The Life of Greece

From Thrace we move southward into Macedonia, and our cultural circumvallation of Greece is complete. It is a picturesque land, with a soil once rich in minerals, plains fertile in grain and fruit, and mountains disciplining a hardy stock that was destined to conquer Greece. The mountaineers and peasants were of mixed race, predominantly Illyrian and Thracian; perhaps they were akin to the Dorians who conquered the Peloponnesus. The ruling aristocracy claimed Hellenic lineage (from Heracles himself), and spoke a dialect of Greek. The earlier capital, Edessa, stood on a vast plateau between the plains that stretched to Epirus and the ranges that reached to the Aegean. Farther east lay Pella, capital-to-be of Philip and Alexander; and near the sea was Pydna, where the Romans would conquer the conquering Macedonians, and win the right to transmit Greek civilization to the Western world.

This, then, was the environment of Greece: civilizations like Egypt, Crete, and Mesopotamia that gave it those elements of technology, science, and art which it would transform into the brightest picture in history; empires like Persia and Carthage that would feel the challenge of Greek commerce, and would unite in a war to crush Greece between them into a harmless vassalage; and, in the north, warlike hordes recklessly breeding, restlessly marching, who would sooner or later pour down over the mountain barriers and do what the Dorians had done—break through what Cicero was to call the Greek border woven on the barbarian robe,¹⁵ and destroy a civilization that they could not understand. Hardly any of these surrounding nations cared for what to the Greeks was the very essence of life—liberty to be, to think, to speak, and to do. Every one of these peoples except the Phoenicians lived under despots, surrendered their souls to superstition, and had small experience of the stimulus of freedom or the life of reason. That was why the Greeks called them all, too indiscriminately, barbaroi, barbarians; a barbarian was a man content to believe without reason and to live without liberty. In the end the two conceptions of life—the mysticism of the East and the rationalism of the West—would fight for the body and soul of Greece. Rationalism would win under Pericles, as under Caesar, Leo X, and Frederick; but mysticism would always return. The alternate victories of these complementary philosophies in the vast pendulum of history constitute the essential biography of Western civilization.

II. ARGOS

Within this circle of nations little Greece expanded until its progeny peopled nearly every Mediterranean shore. For the gaunt hand that stretched its skeletal fingers southward into the sea was but a small part of the Greece whose history concerns us. In the course of their development the irrepressible Hellenes spread into every isle of the Aegean, into Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus, into Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor, into the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea, into the shores and peninsulas of the north Aegean, into Italy, Gaul, Spain, Sicily, and northern Africa. In all these regions they built city-states, independent and diverse, and yet Greek; they spoke the Greek tongue, worshiped Greek gods, read and wrote Greek literature, contributed to Greek science and philosophy, and practiced democracy in the Greek aristocratic way. They did not leave Greece behind them when they migrated from their motherland, they carried it with them, even the very soil of it, wherever they went. For nearly a thousand years they made the Mediterranean a Greek lake, and the center of the world.

The most discouraging task faced by the historian of classic civilization is that of weaving into one pattern and story these scattered members of the body of Greece.* We shall attempt it by the pleasant method of a tour: with a map at our elbow and no expenditure but of the imagination, we shall pass from city to city of the Greek world, and observe in each center the life of the people before the Persian war—the modes of economy and government, the activities of scientists and philosophers, the achievements of poetry, and the creations of art.† The plan has many faults: the geographical sequence will not quite agree with the historical; we shall be leaping from century to century as well as from isle to isle; and we shall find ourselves talking with Thales and Anaximander before listening to Homer and Hesiod. But it will do us no harm to see the irreverent Iliad against its actual background of Ionian skepticism, or to hear Hesiod’s dour plaints after visiting the Aeolian colonies from which his harassed father came. When at last we reach Athens we shall know in some measure the rich variety of the civilization that it inherited, and which it preserved so bravely at Marathon.

If we begin at Argos, where the victorious Dorians established their government, we find ourselves in a scene characteristically Greek: a not too fertile plain, a small and huddled city of little brick-and-plaster houses, a temple on the acropolis, an open-air theater on the slope of the hill, a modest palace here and there, narrow alleys and unpaved streets, and in the distance the inviting and merciless sea. For Hellas is composed of mountains and ocean; majestic scenery is so usual there that the Greeks, though moved and inspired by it, seldom mention it in their books. The winter is wet and cold, the summer hot and dry; sowing is in our autumn, reaping is in our spring; rain is a heavenly blessing, and Zeus the Rain Maker is god of gods. The rivers are short and shallow, torrents for a winter spell, dry smooth pebbles in the summer heat. There were a hundred cities like Argos in the gamut of Greece, a thousand like it but smaller; each of them jealously sovereign, separated from the rest by Greek pugnacity, or dangerous waters, or roadless hills.

The Argives ascribed the foundation of their city to Pelasgic Argus, the hero with a hundred eyes; and its first flourishing to an Egyptian, Danaus, who came at the head of a band of “Danaae” and taught the natives to irrigate their fields with wells. Such eponyms are not to be scorned; the Greeks preferred to end with myth that infinite regress which we must end with mystery. Under Temenus, one of the returning Heracleidae, Argos grew into the most powerful city of Greece, bringing Tiryns, Mycenae, and all Argolis under its sway. Towards 680 the government was seized by one of those tyrannoi, or dictators, who for the next two centuries became the fashion in the larger cities of Greece. Presumably Pheidon, like his fellow dictators, led the rising merchant classallied in a passing marriage of convenience with the commoners—against a landowning aristocracy. When Aegina was threatened by Epidaurus and Athens Pheidon went to its rescue and took it for himself. He adopted—probably from the Phoenicians—the Babylonian system of weights and measures, and the Lydian plan of a currency guaranteed by the state; he established his mint on Aegina, and the Aeginetan “tortoises” (coins marked with the island’s symbol) became the first official coinage in continental Greece.¹⁶

Pheidon’s enlightened despotism opened a period of prosperity that brought many arts to Argolis. In the sixth century the musicians of Argos were the most famous in Hellas;¹⁷ Lasus of Hermione won high place among the lyric poets of his time, and taught his skill to Pindar; the foundations were laid of that Argive school of sculpture which was to give Polycleitus and its canon to Greece; drama found a home here, in a theater with twenty thousand seats; and architects raised a majestic temple to Hera, beloved and especially worshiped by Argos as the goddess-bride who renewed her virginity every year.” But the degeneration of Pheidon’s descendants—the nemesis of monarchy—and a long series of wars with Sparta weakened Argos, and forced it at last to yield to the Lacedaemonians the leadership of the Peloponnesus. Today it is a quiet town, lost amid its surrounding fields; remembering vaguely the glories of its past, and proud that in all its long history it has never been abandoned.

III. LACONIA

South of Argos, and away from the sea, rise the peaks of the Parnon range. They are beautiful, but still more pleasing to the eye is the Eurotas River that runs between them and the taller, darker, snow-tipped range of Taygetus on the west. In that seismic valley lay Homer’s “hollow Lacedaemon,” a plain so guarded by mountains that Sparta, its capital, needed no walls. At its zenith Sparta (“The Scattered”) was a union of five villages, totaling some seventy thousand population. Today it is a hamlet of four thousand souls; and hardly anything remains, even in the modest museum, of the city that once ruled and ruined Greece.

1. The Expansion of Sparta

From that natural citadel the Dorians dominated and enslaved the southern Peloponnesus. To these long-haired northerners, hardened by mountains and habituated to war, there seemed no alternative in life but conquest or slavery; war was their business, by which they made what seemed to them an honest living; the non-Dorian natives, weakened by agriculture and peace, were in obvious need of masters. So the kings of Sparta, who claimed a continuous lineage from the Heracleidae of 1104, first subjected the indigenous population of Laconia, and then attacked Messenia. That land, in the southwestern corner of the Peloponnesus, was relatively level and fertile, and was tilled by pacific tribes. We may read in Pausanias how the Messenian king, Aristodemus, consulted the oracle at Delphi for ways to defeat the Spartans; how Apollo bade him offer in sacrifice to the gods a virgin of his own royal race; how he put to death his own daughter, and lost the war.¹⁹ (Perhaps he had been mistaken about his daughter.) Two generations later the brave Aristomenes led the Messenians in heroic revolt For nine years their cities bore up under attack and siege; but in the end the Spartans had their way. The Messenians were subjected to an annual tax of half their crops, and thousands of them were led away to join the Helot serfs.

The picture that we are to form of Laconian society before Lycurgus has, like some ancient paintings, three levels. Above is a master class of Dorians, living for the most part in Sparta on the produce of fields owned by them in the country and tilled for them by Helots. Socially between, geographically surrounding, the masters and the Helots were the Perioeci (“Dwellers Around”): freemen living in a hundred villages in the mountains or on the outskirts of Laconia, or engaged in trade or industry in the towns; subject to taxation and military service, but having no share in the government, and no right of intermarriage with the ruling class. Lowest and most numerous of all were the Helots, so named, according to Strabo, from the town of Helus, whose people had been among the first to be enslaved by the Spartans.²⁰ By simple conquest of the non-Dorian population or by importing prisoners of war, Sparta had made Laconia a land of some 224,000 Helots, 120,000 Perioeci, and 32,000 men, women, and children of the citizen class.*²¹

The Helot had all the liberties of a medieval serf. He could marry as he pleased, breed without forethought, work the land in his own way, and live in a village with his neighbors, undisturbed by the absentee owner of his lot, so long as he remitted regularly to this owner the rental fixed by the government. He was bound to the soil, but neither he nor the land could be sold. In some cases he was a domestic servant in the town. He was expected to attend his master in war, and, when called upon, to fight for the state; if he fought well he might receive his freedom. His economic condition was not normally worse than that of the village peasantry in the rest of Greece outside of Attica, or the unskilled laborer in a modern city. He had the consolations of his own dwelling, varied work, and the quiet friendliness of trees and fields. But he was continually subject to martial law, and to secret supervision by a secret police, by whom he might at any moment be killed without cause or trial.²²

In Laconia, as elsewhere, the simple paid tribute to the clever; this is a custom with a venerable past and a promising future. In most civilizations this distribution of the goods of life is brought about by the normally peaceful operation of the price system: the clever persuade us to pay more for the less readily duplicable luxuries and services that they offer us than the simple can manage to secure for the more easily replaceable necessaries that they produce. But in Laconia the concentration of wealth was effected by irritatingly visible means, and left among the Helots a volcanic discontent that in almost every year of Spartan history threatened to upset the state with revolution.

