame with a colossal group of Demeter, Persephone, and Artemis. But most of the new sculptors followed the line of least starvation to the palaces and courts of Greco-Oriental magnates and kings.

Rhodes, in the third century, developed a school of sculpture characteristically its own. There were a hundred colossal statues in the island, any one of which, says Pliny,¹⁴ would have made a city famous. The greatest of them was the bronze colossus of the sun-god Helios, set up in successive blocks by Chares of Lindus about 280. Chares, says a naive tradition, committed suicide when the cost seriously exceeded his estimate; and Laches, also of Lindus, completed the work. It did not bestride the harbor, but rose near it to a height of one hundred and five feet. Its dimensions might suggest that Rhodian taste ran to display and size; but perhaps the Rhodians proposed to use it as a lighthouse and a symbol. If we may believe a poem in The Greek Anthology,¹⁵ the statue held a light aloft, and symbolized the freedom that Rhodes enjoyed—a curious anticipation of a famous statue in a modern port.* It was, of course, included among the Seven Wonders of the World. “This statue,” Pliny reports,

was thrown down by an earthquake fifty-six years after it was erected. Few men can clasp the thumb in their arms, and its fingers are larger than most statues. When the limbs are broken asunder vast caverns are seen yawning in the interior. Within it, too, are to be seen large masses of rock by whose weight the artist steadied it while in process of erection. It is said that it was twelve years in the making, and that three hundred talents were spent upon it—a sum raised from the engines of war abandoned by Demetrius after his futile siege.*¹⁶

Almost as famous in history was another product of the Rhodian school, the Laocoön. Pliny saw it in the palace of the Emperor Titus; it was found in the ruins of the Baths of Titus in A.D. 1506, and is almost certainly the original work of Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, who carved it out of two blocks of marble in the second or first century B.C.¹⁸ Its discovery stirred Renaissance Italy and profoundly impressed Michelangelo, who tried, without success, to restore the lost right arm of the central figure.† Laocoön was a Trojan priest who, when the Greeks sent the wooden horse to Troy, advised against receiving it, saying (says Virgil), Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes—“I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts.”¹⁹ To punish his wisdom Athena, who favored the Greeks, commissioned two serpents to kill him. They seized first upon his two sons, seeing which Laocoön rushed to their aid, only to be caught in the coils; in the end all three were crushed, and died from the venom of the fangs. The sculptors took the liberty assumed by Virgil (and, in the Philoctetes, by Sophocles) to describe pain vigorously, but the result does not accord with the natural repose of stone. In literature, and usually in life, pain passes; in the Laocöon the cry of agony has been given an unnatural permanence, and the spectator is not so moved as by Demeter’s silent grief.‡ What nevertheless evokes our admiration is the mastery of design and technique; the musculature is exaggerated, but the old priest’s limbs, and the bodies of his sons, are molded with dignity and restraint. Perhaps if we had known the story before seeing the group we should have been as impressed as Pliny, who thought this the greatest achievement of ancient plastic art.²⁰

Many other Greek centers had flourishing schools of sculpture in this underestimated age. Alexandria turned over its soil and its buildings too often in the long course of its history to preserve the works that Greek artists made for the Ptolemies. The sole important survivor is the serene Nile of the Vatican, humorously supported by sixteen water babies symbolizing the sixteen cubits of the river’s annual rise. At Sidon Greek sculpture cut for unknown dignitaries a series of sarcophagi of which the best, misnamed the Sarcophagus of Alexander, is the pride of the Constantinople Museum. Its carving is equal, on a smaller scale, to that of the Parthenon frieze; the figures are handsome and well proportioned; the action is vigorous but clear, and the soft tints that still cling to the stone exemplify the aid that Greek painting gave to Greek sculpture. At Tralles, in Caria, about 150 B.C., Apollonius and Tauriscus cast for Rhodes a colossal bronze group now known as the Farnese Bull: two handsome youths are lashing the lovely Dirce to the horns of a wild bull, because she has ill-treated their mother Antiope—who looks on in repulsively calm satisfaction.* At Pergamum Greek sculptors cast in bronze several battle groups, which Attalus first dedicated in his capital to celebrate his repulse of the Gauls. To express the debt which all Greek culture felt to Athens, and perhaps to spread his fame, Attalus presented marble replicas of these figures to be set up on the Athenian Acropolis. Fragmentary marble copies have survived in The Dying Gaul of the Capitoline Museum, in the miscalled Paetus and Arria†—a Gaul who, preferring death to capture, kills first his wife and then himself—and in several smaller pieces now scattered through Egypt and Europe. Perhaps to the same group belongs a Dead Amazon,‡ impeccably molded in every detail except the incredibly perfect breasts. These figures show a classic restraint in the expression of emotion; the conquered men suffer the extremes of pain and grief, but die without opera; and the conquerors have allowed the artists to portray the virtues, as well as the defeat, of their enemies. There is no sign here of any falling off in power of conception, accuracy of anatomical observation, or skill and patience of technique. Almost as perfect is the great relief that ran along the base of the Altar of Zeus on the Acropolis of Pergamum, and told again the story of the war between the gods and the giants—presumably a modest allegory for Pergamenes and Gauls. The work is overcrowded, and sometimes theatrically violent; but some figures stand out as in the best tradition of Greek art. The headless Zeus is carved with the strength of Scopas, and the goddess Hecate is a lyric of grace and beauty amid the terror and carnage of war.

The age was rich in now anonymous masterpieces that almost call the roll of the major gods. The majestic Head of Zeus found at Otricoli, and the Ludovisi Hera now in the Museo delle Terme so pleased the young Goethe that he took casts of them with him to Germany as, so to speak, the authentic autographs of Jove and Juno. The once acclaimed Apollo Belvedere* is academically cold and lifeless; and yet, two centuries ago, it set Winckelmann aflame.²¹ A world away from this smooth weakling is the Farnese Heracles, copied by Glycon of Athens from an original attributed to Lysippus—all muscle in the overdone body, all weariness, kindliness, and wonder in the face—as if power was asking itself its never answered question: what should be its goal? Of Aphrodite the age had representatives only less numerous than her devotees; several of these statues have survived, mostly through Roman copies. The Aphrodite of Melos—the Venus de Milo of the Louvre—is apparently an original Greek work of the second century B.C. It was found on the island of Melos in 1820, near a pedestal fragment bearing the letters—sandros; perhaps Agesander of Antioch carved this modest nudity. The face is not as delicately fair as that which forms the symbol of this volume, but the figure itself is a poem of that health whose natural flower is beauty; the wasp waist finds no encouragement in this full body and these sturdy hips. Not so near perfection, but still pleasant to the eye, are the Capitoline Venus and the Venus de Medici.† Candidly and disarmingly sensual is the Venus Callipyge, or Venus of the Lovely Buttocks,‡ who drapes her charms to reveal them, and turns to admire her nates in the pool. More impressive than any of these is the superb Nike, or Victory of Samothrace, found there in 1863, and now the sculptural masterpiece of the Louvre.§ The goddess of victory is shown as if alighting in full flight upon the prow of a swiftly moving ship and leading the vessel on to attack; her great wings seem to pull the craft along in the face of the breeze that confuses her robes. Again the Greek conception of woman as no mere delicacy, but as a strong mother, dominates the work; this is not the frail and passing beauty of youth, but the lifelong call of the woman to the man to lift himself up to achievement, as if the artist had wished to illustrate the last lines of Goethe’s Faust. The civilization that could conceive and carve this figure was yet far from dead.

The gods were not the chief interest of the sculptors who brightened the evening of Greek art. These men looked upon Olympus as a quarry of subjects, and no more. When that quarry had been worn down by repetition they turned to the earth and took delight in representing the wisdom and loveliness, the strangeness and absurdities of human life. They carved or cast impressive heads of Homer, Euripides, and Socrates. They made a number of smooth and delicate Hermaphrodites, whose equivocal beauty arrests the eye in the Archeological Museum at Constantinople, or the Borghese Gallery in Rome, or the Louvre. Children offered refreshingly natural poses, like the boy who removes a thorn from his foot, and another who struggles with a goose,* and—finest of this class—the trustful Praying Youth attributed to Lysippus’ pupil Boëthus.† Or the sculptors went to the woods and depicted sylvan sprites like the Barberini Faun of Munich, or hilarious satyrs like the Drunken Silenus of the Naples Museum. And here and there, with jolly frequency, they inserted among their figures the rosy cheeks and impish pranks of the god of love.

IV. COMMENTARY

This sudden irruption of humor into the once formal sanctuaries of Greek sculpture is a distinctive mark of Hellenistic art. Every museum has preserved from the ruins of the age some laughing faun, some singing Pan, some rioting Bacchus, some urchin serving as a fountain with alarming indecency. Perhaps the return of Greek art to Asia restored to it the variety, feeling, and warmth which it had almost lost in its classic subordination to religion and the state. Nature, which had been adored, began now to be enjoyed. Not that classic moderation disappeared: the Youth of Subiaco in the Museo delle Terme, the Sleeping Ariadne of the Vatican, the Sitting Maiden of the Palace of the Conservatori continue the delicate tradition of Praxiteles; and in Athens, throughout this period, many sculptors fought the “modernistic” tendencies of their time by deliberately going back to fourth-and fifth-century styles, even, now and then, to the archaic dignity of the sixth. But the spirit of the age was for experiment, individualism, naturalism, and realism, with a strong countercurrent toward imagination, idealism, sentiment, and dramatic effect. Artists carefully followed the progress of anatomy, and worked more from models in studios; sculptors carved their figures to be seen not only from in front, but from all sides. They used novel materials—crystal, chalcedony, topaz, glass, dark basalt, black marble, porphyry—to imitate the pigment of Negroes or the ruddy faces of satyrs illumined with wine.

Their fertility of invention equaled their mastery of technique. They were tired of repeating types; they anticipated Ruskin’s criticism,* and were resolved to show the reality and individuality of the persons and objects they portrayed. They no longer confined themselves to the perfect and the beautiful, to athletes, heroes, and gods; they made genre pictures or terra cottas of workingmen, fishermen, musicians, market men, jockeys, eunuchs; they sought unhackneyed subjects in children and peasants, in characterful features like those of Socrates, in bitter old men like Demosthenes, in powerful, almost brutal faces like that of Euthydemus the Greco-Bactrian king, in desolate derelicts like the Old Market Woman of the Metropolitan Museum in New York; they recognized and relished the variety and complexity of life. They did not hesitate to be sensual; they were not parents anxious about the chastity of their daughters, nor philosophers disturbed by the social consequences of an epicurean individualism; they saw the charms of the flesh, and carved them into a beauty that might for a while laugh at wrinkles and time. Freed from the conventions of the classic age, they indulged themselves in tender sentiment, and pictured, possibly with sincere feeling, shepherds dying of undisillusioned love, pretty heads lost in romantic reverie, mothers fondly contemplating their children: these, too, seemed to them a part of the reality they would record. And finally they faced the facts of pain and grief, of tragic catastrophes and untimely death; and they resolved to find a place for them in their representation of human life.

No student with a mind of his own will join in any sweeping judgment about Hellenistic decay; a general conclusion to this effect serves too easily as an excuse for ending the story of Greece before the task is done. We feel in this period a slackening of creative impulse, but we are compensated by the lavish abundance of an art now completely master of its tools. Youth cannot last forever, nor are its charms supreme; the life of Greece, like every life, had to have a natural subsidence, and accept a ripe old age. Decadence had set in, it had bitten into religion, morals, and letters, and had left its stigmata upon individual works here and there; but the impetus of the Greek genius kept Greek art, like Greek science and philosophy, near their zenith to the end. And never in its isolated youth had the Greek passion for beauty, or the Greek power and patience to embody it, spread so triumphantly, or with such rich stimulation and result, into the sleeping cities of the East. There Rome would find it, and pass it on.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The Climax of Greek Science

I. EUCLID AND APOLLONIUS

THE fifth century saw the zenith of Greek literature, the fourth the flowering of philosophy, the third the culmination of science. The kings proved more tolerant and helpful to research than the democracies. Alexander sent to the Greek cities of the Asiatic coast camel loads of Babylonian astronomical tablets, most of which were soon translated into Greek; the Ptolemies built the Museum for advanced studies, and gathered the science as well as the literature of the Mediterranean cultures into the great Library; Apollonius dedicated his Conies to Attalus I, and under the protection of Hieron II Archimedes drew his circles and reckoned the sand. The fading of frontiers and the establishment of a common language, the fluid interchange of books and ideas, the exhaustion of metaphysics and the weakening of the old theology, the rise of a secularly minded commercial class in Alexandria, Rhodes, Antioch, Pergamum, and Syracuse, the multiplication of schools, universities, observatories, and libraries, combined with wealth, industry, and royal patronage to free science from philosophy, and to encourage it in its work of enlightening, enriching, and endangering the world.

