The Life of Greece

* “To write the history of Greece at almost any period without dissipating the interest is a task of immense difficulty . . . because there is no constant unity or fixed center to which the actions and aims of the numerous states can be subordinated or related.”—Bury, Ancient Greek Historians, p. 22.

† To avoid returning too often to the same scene, the architectural history of minor cities will be carried in these chapters (Book II) down to the death of Alexander (323).

* These figures, of course, are conjectural, being based upon a few hints and many assumptions.

* Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides.

† How strangely similar this is—as if one feeling united two poets across twenty-five centuries—to Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Night-Song”:

Über alien Gipfeln

1st Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch.³¹

O’er all the hill-tops

Is quiet now,

In all the tree-tops

Hearest thou

Hardly a breath;

The birds are asleep in the trees.

Wait; soon like these

Thou, too, shalt rest.³²

* Lycurgus, however, was believed to have forbidden the writing of his laws.

* Gitiadas adorned a temple of Athena with excellently wrought bronze plates; Bathycles of Magnesia built the stately throne of Apollo at Amyclae; and Theodorus of Samos built for Sparta a famous town hall. After that Spartan art, even by imported artists, is hardly heard of any more.

* So in 1789 Camille Desmoulins, from his cafe rostra, urged the Gauls to overthrow their German (Frankish) aristocracy.

† The Diolcos was a grateful alternative to merchants who distrusted the rough waters off Cape Malea on the sea route to the western Mediterranean. The tramway was sturdy enough to carry the usual trading vessel of Greek times; indeed, Augustus transported his fleet over the Diolcos in pursuit of Antony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium, and a Greek squadron was similarly carried over as late as A.D. 883.⁷⁸ Periander planned in his day to cut the canal that now joins the two gulfs, but his engineers found it too great a task.⁷⁹

* Cf. the periodical “purges” in Communist Russia, 1935-38.

* The ascription of this poem, and of those quoted below, to certain periods in Theognis’ life is hypothetical.

* So all classical antiquity believed except some Boeotian literati of the second century A.D., who questioned Hesiod’s authorship.⁸

* From aphros, foam. The final syllable is of uncertain derivation.

* History knows nothing of Hesiod’s death. Legend tells how, at the age of eighty, he seduced the maiden Clymene; how her brother killed him and threw his body into the sea; and how Clymene bore as his son the lyric poet Stesichorus—who, however, was born in Sicily.²²

* Twice the Greeks waged Sacred Wars over the perquisites of Apollo’s temple: once in 595-85, when the southern Greeks put an end to the exacting of greedy tolls by the people of neighboring Cirrha from pilgrims passing to Delphi through their port; and again in 356-46, when an allied Greek army under Philip of Macedon ousted the Phocians who had captured Delphi and appropriated the temple funds. The first war led to the neutralization of Delphi and the establishment of the Pythian games; the second led to the Macedonian conquest of Greece.

* A wild boar having devastated the fields of Calydon, Meleager, son of Calydon’s King Oeneus, organized a hunt for it, with such aides as Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Nestor, Jason, and the fair-faced, fleet-footed Atalanta. Several heroes were slain by the boar, but Atalanta shot it and Meleager killed it. Atalanta, sought by many wooers in her Arcadian home, agreed to marry any one of them that could outrun her, but those who lost were to be put to death. Hippomenes won by dropping as he ran the three golden apples of the Hesperides given him by Aphrodite; Atalanta stooped to pick them, and lost the race. Of Meleager’s secret love for Atalanta, and his tragic death, the reader may learn in Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon.

* Hence the wise counsel of Alexander Pope’s philosophical doggerel:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.²⁴

* “Attica,” says Thucydides (i, 1), “because of the poverty of its soil, enjoyed from a very remote period freedom from faction [?] and invasion.”

* Probably named by the Phoenicians from shalam, peace; cf. Salem.³⁴

† Tradition placed this event in the thirteenth century B.C.; but the union of Attica under Athens could hardly have been completed before 700, since the “Homeric” Hymn to Demeter, composed about that date, speaks of Eleusis as still having its own king.³⁵

‡ A possibly legendary event attributed by tradition to 1068 B.C.

* The mark of a gentleman then, as in the days of Roman equites, French chevaliers, and English cavaliers.

* “Those that stole a cabbage or an apple were to suffer even as villains that committed sacrilege or murder.“—Plutarch, Solon.

* Probably this did not apply to commercial debts in which personal servitude was not involved.⁵⁶

* For the value of Athenian coins, see below, Chap. XII, sect. III.

† Grote and many others interpreted Plutarch’s statement to mean that Solon had depreciated the currency by twenty-seven per cent and had thereby given relief to landlords who, themselves debtors to others, were deprived of the mortgage returns upon which they had depended for meeting their obligations.⁶² Such inflation, however, would have fallen as a second blow upon those landlords who had lent sums to merchants; if it helped any class, it helped these merchants rather than the landlords or the peasants—whose mortgages had already been forgiven. Possibly Solon had no thought of debasing the currency, but wished merely to substitute, for a monetary standard that had been found convenient in trading with the Peloponnesus, another that would facilitate trade with the rich and growing markets of Ionia, where the Euboic standard was in common use.⁶³

* A medimnus—about one and a half bushels—was considered equivalent to one drachma in money.

* Diogenes Laertius tells this story rather of Soli in Cilicia—the town whose preservation of old Greek speech into Alexander’s day led to the word solecism.

* The word tyrant had come from Lydia, perhaps from the town of Tyrrha, meaning a fortress; probably it is a distant cousin to our word tower (Gk. tyrris). Apparently it was applied first to Gyges, the Lydian king.

* One would not be surprised to learn that they represented a resentful aristocracy, like Brutus and Cassius in Rome. Brutus, too, became the hero of a revolution, after eighteen centuries had obscured his history.

† Grandson of Cleisthenes, dictator of Sicyon.

* A similar institution was used at Argos, Megara, and Syracuse.

* A property qualification was placed upon the franchise in the earlier stages of American and French democracy.

* Cf. Pater: “Perhaps the most brilliant and animating episode in the entire history of Greece—its early colonization.”¹

* Semonides compares women now to foxes, asses, pigs, and the changeful sea, and swears that no husband has ever passed through a day without some word of censure from his wife.¹³

* Longfellow’s Evangeline, his Hiawatha, and the final line of each stanza in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, by Byron, may serve as examples respectively of dactylic hexameter, trochaic tetrameter, and iambic trimeter.

* Or, as we know it, from the Roman name of the goddess and the Italian name of the island, the Venus de Milo.

† Cf. Case XIII of the Cesnola Collection of Cyprian Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A bilingual tablet unearthed by British scholars in 1868 enabled them to decipher Cypriote writing as a dialect of Greek expressed by syllabic signs; but the results have not added anything of interest to universal history.

* Similar movements, however, appeared in India and China in this sixth century B.C.