2. Sparta’s Golden Age

In that dim past before Lycurgus came, Sparta was a Greek city like the rest, and blossomed out in song and art as it would never do after him. Music above all was popular there, and rivaled man’s antiquity; for as far back as we can delve we find the Greeks singing. In Sparta, so frequently at war, music took a martial turn—the strong and simple “Doric mode”; and not only were other styles discouraged, but any deviation from this Doric style was punishable by law. Even Terpander, though he had quelled a sedition by his songs, was fined by the ephors, and his lyre nailed mute to the wall, because to suit his voice, he had dared to add another string to the instrument; and in a later generation Timotheus, who had expanded Terpander’s seven strings to eleven, was not allowed to compete at Sparta until the ephors had removed from his lyre the scandalously extra strings.²³

Sparta, like England, had great composers when she imported them. Towards 670, supposedly at the behest of the Delphic oracle, Terpander was brought in from Lesbos to prepare a contest in choral singing at the festival of the Carneia. Likewise Thaletas was summoned from Crete about 620; and soon after came Tyrtaeus, Alcman, and Polymnestus. Their labors went mostly to composing patriotic music and training choruses to sing it. Music was seldom taught to individual Spartans;²⁴ as in revolutionary Russia, the communal spirit was so strong that music took a corporate form, and group competed with group in magnificent festivals of song and dance. Such choral singing gave the Spartans another opportunity for discipline and mass formations, for every voice was subject to the leader. At the feast of the Hyacinthia King Agesilaus sang obediently in the place and time assigned to him by the choral master; and at the festival of the Gymnopedia the whole body of Spartans, of every age and sex, joined in massive exercises of harmonious dance and antistrophal song. Such occasions must have provided a powerful stimulus and outlet to the patriotic sentiment.

Terpander (i.e., “Delighter of Men”) was one of those brilliant poetmusicians who inaugurated the great age of Lesbos in the generation before Sappho. Tradition ascribed to him the invention of scolia or drinking songs, and the expansion of the lyre from four to seven strings; but the heptachord, as we have seen, was as old as Minos, and presumably men had sung the glories of wine in the forgotten adolescence of the world. Certainly he made a name for himself at Lesbos as a kitharoedos—i.e., a composer and singer of musical lyrics. Having killed a man in a brawl, he was exiled, and found it convenient to accept an invitation from Sparta. There, it seems, he lived the remainder of his days, teaching music and training choruses. We are told that he ended his life at a drinking party: while he was singing—perhaps that extra note which he had added at the top of the scale—one of his auditors threw a fig at him; which, entering his mouth and his windpipe, choked him to death in the very ecstasy of song.²⁵

Tyrtaeus continued Terpander’s work at Sparta during the Second Messenian War. He came from Aphidna—possibly in Lacedaemon, probably in Attica; certainly the Athenians had an old joke about the Spartans, that when the latter were losing the Second War they were saved by a lame Attic schoolmaster, whose songs of battle woke up the dull Spartans, and stirred them to victory.²⁶ Apparently he sang his own songs to the flute in public assembly, seeking to transform martial death into enviable glory. “It is a fine thing,” says one of his surviving fragments, “for a brave man to die in the front rank of those who fight for their country. . . . Let each one, standing squarely on his feet, rooted to the ground and biting his lips, keep firm. . . . Foot to foot, shield to shield, waving plumes mingling and helmets clashing, let the warriors press breast to breast, each sword and spear-point meeting in the shock of battle.”²⁷ Tyrtaeus, said the Spartan King Leonidas, “was an adept in tickling the souls of youth.”²⁸

Alcman sang in the same generation, as friend and rival of Tyrtaeus, but in a more varied and earthly strain. He came from far-off Lydia, and some said that he was a slave; nevertheless the Lacedaemonians welcomed him, not having yet learned the xenelasia, or hatred of foreigners, which was to become part of the Lycurgean code. The later Spartans would have been scandalized at his eulogies of love and food, and his roster of Laconia’s noble wines. Tradition ranked him as the grossest eater of antiquity, and as an insatiable pursuer of women. One of his songs told how fortunate he was that he had not remained in Sardis, where he might have become an emasculate priest of Cybele, but had come to Sparta, where he could love in freedom his golden-haired mistress Megalostrata.²⁹ He begins for us that dynasty of amorous poets which culminates in Anacreon, and he heads the list of the “Nine Lyric Poets” chosen by Alexandrian critics as the best of ancient Greece.* He could write hymns and paeans as well as songs of wine and love, and the Spartans liked especially the parthenia, or maiden songs, which he composed for choruses of girls. A fragment now and then reveals that power of imaginative feeling which is the heart of poetry:

Asleep lie mountain-top and mountain-gully, shoulder also and ravine; the creeping things that come from the dark earth, the beasts that lie upon the hillside, the generation of the bees, the monsters in the depths of the purple sea; all lie asleep, and with them the tribes of the winging birds.†³⁰

We may judge from these poets that the Spartans were not always Spartans, and that in the century before Lycurgus they relished poetry and the arts as keenly as any of the Greeks. The choral ode became so closely associated with them that when the Athenian dramatists wrote choral lyrics for their plays they used the Doric dialect, though they wrote the dialogue in the Attic speech. It is hard to say what other arts flourished in Lacedaemon in those halcyon days, for even the Spartans neglected to preserve or record them. Laconian pottery and bronze were famous in the seventh century, and the minor arts produced many refinements for the life of the fortunate few. But this little Renaissance was ended by the Messenian Wars. The conquered land was divided among the Spartans, and the number of serfs was almost doubled. How could thirty thousand citizens keep in lasting subjection four times their number of Perioeci, and seven times their number of Helots? It could be done only by abandoning the pursuit and patronage of the arts, and turning every Spartan into a soldier ready at any moment to suppress rebellion or wage war. The constitution of Lycurgus achieved this end, but at the cost of withdrawing Sparta, in every sense but the political, from the history of civilization.

3. Lycurgus

Greek historians from Herodotus onward took it for granted that Lycurgus was the author of the Spartan code, just as they accepted as historical the siege of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon. And as modern scholarship for a century denied the existence of Troy and Agamemnon, so today it hesitates to admit the reality of Lycurgus. The dates assigned to him vary from 900 to 600 B.C.; and how could one man take out of his head the most unpleasant and astonishing body of legislation in all history, and impose it in a few years not only upon a subject population but even upon a self-willed and warlike ruling class?³³ Nevertheless it would be presumptuous to reject on such theoretical grounds a tradition accepted by all Greek historians. The seventh century was peculiarly an age of personal legislators—Zaleucus at Locris (ca. 660), Draco at Athens (620), and Charondas at Sicilian Catana (ca. 610)—not to speak of Josiah’s discovery of the Mosaic code in the Temple at Jerusalem (ca. 621). Probably we have in these instances not so much a body of personal legislation as a set of customs harmonized and clarified into specific laws, and named, for convenience’s sake, from the man who codified them and in most cases gave them a written form.* We shall record the tradition, while remembering that it has in all likelihood personified and foreshortened a process of change, from, custom to law, that required many authors and many years.

According to Herodotus,³⁴ Lycurgus, uncle and guardian of the Spartan King Charilaus, received from the oracle at Delphi certain rhetra, or edicts, which were described by some as the laws of Lycurgus themselves, or by others as a divine sanction for the laws that he proposed. Apparently the legislators felt that to alter certain customs, or to establish new ones, the safest procedure would be to present their proposals as commands of the god; it was not the first time that a state had laid its foundations in the sky. Tradition further relates that Lycurgus traveled in Crete, admired its institutions, and resolved to introduce some of them into Laconia.³⁵ The kings and most of the nobles grudgingly accepted his reforms as indispensable to their own security; but a young aristocrat, Alcander, resisted violently, and struck out one of the legislator’s eyes. Plutarch tells the story with his usual simplicity and charm:

Lycurgus, so far from being daunted or discouraged by this accident, stopped short, and showed his disfigured face, and eye beaten out, to his countrymen. They, dismayed and ashamed at the sight, delivered Alcander into his hands to be punished. . . . Lycurgus, having thanked them, dismissed them all, excepting only Alcander; and taking him with him into his house, neither did nor said anything severely to him, but . . . bade Alcander to wait upon him at table. The young man, who was of an ingenuous temper, without murmuring did as he was commanded; and being thus admitted to live with Lycurgus, he had an opportunity to observe in him, besides his gentleness and calmness of temper, an extraordinary sobriety and an indefatigable industry; and so, from being an enemy, became one of his most zealous admirers, and told his friends and relations that he was not that morose and ill-natured man they had taken him for, but the one mild and gentle character of the world.³⁶

Having completed his legislation, Lycurgus (says a probably legendary coda to his story) pledged the citizens not to change the laws till his return. Then he went to Delphi, retired into seclusion, and starved himself to death, “thinking it a statesman’s duty to make his very death, if possible, an act of service to the state.”³⁷

4. The Lacedaemonian Constitution

When we attempt to specify the reforms of Lycurgus the tradition becomes contradictory and confused. It is difficult to say which elements of the Spartan code preceded Lycurgus, which were created by him or his generation, and which were added after him. Plutarch and Polybius³⁸ assure us that Lycurgus redistributed the land of Laconia into thirty thousand equal shares among the citizens; Thucydides³⁹ implies that there was no such distribution. Perhaps old properties were left untouched, while the newly conquered land was equally divided. Like Cleisthenes of Sicyon and Cleisthenes of Athens, Lycurgus (viz., the authors of the Lycurgean constitution) abolished the kinship organization of Laconian society, and replaced it with geographical divisions; in this way the power of the old families was broken, and a wider aristocracy was formed. To prevent the displacement of this landowning oligarchy by such mercantile classes as were gaining leadership in Argos, Sicyon, Corinth, Megara, and Athens, Lycurgus forbade the citizens to engage in industry or trade, prohibited the use or importation of silver or gold, and decreed that only iron should be used as currency. He was resolved that the Spartans (i.e., the landowning citizens) should be left free for government and war.

It was a boast of ancient conservatives⁴⁰ that the Lycurgean constitution endured so long because the three forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—were united in it, and in such proportions that each element neutralized the others against excess. Sparta’s monarchy was really a duarchy, since it had concurrently two kings, descending from the invading Heraclids. Possibly this strange institution was a compromise between two related and therefore rival houses, or a device to secure without absolutism the psychological uses of royalty in maintaining social order and national prestige. Their powers were limited: they performed the sacrifices of the state religion, headed the judiciary, and commanded the army in war. In all matters they were subordinate to the Senate; and after Plataea they lost more and more of their authority to the ephors.

The aristocratic and predominant element of the constitution resided in the Senate, or gerousia, literally and actually a group of old men; normally citizens under sixty were considered too immature for its deliberations. Plutarch gives their number as twenty-eight, and tells an incredible story of their election. When a vacancy occurred candidates were required to pass silently and in turn before the Assembly; and he who was greeted with the loudest and longest shouts was pronounced elected.⁴¹ Perhaps this was thought to be a realistic and economical abbreviation of the fuller democratic process. We do not know which of the citizens were eligible to such election; presumably they were the homoioi, or equals, who owned the soil of Laconia, had served in the army, and brought their quota of food to the public mess.⁴² The Senate originated legislation, acted as a supreme court in capital crimes, and formulated public policy.