About the opening of the third century—perhaps long before it—the tools of the Greek mathematician were sharpened by the development of a simpler notation. The first nine letters of the alphabet were used for the digits, the next letter for 10, the next nine for 20, 30, etc., the next for 100, the next for 200, 300, and so forth. Fractions and ordinals were expressed by an acute accent after the letter; so, according to the context, l’ stood for one tenth or tenth; and a small l under a letter indicated the corresponding thousand. This arithmetical shorthand provided a convenient system of computation; some extant Greek papyri crowd complicated calculations, ranging from fractions to millions, into less space than similar reckonings would require in our own numerical notation.*

Nevertheless the greatest victories of Hellenistic science were in geometry. To this period belongs Euclid, whose name would for two thousand years provide geometry with a synonym. All that we know of his life is that he opened a school at Alexandria, and that his students excelled all others in their field; that he cared nothing about money, and when a pupil asked, “What shall I profit from learning geometry?” bade a slave give him an obol, “since he must make a gain out of what he learns”;¹ that he was a man of great modesty and kindliness; and that when, about 300, he wrote his famous Elements, it never occurred to him to credit the various propositions to their discoverers, because he made no pretense at doing more than to bring together in logical order the geometrical knowledge of the Greeks.* He began, without preface or apology, with simple definitions, then postulates or necessary assumptions, then “common notions” or axioms. Following Plato’s injunctions, he confined himself to such figures and proofs as needed no other instruments than ruler and compasses. He adopted and perfected a method of progressive exposition and demonstration already familiar to his predecessors: proposition, diagrammatic illustration, proof, and conclusion. Despite minor flaws the total result was a mathematical architecture that rivaled the Parthenon as a symbol of the Greek mind. Actually it outlived the Parthenon as an integral form; for until our own century the Elements of Euclid constituted the accepted textbook of geometry in nearly every European university. One must go to the Bible to find a rival for it in enduring influence.

A lost work of Euclid, the Conies, summarized the studies of Menaechmus, Aristaeus, and others on the geometry of the cone. Apollonius of Perga, after years of study in Euclid’s school, took this treatise as the starting point of his own Conies, and explored in eight “books” and 387 propositions the properties of the curves generated by the intersection of a cone by a plane. To three of these curves (the fourth being the circle) he gave their lasting names—parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola. His discoveries made possible the theory of projectiles, and substantially advanced mechanics, navigation, and astronomy. His exposition was laborious and verbose, but his method was completely scientific; his work was as definitive as Euclid’s, and its seven extant books are to this day the most original classic in the literature of geometry.

II. ARCHIMEDES

The greatest of ancient scientists was born at Syracuse about 287 B.C., son of the astronomer Pheidias, and apparently cousin to Hieron II, the most enlightened ruler of his time. Like many other Hellenistic Greeks who were interested in science and could afford the expense, Archimedes went to Alexandria; there he studied under the successors of Euclid, and derived an inspiration for mathematics that gave him two boons—an absorbed life and a sudden death. Returning to Syracuse, he devoted himself monastically to every branch of mathematical science. Often, like Newton, he neglected food and drink, or the care of his body, in order to pursue the consequences of a new theorem, or to draw figures in the oil on his body, the ashes on the hearth, or the sand with which Greek geometers were wont to strew their floors.² He was not without humor: in what he considered his best book, The Sphere and the Cylinder, he deliberately inserted false propositions (so we are assured), partly to play a joke upon the friends to whom he sent the manuscript, partly to ensnare poachers who liked to appropriate other men’s thoughts.³ Sometimes he amused himself with puzzles that brought him to the verge of inventing algebra, like the famous Cattle Problem that so beguiled Lessing;⁴ sometimes he made strange mechanisms to study the principles on which they operated. But his perennial interest and delight lay in pure science conceived as a key to the understanding of the universe rather than as a tool of practical construction or expanding wealth. He wrote not for pupils but for professional scholars, communicating to them in pithy monographs the abstruse conclusions of his research. All later antiquity was fascinated by the originality, depth, and clarity of these treatises. “It is not possible,” said Plutarch, three centuries later, “to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanations. Some ascribe this to his natural genius; others think that these easy and unlabored pages were the result of incredible effort and toil.’⁵

Ten of Archimedes’ works survive, after many adventures in Europe and Arabia. (1) The Method explains to Eratosthenes, with whom he had formed a friendship in Alexandria, how mechanical experiments can extend geometrical knowledge. This essay ended the ruler-and-compass reign of Plato and opened the door to experimental methods; even so it reveals the different mood of ancient and modern science: the one tolerated practice for the sake of theoretical understanding, the other tolerates theory for the sake of possible practical results. (2) A Collection of Lemmas discusses fifteen “choices,” or alternative hypotheses, in plane geometry. (3) The Measurement of a Circle arrives at a value between and for π—the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle—and “squares the circle” by showing, through the method of exhaustion, that the area of a circle equals that of a right-angled triangle whose perpendicular equals the radius, and whose base equals the circumference, of the circle. (4) The Quadrature of the Parabola studies, by a form of integral calculus, the area cut off from a parabola by a chord, and the problem of finding the area of an ellipse. (5) On Spirals defines a spiral as the figure made by a point moving from a fixed point at a uniform rate along a straight line which is revolving in a plane at a uniform rate about the same fixed point; and finds the area enclosed by a spiral curve and two radii vectores by methods approximating differential calculus. (6) The Sphere and the Cylinder seeks formulas for the volume and surface area of a pyramid, a cone, a cylinder, and a sphere. (7) On Conoids and Spheroids studies the solids generated by the revolution of conic sections about their axes. (8) The Sand-Reckoner passes from geometry to arithmetic, almost to logarithms, by suggesting that large numbers may be represented by multiples, or “orders,” of 10,000; by this method Archimedes expresses the number of grains of sand which would be needed to fill the universe—assuming, he genially adds, that the universe has a reasonable size. His conclusion, which anyone may verify for himself, is that the world contains not more than sixty-three “ten-million units of the eighth order of numbers”—or, as we should put it, 10⁶⁸. References to lost works of Archimedes indicate that he had also discovered a way of finding the square root of nonsquare numbers. (9) On Plane Equilibriums applies geometry to mechanics, studies the center of gravity of various bodily configurations, and achieves the oldest extant formulation of scientific statics. (10) On Floating Bodies founds hydrostatics by arriving at mathematical formulas for the position of equilibrium of a floating body. The work begins with the then startling thesis that the surface of any liquid body at rest and in equilibrium is spherical, and that the sphere has the same center as the earth.

Perhaps Archimedes was led to the study of hydrostatics by an incident almost as famous as Newton’s apple. King Hieron had given to a Syracusan Cellini some gold to be formed into a crown. When the crown was delivered it weighed as much as the gold; but some doubt arose whether the artist had made up part of the weight by using silver, keeping the saved gold for himself. Hieron turned over to Archimedes his suspicion and the crown, presumably stipulating that the one should be resolved without injuring the other. For weeks Archimedes puzzled over the problem. One day, as he stepped into a tub at the public baths, he noticed that the water overflowed according to the depth of his immersion, and that his body appeared to weigh—or press downward—less, the more it was submerged. His curious mind, exploring and utilizing every experience, suddenly formulated the “principle of Archimedes”—that a floating body loses in weight an amount equal to the weight of the water which it displaces. Surmising that a submerged body would displace water according to its volume, and perceiving that this principle offered a test for the crown, Archimedes (if we may believe the staid Vitruvius) dashed out naked into the street and rushed to his dwelling, crying out “Eureka! eureka!”—I have found it! I have found it! Home, he soon discovered that a given weight of silver, since it had more volume per weight than gold, displaced more water, when immersed, than an equal weight of gold. He observed also that the submerged crown displaced more water than a quantity of gold equaling the crown in weight. He concluded that the crown had been alloyed with some metal less dense than gold. By replacing gold with silver in the gold weight which he was using for comparison, until the compound displaced as much water as the crown, Archimedes was able to say just how much silver had been used in the crown, and how much gold had been stolen.

That he had satisfied the curiosity of the King did not mean so much to him as that he had discovered the law of floating bodies, and a method for measuring specific gravity. He made a planetarium representing the sun, the earth, the moon, and the five planets then known (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury), and so arranging them that by turning a crank one could set all these bodies in motions differing in direction and speed;⁶ but he probably agreed with Plato that the laws that govern the movements of the heavens are more beautiful than the stars.* In a lost treatise partly preserved in summaries, Archimedes so accurately formulated the laws of the lever and the balance that no advance was made upon his work until A.D. 1586. “Commensurable magnitudes,” said Proposition VI, “will balance at distances inversely proportional to their gravities”⁸—a useful truth whose brilliant simplification of complex relationships moves the soul of a scientist as the Hermes of Praxiteles moves the artist. Almost intoxicated with the vision of power which he saw in the lever and the pulley, Archimedes announced that if he had a fixed fulcrum to work with he could move anything: “Pa bo, kai tan gan kino” he is reported to have said, in the Doric dialect of Syracuse: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.”⁹ Hieron challenged him to do as well as say, and pointed to the difficulty which his men were experiencing in beaching a large ship in the royal fleet. Archimedes arranged a series of cogs and pulleys in such wise that he alone, sitting at one end of the mechanism, was able to draw the fully loaded vessel out of the water onto the land.¹⁰

Delighted with this demonstration, the King asked Archimedes to design some engines of war. It was characteristic of the two men that Archimedes, having designed them, forgot them, and that Hieron, loving peace, never used them. Archimedes, says Plutarch,

possessed so high a spirit, so profound a soul, and such treasures of scientific knowledge, that though these inventions had now obtained for him the renown of more than human sagacity, he yet would not deign to leave behind him any writing on such subjects; but, repudiating as sordid and ignoble . . . every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life—studies whose superiority to all others is unquestioned, and in which the only doubt can be whether the beauty and grandeur of the subjects examined, or the precision and cogency of the methods and means of proof, most deserve our admiration.¹¹

But when Hieron was dead Syracuse became embroiled with Rome, and the doughty Marcellus assailed it by land and sea. Though Archimedes was now (212) a man of seventy-five, he superintended the defense on both fronts. Behind the walls that protected the harbor he set up catapults able to hurl heavy stones to a considerable distance; their rain of projectiles was so devastating that Marcellus retreated until he could advance by night. But when the ships were seen near the shore the sailors were harassed by bowmen who shot at them through the holes that Archimedes’ aides had pierced in the wall. Moreover, the inventor had arranged within the walls great cranes which, when the Roman vessels came within reach, were turned by cranks and pulleys so as to drop upon the ships heavy weights of stone or lead that sank many of them. Other cranes, armed with gigantic hooks, grasped vessels, lifted them into the air, dashed them against the rocks, or plunged them end-foremost into the sea.*¹² Marcellus withdrew his fleet, and put his hopes in an attack by land. But Archimedes bombarded the troops with large stones thrown by catapults to such effect that the Romans fled, saying that they were being opposed by gods; and they refused to advance again.¹⁴ “Such a great and marvelous thing,” comments Polybius, “does the genius of one man show itself to be when properly applied. The Romans, strong both by sea and by land, had every hope of capturing the town at once if one old man of Syracuse were removed; as long as he was present they did not venture to attack.”¹⁵

Abandoning the idea of taking Syracuse by storm, Marcellus resigned himself to a slow blockade. After a siege of eight months the starving city surrendered. In the slaughter and pillage that followed Marcellus gave orders that Archimedes should not be injured. During the sack a Roman soldier came upon an aged Syracusan absorbed in studying figures that he had traced in the sand. The Roman commanded him to present himself at once to Marcellus. Archimedes refused to go until he had worked out his problem; he “earnestly besought the soldier,” says Plutarch, “to wait a little while, that he might not leave what he was at work upon inconclusive and imperfect, but the soldier, nothing moved by this entreaty, instantly killed him.”¹⁶ When Marcellus heard of it he mourned, and did everything in his power to console the relatives of the dead man.¹⁷ The Roman general erected to his memory a handsome tomb, on which was engraved, in accordance with the mathematician’s expressed wish, a sphere within a cylinder; to have found formulas for the area and volume of these figures was, in Archimedes’ view, the supreme achievement of his life. He was not far wrong; for to add one significant proposition to geometry is of greater value to humanity than to besiege or defend a city. We must rank Archimedes with Newton, and credit him with “a sum of mathematical achievement unsurpassed by any one man in the world’s history.”¹⁸

But for the abundance and cheapness of slaves Archimedes might have been the head of a veritable Industrial Revolution. A treatise on Mechanical Problems wrongly attributed to Aristotle, and a Treatise on Weights wrongly ascribed to Euclid, had laid down certain elementary principles of statics and dynamics a century before Archimedes. Strato of Lampsacus, who succeeded Theophrastus as head of the Lyceum, turned his deterministic materialism to physics, and (about 280) formulated the doctrine that “nature abhors a vacuum.”¹⁹ When he added that “a vacuum can be created by artificial means,” he opened the way to a thousand inventions. Ctesibius of Alexandria (ca. 200) studied the physics of siphons (which had been used in Egypt as far back as 1500 B.C.), and developed the force pump, the hydraulic organ, and the hydraulic clock. Archimedes probably improved—and unwittingly gave his name to—the ancient Egyptian water screw, which literally made water flow uphill.²⁰ Philon of Byzantium, about 150, invented pneumatic machines, and various engines of war.²¹ The steam engine of Heron of Alexandria, which came after the Roman conquest of Greece, brought this period of mechanical development to a climax and close. The philosophical tradition was too strong; Greek thought went back to theory, and Greek industry contented itself with slaves. The Greeks were acquainted with the magnet, and the electrical properties of amber, but they saw no industrial possibilities in these curious phenomena. Antiquity unconsciously decided that it was not worth while to be modern.

III. ARISTARCHUS, HIPPARCHUS, ERATOSTHENES

Greek mathematics owed its Hellenistic stimulus and blossoming to Egypt, Greek astronomy to Babylon. Alexander’s opening of the East led to a resumption and extension of that trade in ideas which, three centuries earlier, had assisted at the birth of Greek science in Ionia. To this fresh contact with Egypt and the Near East we may ascribe the anomaly of Greek science reaching its height in the Hellenistic age, when Greek literature and art were in decline.