* Let Aristotle tell the story: “They say that Thales, perceiving by his skill in astrology (astronomy) that there would be great plenty of olives that year, while it was yet winter hired at a low price all the oil presses in Miletus and Chios, there being no one to bid against him. But when the season came for making oil, many persons wanting them, he all at once let them upon what terms he pleased; and raising a large sum of money by that means, convinced them that it was easy for philosophers to be rich if they chose it.”²³

* That a circle is bisected by its diameter; that the angles at the base of any isosceles triangle are “similar” (i.e., equal); that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle; that the opposite angles formed by two intersecting straight lines are equal; that two triangles having two angles and one side respectively equal are themselves equal.²⁴

* Cf. Spencer’s definition of evolution as substantially a change from “indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity.”³³

* The ecliptic (so called because eclipses of the sun and moon take place in it) is the great circle made by the apparent annual path of the sun through the heavens. Since the plane of this circle or ecliptic is also the plane of the earth’s orbit, the obliquity of the ecliptic is the oblique angle (about 23°) between the plane of the earth’s equator and the plane of its orbit around the sun.

† The Egyptians had drawn maps, but of limited districts.

‡ The wise reader will always supply the word known after such words as earliest and first.

* From histor or istor, knowing; a euphonism for id-tor, from the root id in eidenai, to know; cf. our wit and wisdom. Story is a shortened form of history.

* Similar enterprises today make both ends meet with an error of only a few inches, or none.

* The other six were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pharos at Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Pheidian Zeus at Olympia, the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, and the Pyramids. Pliny describes the second temple as 425 feet long by 225 feet wide, with 127 columns sixty feet in height—several of them adorned or disfigured with reliefs.⁵⁰ Completed in 420 B.C. after more than a century of labor, it was destroyed by fire in 356.

* The parenthetical numbers refer to the fragments of Heracleitus as numbered by Bywater.

* Possibly Heracleitus had in mind a nebular hypothesis: the world begins as fire (or heat or energy), it becomes gas or moisture, which is precipitated as water, whose chemical residue, after evaporation, forms the solids of the earth.⁵⁵ Water and earth (liquid and solid) are two stages of one process, two forms of one reality (25). “All things are exchanged for Fire, and Fire for all things” (22). All change is a “pathway down or up,” a passage from one to another form—now more, now less, condensed—of energy or Fire. “The path upwards and downwards is one and the same” (69); rarefaction and condensation are movements in an eternal oscillation of change; all things are formed on the downward and condensing or on the upward and rarefying pathway of reality from Fire and back to Fire; all forms are modes of one underlying energy. In Spinoza’s language: Fire or energy is the eternal and omnipresent substance, or basic principle; condensation and rarefaction (the downward and upward paths) are its attributes; its modes or specific forms are the visible things of the world.

* Gk. kolophon, hill; cf. Latin collis, Eng. hill. Because the cavalry of the city was famous for giving the “finishing touch” to a defeated force, the word kolophon became in Greek a synonym for the final stroke, and passed into our language as a publisher’s symbol, originally placed at the end of a book.⁵⁹

* Today, under the name of Ismir (this and Smyrna are probably connected with the ancient trade in myrrh), it is the second city of Turkey in population, and the largest in Asia Minor.

* Swinburne has given us a better example of the meter, and described Sappho’s love, in a Profoundly beautiful poem called “Sapphics” (“All the night came not upon my eyelids”), in Poems and Ballads.

* Nearly all the cities mentioned in this chapter are still in existence, though under altered names.

* The name was probably taken from Byzas, a native king.⁹⁶

* Watteau’s painting, Embarkation for Cythera, symbolized the spirit of the upper classes in eighteenth-century France, which had shed just enough theology to be epicurean.

* The traditional dates for the founding of the Greek cities in the West are given in the Chronological Table. These dates were taken by Thucydides from the old logographer Antiochus of Syracuse; they are highly uncertain, and Mahaffy believed that the Sicilian foundations came later than those in Italy. Thucydides’ chronology, however, has still many supporters.⁷

† Cooks or confectioners who invented new dishes or sweets—Athenaeus reports—were allowed to patent them for a year.¹⁰ Perhaps Athenaeus mistook caricature for history.

* The name given by the Romans to the Greek cities in southern Italy.

* Cf. Chap. IX, sect, IV, below.

* The Pythagoreans appear to have been the first to use the word mathematike with the meaning of mathematics; before them it had been applied to the learning (mathema) of anything.³⁰

* In the fragment “On the Improvement of the Intellect.”

† Science tries to reduce all phenomena to quantitative, mathematical, Verifiable statements; chemistry describes all things in terms of symbols and figures, arranges the elements mathematically in a periodic law, and reduces them to an intra-atomic arithmetic of electrons; astronomy becomes celestial mathematics, and physicists seek a mathematical formula to cover the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and gravitation; some thinkers of our time have tried to express philosophy itself in mathematical form.

‡ We should note, in passing, that Pythagoras, slightly anticipating Pasteur, denied spontaneous generation, and taught that all animals are born from other animals through “seeds.”⁴¹

* The Greeks were so fond of this fable that they told it also of the laws of Catana and Thurii. The plan was especially pleasing to Michel de Montaigne, and may not have outlived its utility.

* Or perhaps a generation later; cf. note to p. 160 above.

* He cast his warning into the form of a fable. A horse, annoyed by the invasion of a stag into its pasturage, asked a man to help it punish the poacher. The man promised to do this if the horse would allow him to bestride it javelin in hand. The horse agreed, the stag was frightened away, and the horse found that he was now a slave to the man.

* “Gelon of Syracuse,” says Lucian, “had disagreeable breath, but did not find it out himself for a long time, no one venturing to mention such a circumstance to a tyrant. At last a foreign woman who had a connection with him dared to tell him; whereupon he went to his wife and scolded her for never having, with all her opportunities of knowing, warned him of it; she put in the defense that as she had never been familiar or at close quarters with any other man, she had supposed all men were like that.”⁶⁶ He was disarmed.

* Phaëthon (the Brilliant), son of Helios, begged for the thrill of driving the sun’s chariot across the heavens. He drove it recklessly, nearly set the world on fire, was struck by lightning, and fell into the sea. Perhaps the Greeks meant this tale, like that of Icarus, to serve as a sermon to youth.

* Note the absence of mother goddesses in such strongly patriarchal societies as Judea, Islam, and Protestant Christendom.

* Plutus, god of wealth, was a form of Pluto. In early Greece wealth took chiefly the form of corn either growing in the earth or stored in the earth in jars, in either case under Pluto’s protection.²⁰

* This struggle between Zeus and his aides against the Titans became for the Greeks a symbol of the conquest of barbarism and brute strength by civilization and reason, and offered a frequent subject for art.