The Assembly, or apella, was Sparta’s concession to democracy. Apparently all male citizens were admitted to it upon reaching the age of thirty; some eight thousand males were eligible in a population of 376,000. It met on each day of the full moon. All matters of great public moment were submitted to it, nor could any law be passed without its consent. Few laws, however, were ever added to the Lycurgean constitution; and these the Assembly might accept or reject, but not discuss or amend. It was essentially the old Homeric public meeting, listening in awe to the council of chiefs and elders, or to the army-commanding kings. Theoretically sovereignty resided in the apella; but an amendment made to the constitution after Lycurgus empowered the Senate, if it judged that the Assembly had decided “crookedly,” to reverse the decision.⁴³ When an advanced thinker asked Lycurgus to establish a democracy Lycurgus replied, “Begin, my friend, by setting it up in your own family.”⁴⁴

Cicero compared the five ephors (i.e., overseers) to the Roman tribunes, since they were chosen annually by the Assembly; but they corresponded more to the Roman consuls, as wielding an administrative power checked only by the protests of the Senate. The ephorate existed before Lycurgus, and yet is not mentioned in such reports of his legislation as have reached us. By the middle of the sixth century the ephors had become equal in authority to the kings; after the Persian War they were practically supreme. They received embassies, decided disputes at law, commanded the armies, and directed, absolved, or punished the kings.

The enforcement of the government’s decrees was entrusted to the army and the police. It was the custom of the ephors to arm certain of the younger Spartans as a special and secret police (the krypteia), with the right to spy upon the people, and, in the case of Helots, to kill at their discretion.⁴⁵ This institution was used at unexpected times, even to do away with Helots who, though they had served the state bravely in war, were feared by the masters as able and therefore dangerous men. After eight years of the Peloponnesian War, says the impartial Thucydides,

the Helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their number who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel. As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew how each of them perished.⁴⁶

The power and pride of Sparta was above all in its army, for in the courage, discipline, and skill of these troops it found its security and its ideal. Every citizen was trained for war, and was liable to military service from his twentieth to his sixtieth year. Out of this severe training came the hoplites of Sparta—those close-set companies of heavy-armed, spearhurling citizen infantry that were the terror even of the Athenians, and remained practically undefeated until Epaminondas overcame them at Leuctra. Around this army Sparta formed its moral code: to be good was to be strong and brave; to die in battle was the highest honor and happiness; to survive defeat was a disgrace that even the soldier’s mother could hardly forgive. “Return with your shield or on it,” was the Spartan mother’s farewell to her soldier son. Flight with the heavy shield was impossible.

5. The Spartan Code

To train men to an ideal so unwelcome to the flesh it was necessary to take them at birth and form them by the most rigorous discipline. The first step was a ruthless eugenics: not only must every child face the father’s right to infanticide, but it must also be brought before a state council of inspectors; and any child that appeared defective was thrown from a cliff of Mt. Taygetus, to die on the jagged rocks below.⁴⁷ A further elimination probably resulted from the Spartan habit of inuring their infants to discomfort and exposure.⁴⁸ Men and women were warned to consider the health and character of those whom they thought of marrying; even a king, Archidamus, was fined for marrying a diminutive wife.⁴⁹ Husbands were encouraged to lend their wives to exceptional men, so that fine children might be multiplied; husbands disabled by age or illness were expected to invite young men to help them breed a vigorous family. Lycurgus, says Plutarch, ridiculed jealousy and sexual monopoly, and called it “absurd that people should be so solicitous for their dogs and horses as to exert interest and pay money to procure fine breeding, and yet keep their wives shut up, to be made mothers only by themselves, who might be foolish, infirm, or diseased.” In the general opinion of antiquity the Spartan males were stronger and handsomer, their women healthier and lovelier, than the other Greeks.⁵⁰

Probably more of this result was due to training than to eugenic birth. Thucydides makes King Archidamus say: “There is little difference” (at birth, presumably) “between man and man, but the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.”⁵¹ At the age of seven the Spartan boy was taken from his family and brought up by the state; he was enrolled in what was at once a military regiment and a scholastic class, under a paidonomos, or manager of boys. In each class the ablest and bravest boy was made captain; the rest were instructed to obey him, to submit to the punishments he might impose upon them, and to strive to match or better him in achievement and discipline. The aim was not, as at Athens, athletic form and skill, but martial courage and worth. Games were played in the nude, under the eyes of elders and lovers of either sex. The older men made it their concern to provoke quarrels among the boys, individually and in groups, so that vigor and fortitude might be tested and trained; and any moment of cowardice brought many days of disgrace. To bear pain, hardship, and misfortune silently was required of all. Every year, at the altar of Artemis Orthia, some chosen youths were scourged till their blood stained the stones.⁵² At twelve the boy was deprived of underclothing, and was allowed but one garment throughout the year. He did not bathe frequently, like the lads of Athens, for water and unguents made the body soft, while cold air and clean soil made it hard and resistant. Winter and summer he slept in the open, on a bed of rushes broken from the Eurotas’ banks. Until he was thirty he lived with his company in barracks, and knew none of the comforts of home.

He was taught reading and writing, but barely enough to make him literate; books found few buyers in Sparta,⁵³ and it was easy to keep up with the publishers. Lycurgus, said Plutarch, wished children to learn his laws not by writing but by oral transmission and youthful practice under careful guidance and example; it was safer, he thought, to make men good by unconscious habituation than to rely upon theoretical persuasion; a proper education would be the best government. But such education would have to be moral rather than mental; character was more important than intellect. The young Spartan was trained to sobriety, and some Helots were compelled to drink to excess in order that the youth might see how foolish drunkenness can be.⁵⁴ He was taught, in preparation for war, to forage in the fields and find his own food, or starve; to steal in such cases was permissible, but to be detected was a crime punishable by flogging.⁵⁵ If he behaved well he was allowed to attend the public mess of the citizens, and was expected to listen carefully there so that he might become acquainted with the problems of the state, and learn the art of genial conversation. At the age of thirty, if he had survived with honor the hardships of youth, he was admitted to the full rights and responsibilities of a citizen, and sat down to dine with his elders.

The girl, though left to be brought up at home, was also subject to regulation by the state. She was to engage in vigorous games—running, wrestling, throwing the quoit, casting the dart—in order that she might become strong and healthy for easy and perfect motherhood. She should go naked in public dances and processions, even in the presence of young men, so that she might be stimulated to proper care of her body, and her defects might be discovered and removed. “Nor was there anything shameful in the nakedness of the young women,” says the highly moral Plutarch; “modesty attended them, and all wantonness was excluded.” While they danced they sang songs of praise for those that had been brave in war, and heaped contumely upon those that had given way. Mental education was not wasted upon the Spartan girl.

As to love, the young man was permitted to indulge in it without prejudice of gender. Nearly every lad had a lover among the older men; from this lover he expected further education, and in return he offered affection and obedience. Often this exchange grew into a passionate friendship that stimulated both youth and man to bravery in war.⁵⁶ Young men were allowed considerable freedom before marriage, so that prostitution was rare, and hetairai here found no encouragement.⁵⁷ In all of Lacedaemon we hear of only one temple to Aphrodite, and there the goddess was represented as veiled, armed with a sword, and bearing fetters on her feet, as if to symbolize the foolishness of marrying for love, the subordination of love to war, and the strict control of marriage by the state.

The state specified the best age of marriage as thirty for men and twenty for women. Celibacy in Sparta was a crime; bachelors were excluded from the franchise, and from the sight-of public processions in which young men and women danced in the nude. According to Plutarch the bachelors themselves were compelled to march in public, naked even in winter, singing a song to the effect that they were justly suffering this punishment for having disobeyed the laws. Persistent avoiders of marriage might be set upon at any time in the streets by groups of women, and be severely handled. Those who married and had no children were only less completely disgraced; and it was understood that men who were not fathers were not entitled to the respect that the youth of Sparta religiously paid to their elders.⁵⁸

Marriages were usually arranged by the parents, without purchase; but after this agreement the bridegroom was expected to carry off the bride by force, and she was expected to resist; the word for marriage was harpadzein, to seize.⁵⁹ If such arrangements left some adults still unmarried, several men might be pushed into a dark room with an equal number of girls, and be left to pick their life mates in the darkness;⁶⁰ the Spartans thought that such choosing would not be blinder than love. It was usual for the bride to stay with her parents for a while; the bridegroom remained in his barracks, and visited his wife only clandestinely; “in this relation,” says Plutarch, “they lived a long time, insomuch that they sometimes had children by their wives before even they saw their faces by daylight.” When they were ready for parentage custom allowed them to set up a home. Love came after marriage rather than before, and marital affection appears to have been as strong in Sparta as in any other civilization.⁶¹ The Spartans boasted that there was no adultery among them, and they may have been right, for there was much freedom before marriage, and many husbands could be persuaded to share their wives, especially with brothers.⁶² Divorce was rare. The Spartan general Lysander was punished because he left his wife and wished to marry a prettier one.⁶³

All in all, the position of woman was better in Sparta than in any other Greek community. There more than elsewhere she preserved her high Homeric status, and the privileges that survived from an early matrilinear society. Spartan women, says Plutarch,⁶⁴ “were bold and masculine, overbearing to their husbands . . . and speaking openly even on the most important subjects.” They could inherit and bequeath property; and in the course of time—so great was their influence over men—nearly half the real wealth of Sparta was in their hands.⁶⁵ They lived a life of luxury and liberty at home while the men bore the brunt of frequent war, or dined on simple fare in the public mess.

For every Spartan male, by a characteristic ordinance of the constitution, was required from his thirtieth to his sixtieth year to eat his main meal daily in a public dining hall, where the food was simple in quality and slightly but deliberately inadequate in amount. In this way, says Plutarch, the legislator thought to harden them to the privations of war, and to keep them from the degeneration of peace; they “should not spend their lives at home, laid on costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves up to the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, to fatten them in corners like greedy brutes, and to ruin not their minds only but their very bodies, which, enfeebled by indulgence and excess, would stand in need of long sleep, warm bathing, freedom from work, and, in a word, of as much care and attendance as if they were continually sick.”⁶⁶ To supply the food for this public meal each citizen was required to contribute to his dining club, periodically, stated quantities of corn and other provisions; if he failed in this his citizenship was forfeited.