Aristarchus of Samos was a bright interregnum in the rule of the geocentric theory over Greek astronomy. He burned with such zeal that he studied almost all its branches, and achieved distinction in many of them.²³ In his only extant treatise, On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon,* there is no hint of heliocentricism; on the contrary it assumes that the sun and the moon move in circles about the earth. But Archimedes’ Sand-Reckoner explicitly credits Aristarchus with the “hypothesis that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved; the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit”;²⁴ and Plutarch reports that Cleanthes the Stoic held that Aristarchus should be indicted for “putting the Hearth of the Universe” (i.e., the earth) “in motion.”²⁵ Seleucus of Seleucia defended the heliocentric view, but the opinion of the Greek scientific world decided against it. Aristarchus himself seems to have abandoned his hypothesis when he failed to reconcile it with the supposedly circular movements of the heavenly bodies; for all Greek astronomers took it for granted that these orbits were circular. Perhaps a distaste for hemlock moved Aristarchus to be the Galileo as well as the Copernicus of the ancient world.

It was the misfortune of Hellenistic science that the greatest of Greek astronomers attacked the heliocentric theory with arguments that seemed irrefutable before Copernicus. Hipparchus of Nicaea (in Bithynia), despite what seems to us an epoch-making blunder, was a scientist of the highest type—endlessly curious to know, devotedly patient in research, and so carefully accurate in observation and report that antiquity called him “the lover of truth.”²⁶ He touched and adorned nearly every field of astronomy, and fixed its conclusions for seventeen centuries. Only one of his many works remains—a commentary on the Phainomena of Eudoxus and Aratus of Soli; but we know him from Claudius Ptolemy’s Almagest (ca. A.D. 140), which is based upon his researches and calculations; “Ptolemaic astronomy” should be called Hipparchian. He improved, probably on Babylonian models, the astrolabes and quadrants that were the chief astronomical instruments of his time. He invented the method of determining terrestrial positions by lines of latitude and longitude, and tried to organize the astronomers of the Mediterranean world to make observations and measurements that would fix in these terms the location of all important cities; political disturbances frustrated the plan until Ptolemy’s more orderly age. His mathematical studies of astronomic relations led Hipparchus to formulate a table of sines, and thereby to create the science of trigonometry. Helped, no doubt, by the cuneiform records which had been brought from Babylonia, he determined with approximate accuracy the length of the solar, lunar, and sidereal years. He reckoned the solar year as 365¼ days minus 4 minutes and 48 seconds—an error of 6 minutes according to current calculations. His time for a mean lunar month was 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2½ seconds—less than a second away from the accepted figure.²⁷ He computed, with impressive approximation to modern measurements, the synodic periods of the planets, the obliquity of the ecliptic and of the moon’s orbit, the apogee of the sun, and the horizontal parallax of the moon.²⁸ He estimated the distance of the moon from the earth as 250,000 miles—an error of only five per cent.

Armed with all this knowledge, Hipparchus concluded that the geocentric view better explained the data than did the hypothesis of Aristarchus; the heliocentric theory could not stand mathematical analysis except by supposing an elliptical orbit for the earth, and this supposition was so uncongenial to Greek thought that even Aristarchus does not appear to have considered it. Hipparchus verged upon it by his theory of “eccentrics,” which accounted for the apparent irregularities in the orbital velocities of the sun and the moon by suggesting that the centers of the solar and lunar orbits were slightly to one side of the earth. So near did Hipparchus come to being the greatest theorist, as well as the greatest observer, among ancient astronomers.

Watching the sky night after night, Hipparchus was surprised one evening by the appearance of a star where he was sure there had been none before. To certify later changes he made, about 129 B.C., a catalogue, a map, and a globe of the heavens, giving the positions of 1080 fixed stars in terms of celestial latitude and longitude—an immense boon to subsequent students of the sky. Comparing his chart with that which Timochares had made 166 years before, Hipparchus calculated that the stars had shifted their apparent position some two degrees in the interval. On this basis he made the subtlest of his discoveries*—the precession of the equinoxes—the slight advance, day by day, of the moment when the equinoctial points come to the meridian,† He calculated the precession as thirty-six seconds per year; the current estimate is fifty.

We have displaced from his chronological position between Aristarchus and Hipparchus a scholar whose ecumenical erudition won him the nicknames of Pentathlos and Beta—because he attained distinction in many fields, and ranked second only to the best in each. Tradition gave Eratosthenes of Cyrene exceptional teachers: Zeno the Stoic, Arcesilaus the skeptic, Callimachus the poet, Lysanias the grammarian. By the age of forty his reputation for varied knowledge was so great that Ptolemy III made him head of the Alexandrian Library. He wrote a volume of verse, and a history of comedy. His Chronographia sought to determine the dates of the major events in Mediterranean history. He wrote mathematical monographs, and devised a mechanical method for finding mean proportions in continued proportion between two straight lines. He measured the obliquity of the ecliptic at 23° 51′, an error of one half of one per cent. His greatest achievement was his calculation of the earth’s circumference as 24,662 miles;³⁰ we compute it at 24,847. Observing that at noon on the summer solstice the sun at Syene shone directly upon the deep surface of a narrow well, and learning that at the same moment the shadow of an obelisk at Alexandria, some five hundred miles north, showed the sun to be approximately 7½° away from the zenith as measured on the meridian of longitude that connected the two cities, he concluded that an arc of 7½° on the earth’s circumference equaled five hundred miles, and that the entire circumference would equal 360÷7.5×500, or 24,000 miles.

Having measured the earth, Eratosthenes proceeded to describe it. His Geographica brought together the reports of Alexander’s surveyors, of travelers like Megasthenes, voyagers like Nearchus, and explorers like Pytheas of Massalia, who, about 320, had sailed around Scotland to Norway, and perhaps to the Arctic Circle.³¹ Eratosthenes did not merely depict the physical features of each region, he sought to explain them through the action of water, fire, earthquake, or volcanic eruption.³² He bade the Greeks abandon their provincial division of mankind into Hellenes and barbarians; men should be divided not nationally but individually; many Greeks, he thought, were scoundrels, many Persians and Hindus were refined, and the Romans had shown a greater aptitude than the Greeks for social order and competent government.³³ He knew little of northern Europe or northern Asia, less of India south of the Ganges, nothing of south Africa; but he was, so far as we know, the first geographer to mention the Chinese. “If,” said another significant passage, “the extent of the Atlantic Ocean were not an obstacle, we might easily pass by sea from Iberia (Spain) to India, keeping in the same parallel.”³⁴

IV. THEOPHRASTUS, HEROPHILUS, ERASISTRATUS

Zoology never rose again in antiquity to the level that it had reached in Aristotle’s History of Animals. Probably by an agreed division of labor his successor Theophrastus wrote a classic treatise, The History of Plants, and a more theoretical discussion called The Causes of Plants. Theophrastus loved gardening, and knew every aspect of his subject. In many ways he was more scientific than his master, more careful of his facts, and more orderly in his exposition; a book without classification, he said, was as untrustworthy as an unbridled horse.³⁵ He divided all plants into trees, bushes, shrubs, and herbs, and distinguished the chief parts of a plant as root, stem, branch, twig, leaf, flower, and fruit—a classification not improved on till A.D. 1561.³⁶ “A plant,” he wrote, “has the power of germination in all its parts, for it has life in them all. . . . The methods of generation of plants are these: spontaneous, from a seed, a root, a piece torn off, a branch, a twig, pieces of wood cut up small, or from the trunk itself.”³⁷ He had no clear idea of sexual reproduction in plants, except in a few species like the fig tree or the date palm; here he followed the Babylonians in describing fertilization and caprification. He discussed the geographical distribution of plants, their industrial uses, and the climatic conditions most conducive to their health. He studied the minutiae of half a thousand species with an accuracy of detail astonishing in an age that had no microscope. Twenty centuries before Goethe he recognized that the flower is a metamorphosed leaf.³⁸ He was a naturalist in more ways than one, stoutly rejecting the supernatural explanations current in his day for certain curiosities of botany.³⁹ He had all the inquisitiveness of a scientist, and did not think it beneath his dignity as a philosopher to write monographs on stones, minerals, weather, winds, weariness, geometry, astronomy, and the physical theories of the pre-Socratic Greeks.⁴⁰ “If there had been no Aristotle,” says Sarton, “this period would have been called the time of Theophrastus.”⁴¹

Theophrastus’ ninth “book” summarized all that the Greeks knew about the medicinal properties of plants. One passage hinted at anesthesia in describing “dittany, a plant especially useful for labor in women; people say that either it makes labor easy, or it stops the pains.”⁴² Medicine progressed rapidly in this age, perhaps because it had to keep pace with the novel and multiplying diseases of a complex urban civilization. The Greek study of Egyptian medical lore stimulated a fresh advance. The Ptolemies were ruthlessly helpful; they not only permitted the dissection of animals and cadavers, but turned over some condemned criminals for vivisection.⁴³ Under these encouragements human anatomy became a science, and the absurdities into which Aristotle had fallen were substantially reduced.

Herophilus of Chalcedon, working at Alexandria about 285, dissected the eye and gave a good account of the retina and the optic nerves. He dissected the brain, described the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the meninges, left his name in the torcular Herophili* and restored the brain to honor as the seat of thought. He understood the role of the nerves, originated their division into sensory and motor, and separated the cranial from the spinal nerves. He distinguished arteries from veins, discerned the function of the arteries as carrying blood from the heart to various parts of the body, and in effect discovered the circulation of the blood nineteen centuries before Harvey.⁴⁴ Following a suggestion of the Coan physician Praxagoras, he included the taking of the pulse in diagnosis, and used a water clock to measure its frequency. He dissected and described the ovaries, the uterus, the seminal vesicles, and the prostate gland; he studied the liver and the pancreas, and gave to the duodenum the name that it still bears.⁴⁵“Science and art,” wrote Herophilus, “have nothing to show, strength is incapable of effort, wealth is useless, and eloquence is powerless, where there is no health.”⁴⁶

Herophilus was, so far as we can now judge, the greatest anatomist of antiquity, and Erasistratus was the greatest physiologist. Born in Ceos, Erasistratus studied in Athens, and practiced medicine in Alexandria about 258 B.C. He distinguished more carefully than Herophilus between cerebrum and cerebellum, and made experiments on living subjects to study the operation of the brain. He described and explained the working of the epiglottis, the lacteal vessels of the mesentery, and the aortic and pulmonary valves of the heart. He had some notion of basal metabolism, for he devised a crude respiration calorimeter⁴⁷ Every organ, said Erasistratus, is connected with the rest of the organism in three ways—by artery, vein, and nerve. He sought to account for all physiological phenomena by natural causes, rejecting any reference to mystical entities. He discarded the humoral theory of Hippocrates, which Herophilus had retained. He conceived the art of medicine as prevention through hygiene rather than as cure through therapy; he opposed the frequent use of drugs and bloodletting, and relied upon diet, bathing, and exercise.⁴⁸

Such men made Alexandria the Vienna of the ancient medical world. But there were great schools of medicine also at Tralles, Miletus, Ephesus, Pergamum, Taras, and Syracuse. Many cities had a municipal medical service; the physicians so employed received a modest salary, but were honored for making no distinction between rich and poor, free and slave, and for devoting themselves to their work at any time and risk. Apollonius of Miletus fought the plague in near-by islands without reward; when all the doctors of Cos were laid low by an epidemic which they had labored to control, others came to their rescue from neighboring towns. Many public decrees of gratitude were issued to Hellenistic physicians; and though ancient jests railed at mercenary incompetence, the great profession kept high that standard of ethics which had come down to it from Hippocrates as its most precious inheritance.

CHAPTER XXIX

The Surrender of Philosophy

THREE strains merged in Greek philosophy: the physical, the metaphysical, and the ethical. The physical culminated in Aristotle, the metaphysical in Plato, the ethical in Zeno of Citium. The physical development ended in the separation of science from philosophy in Archimedes and Hipparchus; the metaphysical ended in the skepticism of Pyrrho and the later Academy; the ethical remained until Epicureanism and Stoicism were conquered or absorbed by Christianity.

I. THE SKEPTICAL ATTACK

Amid this spreading Hellenistic culture Athens—mother of much of it, mistress of most of it—retained her leadership in two realms: the drama and philosophy. The world was not too busy with war and revolutions, new sciences and new religions, the love of beauty and the quest of gold, to spare some time for the unanswerable but inescapable problems of truth and error, matter and mind, freedom and necessity, nobility and baseness, life and death. From all the cities of the Mediterranean young men made their way, often through a thousand hardships, to study in the halls and gardens where Plato and Aristotle had left almost living memories.

At the Lyceum the industrious Theophrastus of Lesbos carried on the empirical tradition. The Peripatetics were scientists and scholars rather than philosophers; they devoted themselves to specialist research in zoology, botany, biography, and the history of science, philosophy, literature, and law. In his thirty-four years of leadership (322-288) Theophrastus explored many fields, and published four hundred volumes dealing with almost every subject from love to war. His pamphlet “On Marriage” severely handled the female sex, and was severely handled in turn by Epicurus’ mistress Leontium, who wrote a learned and devastating reply.¹ Nevertheless it is to Theophrastus that Athenaeus attributes the tender sentiment that “it is through modesty that beauty becomes beautiful.”² Diogenes Laertius describes him as “a most benevolent man, and very affable”; so eloquent that his original name was forgotten in that which Aristotle gave him, meaning that he spoke like a god; so popular that two thousand students flocked to his lectures, and Menander was among his most faithful followers.³ Posterity preserved with especial care his book of Characters, not because it created a literary form, but because it sharply satirized the faults that all men ascribe to other men. Here is the Garrulous Man who “begins with a eulogy of his wife, relates the dream he had the night before, tells dish by dish what he had for supper,” and concludes that “we are by no means the men we were” in former times. And here is the Stupid Man who “when he goes to the play, is left at the end fast asleep in an empty house . . . after a hearty supper he has to get up in the night, returns only half awake, misses the right door, and is bitten by his neighbor’s dog.”⁴

One of the few events in Theophrastus’ life was the issuance of a state decree (307) requiring the Assembly’s approval in the selection of leaders for the philosophical schools. About the same time Agnonides indicted Theophrastus on the old charge of impiety. Theophrastus quietly left Athens; but so many students followed him that the storekeepers complained of a ruinous fall in trade. Within a year the decree was annulled, the indictment was withdrawn, and Theophrastus returned in triumph to preside over the Lyceum almost till his death at eighty-five. “All Athens,” we are told, attended his funeral. The Peripatetic school did not long survive him: science left impoverished Athens for affluent Alexandria, and the Lyceum, which had dedicated itself to research, subsided into a penurious obscurity.