† The name Zeus is probably akin to the Latin dies, our day, and may come from an Indo-European root di meaning to shine. Jupiter is Zeu-pater, Zeus the father; hence the genitive Dios. Today the haunts and peaks once sacred to Zeus are named, or dedicated to, St. Elias, the rain-giving saint of the Greek Church.²⁵

* It should be added, in justice to the dead, that these adventures were probably invented by the poets, or by tribes anxious to trace their lineage to the greatest of the gods.

† From Phoebe he took the name Phoebus, “inspired.”

* The myth of Adonis is one more variation on the vegetation theme—the annual death and resurrection of the soil. This handsome youth was desired by both Aphrodite and Persephone, the goddesses of love and of death. Ares, jealous of Adonis’ success with Aphrodite, disguised himself as a wild boar and killed him. The anemone was born of Adonis’ blood, and rivers of poetry from Aphrodite’s grief. Zeus persuaded the goddesses to divide Adonis’ time and attentions by leaving him for half a year with Persephone in Hades, and restoring him for half a year to earthly life and love. In Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Athens the death of the boy was commemorated in the festival of the Adonia; women carried images of the Lord (for such was the meaning of his name), loudly bewailed his death, and triumphantly celebrated his resurrection.³⁸

* Diodorus Siculus, as early as 50 B.C., interpreted the tale as a vegetation myth. Zagreus, the vine, is a child of Demeter, the earth, fertilized by Zeus, the rain. The vine, like the god, is cut (pruned) to give it new life; and the juice of the grape is boiled to make wine. Each year, under nourishing rains, the vine is reborn.⁴¹ Herodotus found so many resemblances between the myths of Dionysus and Osiris that he identified the two gods in one of the first essays in comparative religion.⁴²

† From entheos, “a god within”; “enthusiasm” originally meant possession by a god.

* These victims in Athens were called pharmakoi, which meant originally magicians; pharmakon meant a magic spell or formula, then a healing drug.⁶⁶ The question whether the pharmakoi were really slain is in dispute; but there is little doubt that the sacrifice was originally literal.⁶⁷

* In many parts of Europe the people still believe that the ghosts of the dead return to earth yearly, and must be entertained in a “Feast of All Souls.”⁹⁶

* Cf. in addition to numerals and family terms, such words as Sanskrit dam (as) (house), Greek domos. Latin domus, English tim-ber; dvaras, thyra, fores, door; venas, (f)oinos, vinum, wine; naus, naus, navis, nave; akshas, axon, axis, axle; iugam, zygon, iugum, yoke, etc.

* We do not know how ancient Greek was pronounced.² The accents that trouble us so much were seldom used by the classical Greeks, but were inserted into ancient texts by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the third century B.C. These accents should be ignored in reading Greek poetry.

† Cf. Greek alpha, Phoenician aleph (bull); beta, beth (tent); gamma, gimel (camel); delta, daleth (door); e-psilon, he (window); zeta, zain (lance); beta, kheth (paling); iota, yod (hand), etc.

* Graphein, which we translate to write, originally meant to engrave.

† The Latins called a roll volumen—wound up.

‡ Latin frontes, whence our frontispiece.

§ Though we have been eye-minded since the development of printing, and writing is seldom read aloud, style and punctuation are still formed with a view to easy breathing in the reader, and a rhythmic sound in the words. Probably our descendants will be ear-minded again.

* Rhyme was mostly confined to oracles and religious prophecies.

† From raptein, to stitch together, and oide, a song.

* So called because they were found chiefly near the Double Gate of the city at the Ceramicas.

* No. 682 in the National Museum at Athens.

† Now in the British Museum; there are copies in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Branchidae were the hereditary priests of the temple.

* A scale employing quarter tones; e.g., E E’ F A B B’ C E-where the accent indicates a quarter tone above the preceding note.

* The music of Hellas was played in a variety of scales far more numerous and complex than ours. Our diatonic scale makes no smaller division than the half tone, and twelve half tones constitute our octave; the Greeks used quarter tones, and had forty-five scales of eighteen notes apiece.⁷³ These scales were in three groups: the diatonic scales, based upon the tetrachord E D C B; the chromatic, upon E C# C B; and the enharmonic, upon E C C_b B. From the Greek scales, by simplification, came those of medieval church music, and, through these, our own.

Within the diatonic tetrachord seven modes (harmoniai) were produced by tuning the strings to alter the position of the semitones in the octave. The most important modes were the Dorian (E F G A B C D E), martial and grave though in a minor key; the Lydian (C D E F G A B C), tender and plaintive though in a major key; and the Phrygian (D E F G A B C D), minor in key, and orgiastically passionate and wild.⁷⁴ It is amusing to read of the violent controversies concerning the musical, ethical, and medical effects, restorative or disastrous, which the Greeks—chiefly the philosophers—ascribed to these half-tone variations. Dorian music, we are told, made men brave and dignified, the Lydian made them sentimental and weak, the Phrygian made them excited and headstrong. Plato saw effeminate luxury and gross immorality as the offspring of most music, and wished to banish all instrumental performances from his ideal state. Aristotle would have had all youths trained in the Dorian mode.⁷⁵ Theophrastus had a good word to say even for the Phrygian mode; serious diseases, he tells us, can be made painless by playing a Phrygian air near the affected part.⁷⁶

Greek musical notation used not ovals and stems on a staff of lines, but the letters of the alphabet, varied by inversion or transversion, augmented by dots and dashes to make sixtyfour signs, and placed above the words of the song. A few scraps of such notation have come down to console us for the loss of the rest; they indicate melodies akin rather to Oriental than to European strains, and would be more bearable to the Hindus, the Chinese, or the Japanese than to our dull Occidental ears, untrained to quarter tones.

* The word foot, as meaning part of a verse, owes its origin to the dance that accompanied the song;⁷⁹ orchestra, to the Greek, meant a dancing platform, usually in front of the stage.

* These figures from Herodotus³¹ are presumably an outburst of patriotic imagination. Plutarch, trying to be impartial, raises the Greek loss to 1360, and Diodorus Siculus, though always generous with numbers, lowers the Persian loss to 100,000;³² but even Plutarch and Diodorus were Greeks.

* A river in Pamphylia, in southern Asia Minor.

* Grote’s statement, written about 1850, of the case against the Areopagus recalls certain criticisms of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1937. “The Areopagus, standing alone in the enjoyment of a life-tenure, appears to have exercised an undefined and extensive control which long continuance had gradually consecrated. It was invested with a kind of religious respect. . . . The Areopagus also exercised a supervision over the public assembly, taking care that none of the proceedings . . . should be such as to infringe the established laws of the country. These were powers immense, undefined, not derived from any formal grant of the people.”⁶

* Deianira, wife of Heracles, caused his death by presenting him with a poisoned robe. Cf. Sophocles’ Trachinian Women.

* The Greek word, metoikoi, means “sharing the home.”

† The figures are from Gomme, A. W., The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C., pp. 21, 26, 47. They are frankly conjectural. The total figure includes the wives and minor children of the citizens.

* I.e., what is laid down, from ti-themi, I place; cf. our doom in its early sense of law, and the Russian duma.