Normally, in the earlier centuries of the code, the simplicity and asceticism to which Spartan youth was trained persisted into later years. Fat men were a rarity in Lacedaemon; there was no law regulating the size of the stomach, but if a man’s belly swelled indecently he might be publicly reproved by the government, or banished from Laconia.⁶⁷ There was little of the drinking and the revelry that flourished in Athens. Differences of wealth were real, but hidden; rich and poor wore the same simple dress—a woolen peplos, or shirt, that hung straight from the shoulders without pretense to beauty or form. The accumulation of movable riches was difficult; to lay up a hundred dollars’ worth of iron currency required a large closet, and to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen.⁶⁸ Human greed remained, however, and found an outlet in official corruption. Senators, ephors, envoys, generals, and kings were alike purchasable, at prices befitting their dignity.⁶⁹ When an ambassador from Samos displayed his gold plate at Sparta, King Cleomenes I had him recalled lest the citizens be spoiled by alien example.⁷⁰

The Spartan system, fearful of such contamination, was inhospitable beyond precedent. Foreigners were rarely welcomed. Usually they were made to understand that their visits must be brief; if they stayed too long they were escorted to the frontier by the police. The Spartans themselves were forbidden to go abroad without permission of the government, and to dull their curiosity they were trained to a haughty exclusiveness that would not dream that other nations could teach them anything.⁷¹ The system had to be ungracious in order to protect itself; a breath from that excluded world of freedom, luxury, letters, and arts might topple over this strange and artificial society, in which two thirds of the people were serfs, and all the masters were slaves.

6. An Estimate of Sparta

What type of man, and what kind of civilization, did this code produce? First of all, a man of strong body, at home with hardship and privation. A luxury-loving Sybarite remarked of the Spartans that “it was no commendable thing in them to be so ready to die in the wars, since by that they were freed from much hard labor and miserable living.”⁷² Health was one of the cardinal virtues in Sparta, and sickness was a crime; Plato’s heart must have been gladdened to find a land so free from medicine and democracy. And here was courage; only the Roman would equal the Spartan’s record for fearlessness and victory. When the Spartans surrendered at Sphacteria, Greece could hardly believe it; it was unheard of that Spartans should not fight to the last man; even their common soldiers, on many occasions, killed themselves rather than survive defeat.⁷³ When the news of the Spartan disaster at Leuctra—so overwhelming that in effect it put an end to Sparta’s history—was brought to the ephors as they presided over the Gymnopedia games, the magistrates said nothing, but merely added, to the roster of the holy dead whom the games honored, the names of the newly slain. Self-control, moderation, equanimity in fortune and adversity—qualities that the Athenians wrote about but seldom showed—were taken for granted in every Spartan citizen.

If it be a virtue to obey the laws, the Spartan was virtuous beyond most men. “Though the Lacedaemonians are free,” the ex-king Demaratus told Xerxes, “yet they are not free in all things; for over them is set law as a master, whom they fear much more than thy people fear thee.”⁷⁴ Seldom—probably never again except in Rome and medieval Jewry—has a people been so strengthened by reverence for its laws. Under the Lycurgean constitution Sparta, for at least two centuries, became always stronger. Though it failed to conquer Argos or Arcadia, it persuaded all the Peloponnesus except Argos and Achaea to accept its leadership in a Peloponnesian League that for almost two hundred years (560-380) kept the peace in Pelops’ isle. All Greece admired Sparta’s army and government, and looked to it for aid in deposing burdensome tyrannies. Xenophon tells of “the astonishment with which I first noted the unique position of Sparta among the states of Hellas, the relatively sparse population, and at the same time the extraordinary power and prestige of the community. I was puzzled to account for the fact. It was only when I came to consider the peculiar institutions of the Spartans that my wonderment ceased.”⁷⁵ Like Plato and Plutarch, Xenophon was never tired of praising Spartan ways. Here it was, of course, that Plato found the outlines of his Utopia, a little blurred by a strange indifference to Ideas. Weary and fearful of the vulgarity and chaos of democracy, many Greek thinkers took refuge in an idolatry of Spartan order and law.

They could afford to praise Sparta, since they did not have to live in it. They did not feel at close range the selfishness, coldness, and cruelty of the Spartan character; they could not see from the select gentlemen whom they met, or the heroes whom they commemorated from afar, that the Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind. With the triumph of the code the arts that had flourished before its establishment died a sudden death; we hear of no more poets, sculptors, or builders in Sparta after 550.* Only choral dance and music remained, for there Spartan discipline could shine, and the individual could be lost in the mass. Excluded from commerce with the world, barred from travel, ignorant of the science, the literature, and the philosophy of exuberantly growing Greece, the Spartans became a nation of excellent hoplites, with the mentality of a lifelong infantryman. Greek travelers marveled at a life so simple and unadorned, a franchise so jealously confined, a conservatism so tenacious of every custom and superstition, a courage and discipline so exalted and limited, so noble in character, so base in purpose, and so barren in result; while, hardly a day’s ride away, the Athenians were building, out of a thousand injustices and errors, a civilization broad in scope and yet intense in action, open to every new idea and eager for intercourse with the world, tolerant, varied, complex, luxurious, innovating, skeptical, imaginative, poetical, turbulent, free. It was a contrast that would color and almost delineate Greek history.

In the end Sparta’s narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of soul. She descended to the sanctioning of any means to gain a Spartan aim; at last she stooped so far to conquer as to sell to Persia the liberties that Athens had won for Greece at Marathon. Militarism absorbed her, and made her, once so honored, the hated terror of her neighbors. When she fell, all the nations marveled, but none mourned. Today, among the scanty ruins of that ancient capital, hardly a torso or a fallen pillar survives to declare that here there once lived Greeks.

IV. FORGOTTEN STATES

Northward from Sparta the valley of the Eurotas reaches across the frontier of Laconia into the massed mountains of Arcadia. They would be more beautiful if they were not so dangerous. They have not welcomed the narrow roads cut out of their rock slopes, and seem to threaten gloomily all disturbers of these Arcadian retreats. No wonder the conquering Dorians and Spartans were both baffled here, and left Arcadia, like Elis and Achaea, to the Achaean and Pelasgian stocks. Now and then the traveler comes upon a plain or a plateau, and finds flourishing new towns like Tripolis, or the remains of ancient cities like Orchomenos, Megalopolis, Tegea, and Mantinea, where Epaminondas won both victory and death. But for the most part it is a land of scattered peasants and shepherds, living precariously with their flocks in these grudging hills; and though after Marathon the cities awoke to civilization and art, they hardly enter the story before the Persian War. Here in these perpendicular forests once roamed the great god Pan.

In southern Arcadia the Eurotas almost meets a yet more famous river. Swiftly the Alpheus wears its way through the Parrhasian range, meanders leisurely into the plains of Elis, and leads the traveler to Olympia. The Elians, Pausanias tells us,⁷⁶ were of Aeolic or Pelasgic origin, and came from Aetolia across the bay. Their first king, Aethlius, was father of that Endymion whose beauty so allured the moon that she closed his eyes in a perpetual sleep, sinned at leisure, and had by him half a hundred daughters. Here, where the Alpheus joins the Cladeus flowing from the north, was the holy city of the Greek world, so sacred that war seldom disturbed it, and the Elians had the boon of a history in which battles were replaced by games. In the angle of the merging streams was the Altis, or hallowed precinct, of Olympian Zeus. Wave after wave of invaders stopped here to worship him; periodically, in later days, their delegates returned to beseech his help and enrich his fane; from generation to generation the temples of Zeus and Hera grew in wealth and renown, until the greatest architects and sculptors of Greece were brought together, after the triumph over Persia, to restore and adorn them in lavish gratitude. The shrine of Hera went back to 1000 B.C.; its ruins are the oldest temple remains in Greece. Fragments of thirty-six columns and twenty Doric capitals survive to show how often and how variously the pillars were replaced. Originally, no doubt, they were of wood; and one shaft of oak still stood when Pausanias came there, notebook in hand, in the days of the Antonines.

From Olympia one passes by the site of the ancient capital, Elis, into Achaea. Hither some of the Achaeans fled when the Dorians took Argos and Mycenae. Like Arcadia it is a land of mountains, along whose slopes patient shepherds drive their flocks up or down as the seasons change. On the western coast is the still-thriving port of Patras, of whose women Pausanias said that they were “twice as numerous as the men, and devoted to Aphrodite if any women are.”⁷⁷ Other cities huddled against the hills along the Corinthian Gulf—Aegium, Helice, Aegira, Pellene—now almost forgotten, but once alive with men, women, and children, every one of whom was the center of the world.

V. CORINTH

A few more mountains, and the traveler re-enters, in Sicyon, the area of Dorian settlement. Here, in 676, one Orthagoras taught the world a trick of politics that aftercenturies would use. He explained to the peasants that they were of Pelasgic or Achaean stock, while the landowning aristocracy that exploited them was descended from Dorian invaders; he appealed to the racial pride of the dispossessed, led them in a successful revolution, made himself dictator, and established the manufacturing and trading classes in power.* Under his able successors, Myron and Cleisthenes, these classes made Sicyon a semi-industrial city, famous for its shoes and its pottery, though still named from the cucumbers that it grew.

Farther east is the city that should have been, by all geographic and economic omens, the richest and most cultured center in Greece. For Corinth, on the isthmus, had an enviable position. It could lock the land door to or upon the Peloponnesus; it could serve and mulct the overland trade between northern and southern Greece; and it had harbors and shipping on both the Saronic and the Corinthian Gulf. Between these seas it built a lucrative Diolcos (“a slipping through”)—a wooden tramway along which ships were drawn on rollers over four miles of land.† Its fortress was the impregnable Acrocorinthus, a mountain peak two thousand feet high, watered by its own inexhaustible spring. Strabo has described for us the stirring sight from the citadel, with the city spread out on two bright terraces below, the open-air theater, the great public baths, the colonnaded market place, the gleaming temples, and the protective walls that reached to the port of Lechaeum on the northern gulf. At the very summit of the mount, as if to symbolize a major industry of the city, was a temple to Aphrodite.⁸⁰

Corinth had a history stretching back to Mycenaean times; even in Homer’s day it was famous for its wealth.⁸¹ After the Dorian conquest kings ruled it, then an aristocracy dominated by the family of the Bacchiadae. But here, too, as in Argos, Sicyon, Megara, Athens, Lesbos, Miletus, Samos, Sicily, and wherever Greek trade flourished, the business class, by revolution or intrigue, captured political power; this is the real meaning of the outbreak of “tyrannies” or dictatorships in seventh-century Greece. About 655 Cypselus seized the government. Having promised Zeus the entire wealth of Corinth if he succeeded, he laid a ten per cent tax on all property each year, and gave the proceeds to the temple, until, after a decade, he has fulfilled his vow, while leaving the city as rich as before.⁸² His popular and intelligent rule, through thirty years, laid the basis of Corinthian prosperity.⁸³