Meanwhile Speusippus had succeeded Plato, and Xenocrates Speusippus, at the Academy. Xenocrates governed the school for a quarter of a century (339-314), and brought new credit to philosophy by the honorable simplicity of his life. Absorbed in study and teaching, he left the Academy but once a year, to see the Dionysian tragedies; when he appeared, says Laertius, “the turbulent and quarrelsome rabble of the city made way for him to pass.”⁵ He refused all fees, and became so poor that he was on the verge of being imprisoned for taxes when Demetrius of Phalerum paid his arrears and had him freed. Philip of Macedon said that among the many Athenian ambassadors sent to him Xenocrates was the only one who proved incorruptible. His reputation for virtue annoyed Phryne. Pretending that she was being pursued, she took refuge in his house; and seeing that he had but one bed she asked if she might share it with him. He consented, we are told, out of humane considerations; but he proved so cold to her entreaties and her charms that she fled from his bed and board, and complained to her friends that she had found a statue instead of a man.⁶ Xenocrates would have no mistress but philosophy.

With his death the metaphysical strain in Greek thought neared exhaustion in the very grove that had been its shrine. The successors of Plato were mathematicians and moralists, and spent little time on the abstract questions that had once agitated the Academy. The skeptical challenges of Zeno the Eleatic, the subjectivism of Heracleitus, the methodical doubt of Gorgias and Protagoras, the metaphysical agnosticism of Socrates, Aristippus, and Eucleides of Megara resumed control of Greek philosophy; the Age of Reason was over. Every hypothesis had been conceived, aired, and forgotten; the universe had preserved its secret, and men had grown weary of a search in which even the most brilliant minds had failed. Aristotle had agreed with Plato on only one point—the possibility of acquiring ultimate truth.⁷ Pyrrho voiced the suspicions of his time in suggesting that it was above all on this point that they had both been mistaken.

Pyrrho was born at Elis about 360. He followed Alexander’s army to India, studied under the “Gymnosophists” there, and perhaps learned from them something of the skepticism for which his name became a synonym. Returning to Elis he lived in serene poverty as a teacher of philosophy. He was too modest to write books, but his pupil Timon of Phlius, in a series of Silloi or Satires, sent Pyrrho’s opinions abroad into the world. These opinions were basically three: that certainty is unattainable, that the wise man will suspend judgment and will seek tranquillity rather than truth, and that, since all theories are probably false, one might as well accept the myths and conventions of his time and place. Neither the senses nor reason can give us sure knowledge: the senses distort the object in perceiving it, and reason is merely the sophist servant of desire. Every syllogism begs the question, for its major premise assumes its conclusion. “Every reason has a corresponding reason opposed to it”;⁸ the same experience may be delightful or unpleasant according to circumstance and mood; the same object may seem small or large, ugly or beautiful; the same practice may be moral or immoral according to where and when we live; the same gods are or are not, according to the different nations of mankind; everything is opinion, nothing is quite true. It is foolish, then, to take sides in disputes, or to seek some other place or mode of living, or to envy the future or the past; all desire is delusion. Even life is an uncertain good, death not a certain evil; one should have no prejudices against either of them. Best of all is a calm acceptance: not to reform the world, but to bear with it patiently; not to fever ourselves with progress, but to content ourselves with peace. Pyrrho tried sincerely to live this half-Hindu philosophy. He conformed humbly with the customs and worship of Elis, made no effort to avoid dangers or prolong his life,⁹ and died at the age of ninety. His fellow citizens so approved of him that in his honor they exempted philosophers from taxation.

By the irony of time it was the followers of Plato who carried forward this attack upon metaphysics. Arcesilaus, who became head of the “Middle Academy” in 269, transformed Plato’s rejection of sense knowledge into a skepticism as complete as Pyrrho’s, and probably under Pyrrho’s influence¹⁰ “Nothing is certain,” said Arcesilaus, “not even that.”¹¹ When he was told that such a doctrine made life impossible he answered that life had long since learned to manage with probabilities. A century later a still more vigorous skeptic took charge of the “New Academy,” and pressed the doctrine of universal doubt to the point of intellectual and moral nihilism. Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made life bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught. As they had undertaken to make him a logician he used to say to them (turning the tables on Protagoras): “If my reasoning is right, well and good; if it is wrong, give me back my tuition fee.”¹² When he set up shop for himself he lectured one morning for an opinion, the next morning against it, proving each so well as to destroy both; while his pupils, and even his biographer, sought in vain to discover his real views. He undertook to refute the materialistic realism of the Stoics by a Platonic-Kantian critique of sensation and reason. He attacked all conclusions as intellectually indefensible, and bade his students be satisfied with probability and the customs of their time. Sent to Rome by Athens as one of an embassy (155), he shocked the Senate by speaking one day in defense of justice, and on the morrow deriding it as an impracticable dream: if Rome wished to practice justice it would have to restore to the nations of the Mediterranean all that it had taken from them by superior force.¹³ On the third day Cato had the embassy sent home as a danger to public morals. Perhaps Polybius, who was then a hostage with Scipio, heard these addresses or of them, for he speaks with the anger of a practical man against those philosophers

who in the discussions of the Academy have trained themselves in extreme readiness of speech. For some of them, in their efforts to puzzle the minds of their hearers, resort to such paradoxes, and are so fertile in inventing plausibilities, that they wonder whether or not it is possible for those in Athens to smell eggs roasted in Ephesus, and are in doubt whether all the time they are discussing the matter in the Academy they are not lying in their beds at home and composing this discourse in a dream. . . . From this excessive love of paradox they have brought all philosophy into disrepute. . . . They have implanted such a passion in the minds of our young men that they never give even a thought to the ethical and political qaestions that really benefit students of philosophy, but spend their lives in the vain attempt to invent useless absurdities.¹⁴

II. THE EPICUREAN ESCAPE

Though he described for many ages the theorist who loses his life in the cobwebs of speculation, Polybius was wrong in supposing that moral problems had lost their lure for the Greek mind. It was precisely the ethical strain that in this period replaced the physical and the metaphysical as the dominant note in philosophy. Political problems were indeed in abeyance, for freedom of speech was harassed by the presence or memory of royal garrisons, and national liberty was implicitly understood to depend upon quiescence. The glory of the Athenian state had departed, and philosophy had to face what to Greece was an unprecedented divorce between politics and ethics. It had to find a way of life at once forgivable to philosophy and compatible with political impotence. Therefore it conceived its problem no longer as one of building a just state, but as that of forming the selfcontained and contented individual.

The ethical development now took two opposite directions. One followed the lead of Heracleitus, Socrates, Antisthenes, and Diogenes, and expanded the Cynic into the Stoic philosophy; the other stemmed from Democritus, leaned heavily on Aristippus, and drew out the Cyrenaic into the Epicurean creed. Both of these philosophical compensations for religious and political decay came from Asia: Stoicism from Semitic pantheism, fatalism, and resignation; Epicureanism from the pleasure-loving Greeks of the Asiatic coast.

Epicurus was born at Samos in 341. At twelve he fell in love with philosophy; at nineteen he went to Athens and spent a year at the Academy. Like Francis Bacon he preferred Democritus to Plato and Aristotle, and took from him many bricks for his own construction. From Aristippus he learned the wisdom of pleasure, and from Socrates the pleasure of wisdom; from Pyrrho he took the doctrine of tranquillity, and a ringing word for it—ataraxia. He must have watched with interest the career of his contemporary Theodoras of Cyrene, who preached an unmoralistic atheism so openly in Athens that the Assembly indicted him for impiety¹⁵—a lesson that Epicurus did not forget. Then he returned to Asia and lectured on philosophy at Colophon, Mytilene, and Lampsacus. The Lampsacenes were so impressed with his ideas and his character that they felt qualms of selfishness in keeping him in so remote a city; they raised a fund of eighty minas ($4000), bought a house and garden on the outskirts of Athens, and presented it to Epicurus as his school and his home. In 306, aged thirty-five, Epicurus took up his residence there, and taught to the Athenians a philosophy that was Epicurean in name only. It was a sign of the growing freedom of women that he welcomed them to his lectures, even into the little community that lived about him. He made no distinctions of station or race; he accepted courtesans as well as matrons, slaves as well as freemen; his favorite pupil was his own slave, Mysis. The courtesan Leontium became his mistress as well as his pupil, and found him as jealous a mate as if he had secured her by due process of law. Under his influence she had one child and wrote several books, whose purity of style did not interfere with her morals.¹⁶

For the rest Epicurus lived in Stoic simplicity and prudent privacy. His motto was lathe biosas—“live unobtrusively.” He took part dutifully in the religious ritual of the city, but kept his hands clear of politics, and his spirit free from the affairs of the world. He was content with water and a little wine, bread and a little cheese. His rivals and enemies charged that he gorged himself when he could, and became abstemious only when overeating had ruined his digestion. “But those who speak thus are all wrong,” Diogenes Laertius assures us; and he adds: “There are many witnesses of the unsurpassable kindness of the man to everybody—both his own country, which honored him with statues, and his friends, who were so numerous that they could not be contained in whole cities.”¹⁷ He was devoted to his parents, generous to his brothers, and gentle to his servants, who joined with him in philosophical studies.¹⁸ His pupils looked upon him, says Seneca, as a god among men; and after his death their motto was: “Live as though the eye of Epicurus were upon thee.”

Between his lessons and his loves he wrote three hundred books. The ashes of Herculaneum preserved for us some fragments of his central work, On Nature; Diogenes Laertius, the Plutarch of philosophy, handed down three of his letters, and late discoveries have added a few more. Above all, Lucredus enshrined the thought of Epicurus in the greatest of philosophical poems.

Perhaps already conscious that Alexander’s conquest was letting loose upon Greece a hundred mystic cults from the East, Epicurus begins with the arresting proposition that the aim of philosophy is to free men from fear—more than anything else, from the fear of gods. He dislikes religion because, he thinks, it thrives on ignorance, promotes it, and darkens life with the terror of celestial spies, relentless furies, and endless punishments. The gods exist, says Epicurus, and enjoy, in some far-off space among the stars, a serene and deathless life; but they are too sensible to bother with the affairs of so infinitesimal a species as mankind. The world is not designed, nor is it guided, by them; how could such divine Epicureans have created so middling a universe, so confused a scene of order and disorder, of beauty and suffering?¹⁹ If this disappoints you, Epicurus adds, console yourself with the thought that the gods are too remote to do you any more harm than good. They cannot watch you, they cannot judge you, they cannot plunge you into hell. As for evil gods, or demons, they are the unhappy fantasies of our dreams.

Having rejected religion, Epicurus goes on to reject metaphysics. We can know nothing of the suprasensual world; reason must confine itself to the experience of the senses, and must accept these as the final test of truth. All the problems that Locke and Leibnitz were to debate two thousand years later are here settled with one sentence: if knowledge does not come from the senses, where else can it come from? And if the senses are not the ultimate arbiter of fact, how can we find such a criterion in reason, whose data must be taken from the senses?

Nevertheless the senses give us no certain knowledge of the external world; they catch not the objective thing itself, but only the tiny atoms thrown off by every part of its surface, and leaving upon our senses little replicas of its nature and form. If, therefore, we must have a theory of the world (and really it is not altogether necessary), we had better accept Democritus’ view that nothing exists, or can be known to us, or can even be imagined by us, except bodies and space; and that all bodies are composed of indivisible and unchangeable atoms. These atoms have no color, temperature, sound, taste, or smell; such qualities are created by the corpuscular radiations of objects upon our sense organs. But the atoms do differ in size, weight, and form; for only by this supposition can we account for the infinite variety of things. Epicurus would like to explain the operation of the atoms on purely mechanical principles; but as he is interested in ethics far more than in cosmology, and is anxious to preserve free will as the source of moral responsibility and the prop of personality, he abandons Democritus in mid-air, and supposes a kind of spontaneity in the atoms: they swerve a bit from the perpendicular as they fall through space, and so enter into the combinations that make the four elements, and through them the diversity of the objective scene.²⁰ There are innumerable worlds, but it is unwise to interest ourselves in them. We may assume that the sun and the moon are about as large as they appear to be, and then we can give our time to the study of man.

Man is a completely natural product. Life probably began by spontaneous generation, and progressed without design through the natural selection of the fittest forms.²¹ Mind is only another kind of matter. The soul is a delicate material substance diffused throughout the body.²² It can feel or act only by means of the body, and dies with the body’s death. Despite all this we must accept the testimony of our immediate consciousness that the will is free; else we should be meaningless puppets on the stage of life. It is better to be a slave to the gods of the people than to the Fate of the philosophers.²³

The real function of philosophy, however, is not to explain the world, since the part can never explain the whole, but to guide us in our quest of happiness. “That which we have in view is not a set of systems and vain opinions, but much rather a life exempt from every kind of disquietude.”²⁴ Over the entrance to the garden of Epicurus was the inviting legend: “Guest, thou shalt be happy here, for here happiness is esteemed the highest good.” Virtue, in this philosophy, is not an end in itself, it is only an indispensable means to a happy life.²⁵ “It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently, honorably, and justly; nor to live prudently, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly.”²⁶ The only certain propositions in philosophy are that pleasure is good, and that pain is bad. Sensual pleasures are in themselves legitimate, and wisdom will find some room for them; since, however, they may have evil effects, they need such discriminating pursuit as only intelligence can give.