* In Periclean Athens the name thesmothetai was given to the six minor archons who recorded, interpreted, and enforced the laws; in Aristotle’s day they presided over the popular courts.

* Strictly, heliaea is the name of the place where the courts met, and was so called (from helios, sun) because the sessions were held in the open air.

* Crito, rich friend of Socrates, complained that it was difficult for one who wished to mind his own business to live at Athens. “For at this very time,” he said, “there are people bringing actions against me, not because they have suffered any wrongs from me, but because they think that I would rather pay them a sum of money than have the trouble of law proceedings.”⁴⁵

* The word is cousin to the Sanskrit barbara and the Latin balbus, both of which mean stammering; cf. our babble. The Greeks implied by barbaros rather strangeness of speech than lack of civilization, and used barbarismos precisely as we, following them, use barbarism-to mean an alien or quasi-alien distortion of a nation’s idiom.

* In this volume an obol is reckoned as equivalent in buying power to 17 cents in United States currency in 1938, a drachma as $1, a talent as $6000. These equivalents are only approximate, for prices rose throughout Greek history; cf. section V of this chapter.

* Plutarch, Pericles. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 272, and Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, 61, feel that the Athenian disdain for manual labor has been exaggerated; but cf. Glotz, Ancient Greece at Work 160.

* The figure is Gomme’s, I.e. Possibly the number was much greater: Suidas, on the authority of a speech uncertainly attributed to Hypereides in 338, gives the number of adult male slaves alone as 150,000;³⁷ and according to the unreliable Athenaeus the census of Attica by Demetrius Phalereus about 317 gave 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics and freedmen, and 400,000 slaves. Timaeus about 300 reckoned the slaves of Corinth at 460,000, and Aristotle, about 340, those of Aegina at 470,000.³⁸ Perhaps these high figures are due to including slaves transiently offered for sale in the slave marts of Corinth, Aegina, and Athens.

* The great fortunes of Greek antiquity were of course modest in amount by modern standards. Callias, the wealthiest of the Athenians, is said to have had two hundred talents ($1,200,000); Nicias, one hundred.⁵²

* The sculptors and architects of Greece formed a guild of builders, with their own religious mysteries, and became the forerunners of the Freemasons of later Europe.⁶⁰

* We have no evidence of contraceptive devices among the Greeks.⁴

* In one of the pictures at Pompeii, probably copied from the Greek, we see a pupil supported upon the shoulders of another, and held at his heels by a third, while the teacher flogs him.¹³

† This institution, however, cannot yet be traced back beyond 336 B.C.

* Plutarch tells a pretty story of how an epidemic of suicide among the women of Miletus was suddenly and completely ended by an ordinance decreeing that self-slain women should be carried naked through the marketplace to their burial.²¹

* Cf. Antigone, 781f.:

When Love disputes

He carries his battles!

Love, he loots

The rich of their chattels!

By delicate cheeks

On maiden’s pillow

Watches he all the night-time long;

His prey he seeks

Over the billow,

Pastoral haunts he preys among.

Gods are deathless, and they

Cannot elude his whim;

And oh, amid us whose life’s a day,

Mad is the heart that broodeth him!^92a

* This consisted in throwing liquid from a cup so that it would strike some small object placed at a distance.

* It was the custom among the Greeks to carry small change in the mouth.

* Philokaloumen met’ euteleias, says Thucydides’ Pericles: “We love beauty without extravagance.”²

* “Among the ancients,” said Stendhal, “the beautiful is only the high relief of the useful.”⁴

* He repaid Cimon by making love to his sister Elpinice, and painting her portrait as Laodicea among the women of Troy.¹¹

* A block of marble discovered in Rome in 1887 when the Villa Ludovisi was torn down. The original is in the Museo delle Terme in Rome; there is a good copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

* A method of indicating the depth to which, at various points, a block of sculptural material is to be cut by a carver before the artist takes it in hand. This process came into use in Hellenistic Greece.²⁶

* In the Capitoline Museum, Rome; probably a copy of a fifth-century Greek original

† In the Athens Museum; reproduced in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* We have perhaps an echo of its majesty in the noble head of Juno in the British Museum, reputed to be a copy from Polycleitus.

† Perhaps an Amazon in the Vatican is a Roman copy of this work.

* The Museo delle Terme has the torso of a fine marble copy by a Roman artist. The Munich Antiquarium has a late copy in bronze; the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a copy uniting the Vatican torso with the head from the Palazzo Lancelotti.

† There is a good copy of the Lateran copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* The Nike was pieced together from fragments unearthed by the Germans at Olympia in 1890, and is now in the Olympia Museum.—Almost as beautiful are the Nereids, or Sea Maidens, which were found headless among the ruins of a monument in Lycian Xanthus, and are now in the British Museum. The Greek spirit had penetrated even into non-Greek Asia.

* No authentic copy remains.

† It was carried off to Constantinople about A.D. 330, and appears to have been destroyed in a riot there in 1203.³¹

‡ If we may judge from the “Lenormant” and “Varvaka” models of this statue that are preserved in the Athens Museum, we should not have cared much for the Athene Parthenos. The first has a stout frame and a swollen face, and the breast of the second is crawling with sacred snakes.

§ Ca. 438. There is much uncertainty about the date, and about the sequence of events in the later years of Pheidias’ life.³³

* Nothing remains of this Zeus but fragments of the pedestal.

† A Draped Venus in the Louvre may be a copy of this statue.

* Thirty-eight of the columns remain, the walls of the naos, and parts of the inner colonnade. Fragments of the frieze are in the British Museum.

† Now in the Olympia Museum.

* The name is a mistake, since this temple, erected in 425, could not have been the Theseum to which, in 469, Cimon brought the supposed bones of Theseus; but time sanctifies error as well as theft, and the traditional name is commonly retained for lack of a certain designation.

† The Theseum is the best preserved of all ancient Greek buildings; even so it lacks its marble tiles, its murals, its interior statuary, its pedimental sculptures, and nearly all of its external coloring. The metopes are so badly damaged that their reliefs are almost undistinguishable.

* Statues of Nike, or Victory, were often made without wings, so that she might not be able to abandon the city. The temple was pulled down by the Turks in A.D. 1687 to make a fortress. Lord Elgin rescued some slabs of the frieze and sent them to the British Museum. In 1835 the stones of the temple were put together again; the restored building was replaced on the original site, and terra-cotta casts were substituted for the missing parts of the badly damaged frieze.

* These columns, rather than those of the Parthenon, set the style for later architecture. The foot of each was modulated into the stylobate by an “Attic base” of three members, articulated by fillets or bands. The top of the column was graduated into the voluted capital by a band of flowers. The entablature had a richly decorated molding, a frieze of black stone, and, under the cornice, a series of reliefs. The egg-and-dart and honeysuckle ornament of the molding was as carefully carved as the sculpture; the artists were paid as much for a foot of such molding as for a figure in the frieze.⁴⁸

† This term was applied to the figures by the Roman architect Vitruvius, from the name given to the priestesses of Artemis at Caryae in Laconia. The Athenians called them simply korai, or Maidens.