His ruthless son, Periander, in one of the longest dictatorships in Greek history (625-585), established order and discipline, checked exploitation, encouraged business, patronized literature and art, and made Corinth for a time the foremost city in Greece. He stimulated trade by establishing a state coinage,⁸⁴ and promoted industry by lowering taxes. He solved a crisis of unemployment by undertaking great public works, and establishing colonies abroad. He protected small businessmen from the competition of large firms by limiting the number of slaves that might be employed by one man, and forbidding their further importation.⁸⁵ He relieved the wealthy of their surplus gold by compelling them to contribute to a colossal golden statue as an ornament for the city; he invited the rich women of Corinth to a festival, stripped them of their costly robes and jewels, and sent them home with half their beauty nationalized. His enemies were numerous and powerful; he dared not go out without a heavy guard, and his fear and seclusion made him morose and cruel. To protect himself against revolt he acted on the cryptic advice of his fellow dictator Thrasybulus of Miletus, that he should periodically cut down the tallest ears of corn in the field.*⁸⁶ His concubines preyed upon him with accusations of his wife, until in a temper he threw her downstairs; she was pregnant, and died of the shock. He burnt the concubines alive, and banished to Corcyra his son Lycophron, who so grieved for his mother that he would not speak to his father. When the Corcyreans put Lycophron to death Periander seized three hundred youths of their noblest families and sent them to King Alyattes of Lydia, that they might be made eunuchs; but the ships that bore them touched at Samos, and the Samians, braving Periander’s anger, freed them. The dictator lived to a ripe old age, and after his death was numbered by some among the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece.⁸⁷

A generation after him the Spartans overthrew the dictatorship at Corinth and set up an aristocracy—not because Sparta loved liberty, but because she favored landowners against the business classes. Nevertheless it was upon trade that the wealth of Corinth was based, helped now and then by the devotees of Aphrodite, and the Panhellenic Isthmian games. Courtesans were so numerous in the city that the Greeks often used corinthiazomai as signifying harlotry.⁸⁸ It was a common matter in Corinth to dedicate to Aphrodite’s temple women who served her as prostitutes, and brought their fees to the priests. One Xenophon (not the leader of the Ten Thousand) promises the goddess fifty hetairai, or courtesans, if she will help him to victory in the Olympic games; and the pious Pindar, celebrating this triumph, refers to the vow without flinching.⁸⁹ “The Temple of Aphrodite,” says Strabo,⁹⁰ “was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money here.” The city was grateful, and looked upon these “hospitable ladies” as public benefactors. “It is an ancient custom at Corinth,” says an early author quoted by Athenaeus,⁹¹ “whenever the city addresses any supplication to Aphrodite . . . to employ as many courtesans as possible to join in the supplication.” The courtesans had a religious festival of their own, the Aphrodisia, which they celebrated with piety and pomp.⁹² St. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians,⁹³ denounced these women, who still in his time plied there their ancient trade.

In 480 Corinth had a population of fifty thousand citizens and sixty thousand slaves—an unusually high proportion of freemen to slaves.⁹⁴ The quest for pleasure and gold absorbed all classes, and left little energy for literature and art. We hear of a poet Eumelus in the eighth century, but Corinthian names seldom grace Greek letters. Periander welcomed poets at his court, and brought Arion from Lesbos to organize music in Corinth. In the eighth century the pottery and bronzes of Corinth were famous; in the sixth her vase painters were at the top of their profession in Greece. Pausanias tells of a great cedar chest, in which Cypselus hid from the Bacchiadae, and upon which artists carved elegant reliefs, with inlays of ivory and gold.⁹⁵ Probably it was in the age of Periander that Corinth raised to Apollo a Doric temple famous for its seven monolithic columns, five of which still stand to suggest that Corinth may have loved beauty in more forms than one. Perhaps time and chance were ungrateful to the city, and her annals fell to be written by men of other loyalties. The past would be startled if it could see itself in the pages of historians.

VI. MEGARA

Megara loved gold as much as Corinth did, and like her thrived on commerce; it had, however, a great poet, in whose verses the ancient city lives as if its revolutions were one with our own. Standing at the very entrance to the Peloponnesus, with a port on either gulf, it was in a position to bargain with armies and levy tolls upon trade; to which it added a busy textile industry manned with men and women who, in the honest phraseology of the day, were called slaves. The city flourished best in the seventh and sixth centuries, when it disputed the commerce of the isthmus with Corinth; it was then that it sent out, as trading posts, colonies as far-flung as Byzantium on the Bosporus and Megara Hyblaea in Sicily. Wealth mounted, but the clever gathered it so narrowly into their hands that the mass of the people, destitute serfs amid plenty,⁹⁶ listened readily to men who promised them a better life. About 630 Theagenes, having decided to become dictator, praised the poor and denounced the rich, led a starving mob into the pastures of the wealthy breeders, had himself voted a bodyguard, increased it, and with it overthrew the government.⁹⁷ For a generation Theagenes ruled Megara, freed the serfs, humbled the mighty, and patronized the arts. Towards 600 the rich deposed him in turn; but a third revolution restored the democracy, which confiscated the property of leading aristocrats, commandeered rich homes, abolished debts, and passed a decree requiring the wealthy to refund the interest that had been paid them by their debtors.⁹⁸

Theognis lived through these revolutions, and described them in bitter poems that might be the voice of our class war today. He was, he tells us (for he is our sole authority on this subject), a member of an ancient and noble family. He must have grown up in comfortable circumstances, for he was guide, philosopher, and lover to a youth named Cyrnus, who became one of the leaders of the aristocratic party. He gives Cyrnus much advice, and asks merely love in return. Like all lovers he complains of short measure, and his finest extant poem reminds Cyrnus that he will achieve immortality only through Theognis’ poetry:

Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly

Over the boundless ocean and the earth;

Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie,

The comrade of their banquet and their mirth.

Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound

Upon the silver flute’s melodious breath;

And when thou goest darkling underground

Down to the lamentable house of death,

Oh, yet not then from honor shalt thou cease,

But wander, an imperishable name,

Cyrnus, about the seas and shores of Greece,

Crossing from isle to isle the barren main.

Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride,

Sped by the Muses of the violet crown,

And men to come, while earth and sun abide,

Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown.

Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return

Thou givest me the scorn with which I burn.⁹⁹

He warns Cyrnus that the injustices of the aristocracy may provoke a revolution:

Our state is pregnant, shortly to produce

A rude avenger of prolonged abuse.

The commons hitherto seem sober-minded,

But their superiors are corrupt and blinded.

The rule of noble spirits, brave and high,

Never endangered peace and harmony.

The supercilious, arrogant pretense

Of feeble minds, weakness and insolence;

Justice and truth and law wrested aside

By crafty shifts of avarice and pride;

These are our ruin, Cyrnus!—never dream

(Tranquil and undisturbed as it may seem)

Of future peace or safety to the state;

Bloodshed and strife will follow soon or late.*¹⁰⁰

The revolution came; Theognis was among the men exiled by the triumphant democracy, and his property was confiscated. He left his wife and children with friends, and wandered from state to state—Euboea, Thebes, Sparta, Sicily; at first welcomed and fed for his poetry, then lapsing into a bitter and unaccustomed poverty. Out of his resentment he addresses to Zeus the questions which Job would ask of Yahweh:

Blessed, almighty Jove! with deep amaze

I view the world, and marvel at thy ways. . . .

How can you reconcile it to your sense

Of right and wrong, thus loosely to dispense

Your bounties on the wicked and the good?

How can your laws be known or understood?¹⁰¹

He becomes bitter against the leaders of the democracy, and prays to this inscrutable Zeus for the boon of drinking their blood.¹⁰² In the first known use of this metaphor he likens the state of Megara to a ship whose pilot has been replaced by disorderly and unskilled mariners.¹⁰³ He argues that some men are by nature abler than others, and that therefore aristocracy in some form is inevitable; already men had discovered that majorities never rule. He uses hoi agathoi, the good, as synonymous with the aristocrats, and hoi kakoi, the bad, base, worthless, as signifying the common people.¹⁰⁴ These native differences, he thinks, are ineradicable; “no amount of teaching will make a bad man good,”¹⁰⁵—though he may merely mean here that no training can turn a commoner into an aristocrat. Like all good conservatives he is strong for eugenics: the evils of the world are due not to the greed of the “good” but to their misalliances and their infertility.¹⁰⁶

He plots with Cyrnus another counterrevolution; he argues that even if one has taken a vow of loyalty to the new government it is permissible to assassinate a tyrant; and he pledges himself to work with his friends until they have taken full vengeance upon their foes. Nevertheless, after many years of exile and loneliness, he bribes an official to let him return to Megara.¹⁰⁷ He is revolted at his own duplicity, and writes lines of despair that hundreds of Greeks would quote:

Not to be born, never to see the sun—

No worldly blessing is a greater one!

And the next best is speedily to die,

And lapt beneath a load of earth to lie.¹⁰⁸

In the end we find him back in Megara, old and broken, and promising, for safety’s sake, never again to write of politics. He consoles himself with wine and a loyal wife,¹⁰⁹ and does his best to learn at last the lesson that everything natural is forgivable.

Learn, Cyrnus, learn to bear an easy mind;

Accommodate your humor to mankind

And human nature; take it as you find.

A mixture of ingredients good and bad—

Such are we all, the best that can be had.

The best are found defective, and the rest,

For common use, are equal to the best.

Suppose it had been otherwise decreed,

How could the business of the world proceed?¹¹⁰

VII. AEGINA AND EPIDAURUS

Across the bay from Megara and Corinth earthquake had raised, or left, one of their earliest rivals in industry and trade—the island of Aegina. There, in Mycenaean times, a prosperous city developed, whose graves gave up much gold.¹¹¹ The conquering Dorians found the land too barren for tillage, but admirably placed for commerce. When the Persians came the island knew only an aristocracy of tradesmen, eager to sell the excellent vases and bronzes produced in their shops for the slaves whom they imported in great number to work in their factories, or for sale to the cities of Greece. Aristotle, about 350, calculated that Aegina had a population of half a million, of whom 470,000 were slaves.¹¹² Here the first Greek coins were made, and the Aeginetan weights and measures remained standard in Greece till its conquest by Rome.

That such a commercial community could graduate from wealth to art was revealed when, in 1811, a traveler discovered in a heap of rubbish the vigorous and finely carved figures that once adorned the pediment of the temple of Aphaea. Of the temple itself twenty-two Doric columns stand, still bearing their architrave. Probably the Aeginetans built it shortly before the Persian War; for though its architecture is classic, its statuary shows many traces of the archaic, semi-Oriental style. Possibly, however, it was raised after Salamis; for the statuary, which represents Aeginetans overcoming Trojans, may symbolize the perennial conflict between Greece and the Orient, and the recent victory won by the Greek fleet under the very brows of Aegina at Salamis. To that fleet the little island contributed thirty ships; and one of these, after the victory, was awarded by the Greeks the first prize for bravery.