When, therefore, we say that pleasure is the chief good we are not speaking of the pleasures of the debauched man, or those that lie in sensual enjoyment. . . but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from disturbance. For it is not continued drinkings and revels, or the enjoyment of female society, or feasts of fish or other expensive foods, that make life pleasant, but such sober contemplation as examines the reasons for choice and avoidance, and puts to flight the vain opinions from which arises most of the confusion that troubles the soul.²⁷

In the end, then, understanding is not only the highest virtue, it is also the highest happiness, for it avails more than any other faculty in us to avoid pain and grief. Wisdom is the only liberator: it frees us from bondage to the passions, from fear of the gods, and from dread of death; it teaches us how to bear misfortune, and how to derive a deep and lasting pleasure from the simple goods of life and the quiet pleasures of the mind. Death is not so frightful when we view it intelligently; the suffering it involves may be briefer and slighter than that which we have borne time and again during our lives; it is our foolish fancies of what death may bring that lend to it so much of its terror. And consider how little is needed to a wise contentfresh air, the cheapest foods, a modest shelter, a bed, a few books, and a friend. “Everything natural is easily procured, and only the useless is costly.”²⁸ We should not fret our lives out in realizing every desire that comes into our heads: “Desires may be ignored when our failure to accomplish them will not really cause us pain.”²⁹ Even love, marriage, and parentage are unnecessary; they bring us fitful pleasures, but perennial grief.³⁰ To accustom ourselves to plain living and simple ways is an almost certain road to health.³¹ The wise man does not burn with ambition or lust for fame; he does not envy the good fortune of his enemies, nor even of his friends; he avoids the fevered competition of the city and the turmoil of political strife; he seeks the calm of the countryside, and finds the surest and deepest happiness in tranquillity of body and mind. Because he controls his appetites, lives without pretense, and puts aside all fears, the natural “sweetness of life” (hedone) rewards him with the greatest of all goods, which is peace.

This is a likably honest creed. It is encouraging to find a philosopher who is not afraid of pleasure, and a logician who has a good word to say for the senses. There is no subtlety here, and no warm passion for understanding; on the contrary Epicureanism, despite its transmission of the atomic theory, marks a reaction from the brave curiosity that had created Greek science and philosophy. The profoundest defect of the system is its negativity: it thinks of pleasure as freedom from pain, and of wisdom as an escape from the hazards and fullness of life; it provides an excellent design for bachelorhood, but hardly for a society. Epicurus respected the state as a necessary evil, under whose protection he might live unmolested in his garden, but he appears to have cared little about national independence; indeed, his school seems to have preferred monarchy to democracy, as less inclined to persecute heresy³²—an arresting inversion of modern beliefs. Epicurus was ready to accept any government that offered no hindrance to the unobtrusive pursuit of wisdom and companionship. He dedicated to friendship the devotion that earlier generations had given to the state. “Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is friendship.”³³ The friendships of the Epicureans were proverbial for their permanence; and the letters of the master abound in expressions of ardent affection.³⁴ His disciples returned this feeling with Greek intensity. Young Colotes, on first hearing Epicurus speak, fell on his knees, wept, and hailed him as a god.³⁵

For thirty-six years Epicurus taught in his garden, preferring a school to a family. In the year 270 he was brought down with the stone. He bore the pains stoically, and on his deathbed found time to think of his friends. “I write to you on this happy day which is the last of my life. The obstruction of my bladder, and the internal pains, have reached the extreme point, but there is marshaled against them the delight of my mind in thinking over our talks together. Take care of Metrodorus’ children in a way worthy of your lifelong devotion to me and to philosophy.”³⁶ He willed his property to the school, hoping “that all those who study philosophy may never be in want. . . so far as our power to prevent it may extend.”³⁷

He left behind him a long succession of disciples, so loyal to his memory that for centuries they refused to change a word of his teaching. His most famous pupil, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, had already shocked or amused Greece by reducing Epicureanism to the proposition that “all good things have reference to the belly”³⁸—meaning, perhaps, that all pleasure is physiological, and ultimately visceral. Chrysippus countered by calling the Gastrology of Archestratus “the metropolis of the Epicurean philosophy.”³⁹ Popularly misunderstood, Epicureanism was publicly denounced and privately accepted in wide circles throughout Hellas. So many Hellenizing Jews adopted it that Apiköros was used by the rabbis as a synonym for apostate.⁴⁰ In 173 or 155 two Epicurean philosophers were expelled from Rome on the ground that they were corrupting youth.⁴¹ A century later Cicero asked, “Why are there so many followers of Epicurus?”⁴² and Lucretius composed the fullest and finest extant exposition of the Epicurean system. The school had professed adherents until the reign of Constantine, some of them, by their lives, degrading the name of the master to mean “epicure,” others faithfully teaching the simple maxims into which he had once condensed his philosophy: “The gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be won; all that we dread can be conquered.”⁴³

III. THE STOIC COMPROMISE

Since an increasing number of Epicurus’ followers interpreted him as counseling the pursuit of personal pleasure, the essential problem of ethics—what is the good life?—had reached not a solution but only a new formulation: how can the natural epicureanism of the individual be reconciled with the stoicism necessary to the group and the race?—how can the members of a society be inspired to, or frightened into, the self-control and self-sacrifice indispensable to collective survival? The old religion could no longer fulfill this function; the old city-state no longer lifted men up to self-forgetfulness. Educated Greeks turned from religion to philosophy for an answer; they called in philosophers to advise or console them in the crises of life; they asked from philosophy some world view that would give to human existence a permanent meaning and value in the scheme of things, and that would enable them to look without terror upon the certainty of death. Stoicism is the last effort of classical antiquity to find a natural ethic. Zeno tried once more to accomplish the task in which Plato had failed.

Zeno was a native of jCitium in Cyprus. The city was partly Phoenician, chiefly Greek; Zeno is frequently called a Phoenician, sometimes an Egyptian; he was almost certainly of mixed Hellenic and Semitic parentage.⁴⁴ Apollonius of Tyre describes him as thin, tall, and dark; his head was bent to one side, and his legs were weak; Aphrodite, though Hephaestus was no better, would have surrendered him to Athena. Having no distractions, he rapidly amassed wealth as a merchant; when he first came to Athens, we are told, he had over a thousand talents. According to Diogenes Laertius he was shipwrecked on the Attic coast, lost his fortune, and arrived in Athens, about 314, almost destitute.⁴⁵ Sitting down by a bookseller’s stall he began to read Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and was soon fascinated by the character of Socrates. “Where are such men to be found today?” he asked. At that moment Crates, a Cynic philosopher, passed by. “Follow that man,” the bookseller advised him. Zeno, aged thirty, enrolled in Crates’ school, and rejoiced in having discovered philosophy: “I made a prosperous voyage,” he said, “when I was wrecked.”⁴⁶ Crates was a Theban who had turned over his fortune of three hundred talents to his fellow citizens and had taken up the ascetic life of a Cynic mendicant. He denounced the sexual looseness of his time, and counseled hunger as a cure for love. His pupil Hipparchia, having plenty to eat, fell in love with him, and threatened to kill herself unless her parents gave her to him. They begged Crates to dissuade her, which he tried to do by laying his beggar’s wallet at her feet, saying: “This is all my fortune; think now what you are doing.” Undiscouraged, she left her rich home, donned the beggar’s garb, and went to live with Crates in free love. Their nuptials, we are informed, were consummated in public, but their lives were models of affection and fidelity⁴⁷

Zeno was impressed by the stern simplicity of the Cynic life. The followers of Antisthenes had now become the Franciscan monks of antiquity, vowed to poverty and abstinence, sleeping in any natural shelter that they came upon, and living upon the alms of people too industrious to be saints. Zeno took from the Cynics the outlines of his ethic, and did not conceal his debt. In his first book, The Republic, he was so far under their influence that he espoused an anarchist communism in which there should be no money, no property, no marriage, no religion, and no laws.⁴⁸ Recognizing that this utopia and the Cynic regimen offered no practicable program of life, he left Crates and studied for a time with Xenocrates at the Academy, and with Stilpo of Megara. He must have read Heracleitus receptively, for he incorporated into his own thought several Heracleitean ideas—the Divine Fire as the soul of man and of the cosmos, the eternity of law, and the repeated creation and conflagration of the world. But it was his custom to say that he owed most of all to Socrates, as the fountainhead and ideal of the Stoic philosophy.

After many years of humble tutelage Zeno at last, in 301, set up his own school by discoursing informally as he walked up and down under the colonnades of the Stoa Poecile, or Pointed Porch. He welcomed poor and rich alike, but discouraged the attendance of young men, feeling that only mature manhood could understand philosophy. When a youth talked toe much Zeno informed him that “the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may hear more and talk less.”⁴⁹ Antigonus II, when in Athens, attended Zeno’s classes, became his admiring friend, sought his advice, seduced him into momentary luxury, and invited him to come and live as his guest in Pella. Zeno excused himself and sent his pupil Persaeus instead. For forty years* he taught in the Stoa, and lived a life so consistent with his teachings that “more temperate than Zeno” became a proverb in Greece. Despite his intimacy with Antigonus the Athenian Assembly gave him the “keys to the walls,” and voted him a statue and a crown. The decree read:

Whereas Zeno of Citium has passed many years in our city in the study of philosophy, being in all other respects a good man (sic), and also exhorting all the young men who have sought his company to the practice of temperance; making his own life a model of the greatest excellence . . . it has been resolved by the people to honor Zeno . . . to present him with a golden crown . . . and to build him a tomb in the Ceramicus at the public expense.⁵¹

“He died,” says Laertius, “in the following manner,” reputedly in his ninetieth year. “When he was going out of his school he tripped and broke a toe. Striking the ground with his hand, he repeated a line from the Niobe: ‘I come; why call me so?’ And immediately he strangled himself.”⁵²

His work at the Stoa was carried on by two Asiatic Greeks—by Cleanthes of Assus and then by Chrysippus of Soli. Cleanthes was a pugilist who came to Athens with four drachmas, worked as a common laborer, refused public relief, studied for nineteen years under Zeno, and lived a life of industry and ascetic poverty. Chrysippus was the most learned and prolific of the school; he gave the Stoic doctrine its historic form by expounding it in 750 books, which Dionysius of Halicarnassus held up as models of learned dullness. After him Stoicism spread throughout Hellas, and found its greatest exponents in Asia: in Panaetius of Rhodes, Zeno of Tarsus, Boethus of Sidon, and Diogenes of Seleucia. Out of the casual fragments that survive from a once voluminous literature we must piece together a composite picture of the most widespread and influential philosophy in the ancient world.

It was probably Chrysippus who divided the Stoic system into logic, natural science, and ethics. Zeno and his successors prided themselves on their contributions to logical theory, but the streams of ink that flowed from them on this subject have left no appreciable residue of enlightenment or use.* The Stoics agreed with the Epicureans that knowledge arises only out of the senses, and placed the final test of truth in such perceptions as compel the assent of the mind by their vividness or their persistence. Experience, however, need not lead to knowledge; for between sensation and reason lies emotion or passion, which may distort experience into error even as it distorts desire into vice. Reason is the supreme achievement of man, a seed from the Logos Spermatikos, or Seminal Reason, that made and rules the world.

The world itself, like man, is at once completely material and inherently divine. Everything that the senses report to us is material, and only material things can cause or receive action. Qualities as well as quantities, virtues as well as passions, soul as well as body, God as well as the stars, are material forms or processes, differing in degrees of fineness, but essentially one.⁵⁴ On the other hand all matter is dynamic, full of tensions and powers, perpetually engaged in diffusion or concentration, and animated by an internal and eternal energy, heat, or fire. The universe lives through innumerable cycles of expansion and contraction, development and dissolution; periodically it is consumed in a grand conflagration, and slowly it takes form again; then it passes through all its previous history, even in minutest detail;* for the chain of causes and effects is an unbreakable circle, an endless repetition. All events and all acts of will are determined; it is as impossible for anything to happen otherwise than it does as it is for something to come out of nothing; any break in the chain would disrupt the world.

God, in this system, is the beginning, the middle, and the end. The Stoics recognized the necessity of religion as a basis for morality; they looked with a genial tolerance upon the popular faith, even upon its demons and its divination, and found allegorical interpretations to bridge the chasm between superstition and philosophy. They accepted Chaldean astrology as essentially correct, and thought of earthly affairs as in some mystic and continuous correspondence with the movements of the stars⁵⁵—one phase of that universal sympatheia by which whatever happened to any part affected all the rest. As if preparing not only an ethic but a theology for Christianity, they conceived the world, law, life, the soul, and destiny in terms of God, and defined morality as a willing surrender to the divine will. God, like man, is living matter; the world is his body, the order and law of the world are his mind and will; the universe is a gigantic organism of which God is the soul, the animating breath, the fertilizing reason, the activating fire.⁵⁶ Sometimes the Stoics conceive God in impersonal terms; more often they picture him as a Providence designing and guiding the cosmos with supreme intelligence, adjusting all its parts to rational purposes, and making everything redound to the use of virtuous men. Cleanthes identifies him with Zeus in a monotheistic hymn worthy of Ikhnaton or Isaiah:

Thou, O Zeus, art praised above all gods: many are thy names and thine is all power for ever.

The beginning of the world was from thee: and with law thou rulest over all things.

Unto thee may all flesh speak: for we are thy offspring.

Therefore will I raise a hymn unto thee: and will ever sing of thy power.

The whole order of the heavens obeyeth thy word: as it moveth around the earth:

With little and great lights mixed together: how great art thou, King above all for ever!