* The naming of the Parthenon figures is mostly conjectural.

* The Parthenon, like the Erechtheum and the Theseum, was preserved through its use as a Christian church; it needed no great change of name, being in each case dedicated to the Virgin. After the Turkish occupation in 1456 it was transformed into a mosque, and acquired a minaret. In 1687, when the Venetians besieged Athens, the Turks used the temple to store each day’s supply of powder for their artillery. The Venetian commander, so informed, ordered his gunners to fire upon the Parthenon. A shell pierced the roof, exploded the powder, and laid half the building in ruins. After capturing the city Morosini tried also to take the pediment statuary, but his workmen dropped and smashed the figures in lowering them. In 1800 Lord Elgin, British ambassador to Turkey, secured permission to remove a part of the sculptures to the British Museum, on the ground that they would be safer there than at Athens against weather and war. His spoils included twelve statues, fifteen metopes, and fifty-six slabs of the frieze. The Museum’s expert on sculpture advised against buying this material; it was only after ten years of negotiations that the Museum agreed to pay $175,000 for them, which was less than half what Lord Elgin had spent in securing and transporting them.⁵³ A few years later, during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), the Acropolis was twice bombarded, and much of the Erechtheum was destroyed.⁵⁴ Some metopes of the Parthenon are still in place; a few slabs of the frieze are in the Athens Museum, and a few others in the Louvre, The citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, have built a replica, of the Parthenon., in the same dimensions as the original, with like materials, and, so far as our knowledge goes, with the same decorations and coloring; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art contains a small hypothetical reproduction of the interior.

* One might also note the lack of order in the arrangement of the buildings on the Acropolis, or in the sacred enclosure at Olympia; but it is difficult to say whether this disorder was a defect of taste or an accident of history.

* On later (possibly Periclean) arithmetical notation cf. Chap. XXVIII, sect. 1, below.

* Irrational numbers are those that cannot be expressed by either a whole number or a fraction, like the square root of 2. Incommensurable quantities are those for which no third quantity can be found which bears to each of them a relation expressible by a rational number, like the side and diagonal of a square, or the radius and circumference of a circle.

† A moonlike figure made by the arcs of two intersecting circles.

* This is the Vortex that Aristophanes, in The Clouds, so effectively satirized as Socrates’ substitute for Zeus.

* Ca. 434.³⁰ Another account places the trial in 450.³¹

† According to a rival story he was imprisoned at Athens, and was awaiting the fatal cup when Pericles arranged his escape.³²

‡ Herodotus remarks on the superior calendar of the Egyptians.³⁷ From Egypt the Greeks took the gnomon, or sundial, and from Asia the clepsydra, or water clock, as their instruments for measuring time.

* The oath is regarded as deriving from the Hippocratic school rather than from the master himself; but Erotian, writing in the first century A.D., attributes it to Hippocrates.⁷⁵

* The Hindus had seen the problem long before, and were to remain Parmenideans to the end; perhaps the antisensationism of the Upanishads had penetrated through Ionia or Pythagoras to Parmenides.

† This strains the imagination; but almost in Parmenidean fashion we speak of a table as at rest though it is composed (we are told) of the most excitably mobile “electrons.” Parmenides saw the world as we see the table; the electron would see the table as we see the world.

* The discussion of these paradoxes has gone on from Plato⁶ to Bertrand Russell,⁷ and may continue as long as words are mistaken for things. The assumptions that invalidate the puzzles are that “infinite” is a thing instead of merely a word indicating the inability of the mind to conceive an absolute end; and that time, space, and motion are discontinuous, i.e., are composed of separate points or parts.

* “To the wise and good man,” he writes, “the whole earth is his fatherland.”²¹

* Lucretius attributes a kind of psychophysical parallelism to “the great Democritus,” who laid it down that the atoms of body and the atoms of mind are placed one beside one alternately in pairs, and so link the frame together.”³⁹

* Perhaps Plato poached here for Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium.

* These probably occurred in 451-45, 432, 422, and 415.⁸⁵

* These propositions, aiming to discredit the transcendentalism of Parmenides, meant: (1) Nothing exists beyond the senses; (2) if anything existed beyond the senses it would be unknowable, for all knowledge comes through the senses; (3) if anything suprasensual were knowable, the knowledge of it would be incommunicable, since all communication is through the senses.

* So in Book III of the Memorabilia Socrates is made to expound the principles of military Strategy.

* “So far as drinking is concerned,” Xenophon makes Socrates say, “wine does of a truth ’moisten the soul and lull our griefs to sleep. . . . But I suspect that men’s bodies fare like those of plants. . . . When God gives the plants water in floods to drink they cannot stand up straight or let the breezes blow through them; but when they drink only as much as they enjoy they grow up straight and tall, and come to full and abundant fruitage.”¹³⁴

* De anexetastos bios ou biotos anthropo.—Plato, Apology, 37.

* Possibly, as Plutarch and Athenaeus assure us, Anytus loved Alcibiades, who rejected him for Socrates.¹⁶⁴

* A notable exception is Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast.

* Music continued to play a central role in the culture of the classic period (480-323). The great name among the fifth-century composers was Timotheus of Miletus; he wrote nomes in which the music dominated the poetry, and represented a story and an action. His extension of the Greek lyre to eleven strings, and his experiments in complex and elaborate styles, provoked the conservatives of Athens to such denunciation that Timotheus, we are told, was about to take his own life when Euripides comforted him, collaborated with him, and correctly prophesied that all Greece would soon be at his feet.²⁵

* There were a few dramas about later history; of these the only extant example is Aeschylus’ Persian Women. About 493 Phrynichus presented The Fall of Miletus; but the Athenians were so moved to grief by contemplating the capture of their daughter city by the Persians that they fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas for his innovation, and forbade any repetition of the play.³⁹ There are some indications that Themistocles had secretly arranged for the performance as a means of stirring up the Athenians to active war against Persia.⁴⁰

* Though in Aeschylus the actors were only two, the roles they played in a drama were limited only in the sense that no more than two characters could be on the stage at once. The leader of the chorus was sometimes individualized into a third actor. Minor charactersattendants, soldiers, etc.—were not counted as actors.

* The Suppliant Women is of the primitive type, in which the chorus predominates; The Persians is also mostly choral, and vividly describes the battle of Salamis; the Seven against Thebes was the third play in a trilogy that told the story of King Laius and his queen Jocasta, the patricide and incest of their son Oedipus, and the conflict between the sons of Oedipus for the Theban throne.

* Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone were produced separately.

* Theseus.

* The major plays appeared in approximately the following order: Alcestis, 438; Medea, 431; Hippolytus, 428; Andromache, 427; Hecuba, ca. 425; Electra, ca. 416; The Trojan Women, 415; Iphigenia in Tauris, ca. 413; Orestes, 408; Iphigenia in Aulis, 406; The Bacchae, 406.