A pleasant boat ride takes the traveler from Aegina to Epidaurus, now a village of five hundred souls, but once among the most famous cities of Greece. For here—or rather ten miles out in a narrow gorge among the loftiest mountains of the Argolic peninsula—was the chief home of Asclepius, the hero-god of healing. “O Asclepius!” Apollo himself had said through his oracle at Delphi, “thou who art born a great joy to all mortals, whom lovely Coronis bare to me, the child of love, at rocky Epidaurus.”¹¹³ Asclepius cured so many people—even raising a man from the dead—that Pluto, god of Hades, complained to Zeus that hardly anyone was dying any more; and Zeus, who would hardly know what to do with the human race if it were not for death, destroyed Asclepius with a thunderbolt.¹¹⁴ But the people, first in Thessaly, then in Greece, worshiped him as a savior god. At Epidaurus they raised to him the greatest of his temples, and there the physician-priests who from him were called Asclepiads established a sanitarium known throughout Hellas for its success in treating disease. Epidaurus became a Greek Lourdes; pilgrims flocked to it from every part of the Mediterranean world, seeking what to the Greeks seemed the greatest boon of all—health. They slept in the temple, submitted hopefully to the regimen prescribed, and recorded their cures, which they believed to be miraculous, on stone tablets that still lie here and there among the ruins of the sacred grove. It was out of the fees and gifts of these patients that Epidaurus built its theater, and the stadium whose seats and goals still lie in the lap of the neighboring hills, and the lovely tholos—a circular, colonnaded building whose surviving fragments, preserved in the little museum, are among the most exquisitely carved marbles in Greece. Today such patients go to Tenos in the Cyclades, where the priests of the Greek Church heal them¹¹⁵ as those of Asclepius healed their forerunners two thousand five hundred years ago. And the gloomy peak where once the people of Epidaurus sacrificed to Zeus and Hera is now the sacred mount of St. Elias. The gods are mortal, but piety is everlasting.

What the student looks for most eagerly at Epidaurus is not the leveled ruins of the Asclepium. The land is well wooded here, and he does not see the perfect theater that he is seeking until a turn in the road spreads it out against the mountainside in a gigantic fan of stone. Polycleitus the Younger built it in the fourth century before our era, but even to this day it is almost completely preserved. As the traveler stands in the center of the orchestra, or dancing place—a spacious circle paved with stone—and sees before him fourteen thousand seats in rising tiers, so admirably designed that every seat directly faces him; as his glance follows the radiating aisles that rise in swift straight lines from the stage to the trees of the mountain slope above; as he speaks quietly to his friends on the farthest, highest seats, two hundred feet away, and perceives that his every word is understood: then he visions Epidaurus in the days of its prosperity, sees in his mind’s eye the crowds coming out in gay freedom from shrine and city to hear Euripides, and feels, more than he can ever express, the vibrant, plein-air life of ancient Greece.

CHAPTER V

Athens

I. HESIOD’S BOEOTIA

EAST of Megara the road divides—south to Athens, north to Thebes. Northward the route is mountainous, and draws the traveler up to the heights of Mt. Cithaeron. Far to the west Parnassus is visible. Ahead, across lesser heights and far below, is the fertile Boeotian plain. At the foot of the hill lies Plataea, where 100,000 Greeks annihilated 300,000 Persians. A little to the west is Leuctra, where Epaminondas won his first great victory over the Spartans. Again a little west rises Mt. Helicon, home of the Muses and Keats’s “blushful Hippocrene”—that famous fountain, the Horse’s Spring, which, we are assured, gushed forth when the hoof of the winged steed Pegasus struck the earth as he leaped toward heaven.¹ Directly north is Thespiae, always at odds with Thebes; and close by is the fountain in whose waters Narcissus contemplated his shadow—or, another story said, that of the dead sister whom he loved.²

In the little town of Ascra, near Thespiae, lived and toiled the poet Hesiod, second only to Homer in the affection of the classic Greeks. Tradition gave 846 and 777 as the dates of his birth and death; some modern scholars bring him down to 650;³ probably he lived a century earlier than that.⁴ He was born at Aeolian Cyme in Asia Minor; but his father, tired of poverty there, migrated to Ascra, which Hesiod describes as “miserable in winter, insufferable in summer, and never good”⁵—like most of the places in which men live. As Hesiod, farm hand and shepherd boy, followed his flocks up and down the slopes of Helicon he dreamed that the Muses breathed into his body the soul of poetry. So he wrote and sang, and won prizes in musical contests,⁶ even, some said, from Homer himself.⁷

Loving like any young Greek the marvels of mythology, he composed* a Theogony, or Genealogy of the Gods, of which we have a thousand halting lines, giving those dynasties and families of deities which are as vital to religion as the pedigrees of kings are to history. First he sang of the Muses themselves, because they were, so to speak, his neighbors on Helicon, and in his youthful imagination he could almost see them “dancing with delicate feet” on the mountainside, and “bathing their soft skins” in the Hippocrene.⁹ Then he described not so much the creation as the procreation of the world—how god begot god until Olympus overflowed. In the beginning was Chaos; “and next broad-bosomed Earth, ever secure seat of all the immortals”; in Greek religion the gods live on the earth or within it, and are always close to men. Next came Tartarus, god of the nether world; and after him Eros, or Love, “fairest of the gods.”¹⁰ Chaos begot Darkness and Night, which begot Ether and Day; Earth begot Mountains and Heaven, and Heaven and Earth, mating, begot Oceanus, the Sea. We capitalize these names, but in Hesiod’s Greek there were no capitals, and for all we know he meant merely that in the beginning was chaos, and then the earth, and the inners of the earth, and night and day and the sea, and desire begetting all things; perhaps Hesiod was a philosopher touched by the Muses and personifying abstractions into poetry; Empedocles would use the same tricks a century or two later in Sicily.¹¹ From such a theology it would be but a step to the natural philosophy of the Ionians.

Hesiod’s mythology revels in monsters and blood, and is not averse to theological pornography. Out of the mating of Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Ge or Gaea) came a race of Titans, some with fifty heads and a hundred hands. Uranus liked them not, and condemned them to gloomy Tartarus. But Earth resenting this, proposed to them that they should kill their father. One of the Titans, Cronus, undertook the task. Then “huge Ge rejoiced, and hid him in ambush; in his hand she placed a sickle with jagged teeth, and suggested to him all the stratagem. Then came vast Heaven, bringing Night [Erebus] with him, and, eager for love, brooded around Earth, and lay stretched on all sides.” Thereupon Cronus mutilated his father, and threw the flesh into the sea. From the drops of blood that fell upon the earth came the Furies; from the foam that formed around the flesh as it floated on the waters rose Aphrodite.*¹² The Titans captured Olympus, deposed Heaven-Uranus, and raised Cronus to the throne. Cronus married his sister Rhea, but Earth and Heaven, his parents, having predicted that he would be deposed by one of his sons, Cronus swallowed them all except Zeus, whom Rhea bore secretly in Crete. When Zeus grew up he deposed Cronus in turn, forced him to disgorge his children, and plunged the Titans back into the bowels of the earth.¹³

Such, according to Hesiod, were the births and ways of the gods. Here, too, is the tale of Prometheus, Far-Seer and Fire-Bringer; here, in tedious abundance, are some of the divine adulteries that enabled so many Greeks, like Mayflower Americans, to trace their pedigrees to the gods—one would never have guessed that adultery could be so dull. We do not know how far these myths were the popular outgrowth of a primitive and almost savage culture, and how far they are due to Hesiod; few of them are mentioned in the healthy pages of Homer. It is possible that some measure of the disrepute into which these tales brought the Olympians in days of philosophical criticism and moral development is to be ascribed to the gloomy fancy of Ascra’s bard.

In the only poem universally conceded to Hesiod he descends from Olympus to the plains, and writes a vigorous georgic of the farmer’s life. The Works and Days takes the form of a long reproof and counsel to the poet’s brother Perseus, who is so strangely pictured that he may be only a literary device. “Now will I speak to thee with good intent, thou exceeding foolish Perseus.”¹⁴ This Perseus, we are told, has cheated Hesiod of Hesiod’s inheritance; and now the poet, in the first of known sermons on the dignity of labor, tells him how much wiser honesty and toil are than vice and luxurious ease. “Behold, thou mayest choose vice easily, even in heaps; for the path is plain, and she dwells very near. But before excellence the immortal gods have placed the sweat of toil; long and steep is the road that leads to her, and rough it is at first; but when you reach the height then truly is it easy, though so hard before.”¹⁵ So the poet lays down rules for diligent husbandry, and the proper days for plowing, planting, and reaping, in rough saws that Virgil would polish into perfect verse. He warns Perseus against drinking heavily in summer, or dressing lightly in winter. He draws a chilly picture of winter in Boeotia—the “keenly piercing air that flays the steers,” the seas and rivers tossed about by the northern wind, the moaning forests and crashing pines, the beasts “shunning the white snow” and huddling fearfully in their folds and stalls.¹⁶ How cozy then is a well-built cottage, the lasting reward of courageous and prudent toil! There the domestic tasks go on despite the storm; then a wife is a helpmate indeed, and repays a man for the many tribulations she has caused him.

Hesiod cannot quite make up his mind about helpmates. He must have been a bachelor or a widower, for no man with a living wife would have spoken so acridly of woman. It is true that at the end of our fragment of the Theogony the poet begins a chivalrous Catalogue of Women, recounting the legends of those days when heroines were as numerous as men, and most of the gods were goddesses. But in both of his major works he tells with bitter relish how all human ills were brought to man by the beautiful Pandora. Angered by Prometheus’ theft of fire from Heaven, Zeus bids the gods mold woman as a Greek gift for man. He

bade Hephaestus with all speed mix earth with water, and endue it with man’s voice and strength, and to liken in countenance to immortal goddesses the fair, lovely beauty of a maiden. Then he bade Athena teach her how to weave the highly wrought web, and golden Aphrodite to shed around her head grace, and painful desire, and cares that waste the limbs; but to endue her with a dog-like mind and tricky manners he charged the messenger Hermes. . . . They obeyed Zeus . . . and the herald of the gods placed within her a winning voice; and this woman he called Pandora, because all who dwelt in Olympian mansions bestowed on her a gift, a mischief to inventive men.¹⁷

Zeus presents Pandora to Epimetheus, who, though he has been warned by his brother Prometheus not to accept gifts from the gods, feels that he may, yield to beauty this once. Now Prometheus has left with Epimetheus a mysterious box, with instructions that it should under no circumstances be opened. Pandora, overcome with curiosity, opens the box, whereupon ten thousand evils fly out of it and begin to plague the life of man, while Hope alone remains. From Pandora, says Hesiod, “is the race of tender women; from her is a pernicious race; and tribes of women, a great hurt, dwell with men, helpmates not of consuming poverty but of surfeit. . . . So to mortal men Zeus gave women as an evil.”¹⁸

But alas, says our vacillating poet, celibacy is as bad as marriage; a lonely old age is a miserable thing, and the property of a childless man reverts at his death to the clan. So, after all, a man had better marry—though not before thirty; and he had better have children—though not more than one lest the property be divided.