Nor is anything done upon the earth apart from thee: nor in the firmament, nor in the seas:

Save that which the wicked do: by their own folly.

But thine is the skill to set even the crooked straight: what is without fashion is fashioned and the alien akin before thee.

Thus hast thou fitted together all things in one: the good with the evil:

That thy word should be one in all things: abiding for ever.

Let folly be dispersed from our souls: that we may repay thee the honor wherewith thou hast honored us:

Singing praise of thy works for ever: as becometh the sons of men.⁵⁷

Man is to the universe as microcosm to macrocosm; he too is an organism with a material body and a material soul. For whatever moves or influences the body, or is moved or influenced by the body, must be corporeal. The soul is a fiery breath or pneuma diffused through the body, just as the world soul is diffused through the world. At death the soul survives the body, but only as an impersonal energy. At the final conflagration the soul will be reabsorbed, like Atman into Brahman, into that ocean of energy which is God.

Since man is a part of God or Nature, the problem of ethics can be easily solved: goodness is co-operation with God, or Nature, or the Law of the World. It is not the pursuit or enjoyment of pleasure, for such pursuit subordinates reason to passion, often injures the body or the mind, and seldom satisfies us in the end. Happiness can be found only through a rational adjustment of our aims and conduct to the purposes and laws of the universe. There is no contradiction between the good of the individual and the good of the cosmos, for the law of well-being in the individual is identical with the law of Nature. If evil comes to the good man it is only temporary, and is not really evil; if we could understand the whole we should see the good behind whatever evil appears in the parts.* The wise man will study science only sufficiently to find the law of Nature, and will then adapt his life to that Law. Zen kata physin, to live according to Nature—this is the purpose and sole excuse of science and philosophy. Almost in Newman’s words Cleanthes surrenders his will to God’s:

Lead me, O God, and thou my Destiny,

To that one place which you will have me fill.

I follow gladly. Should I strive with thee,

A recreant, I needs must follow still.⁵⁹

The Stoic, therefore, will shun luxury and complexity, economic or political strife; he will content himself with little, and will accept without complaint the difficulties and disappointments of life. He will be indifferent to everything but virtue and vice—to sickness and pain, good or ill repute, freedom or slavery, life or death. He will suppress all feelings that may obstruct the course or question the wisdom of Nature: if his son dies he will not grieve, but will accept Fate’s decree as in some hidden way the best. He will seek so complete an apatheia, or absence of feeling, that his peace of mind will be secure against all the attacks and vicissitudes of fortune, pity, or love.† He will be a hard teacher and a stern administrator. Determinism does not imply indulgence; we must hold ourselves, and others, morally responsible for every action. When Zeno beat his slave for stealing, and the slave, having a little learning, said, “But it was fated that I should steal,” Zeno answered, “And that I should beat you.”⁶¹ The Stoic looks upon virtue as its own reward, and as an absolute duty or categorical imperative, derived from his participation in divinity; and he will console himself, in misfortune, by remembering that in following the divine law he becomes an incarnate god.⁶² When he is tired of life, and can leave it without injuring others, he will have no scruples against suicide. Cleanthes, having reached his seventieth year, entered upon a long fast; and then, saying that he would not go back after coming halfway, continued it until he died.⁶³

The Stoic, however, is not unsocial, neither so proud of poverty as the Cynic, nor so enamored of solitude as the Epicurean. He accepts marriage and the family as necessary, though he has no praise for romantic love; he dreams of a utopia in which all women will be in common.⁶⁴ He accepts the state, even monarchy; he has no fond memories of the city-state, and considers the average man a dangerous simpleton; he prefers the Antigonids to King Mob. In truth he cares little for any government; he wishes that all men might be philosophers, so that laws would be unnecessary; he thinks of perfection not, as Plato and Aristotle did, in terms of the good society, but in terms of the good man. He may take part in political affairs, and will support every move, however modest, toward human freedom and dignity; but he will not fetter his happiness to place or power. He may give his life for his country, but he will reject any patriotism that hinders his loyalty to all mankind; he is a citizen of the world. Zeno, in whose veins, as we have seen, there probably flowed both Greek and Semitic blood, longed like Alexander for a breaking down of racial and national barriers, and his internationalism reflects Alexander’s passing unification of the eastern Mediterranean world. Ultimately, Zeno and Chrysippus hoped, all those warring states and classes would be replaced by one vast society in which there would be no nations, no classes, no rich or poor, no masters or slaves; in which philosophers would rule without oppression, and all men would be brothers as the children of one God.⁶⁵

Stoicism was a noble philosophy, and proved more practicable than a modern cynic would expect. It brought together all the elements of Greek thought in a final effort of the pagan mind to create a system of morals acceptable to the classes that had abandoned the ancient creed; and though it naturally won only a small minority to its standard, those few were everywhere the best. Like its Christian counterparts, Calvinism and Puritanism, it produced the strongest characters of its time. Theoretically it was a monstrous doctrine of an isolated and pitiless perfection. Actually it created men of courage, saintliness, and good will like Cato the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius; it influenced Roman jurisprudence in building a law of nations for non-Romans; and it helped to hold ancient society together until a new faith came. The Stoics lent countenance to superstition, and had an injurious effect upon science; but they saw clearly the basic problem of their age—the collapse of the theological basis of morals—and they made an honest attempt to bridge the gap between religion and philosophy. Epicurus won the Greeks, Zeno won the aristocracy of Rome; and to the end of pagan history the Stoics ruled the Epicureans, as they always will. When a new religion took form out of the intellectual and moral chaos of the dying Hellenistic world, the way had been prepared for it by a philosophy that acknowledged the necessity of faith, preached an ascetic doctrine of simplicity and self-restraint, and saw all things in God.

IV. THE RETURN TO RELIGION

The conflict between religion and philosophy had now seen three stages: the attack on religion, as in the pre-Socratics; the endeavor to replace religion with a natural ethic, as in Aristotle and Epicurus; and the return to religion in the Skeptics and the Stoics—a movement that culminated in Neo-Platonism and Christianity. A like sequence has occurred more than once in history, and may be taking place today. Thales corresponds to Galileo, Democritus to Hobbes, the Sophists to the Encyclopedists, Protagoras to Voltaire; Aristotle to Spencer, Epicurus to Anatole France; Pyrrho to Pascal, Arcesilaus to Hume, Carneades to Kant, Zeno to Schopenhauer, Plotinus to Bergson. The chronology resists the analogy, but the basic line of development is the same.

The age of the great systems gave way to doubt in the ability of reason either to understand the world or to control the impulses of men into order and civilization. The skeptics were such not in the Humian but in the Kantian sense: they doubted philosophy as well as dogma, sapped the foundations of materialism, and advised a quiet acceptance of the ancient cult; in Pyrrho, as in Pascal, skepticism led not from but to religion, and Pyrrho himself ended as the venerated high priest of his city. The Epicurean abandonment of politics for ethics, the flight from the state to the soul, could only represent a moment in the return of the pendulum; and the concentration on individual salvation paved the way for a religion that would appeal to the individual rather than to the state. There were many who could not find in life the consolations that had satisfied Epicurus; poverty, misfortune, disease, bereavement, revolution, or war overtook them, and all the counsels of the sage left them empty-souled. Hegesias of Cyrene, though he started like Epicurus from the standpoint of the Cyrenaics, concluded that life has in it more pain than pleasure, more grief than joy, and that the only logical outcome of a naturalistic philosophy is suicide.* Philosophy, like a prodigal daughter, after bright adventures and dark disillusionments, gave up the pursuit of truth and the quest of happiness, returned repentant to her mother, religion, and sought again in faith the foundations of hope and the sanctions of charity.

Stoicism, while seeking to construct a natural ethic for the intellectual classes, sought to preserve the old supernatural aids for the morality of the common man, and, as time went on, gave a more and more religious color to its own metaphysical and ethical thought. Zeno denied any real existence to the popular gods,⁶⁷ but a generation later Cleanthes proposed to prosecute Aristarchus for heresy. Zeno offered no personal immortality, but Seneca spoke of heavenly bliss in terms almost identical with those of the Eleusinian and Christian faiths.⁶⁸ After Zeno Stoicism became a theology rather than a philosophy, and nearly every proposition in it took a theological form. The greater part of the system was composed of arguments about the existence and nature of God, the emanation of the world from God, the reality of Providence, the correspondence of virtue with the divine will, the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God, and the final return of the world to God. In this philosophy we find the sence of sin that was to play so stern a role in primitive and in Protestant Christianity, the lofty inclusiveness that as in the new religions welcomed all races and ranks, and a celibate asceticism that derived from the Cynics and culminated in a long line of Christian monks. From Zeno of Tarsus to Paul of Tarsus was but a step, which would be taken on the road to Damascus.

Many components of the Stoic creed were Asiatic in origin, some were specifically Semitic. In essentials Stoicism was one elemental phase of the Oriental triumph over Hellenic civilization. Greece had ceased to be Greece before it was conquered by Rome.

CHAPTER XXX

The Coming of Rome

I. PYRRHUS

“WHO is so worthless or indolent,” Polybius demands to know, “as not to wish to understand by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting the whole inhabited world to their sole government—a thing unique in history? Who is so passionately devoted to other studies as to regard anything of greater moment than the acquisition of this knowledge?”¹ It is a permissible inquiry, which may engage us later; but there have been so many conquests since Polybius wrote that we cannot spend much time on any of them. We have tried to show that the essential cause of the Roman conquest of Greece was the disintegration of Greek civilization from within. No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself. Deforestation and the abuse of the soil, the depletion of precious metals, the migration of trade routes, the disturbance of economic life by political disorder, the corruption of democracy and the degeneration of dynasties, the decay of morals and patriotism, the decline or deterioration of the population, the replacement of citizen armies by mercenary troops, the human and physical wastage of fratricidal war, the guillotining of ability by murderous revolutions and counterrevolutions—all these had exhausted the resources of Hellas at the very time when the little state on the Tiber, ruled by a ruthless and farseeing aristocracy, was training hardy legions of landowners, conquering its neighbors and competitors, capturing the food and minerals of the western Mediterranean, and advancing year by year upon the Greek settlements in Italy. These ancient communities, once proud of their wealth, their sages, and their arts, had been impoverished by war, by the depredations of Dionysius I, and by the growth of Rome as a rival center of trade. The native tribes that, centuries before, had been enslaved by the Greeks or pushed back into the hinterland, increased and multiplied while their masters cultivated comfort through infanticide and abortion. Soon the native stocks were contesting the control of southern Italy. The Greek cities turned to Rome for help; they were helped, and absorbed.

Taras, frightened by the growth of Rome, called to its aid the dashing young king of Epirus. In that picturesque and mountainous country, known to us as southern Albania, Greek culture had kept a precarious footing ever since the Dorians had raised a shrine to Zeus at Dodona.* In 295 Pyrrhus, who traced his ancestry to Achilles, became king of the Molossians, the dominant Epirote tribe. He was handsome and brave, a despotic but popular ruler. His subjects thought that he could cure the spleen by pressing his right foot upon their prostrate backs; nor was anyone so poor as to be refused his ministrations.² When the Tarentines appealed to him he saw an alluring opportunity: he would conquer Rome, the danger in the West, as Alexander had conquered Persia, the danger in the East; and he would prove his genealogy by his courage. In 281 he crossed the Ionian (Adriatic) Sea with 25,000 infantry, three thousand horse, and twenty elephants; the Greeks had taken elephants as well as mysticism from India. He met the Romans at Heracleia, and won a “Pyrrhic victory”: his losses were so great, and his resources in men and materials were now so small, that when an aide complimented him on his success he created an historic phrase by replying that another such triumph would ruin him.³ The Romans sent Caius Fabricius to treat with him for an exchange of prisoners. At supper, says Plutarch,

amongst all sorts of things that were discoursed of, but more particularly Greece and its philosophers, Cineas [the Epirote diplomat] spoke of Epicurus, and explained the opinions his followers hold about the gods and the commonwealth, and the objects of life, placing the chief happiness of man in pleasure, and declining public affairs as an injury and disturbance of a happy life, removing the gods afar off both from kindness or anger, or any concern for us at all, to a life wholly without business and flowing in pleasures. Before he had done speaking, “O Hercules!” Fabricius cried out to Pyrrhus, “may Pyrrhus and the Samnites† entertain themselves with opinions as long as they are at war with us.”⁴

Impressed by the Romans, and despairing of adequate aid from the Greeks of Italy, Pyrrhus dispatched Cineas to Rome to negotiate peace. The Senate was about to agree when Appius Claudius, blind and dying, had himself carried into the senate house and protested against making peace with a foreign army on Italian soil. Frustrated, Pyrrhus fought again, won another suicidal victory at Asculum, and then, hopeless of success against Rome, sailed to Sicily with the generous resolve to free it from the Carthaginians. There he drove the Carthaginians back with reckless heroism; but whether it was that the Sicilian Greeks were too timid to rally to him, or that he governed them as willfully as any tyrant, he received so little support that he had to abandon the island after a three years’ campaign, making the prophetic remark, “What a battlefield I am leaving to Carthage and Rome!” Arriving with depleted forces in Italy, he was defeated at Beneventum (275), where for the first time the light-armed and mobile cohorts proved their superiority to the unwieldy phalanxes, and thereby wrote a chapter in military history.⁵ Pyrrhus returned to Epirus, says the philosophical Plutarch,

after he had consumed six years in these wars; and though unsuccessful in his affairs, yet preserved his courage unconquerable among all these misfortunes, and was held, for military experience and personal valor and enterprise, above all the other princes of his time; but what he got by brave actions he lost again by vain hopes, and by new desires of what he had not, kept nothing of what he had.⁶

Pyrrhus went out now to fresh wars, and was killed with a tile by an old woman in Argos. In that same year (272) Taras yielded to Rome.