* It was presented in 438 as the fourth play in a group by Euripides; perhaps it was intended as a half-serious satyr play rather than as a half-comic tragedy. In Balaustion’s Adventure Browning, with generous simplicity, has taken the play at its face value.

* There had already been royal or state libraries in Greece, as we have seen; and such collections in Egypt can be traced back to the Fourth Dynasty. A Greek library consisted of scrolls arranged in pigeonholes in a chest. Publication meant that an author had allowed his manuscript to be copied, and the copies to be circulated; thereafter further copies could be made without permission or “copyright.” Copies of popular works were numerous, and not costly; Plato tells us in the Apology that Anaxagoras’ treatise On Nature could be bought for a drachma ($1). Athens, in the age of Euripides, became the chief center of the book trade in Greece.

* Possibly a reference to the repetition of Aeschylus’ plays.

* Some of the gods, he tells us, keep brothels in heaven.¹³⁵

* Cf. the imaginative but excellent discussion of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, in iii, 80-2.

* E.g., the speech of Alcibiades at Sparta, vi, 20.89.

* The theater was probably built under Hieron I (478-67), and rebuilt under Hieron II (270-16). Much of it survives; and many ancient Greek dramas have been staged in it in our century.

* Cf. Lucretius’ powerful description of this plague in De Rerum Natura, vi, 1138-1286.

* The term strategos was applied to naval as well as military commanders.

* Critias and Alcibiades had left the tutelage of Socrates early in his career as a teacher, not liking the restraints which he preached to them.³⁴

* Croiset believed that the real cause of the indictment was the hostility of the Attic peasantry to anyone who cast doubt upon the state gods. One of the chief markets for cattle was provided by the pious who bought the animals to offer in sacrifice; any decrease in faith would lessen this market. Aristophanes, in this interpretation, was the mouthpiece of these peasants, before whom his plays, if successful, would be repeated.³⁶

* Grote⁵⁴ doubts them, and they are rendered dubious by the efforts of Plato and Xenophon to defend Socrates’ reputation. But these accounts were generally accepted in antiquity (e.g., by Tertullian and Augustine⁵⁵), and accord admirably with the habits of the Athenians.

* The homoioi, or Equals, numbered eight thousand in 480, two thousand in 371, seven hundred in 341.²

* “In what respect,” he asked, “is the ‘Great King’ greater than I, unless he is more upright and self-restrained?”⁵

* “Now that a certain portion of mankind,” says Plato (Laws, 948), “do not believe at all in the existence of the gods . . . a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths of the parties on either side.”

* On a similar use of olive oil in our own time, cf. Himes, Medical History of Contraception, 80.

* When he condemned the Pythagorean Phintias (less correctly Pythias) to death for conspiracy, Phintias asked leave to go home for a day to settle his affairs. His friend Damon (not the music master of Pericles and Socrates) offered himself as hostage, and volunteered to suffer death in case Phintias should not return. Phintias returned; and Dionysius, as surprised as Napoleon at any sincere friendship, pardoned Phintias, and begged to be admitted into so steadfast a comradeship.⁴²

† A bireme was a galley with two banks or decks of oars; a trireme, quadrireme, or quinquereme probably had not three, four, or five banks of oars, but so many men on each bench, handling so many oars through one oarlock or port.

* The theoric (i.e., spectacle) fund had now been extended to so many festivals as almost to pauperize a large part of the citizenry. “The Athenian Republic,” says Glotz, “had become a mutual benefit society, demanding from one class the wherewithal to support another.”⁵⁶ The Assembly had made it a capital crime to propose any diversion of this fund to other purposes.

* Who was suspected of having urged on Pausanias.

* E.g., Isocrates—and most Greek writers after him—counted it a literary sin to end one word, and begin the next, with a vowel.

† So named because addressed to the panegyris, or General Assembly (pan-agora) of the Greeks, at the hundredth Olympiad.

* Thrasybulus, Anytus, and the other restorers of democracy in 404.

* Cicero, Milton, Massillon, Jeremy Taylor, and Edmund Burke formed their prose style upon the balanced clauses and long periods of Isocrates.

† The enlightened dictator who had imported Greek culture into Cyprus, 410-387.

* Now in the British Museum.

* A Roman copy in the Vatican corresponds to the representation of the statue on exhumed Cnidian coins.

† Nero had it brought to Rome, where it perished in the conflagration of A.D. 64. The Vatican Cupid of Centocelle may be a copy.

* Other artists, said Lysippus, in a sentence that would have pleased Manet, made men as they were, while he made them “as they appeared?.”⁴³

* This lovely head, which has been used as symbol and first illustration for this volume, was stolen from the little museum at Tegea, and, after nine years’ search, was found in a granary in a village of Arcadia by Alexandre Philadelpheus, the gracious curator of the National Museum at Athens. Both the subject and the period are uncertain; but the Praxitelean style seem to date it in the fourth century. M. Philadelpheus considers it “the pearl of the National Museum.”

* The Greeks defined conic sections as the figures—ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola—produced by cutting an acute-angled, a right-angled, and an obtuse-angled cone with a plane perpendicular to an element.⁷ Modern mathematics adds the cirqle and intersecting lines.

† The tetrahedron (pyramid), hexahedron (cube), octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron—convex solids enclosed by four, six, eight, twelve, or twenty regular polygons.

‡ The Royal Roads, or King’s Highways, usually referred to the great roads of the Persian Empire. The story is told also of Euclid and Ptolemy I.^8a

§ One of his favorite problems was to find the “golden section”—i.e., to divide a line at such a point that the whole line should have the same proportion to the larger part as the larger to the smaller.

* The synodic period of a heavenly body is the time between two successive conjunctions of it with the sun, as seen from the earth; the zodiacal period is the time between two successive appearances of a heavenly body in the same part of the sky as imaginatively divided into the twelve signs of the zodiac. Eudoxus’ figure for the synodic period of Saturn was 390 days, ours is 378; for Jupiter, 390, ours 399; for Mars, 260, ours 780; for Mercury, no (one manuscript says 116), ours 116; for Venus, 570, ours 584. The zodiacal period given by Eudoxus for Saturn was 30 years, our figure, 29 years, 166 days; for Jupiter, 12 years, our figure, 11 years, 315 days; for Mars, 2 years, our figure, I year, 322 days; for Mercury and Venus, I year, our figure. I year.¹¹

* Those who omit philosophy from their education, said Aristippus, “are like the suitors of Penelope; they . . . find it easier to win over the maidservants than to marry the mistress.”³⁰

* It was not the first university: the Pythagorean school of Crotona, as far back as 520, had offered a variety of courses to a united scholastic community; and the school of Isocrates antedated the Academy by eight years.

* Certain passages in Aristotle suggest a different understanding of Plato—especially of the theory of Ideas—than that which we get from the Dialogues.