When full matureness crowns thy manhood’s pride,

Lead to thy mansion the consenting bride;

Thrice ten thy sum of years the nuptial prime,

Nor fall far short, nor far exceed the time . . .

A virgin choose, that morals chaste imprest

By this wise love may stamp her yielding breast.

Some known and neighboring damsel be thy prize;

And wary bend around thy cautious eyes,

Lest by a choice imprudent thou be found

The merry mock of all the dwellers round.

No better lot has Providence assigned

Than a fair woman with a virtuous mind;

Nor can a worse befall than when thy fate

Allots a worthless, feast-continuing mate.

She with no touch of mere material flame

Shall burn to tinder thy care-wasted frame;

Shall send a fire thy vigorous bones within

And age unripe in bloom of years begin.¹⁹

Before this Fall of Man, says Hesiod, the human race lived through many happy centuries on the earth. First the gods, in the days of Cronus (Virgil’s Saturnia regna), had made a Golden Race of men, who were themselves as gods, living without toil or care; of its own accord the earth bore ample food for them, and nourished their rich flocks; they spent many a day in joyous festival, and never aged; and when at last death came to them, it was like a painless and dreamless sleep. But then the gods, with divine whimsicality, made a Silver Race, far inferior to the first; these individuals took a century to grow up, lived through a brief maturity of suffering, and died. Zeus made then a Brazen Race, men with limbs and weapons and houses of brass, who fought so many wars with one another that “black Death seized them and they quitted the bright sunlight.” Zeus tried again and made the Heroic Race, which fought at Thebes and Troy; when these men died “they dwelt with carefree spirit in the Isles of the Blest.” Last and worst came the Iron Race, mean and corrupt, poor and disorderly, toiling by day and wretched by night; sons dishonoring parents, impious and stingy to the gods, lazy and factious, warring among themselves, taking and giving bribes, distrusting and maligning one another, and grinding the faces of the poor; “Would,” cries Hesiod, “that I had not been born in this age, but either before or after it!” Soon, he hopes, Zeus will bury this Iron Race under the earth.²⁰

Such is the theology of history with which Hesiod explains the poverty and injustice of his time. These ills he knew by sight and touch; but the past, which the poets had filled with heroes and gods, must have been nobler and lovelier than this; surely men had not always been as poor and harassed and petty as the peasants whom he knew in Boeotia. He does not realize how deeply the faults of his class enter into his own outlook, how narrow and earthly, almost commercial, are his views of life and labor, women and men. What a fall this is from the picture of human affairs in Homer, as a scene of crime and terror, but also of grandeur and nobility! Homer was a poet, and knew that one touch of beauty redeems a multitude of sins; Hesiod was a peasant who grudged the cost of a wife, and grumbled at the impudence of women who dared to sit at the same table with their husbands.²¹ Hesiod, with rough candor, shows us the ugly basement of early Greek society—the hard poverty of serfs and small farmers upon whose toil rested all the splendor and war sport of the aristocracy and the kings. Homer sang of heroes and princes for lords and ladies; Hesiod knew no princes, but sang his lays of common men, and pitched his tune accordingly. In his verses we hear the rumblings of those peasant revolts that would produce in Attica the reforms of Solon and the dictatorship of Peisistratus.*

In Boeotia, as in the Peloponnese, the land was owned by absentee nobles who dwelt in or near the towns. The most prosperous of the cities were built around Lake Copais, now dry but once supplying a complex system of irrigation tunnels and canals. Late in the Homeric Age this tempting region was invaded by peoples who took their name from that Mt. Boeon, in Epirus, near which they had had their home. They captured Chaeronea (near which Philip was to put an end to Greek liberty), Thebes, their future capital, and finally the old Minyan capital, Orchomenos. These and other towns, in classic days, joined under the leadership of Thebes in a Boeotian Confederacy, whose common affairs were managed by annually chosen boeotarchs, and whose peoples celebrated together at Coronea the festival of Panboeotia.

It was the custom of the Athenians to laugh at the Boeotians as dullwitted, and to attribute this obtuseness to heavy eating and a moist and foggy climate—very much as the French used to diagnose the English. There may have been some truth in this, for the Boeotians play an unprepossessing part in Greek history. Thebes, for example, aided the Persian invaders, and was a thorn in the side of Athens for centuries. But in the other side of the scales we place the brave and loyal Plataeans, plodding Hesiod and soaring Pindar, the noble Epaminondas and the completely lovable Plutarch. We must beware of seeing Athens’ rivals only through Athens’ eyes.

II. DELPHI

From Plutarch’s city, Chaeronea, one passes at the continuous risk of his life over a dozen mountains into Phocis, to reach, on the very slope of Parnassus, the sacred city of Delphi. A thousand feet below is the Crisaean plain, bright with the silver leaves of ten thousand olive trees; five hundred feet farther down is an inlet of the Corinthian Gulf; ships move with the stately, silent slowness of distance over waters deceptively motionless. Beyond are other ranges, clothed for a moment in royal purple by the setting sun. At a turn in the road is the Castalian Spring, framed in a gorge of perpendicular cliffs; from the heights, legend said (adding another fable to his own), the citizens of Delphi hurled the wandering Aesop; over them, says history, Philomelus the Phocian drove the defeated Locrians in the Second Sacred War.*²³ Above are the twin peaks of Parnassus, where the Muses dwelt when they tired of Helicon. Greeks who climbed a hundred tortuous miles to stand on this mountainside—poised on a ledge between mist-shrouded heights and a sunlit sea, and surrounded on every side with beauty or terror—could hardly doubt that beneath these rocks lived some awful god. Time and again earthquake had rumbled here, frightening away the plundering Persians, and a century later the plundering Phocians, and a century later the plundering Gauls; it was the god protecting his shrine. As far back as Greek tradition could reach, worshipers had gathered here to find in the winds among the gorges, or the gases escaping from the earth, the voice and will of deity. The great stone that nearly closed the cleft from which the gases came was, to the Greeks, the center of Greece, and therefore the omphalos, as they called it, the umbilicus or very navel of the world.

Over that navel they built their altars, in older days to Ge, Mother Earth, later to her bright conqueror Apollo. Once a terrible serpent had guarded the gorge, holding it against men; Phoebus had slain him with an arrow, and, as the Pythian Apollo, had become the idol of the shrine. There, when an earlier temple was destroyed by fire (548), the rich Alcmaeonids, aristocrats exiled from Athens, rebuilt it with funds subscribed by all Greece and augmented by their own; they gave it a façade of marble, surrounded it with a Doric peristyle, and supported it with Ionic colonnades within; seldom had Greece seen so magnificent a shrine. A Sacred Way wound up the slope to the sanctuary, adorned at every step with statues, porticoes, and “treasuries”—miniature temples built in the sacred precincts (at Olympia, Delphi, or Delos) by Greek cities as repositories for their funds, or as their individual tributes to the god. A hundred years before the battle of Marathon, Corinth and Sicyon raised such treasuries at Delphi; later, Athens, Thebes, and Cyrene rivaled them, Cnidus and Siphnos surpassed them. Amid them all, as a reminder that Greek drama was a part of Greek religion, a theater was built into the face of Parnassus. Far above all the rest was a stadium, where Greece practiced its favorite worship of health, courage, beauty, and youth.

Imagination pictures the scene in the days of Apollo’s festival—fervent pilgrims crowding the road to the sacred city, filling noisily the inns and tents thrown up to shelter them, passing curiously and skeptically among the booths where subtle traders displayed their wares, mounting in religious procession or hopeful pilgrimage to Apollo’s temple, laying before it their offering or sacrifice, chanting their hymns or saying their prayers, sitting awed in the theater, and plodding up half a thousand trying steps to witness the Pythian games or gaze in wonder at mountains and sea. Life once passed this way in all its eagerness.

III. THE LESSER STATES

In the western mainlands of Greece life was content to be rural and subdued throughout Greek history—and is so today. In Locris, Aetolia, Acarnania, and Aeniania men were too close to primitive realities, too far from the quickening currents of communication and trade, to have time or skill for literature, philosophy, or art; even the gymnasium and the theater, so dear to Attica, found no home here; and the temples were artless village shrines stirring no national sentiment. At long intervals modest towns arose, like Amphissa in Locris, or Aetolian Naupactus, or little Calydon, where once Meleager had hunted the boar with Atalanta.* On the west coast near Calydon is the modern Mesolongion, or Missolonghi, where Marco Bozzaris fought and Byron died.

Between Acarnania and Aetolia runs the greatest river of Hellas—the Achelous, which the imaginative Greeks worshiped as a god, and appeased with prayer and sacrifice. Near its sources in Epirus rises the Spercheus, along whose banks in the little state of Aeniania once lived the pre-Homeric Achaeans, and a small tribe called Hellenes, whose name, by the whims of usage, was adopted by all the Greeks. Towards the east lay Thermopylae, called “Hot Gates” because of its warm sulphur springs and its narrow strategic pass, from north to south, between mountains and the Malic Gulf. Then over Mt. Othrys and through Achaea Phthiotis one descends into the great plains of Thessaly.

Here at Pharsalus Caesar’s weary troops wiped out the forces of Pompey. Nowhere else in Greece were the crops so rich as in Thessaly, or the horses so spirited, or the arts so poor. Rivers ran from all directions into the Peneus, making a fertile alluvial soil from the southern boundary of the state to the foot of the northern ranges. Through these mountains the Peneus slashes its way across Thessaly to the Thracian Sea. Between the peaks of Ossa and Olympus it carves the Vale of Tempe (i.e., a cutting), where for four miles the angry river is-hemmed in by precipitous cliffs rising a thousand feet above the stream. Along the great rivers were many cities—Pherae, Crannon, Tricca, Larisa, Gyrton, Elatea—ruled by feudal barons living on the toil of serfs. Here, in the extreme north, is Mt. Olympus, tallest of Greek peaks, and home of the Olympian gods. On its northern and eastern slopes lay Pieria, where the Muses had dwelt before they moved to Helicon.* Southward, and along the gulf, ran Magnesia, piling up mountains from Ossa to Pelion.

Beginning a few miles across the strait from Magnesia, the great island of Euboea stretches its length along the shores of the mainland between inner gulfs and outer Aegean, and pivots itself on a peninsula at Chalcis that almost binds it to Boeotia. The island’s backbone is a range that continues Olympus, Ossa, Pelion, and Othrys, and ends in the Cyclades. Its coastal plains were rich enough to lure Ionians from Attica in the days of the Dorian invasion, and to lead to its conquest by Athens in 506 on the plea that Athens, if blockaded at the Piraeus, would starve without Euboean grain. Neighboring deposits of copper and iron and banks of murex shells gave Chalcis its wealth and its name; for a time it was the chief center of the metallurgical industry in Greece, making unrivaled swords and excellent vases of bronze. The trade of the island, helped by one of the first Greek coinages, passed out from Chalcis, enriched its citizens, and led them to found commercial colonies in Thrace, Italy, and Sicily. The Euboean system of weights and measures became almost universal in Greece; and the alphabet of Chalcis, given to Rome by the Euboean colony of Italian Cumae, became through Latin the alphabet of modern Europe. A few miles to the south of Chalcis was its ancient rival, Eretria. There Menedemus, a pupil of Plato, established a school of philosophy, but for the rest neither Eretria nor Chalcis wrote its name very distinctly into the record of Greek thought or art.