Eight years later Rome began her century-long struggle against Carthage for the mastery of the western Mediterranean. After a generation of fighting Carthage ceded to Rome Sardinia, Corsica, and the Carthaginian portions of Sicily. In the Second Punic War Syracuse made the mistake of siding with Carthage, whereupon Marcellus starved it into surrender. The victors plundered the city so thoroughly that it never recovered. Marcellus “removed to Rome,” says Livy, “the ornaments of Syracuse—the statues and pictures in which it abounded. . . . The spoils were almost greater than if Carthage itself had been taken.”⁷ By 210 all Sicily had fallen forfeit to Rome. The island was transformed into a granary for Italy, and relapsed into an agricultural economy in which nearly all the work was done by hopeless slaves. Industries were discouraged, trade was limited, wealth was sluiced off to Rome, and the free population withered away. Sicily disappeared from the history of civilization for a thousand years.

II. ROME THE LIBERATOR

At every step the expansion of Rome was aided by the mistakes of her enemies. In the year 230 two Romans were sent to Scodra, capital of Illyria (northern Albania) to remonstrate against the attacks of Illyrian pirates upon Roman shipping. Queen Teuta, who had been allowed to share the spoils, answered that “it was contrary to the custom of the Illyrian rulers to hinder their subjects from winning booty from the sea.”⁸ When one envoy threatened war Teuta had him killed. Pleased with so inexpensive an excuse for seizing the Dalmatian coast, Rome dispatched an expedition which reduced Illyria to a Roman protectorate almost as easily in 229 B.C. as in A.D. 1939. Corcyra (Corfu), Epidamnus (Durazzo), and other Greek settlements became Roman dependencies. Since Greek trade had also suffered from Illyrian piracy, Athens, Corinth, and the two leagues applauded Rome as a deliverer, accepted her ambassadors, and admitted the Romans to participation in the Eleusinian mysteries and the Isthmian games.

In 216 Hannibal annihilated the Roman army at Cannae, and marched up to the gates of Rome. While Rome faced the greatest crisis in the history of the republic, Philip V, King of Macedon, signed an alliance with Hannibal and prepared to invade Italy (214). In the conference at Naupactus (213) the Aetolian delegate Agelaus appealed for the unity of all Greeks, in this First Macedonian War, against the rising power in the west:

It would be best of all if the Greeks never made war upon each other, but regarded it as the highest favor in the gift of the gods could they always speak with one heart and voice, and marching arm in arm like men fording a river, repel barbarian invaders and unite in preserving themselves and their cities. . . . For it is evident that whether the Carthaginians beat the Romans or the Romans the Carthaginians in this war, it is not in the least likely that the victors will be content with the sovereignty of Italy and Sicily, but they are sure to come here and extend their ambitions beyond the bounds of justice. Therefore I implore you all to secure yourselves against this danger, and I address myself especially to King Philip. For you, Sire, the best security is, instead of exhausting the Greeks and making them an easy prey to the invader, on the contrary to take thought for them as for your own body, and to attend to the safety of every province of Greece as if it were part and parcel of your own dominions.⁹

Philip heard him politely, and became for a moment the idol of Greece. But his treaty with Hannibal, if we may believe the too patriotic Livy, specified that in return for Philip’s attack upon Italy, Carthage, if successful in the present war, would help Philip to subdue all mainland Greece to Macedonia.¹⁰ Perhaps because the terms of such an agreement became known to the Greek states, most of them, including Agelaus’ Aetolian League, entered into a pact with Rome against Macedon, and kept Philip so harassed at home that his invasion of Italy was indefinitely postponed. In 205 Rome signed a treaty with Philip so that she might give all her attention to Hannibal, and three years later the elder Scipio overwhelmed the Carthaginian at Zama. As the last great century of Greek civilization came to an end Egypt, Rhodes, and Pergamum appealed to Rome for help against Philip. Rome responded by inviting the Second Macedonian War. Opposed by nearly all of Greece as well as by Rome, Philip fought with the ferocity of a beast at bay. He used every treachery, stole whatever he found to his purpose, and treated captives with such cruelty that every man in Abydos, when Philip’s siege was proving irresistible, killed his wife and children and then himself.¹¹ In 197 Titus Quinctius Flamininus, a patrician of the type that made Polybius a pro-Roman enthusiast, so overwhelmed Philip at Cynoscephalae that suddenly all Macedonia—indeed, all Greece—lay at the mercy of Rome. To the disgust of his Aetolian allies (who claimed that they had won the battle), Flamininus, after exacting severe indemnities and appropriating a shipload of spoils, allowed the safely weakened Philip to keep his throne, on the ground that Macedonia was needed as a bulwark against the barbarians in the north.

The Roman general had learned Greek at Tarentum (as Rome called Taras), and had known the fascination of Greek literature, philosophy, and art. It was apparently his sincere resolve to liberate the Greek city-states from Macedonian domination, and to give them every opportunity to live in freedom and peace. Having with some difficulty convinced the Roman commissioners that this was a wise policy, he went to the Isthmian games at Corinth (196), where all the important Greek world was gathered (each man telling the next, says Polybius, what the Romans would do now), and announced through a herald: “The Senate of Rome, and Titus Quinctius the proconsul, having overcome King Philip and the Macedonians, leave the following people free, without garrisons, subject to no tribute, and governed by their own laws: the Corinthians, Phocians, Locrians, Euboeans, Phthiotic Achaeans, Magnesians, Thessalians, and Perrhaebians”—i.e., all those mainland Greeks who were not already free. The greater part of the assemblage, unable to credit so unprecedented an act of liberality, cried out that the announcement should be repeated. When the herald read it again, “such a mighty burst of cheering arose,” says Polybius, “that those who listen to the tale today cannot easily conceive what it was.”¹² Many doubted the sincerity of the declaration, and looked for a trick behind it; but Flamininus that day began the removal of Roman troops from Corinth, and by 194 his entire army was back in Italy. Greece hailed him as “Savior and Liberator,” and entered happily upon its last days of freedom.

III. ROME THE CONQUEROR

The Aetolians were not satisfied with these arrangements. Some of the cities that Rome had freed had once been under Aetolian domination, and were not now restored to the League. The Second Macedonian War was hardly over when the Aetolians invited Antiochus III to rescue Greece from Rome. Pergamum and Lampsacus, caught between the restless Gauls on the north and the expanding Seleucid power on the south, appealed to Rome for help against Antiochus. The Senate sent its ablest general, Publius Scipio Africanus, victor of Zama. With a few legions and the troops of Eumenes II, the Roman generals defeated Antiochus at Magnesia, and turning northward, drove back the Gauls. The Romans extended their protection over nearly all the Mediterranean coast of Asia, and then returned to Italy. Eumenes was grateful, but mainland Greece denounced him as a traitor to Hellas for calling in the barbarous Romans against his fellow Greeks.

For fickle Greece already regretted that she had ever accepted the favors of her rude rescuer from the west. It was observed that though Flamininus and his successors had given Greece freedom, they had taken in payment—from any city that had supported Philip or Antiochus or the Aetolians—so much booty that the Greeks dreaded another such liberation. For three days, in Flamininus’ triumph, the spoils of his Grecian campaign passed in continuous train before the eyes of Rome: on the first day arms, armor, and innumerable statues of marble or bronze; on the second day 18,000 pounds of silver, 3,714 pounds of gold, and 100,000 silver coins; on the third day 114 coronets.¹³ Moreover, the Romans had supported, and now through their representatives continued actively to support, the moneyed classes in Greece against the poorer citizens, and had forbidden all manifestations of class war. The Greeks did not want peace at such a price; they wished to be free to settle their own disputes, and to give play to national territorial ambitions; they could not bear changelessness. Soon the rival leagues were at odds, and faction ran rife everywhere. Each city or group laid conflicting claims before the Roman Senate; the Senate dispatched commissions to investigate and adjudicate; the Greeks denounced this interference as vassalage. The chains of foreign control were invisible but real; year after year the Greeks—all but the rich—felt them more sharply, and prayed for an end to this freedom. The Senate began to listen to those of its members who contended that there would never be order or quiet in Greece until Rome took full control.

In 179 Philip V died, and his eldest son Perseus, not without bloodshed, inherited his throne. Seventeen years of peace had restored the economy of Macedon, and had raised up a fresh generation of youths for the jaws of war. Perseus negotiated an alliance with Seleucus IV, and married Seleucus’ daughter; Rhodes joined the alliance, and sent a great fleet to escort the bride. All Greece rejoiced, and saw in Perseus a living hope against the power of Rome. Eumenes II, fearful for the independence of Pergamum, journeyed to Rome and urged the Senate, for its own sake, to destroy Macedon. On his way home he was almost killed in a private quarrel. It suited Rome to interpret the brawl as a plot of Perseus to assassinate the king; and a patriotic exchange of diplomatic recriminations announced the Third Macedonian War. Only Epirus and Illyria had the courage to help Perseus; the Greek states sent him secret letters of sympathy, but did nothing. In 168 Aemilius Paulus annihilated the Macedonian army at Pydna, destroyed seventy Macedonian cities, banished their upper classes to Italy, and quartered the kingdom into four autonomous but tributary republics, among which all trade and intercourse were forbidden. Perseus was imprisoned in Italy, and died of maltreatment in two years. Epirus was devastated, and 100,000 Epirots were sold into slavery at a dollar a head.¹⁴ Rhodes, which had played no active part in the war, was punished by the liberation of her possessions on the Asiatic coast, and by the establishment of a competitive and free port at Delos. The private papers of Perseus were captured, and all Greeks who had offered him aid or comfort were banished or jailed. A thousand of the Achaean League’s most prominent representatives, including Polybius, were deported to Italy; they remained in exile there for sixteen years, during which seven hundred of them died. The admiration of Greece for Rome the liberator had never been so intense as was now the Greek hatred of Rome the conqueror.

The severity of the victors had unwilled results. The weakening of Rhodes ended her policing of the Aegean, and revived a trade-destroying piracy. The removal of so many aristocrats left the field open to radical leadership in the cities of the Achaean League, and the class war enjoyed one of its bitterest periods. The rich clung to the protection of Rome, the poor demanded the expulsion both of the rich and of the Roman power. In 150 the surviving Achaean exiles returned from Italy, and joined in the demand for the repudiation of Roman authority in Greece. To weaken the Achaean power Rome sent to Greece a commission that ordered Corinth, Orchomenos, and Argos to secede from the League. The ladies of Corinth replied by emptying pails of refuse upon the heads of the commissioners.¹⁵ In 146 the League voted for a war of liberation, hoping that Rome’s campaigns in Spain and Africa would divert her energies and incline her to a complaisant peace. A fever of patriotism swept the cities of the League. Slaves were freed and armed, a moratorium on debts was proclaimed, and land was promised to the poor, while the unhappy rich, trembling between socialism and Rome, reluctantly contributed their jewelry and their money to the cause of freedom. Athens and Sparta remained aloof, but Boeotia, Locria, and Euboea committed themselves bravely to the war. The republics of Macedonia joined in open revolt against Rome.

The angry Senate sent over an army under Mummius and a fleet under Metellus. Their combined forces overcame all resistance, and in 146 Mummius captured Corinth, the citadel of the League. Whether to destroy a commercial rival in the east as the younger Scipio was in that year destroying Carthage in the west, or to give rebellious Greece a lesson after the fashion of Alexander at Thebes, the rich city of merchants and courtesans was put to the flames, all the men were slaughtered, and all the women and children were sold into slavery. Mummius carried off to Italy whatever wealth could be moved, including the works of art with which the Corinthians had adorned their cities and their homes. Polybius tells how Roman soldiers used world-famous paintings as boards for their games of draughts or dice. The League was dissolved, and its leaders were put to death. Greece and Macedonia were united into one province under a Roman governor. Boeotia, Locris, Corinth, and Euboea were subjected to annual tribute; Athens and Sparta were spared, and were allowed to remain under their own laws. The party of property and order was upheld everywhere, and all attempts to wage war, or make revolutions, or change the constitution, were proscribed. The turbulent cities had at last found peace.

EPILOGUE

Our Greek Heritage

GREEK civilization was not dead; it had yet several centuries of life before it; and when it died* it bequeathed itself in an incomparable legacy to the nations of Europe and the Near East. Every Greek colony poured the elixir of Greek art and thought into the cultural blood of the hinterland—into Spain and Gaul, Etruria and Rome, Egypt and Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor, and along the shores of the Black Sea. Alexandria was the port of reshipment for ideas as well as goods: from the Museum and the Library the works and views of Greek poets, mystics, philosophers, and scientists were scattered through scholars and students into every city of the Mediterranean concourse. Rome took the Greek heritage in its Hellenistic form: her playwrights adopted Menander and Philemon, her poets imitated the modes, measures, and themes of Alexandrian literature, her arts used Greek craftsmen and Greek forms, her law absorbed the statutes of the Greek cities, and her later imperial organization was modeled upon the Greco-Oriental monarchies: Hellenism, after the Roman conquest of Greece, conquered Rome even as the Orient was conquering Greece. Every extension of Roman power spread the ferment of Hellenic civilization. The Byzantine Empire wedded Greek to Asiatic culture, and passed on some part of the Greek inheritance to the Near East and the Slavic north. The Syrian Christians took up the torch and handed it to the Arabs, who carried it through Africa to Spain. Byzantine, Moslem, and Jewish scholars conveyed or translated the Greek masterpieces to Italy, arousing first the philosophy of the Schoolmen and then the fever of the Renaissance. Since that second birth of the European mind the spirit of Greece has seeped so thoroughly into modern culture that “all civilized nations, in all that concerns the activity of the intellect, are colonies of Hellas” today.†¹

If we include in our Hellenic heritage not only what the Greeks invented but what they adapted from older cultures and transmitted by these diverse routes to our own, we shall find that patrimony in almost every phase of modern life. Our handicrafts, the technique of mining, the essentials of engineering, the processes of finance and trade, the organization of labor, the governmental regulation of commerce and industry—all these have come down to us on the stream of history from Rome, and through Rome from Greece. Our democracies and our dictatorships alike go back to Greek exemplars; and though the widened reach of states has evolved a representative system unknown to Hellas, the democratic idea of a government responsible to the governed, of trial by jury, and of civil liberties of thought, speech, writing, assemblage, and worship, have been profoundly stimulated by Greek history. These things above all distinguished the Greek from the Oriental, and gave him an independence of spirit and enterprise that made him smile at the obeisances and inertia of the East.