† The thirty-six Dialogues cannot be dated or authoritatively classified. We may arbitrarily divide them into (1) an early group—chiefly the Apology, Crito, Lysis, Ion, Charmides, Cratylus, Euthyphro, and Euthydemus; (2) a middle group—chiefly Gorgias, Protagoras, Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic; and (3) a later group—chiefly Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, and Laws. The first group was probably composed before the age of thirty-four, the second before forty, the third after sixty, the interval being devoted to the Academy.⁷⁶

* In his later years Plato tried to prove the Pythagorean converse, that all Ideas are mathematical forms.⁸⁶

† Cf. Carrel: “For modern scientists, as for Plato, Ideas are the sole reality.”⁸⁹ Cf. Spinoza: “I do not understand, by the series of causes and real entities, a series of individual mutable things, but rather the series of fixed and eternal things. For it would be impossible for human weakness to follow up the series of individual mutable things, not only because their number surpasses all counting, but because . . . the existence of particular things has no connection with their essence, and is not an eternal truth.” (In order that the geometry of triangles may be true, it is not necessary that any particular triangle should exist.) “However, there is no need that we should understand the series of individual mutable things, for their essence . . . is only to be found in fixed and eternal things, and from the laws inscribed in those things as their true codes, according to which all individual things are made and arranged.”⁹⁰ Note that in Plato’s theory of Ideas Heracleitus and Parmenides are reconciled: Heracleitus is right, and flux is true, in the world of sense; Parmenides is right, and changeless unity is true, in the world of Ideas.

* How much of this Hindu-Pythagorean-Orphic doctrine of immortality was protective coloration it is hard to say. Plato presents it half playfully, as if it were merely a useful myth, a poetic aid to decency.¹⁰⁰

* I.e., Plato concludes that a natural ethic is inadequate.

* The most important of the extant treatises may be arranged under six heads:

I. LOGIC: Categories, Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophist Reasonings.

II. SCIENCE:

1. Natural Science: Physics, Mechanics, On the Heavens, Meteorology.

2. Biology: History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Movements of Animals, Locomotion of Animals, Reproduction of Animals.

3. Psychology: On the Soul, Little Essays on Nature.

III. Metaphysics.

IV. ESTHETICS: Rhetoric, Poetics.

V. ETHICS: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics.

VI. POLITICS: Politics, The Constitution of Athens.

* E.g., in the Reproduction of Animals (iv. 6.1) he refers to the regrowth of the eyes when experimentally cut out in young birds; and he rejects the theory that the right testicle produces male, and the left testicle female, offspring, by showing that a man whose right testicle had been removed had continued to have children of either sex.

* References in the History of Animals indicate that Aristotle prepared a volume of anatomical sketches, and that some of them were reproduced on the walls of the Lyceum; his text uses letters, in modern style, to refer to various organs or points in the drawings.

† Aristotle failed to distinguish between ovaries and uterus; but his description was not materially bettered before the work of Stensen in 1669.

* From echo, I have—telos, my goal or purpose—en, within.

* He was misled by the insensitivity of cerebral tissue to direct stimulus.

† “The soul,” Aristotle adds in a startling idealistic aside, “is in a certain way all existing things; for all things are either perceptions or thoughts.”¹⁸⁵ Having bowed to Berkeley, Aristotle also bows to Hume: “Mind is one and continuous in the sense in which the process of thinking is so; and thinking is identical with the thoughts which are its parts.”¹⁸⁶

* Other interpretations of Aristotle’s contradictory pronouncements on this point are possible. The text follows the Cambridge Ancient History, VI, 345; Grote, Aristotle, II, 233; and Rohde, Psyche, 493.

† The essential aspect of anything, in Aristotle as in Plato, is the “form” (eidos), not the matter which is formed; the matter is not the “real being,” but a negative and passive potentiality which acquires specific existence only when actuated and determined by form.

‡ Every effect, says Aristotle, is produced by four causes: material (the component stuff), efficient (the agent or his act), formal (the nature of the thing), and final (the goal). He gives a peculiar example: “What is the material cause of a man? The menses” (i.e., the provision of an ovum). “What is the efficient cause? The semen” (i.e., the act of insemination). “What is the formal cause? The nature” (of the agents involved). “What is the final cause? The purpose in view.”¹⁸⁸

* The Nicomachean Ethics (so called because edited by Aristotle’s son Nicomachus) and the Politics were originally one book. The plural title forms—ta ethika and ta politika—were used by the Greek editors to suggest the treatment of various moral and political problems; and these forms have been retained in the English adoption of the words.

* Only one of these studies survives—the Athenaion Politeia, found in 1891. It is an admirable constitutional history of Athens.

* Even slavery is legitimate, Aristotle thinks: as it is right that the mind should rule the body, so it is just that those who excel in intelligence should rule those who excel only in strength.²¹⁶

* Dinocrates had pleased Alexander by proposing to carve Mt. Athos—six thousand feet high—into a figure of Alexander standing waist deep in the sea, holding a city in one hand and a harbor in the other.²⁴ The project was never carried out.

* Lucian gives the ancient view in one of his Dialogues of the Dead: “Philip. You cannot deny that you are my son, Alexander; if you had been Ammon’s son you would not have died. Alex. I knew all the time that you were my father. I only accepted the statement of the oracle because I thought it was good policy. . . . When the barbarians thought they had a god to deal with, they gave up the struggle; which made their conquest an easy matter.”³⁶

* There are conflicting stories about his guilt and his death.³⁷ He left three main works: Hellenic a, a history of Greece from 387 to 337; a History of the Sacred War, and a History of Alexander.

† Each of them, Arrian assures us, received a talent in addition to his pay—which continued till he reached his home.³⁸

* Damocles, sought out everywhere by Demetrius and at last about to be captured, killed himself by plunging into a caldron of boiling water.³ We must not misjudge the Athenians from one such instance of virtue.

* Not the Brennus who had invaded Italy in 390 B.C.

† We have no Gallic version of these matters, nor any “barbarian” account of Greek invasions into Asia, Italy, or Sicily.

‡ In the following pages, to allow for the rise of prices in the Hellenistic age, the talent will be reckoned as equivalent to $3000 in the United States of 1939.

* Perhaps it reflected and aided the Hellenistic deification of kings.

* Perhaps because the latter had led to family limitation, as in modern France.

* A Greek talent weighed fifty-eight pounds avoirdupois.

* On this site Professor Leroy Waterman in 1931 exhumed tablets indicating that one of the richest citizens of Seleucia had avoided the payment of taxes for twenty-five years.¹

* Usually but uncertainly interpreted as “The Hammer.”

† The anniversary of this Rededication (Hanukkah) is still celebrated in nearly every Jewish home.

* Ptolemy Philadelphus had the sarcophagus removed to Alexandria. Ptolemy Cocces melted down the gold for his use, and exposed the mortal remains of Alexander in a glass coffin.¹

* See Chap. XXVII below.

* Sostratus of Cnidus designed it for Ptolemy II, at a cost of eight hundred talents (about $2,400,000)²² It rose in several setbacks to a height of four hundred feet; it was covered with white marble and adorned with sculptures in marble and bronze; above the pillared cupola that contained the light rose a twenty-one-foot statue of Poseidon. The flame came from the burning of resinous wood, and was made visible, probably by convex metal mirrors, to a distance of thirty-eight miles²³ The structure was completed in 279 B.C., and was destroyed in the thirteenth century A.D. The island of Pharos, on which it stood, is now the Ras-et-Tin quarter of Alexandria; the site of the lighthouse has been covered by the sea.

* Hardly anything but a few catacombs and pillars have been preserved from ancient Alexandria. Its remains lie directly under the present capital, making excavation expensive; probably they have sunk beneath the water level; and parts of the old city have been covered by the Mediterranean.

* The population of Alexandria in 1927 was 570,000.

* The story was based upon a letter purporting to have been written by one Aristeas in the first century A.D. The letter was proved spurious by Hody of Oxford in 1684.⁴⁵

* The Old Testament Apocrypha (lit. hidden) are those books that were excluded from the Jewish canon of the Old Testament as uninspired, but were included in the Roman Catholic Vulgate—i.e., the Latin translation, by St. Jerome, of the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible. The chief O. T. Apocrypha are Ecclesiasticus, I and II Esdras, and I and II Maccabees. The apocalyptic (i.e., revealing) books are those that purport to contain prophetic divine revelations; such writings began to appear about 250 B.C., and continued into the Christian era. Some apocalypses, like the Book of Enoch, are considered apocryphal and uncanonical; others, like the Book of Revelation, are considered canonical.

* Virgil copied it in form, sometimes in substance, sometimes line for line, in the Aeneid.²⁵

* It derives its name from the Duke of Portland, who bought it in Rome. It is now in the British Museum.

* This mosaic, and the Achilles and Briseis, are in the Naples Museum.

* The Statue of Liberty is one hundred and fifty-one feet high from base to torch.

* It remained where it fell till A.D. 653, when the Saracens sold the materials. Nine hundred camels were required to remove them.¹⁷

† The restored arm in the Vatican is the work of Bernini, well done in detail, but ruinous to the centripetal unity of the composition. Winckelmann nevertheless liked the group so well that Lessing was aroused, by reading him, to write a book of esthetic criticism around it. and occasionally about it.

‡ In the Demeter of the British Museum.

* The original is lost. A Roman marble copy of the third century A.D. was found in the sixteenth century in the Baths of Caracalla, was repaired by Michelangelo, was housed for a time in the Palazzo Farnese, and is now in the Naples Museum.

† In the Museo delle Terme at Rome.

‡ In the Naples Museum.

* So called from the pavilion in the Vatican where the statue was formerly placed.

† In the Capitoline Museum at Rome, and the Uffizi at Florence.

‡ In the Naples Museum.

§ It was formerly described as a dedication set up by Demetrius Poliorcetes in 305 to commemorate his defeat of Ptolemy I off Cyprian Salamis in 306; but recent discussion tends to connect it with the battle of Cos (ca. 258), in which the fleets of Macedonia, Seleucia, and Rhodes defeated Ptolemy II.²²

* Both in the Vatican.

† In the State Museum, Berlin.

* “There is no personal character in Greek art—abstract ideas of youth and age, strength and swiftness, virtue and vice—yes; but there is no individuality.”²³ Ruskin thought only of fifth-and fourth-century Greek art, just as Winckelmann and Lessing knew chiefly the art of the Hellenistic age.

* These papyri are not older than Alexandria; but since they use the primitive digamma to represent 6, it is probable that the alphabetical notation antedated the Hellenistic age.

* Books I and II summarize the geometrical work of Pythagoras; Book III, Hippocrates of Chios; Book V, Eudoxus; Books IV, VI, XI, and XII, the later Pythagorean and Athenian geometricians. Books VII-X deal with higher mathematics.

* Cicero saw the apparatus two centuries later, and marveled at its complex synchronism. “When Gallus moved the globe,” he writes, “it was actually true that the moon was always as many revolutions behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the number of days it was behind it in the sky. Thus the same eclipse of the sun happened on the globe as would happen in actuality.⁷

* Lucian is our earliest, and not quite reliable, authority for the story that Archimedes set Roman ships on fire by concentrating the sun’s rays upon them through the use of great concave mirrors.¹³

* Aristarchus estimated the volume of the sun as three hundred (it is over a million) times that of the earth—an estimate that seems low to us, but would have astonished Anaxagoras or Epicurus. He calculated the diameter of the moon as one third that of the earth—an error of eight per cent—and our distance from the sun as twenty (it is almost four hundred) times our distance from the moon. “When the sun is totally eclipsed,” reads one proposition, “the sun and the moon are then comprehended by one and the same cone, which has its vertex at our eye.”²⁹

* If it was not taken from his Babylonian predecessor Kidinnu.²²

† The equinoxes (lit., equal nights) are those two days of the year when the sun in its annual apparent motion crosses the equator northward (our vernal, Argentina’s autumnal, equinox), or southward (our autumnal equinox), making day and night equal for a day. The equinoctial points are those points in the sky where the equator of the celestial sphere intersects the ecliptic.

* A confluence of blood sinuses in the dura mater, or outer membrane of the brain.

* All dates for Zeno are disputed; the sources are contradictory. Zeller concludes to 350 for his birth and 260 for his death.⁵⁰

* Except in certain additions to terminology, like the word logic itself. Zeno’s pupil Aristo likened logicians to people eating lobsters, who take a great deal of trouble for a little morsel of meat concealed in much shell.⁵³

* We are relieved to learn that some of the Stoics were not quite certain on this point.

* Wars, said Chrysippus, are a useful corrective of overpopulation, and bedbugs do us the service of preventing us from oversleeping.⁵⁸

† Chrysippus proposed to limit the care of dead relatives to the simplest and quietest burial; it would be still better, he thought, to use their flesh as food.⁶⁰

* He argued the point so eloquently that a wave of suicides rose in Alexandria, and Ptolemy II had to banish him from Egypt.⁶⁶

* Italian archeologists in 1929 unearthed at Butrinto (the ancient Buthrotum) numerous architectural and sculptural remains of Greek and Roman civilization, including a Greek theater of the third century B.C.

† The strongest of Rome’s enemies in Italy.

* We may arbitrarily date this at A.D. 325, when Constantine founded Constantinople, and Christian Byzantine civilization began to replace the “pagan” Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean.

† Increased knowledge of Egyptian and Asiatic civilization compels extensive modification of Sir Henry Maine’s classic hyperbole: “Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.”²

* Copernicus knew of Aristarchus’ heliocentric hypothesis, for he mentioned it in a paragraph that disappeared from later editions of his book.³