Our schools and universities, our gymnasiums and stadiums, our athletics and Olympic games, trace their lineage to Greece. The theory of eugenic mating, the conception of self-containment and of self-control, the cult of health and natural living, the pagan ideal of a shameless enjoyment of every sense, found their historic formulations in Greece. Christian theology and practice (the very words are Greek) stem in large part from the mystery religions of Greece and Egypt, from Eleusinian, Orphic, and Osirian rites; from Greek doctrines of the divine son dying for mankind and rising from the dead; from Greek rituals of religious procession, ceremonial purification, holy sacrifice, and the sacred common meal; from Greek ideas of hell demons, purgatory, indulgences, and heaven; and from Stoic and Neo-Platonic theories of the Logos, creation, and the final conflagration of the world. Even our superstition is indebted to Greek bogies, witches, curses, omens, and unlucky days. And who could understand English literature, or one ode of Keats, without some tincture of Greek mythology?

Our literature could hardly have existed without the Greek tradition. Our alphabet came from Greece through Cumae and Rome; our language is littered with Greek words; our science has forged an international language through Greek terms; our grammar and rhetoric, even the punctuation and paragraphing of this page, are Greek inventions. Our literary genres are Greek—the lyric, the ode, the idyl, the novel, the essay, the oration, the biography, the history, and above all the drama; again nearly all the words are Greek. The terms and forms of the modern drama—tragedy, comedy, and pantomime—are Greek; and though Elizabethan tragedy is unique, the comic drama has come down almost unchanged from Menander and Philemon through Plautus and Terence, Ben Jonson and Moliere. The Greek dramas themselves are among the richest portions of our inheritance.

Nothing else in Greece seems so foreign to us as its music; and yet modern music (until its return to Africa and the Orient) was derived from medieval chants and dances, and these went back in part to Greece. The oratorio and the opera owe something to the Greek choral dance and drama; and the theory of music, so far as we know, was first explored and expounded by the Greeks from Pythagoras to Aristoxenus. Our debt is least in painting; but in the art of fresco a direct line can be traced from Polygnotus through Alexandria and Pompeii, Giotto and Michelangelo, to the arresting murals of our own day. The forms and much of the technique of modern sculpture are still Greek, for upon no other art has the Hellenic genius stamped itself so despotically. We are only now freeing ourselves from the fascination of Greek architecture; every city in Europe and America has some temple of commerce or finance whose form or columnar façade came from the shrines of Greek gods. We miss in Greek art the study of character and the portrayal of the soul, and its infatuation with physical beauty and health leaves it less mature than the masculine statuary of Egypt or the profound painting of the Chinese; but the lessons of moderation, purity, and harmony embodied in the sculpture and architecture of the classic age are a precious heirloom for our race.

If Greek civilization seems more akin and “modern” to us now than that of any century before Voltaire, it is because the Hellene loved reason as much as form, and boldly sought to explain all nature in nature’s terms. The liberation of science from theology, and the independent development of scientific research, were parts of the heady adventure of the Greek mind. Greek mathematicians laid the foundations of trigonometry and calculus, they began and completed the study of conic sections, and they brought three-dimensional geometry to such relative perfection that it remained as they left it until Descartes and Pascal. Democritus illuminated the whole area of physics and chemistry with his atomic theory. In a mere aside and holiday from abstract studies Archimedes produced enough new mechanisms to place his name with the highest in the records of invention. Aristarchus anticipated and perhaps inspired Copernicus;* and Hipparchus, through Claudius Ptolemy, constructed a system of astronomy which is one of the landmarks in cultural history. Eratosthenes measured the earth and mapped it. Anaxagoras and Empedocles drew the outlines of a theory of evolution. Aristotle and Theophrastus classified the animal and plant kingdoms, and almost created the sciences of meteorology, zoology, embryology, and botany. Hippocrates freed medicine from mysticism and philosophical theory, and ennobled it with an ethical code; Herophilus and Erasistratus raised anatomy and physiology to a point which, except in Galen, Europe would not reach again till the Renaissance. In the work of these men we breathe the quiet air of reason, always uncertain and unsafe, but cleansed of passion and myth. Perhaps, if we had its masterpieces entire, we should rate Greek science as the most signal intellectual achievement of mankind.

But the lover of philosophy will only reluctantly yield to science and art the supreme places in our Grecian heritage. Greek science itself was a child of Greek philosophy—of that reckless challenge to legend, that youthful love of inquiry, which for centuries united science and philosophy in one adventurous quest. Never had men examined nature so critically and yet so affectionately: the Greeks did no dishonor to the world in thinking that it was a cosmos of order and therefore amenable to understanding. They invented logic for the same reason that they made perfect statuary: harmony, unity, proportion, form, in their view, provided both the art of logic and the logic of art. Curious of every fact and every theory, they not only established philosophy as a distinct enterprise of the European mind, but they conceived nearly every system and every hypothesis, and left little to be said on any major problem of our life. Realism and nominalism, idealism and materialism, monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, feminism and communism, the Kantian critique and the Schopenhaurian despair, the primitivism of Rousseau and the immoralism of Nietzsche, the synthesis of Spencer and the psychoanalysis of Freud—all the dreams and wisdom of philosophy are here, in the age and land of its birth. And in Greece men not only talked of philosophy, they lived it: the sage, rather than the warrior or the saint, was the pinnacle and ideal of Greek life. Through all the centuries from Thales that exhilarating philosophical bequest has come down to us, inspiring Roman emperors, Christian Fathers, Scholastic theologians, Renaissance heretics, Cambridge Platonists, the rebels of the Enlightenment, and the devotees of philosophy today. At this moment thousands of eager spirits are reading Plato, perhaps in every country on the earth.

Civilization does not die, it migrates; it changes its habitat and its dress, but it lives on. The decay of one civilization, as of one individual, makes room for the growth of another; life sheds the old skin, and surprises death with fresh youth. Greek civilization is alive; it moves in every breath of mind that we breathe; so much of it remains that none of us in one lifetime could absorb it all. We know its defects—its insane and pitiless wars, its stagnant slavery, its subjection of woman, its lack of moral restraint, its corrupt individualism, its tragic failure to unite liberty with order and peace. But those who cherish freedom, reason, and beauty will not linger over these blemishes. They will hear behind the turmoil of political history the voices of Solon and Socrates, of Plato and Euripides, of Pheidias and Praxiteles, of Epicurus and Archimedes; they will be grateful for the existence of such men, and will seek their company across alien centuries. They will think of Greece as the bright morning of that Western civilization which, with all its kindred faults, is our nourishment and our life.

TO THOSE WHO HAVE COME THUS FAR:

THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNSEEN BUT EVER FELT COMPANIONSHIP.

Glossary

Aperçus—instinctive insights.

Bizarreries—strange or extravagant expressions or actions.

Bourgeoisie—the middle classes.

Cujus regio ejus religio—the religion of the region must be that of the ruler.

De nobis fabula narrabitur—about us the story will be told.

Deus ex machina—the god from the machine.

Élan—spirited vitality.

In medias res—into the middle of things, or into the heart of the subject.

La Parisienne—The Parisian Woman.

Mater Dolorosa—The Sorrowful Mother.

Mise en scène—the surrounding situation.

Nouveaux riches—the newly rich.

Oikoumene (sc. ge)—the inhabited world.

Pace—despite, begging the pardon of.

Pinakotheka—picture gallery.

Plein air—open air.

Pornaia—brothels.

Soferim—scholars.

Bibliography

Of Books Referred to in Text or Notes

The starred volumes are recommended for further study.

ADAMS, B.: The New Empire. N. Y., 1903.

*AESCHYLUS: The Oresteia. Tr. G. Murray. London, 1928.

ANDERSON, W. J., and SPIERS, R. P.: The Architecture of Greece and Rome. London, 1902.

ARISTOPHANES: The Eleven Comedies. 2v. N. Y., 1928.

ARISTOPHANES: The Frogs, and Three Other Plays. Tr. Frere, etc., Everyman Library.

ARISTOTLE: Art of Rhetoric. Loeb Classical Library.

ARISTOTLE: Metaphysics. 2v. Loeb Library.

ARISTOTLE: Metaphysics. Tr. M’Mahon. London, 1857.

ARISTOTLE: Nicomachean Ethics. Tr. Chase. Everyman Library.

ARISTOTLE (?): Oeconomica and Magna Moralia. Loeb Library.

ARISTOTLE: On the Constitution of Athens. Tr. E. Poste. London, 1891.

ARISTOTLE: Physics. 2v. Loeb Library.

ARISTOTLE: Poetics. Loeb Library.

*ARISTOTLE: Politics. Tr. Lindsay. Everyman Library.

ARISTOTLE: Works. Tr. Smith and Ross. Oxford, 1931.

ARNOLD, M.: Essays in Criticism. A. L. Burt, N. Y., n.d.

ARRIAN: Anabasis of Alexander; Indica. London, 1893.

ATHENAEUS: The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned. 3v. London, 1854.

*BACON, F.: Philosophical Works. Ed. J. M. Robertson. London, 1905.

BAEDEKER, K.: Greece. Leipzig, 1909.

BAIKIE, J.: The Sea-Kings of Crete. London, 1926.

BAKEWELL, C.: Source Book in Ancient Philosophy. N. Y., 1909.

BALL, W. W. R.: Short Account of the History of Mathematics. London, 1888.

BARON, S. W.: Social and Religious History of the Jews. 3v. N. Y., 1937.

BEBEL, A.: Woman under Socialism. N. Y., 1923.

BECKER, W. A.: Charicles. Tr. Metcalfe. London, 1886.

BENSON, E. F.: Life of Alcibiades. N. Y., 1929.

BENTWICH, N.: Hellenism. Phila., 1919.

BERRY, A.: Short History of Astronomy. N. Y., 1909.

BEVAN, E. R.: House of Seleucus. 2v. London, 1902.

BEVAN, E. R., and SINGER, C., eds.: The Legency of Israel. Oxford, 1927.

BIBLE, THE

BLAKENEY, J. A.: Smaller Classical Dictionary. Everyman Library.

BOTSFORD, G. W.: The Athenian Constitution. N. Y., 1893.

BOTSFORD, G. W., and SIHLER, E. G.: Hellenic Civilization. N. Y., 1920.

BRECCIA, E.: Alexandrea ad Aegyptum. Bergamo, 1922.

BRIFFAULT, R.: The Mothers. 3v. N. Y., 1927.

BROWNE, H.: Handbook of Homeric Study. London, 1908.

BURY, J. B.: Ancient Greek Historians. N. Y., 1909.

*BURY, J. B.: History of Greece. London, 1931.

CALHOUN, G. M.: Business Life of Ancient Athens. Chicago, 1926.

CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY (CAH): Vols. I-VIII. N. Y., 1924f.

CAPES, W.: University Life in Ancient Athens. N. Y., 1922.

CARPENTER, E.: Pagan and Christian Creeds. N. Y., 1920.

CARREL, A.: Man the Unknown. N. Y., 1935.

CARROLL, N.: Greek Women. Phila., 1908.

CHILDE, V. G.: Dawn of European Civilization. N. Y., 1925.

CICERO: De Finibus. Loeb Library.

CICERO: De Natura Deorum. Loeb Library.

CICERO: De Re Publica. Loeb Library.

CICERO: Tusculan Disputations. Loeb Library.

COOK, A. B.: Zeus. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914.

COTTERILL, H. B.: History of Art. 2v. N. Y., 1922.

COULANGES, F.DE: The Ancient City. Boston, 1901.

CURTIUS, E.: Griechische Geschichte. 3v. Berlin, 1887f.

DAY, C.: History of Commerce. London, 1926.

DEMOSTHENES: On the Crown, etc. Loeb Library.

DEWEY, JOHN, etc.: Studies in the History of Ideas. N. Y., 1935.

DICKINSON, G. L.: The Greek View of Life. N. Y., 1928.

DIODORUS SICULUS: Library of History. 3v. Loeb Library.

DIODORUS SICULUS: Historical Library. 2v. London, 1814.

*DIOGENES LAERTIUS: Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers. London, 1853.

DRAPER, J. W.: History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. 2v. N. Y., 1876.

DUPRÉEL, E.: La Légende Socratique. Bruxelles, 1922.

DYER, T. H.: Ancient Athens. London, 1873.

ELLIS, H.: Studies in the Psychology of Sex. 6v. Phila., 1911.

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 14th ed. N. Y., 1929.

EURIPIDES: Electra. Tr. G. Murray. Oxford, 1907.

EURIPIDES: Iphigenia in Tauris. Tr. G. Murray. Oxford, 1930.

*EURIPIDES: Medea. Tr.G. Murray. Oxford, 1912.

EURIPIDES: Text and tr. by A. S. Way. 4v. Loeb Library.

*EURIPIDES: Trojan Women. Tr. G. Murray. Oxford, 1914.

EVANS, SIR A.: The Palace of Minos. 4v. in 6. London, 1921f.