From Chalcis a bridge, lineal descendant of the wooden span built in 411 B.C., leads the traveler across the Euripus strait back into Boeotia. A few miles south on the Boeotian coast lay the little town of Aulis, where Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to the gods. In this region once lived an insignificant tribe, the Graii, who joined the Euboeans in sending a colony to Cumae, near Naples; from them the Romans gave to all the Hellenes whom they encountered the name Graici, Greeks; and from that circumstance all the world came to know Hellas by a term which its own inhabitants never applied to themselves.²⁵ Farther south is Tanagra, whose poetess Corinna won the prize from Pindar about 500 B.C., and whose potters, in the fifth and fourth centuries, would make the most famous statuettes in history. Five miles south again and we are in Attica. From the peaks of the Parnes range we can make out the hills of Athens.

IV. ATTICA

1. The Background of Athens

The very atmosphere seems different—clean, sharp, and bright; each year here has three hundred sunny days. We are at once reminded of Cicero’s comment on “Athens’ clear air, which is said to have contributed to the keenness of the Attic mind.”²⁶ Rain falls in Attica in autumn and winter, but seldom in summer. Fog and mist are rare. Snow falls about once a year in Athens, four or five times a year on the surrounding mountaintops.²⁷ The summers are hot, though dry and tolerable; and in the lowlands, in ancient days, malarial swamps detracted from the healthiness of the air.²⁸ The soil of Attica is poor; nearly everywhere the basic rock lies close to the surface, and makes agriculture a heartbreaking struggle for the simplest goods of life.* Only adventurous trade, and the patient culture of the olive and the grape, made civilization possible in Attica.

It is all the more surprising that on this arid peninsula so many towns should have appeared. They are everywhere: at every harbor along the coast, in every valley among the hills. An active and enterprising people had settled Attica in or before neolithic days, and had hospitably received and intermarried with Ionians—a mixture of Pelasgo-Mycenaeans and Achaeans^28a—fleeing from Boeotia and the Peloponnesus in the face of the northern migrations and invasions. Here was no conquering alien race exploiting a native population, but a complex Mediterranean stock, of medium stature and dark features, directly inheriting the blood and culture of the old Helladic civilization, proudly conscious of its indigenous quality,²⁹ and excluding from its national sanctuary, the Acropolis, those half-barbarian upstarts, the Dorians.³⁰

Relationships of blood gave them their social organization. Each family belonged to a tribe, whose members claimed the same divine heroic ancestor, worshiped the same deity, joined in the same religious ceremony, had a common archon (governor) and treasurer, owned together certain communal lands, enjoyed among themselves the rights of intermarriage and bequest, accepted obligations of mutual aid, vengeance, and defense, and slept at last in the tribal burial place. Each of the four tribes of Attica was composed of three phratries or brotherhoods, each phratry of thirty clans or gentes (gene), and each clan, as nearly as possible, of thirty heads of families.³¹ This kinship classification of Attic society lent itself not only to military organization and mobilization, but to so clannish an aristocracy of old families that Cleisthenes had to redistribute the tribes before he could establish democracy.

Each town or village was probably in origin the home of a clan, and sometimes took its name from the clan, or from the god or hero whom it worshiped, as in the case of Athens. The traveler entering Attica from eastern Boeotia would come first to Oropus, and receive no very favorable impression; for Oropus was a frontier town, as terrifying to the tourist as any such today. “Oropus,” says Dicaearchus (?) about 300 B.C., “is a nest of hucksters. The greed of the customhouse officials here is unsurpassed, their roguery inveterate and bred in the bone. Most of the people are coarse and truculent in their manners, for they have knocked the decent members of the community on the head.”³² From Oropus southward one moved through a close succession of towns: Rhamnus, Aphidna, Deceleia (a strategic point in the Peloponnesian War), Acharnae (home of Aristophanes’ pugnacious pacifist Dicaeopolis), Marathon, and Brauron—in whose great temple stood that statue of Artemis which Orestes and Iphigenia had brought from the Tauric Chersonese, and where, every four years, as much of Attica as could come joined in the piety and debauchery of the Brauronia, or feast of Artemis.³³ Then Prasiae and Thoricus; then the silver-mining region of Laurium, so vital in the economic and military history of Athens then, at the very point of the peninsula, Sunium, on whose cliffs a lovely temple rose as a guide to mariners and their hopeful offering to the incalculable Poseidon. Then up the western coast (for Attica is half coast, and its very name is from aktike, coastland) past Anaphlystus to the isle of Salamis,* home of Ajax and Euripides; then to Eleusis, sacred to Demeter and her mysteries; and then back to the Piraeus. Into this sheltered port, neglected before Themistocles revealed its possibilities, ships were to bring the goods of all the Mediterranean world for the use and pleasure of Athens. The barrenness of the soil, the nearness of the coast, the abundance of harbors lured the people of Attica into trade; their courage and inventiveness won for them the markets of the Aegean; and out of that commercial empire came the wealth, the power, and the culture of Athens in the Periclean age.

2. Athens under the Oligarchs

These towns of Attica were not only the background but the members of Athens. We have seen how, according to Greek belief, Theseus with a benevolent “synoecism” had brought the people of Attica into one political organization, with one capital,† Five miles from the Piraeus, and in a nest of hills—Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes—Athens grew around the old Mycenaean acropolis; and all the landowners of Attica were its citizens. The oldest families, and those with the largest holdings, wielded the balance of power; they had tolerated the kingship when disorder threatened, but when quiet and stability returned they reasserted their feudal domination of the central government. After King Codrus had died in heroic self-sacrifice against the invading Dorians,‡ they announced (so the story went) that no one was good enough to succeed him, and replaced the king with an archon chosen for life. In 752 they limited the tenure of the archonship to ten years, and in 683 to one. On the latter occasion they divided the powers of the office among nine archons: an archon eponymos, who gave his name to the year as a means of dating events; an archon basileus, who bore the name of king but was merely head of the state religion; a polemarchos, or military commander; and six thesmothetai, or lawmakers. As in Sparta and Rome, so in Athens the overthrow of the monarchy represented not a victory for the commons, or any intentional advance towards democracy, but a recapture of mastery by a feudal aristocracy—one more swing of the pendulum in the historical alternation between localized and centralized authority. By this piecemeal revolution the royal office was shorn of all its powers, and its holder was confined to the functions of a priest. The word king remained in the Athenian constitution to the end of its ancient history, but the reality was never restored. Institutions may with impunity be altered or destroyed from above if their names are left unchanged.

The Eupatrid oligarchs—i.e., the well-born ruling few—continued to govern Attica for almost five centuries. Under their rule the population was divided into three political ranks: the hippes, or knights, who owned horses* and could serve as cavalry; the zeugitai, who owned a yoke of oxen and could equip themselves to fight as hoplites or heavy-armed troops; and the thetes, hired laborers who fought as light-armed infantry. Only the first two were accounted citizens; and only the knights could serve as archons, judges, or priests. After completing their term of office the archons, if no scandal had tarnished them, became automatically and for life members of the boule or Council that met in the cool of the evening on the Areopagus, or Ares’ hill, chose the archons, and ruled the state. Even under the monarchy this Senate of the Areopagus had limited the authority of the king; now, under the oligarchy, it was as supreme as its counterpart in Rome.³⁶

Economically the population fell again into three groups. At the top were the Eupatrids, who lived in relative luxury in the towns while slaves and hired men tilled their holdings in the country, or merchants made profits for them on their loans. Next in wealth were the demiurgoi, or public workmen—i.e., professional men, craftsmen, traders, and free laborers. As colonization opened up new markets, and coinage liberated trade, the rising power of this class became the explosive force that under Solon and Peisistratus won for it a share in the government, and under Cleisthenes and Pericles raised it to the zenith of its influence. Most of the laborers were freemen; slaves were as yet in the minority, even in the lower classes.³⁷—Poorest of all were the georgoi, literally land workers, small peasants struggling against the stinginess of the soil and the greed of moneylenders and baronial lords, and consoled only with the pride of owning a bit of the earth.

Some of these peasants had once held extensive tracts; but their wives had been more fertile than their land, and in the course of generations their holdings had been divided and redivided among their sons. The collective ownership of property by clan or patriarchal family was rapidly passing away, and fences, ditches, and hedges marked the rise of jealously individual property. As plots became smaller and rural life more precarious, many peasants sold their lands—despite the fine and disfranchisement that punished such sales—and went to Athens or lesser towns to become traders or craftsmen or laborers. Others, unable to meet the obligations of ownership, became tenant tillers of Eupatrid estates, hectemoroi, or “share-croppers” who kept a part of the produce as their pay.³⁸ Still others struggled on, borrowed money by mortgaging their land at high rates of interest, were unable to pay, and found themselves attached to the soil by their creditors, and working for them as serfs. The holder of the mortgage was considered to be the hypothetical owner of the property until the mortgage was satisfied, and placed upon the mortgaged land a stone slab announcing this ownership.³⁹ Small holdings became smaller, free peasants fewer, great holdings greater. “A few proprietors,” says Aristotle, “owned all the soil, and the cultivators with their wives and children were liable to be sold as slaves,” even into foreign parts, “on failure to pay their rent” or their debts.⁴⁰ Foreign trade, and the replacement of barter with coinage, hurt the peasant further; for the competition of imported food kept the prices of his products low, while the prices of the manufactured articles that he had to buy were determined by forces beyond his control, and rose inexplicably with every decade. A bad year ruined many farmers, and starved some of them to death. Rural poverty in Attica became so great that war was welcomed as a blessing: more land might be won, and fewer mouths would have to be fed.⁴¹

Meanwhile, in the towns, the middle classes, unhindered by law, were reducing the free laborers to destitution, and gradually replacing them with slaves.⁴² Muscle became so cheap that no one who could afford to buy it deigned any longer to work with his hands; manual labor became a sign of bondage, an occupation unworthy of freemen. The landowners, jealous of the growing wealth of the merchant class, sold abroad the corn that their tenants needed for food, and at last, under the law of debt, sold the Athenians themselves.⁴³

For a time men hoped that the legislation of Draco would remedy these evils. About 620 this thesmothete, or lawmaker, was commissioned to codify, and for the first time to put into writing, a system of laws that would restore order in Attica. So far as we know, the essential advances of his code were a moderate extension, among the newly rich, of eligibility to the archonship, and the replacement of feud vengeance with law: here after the Senate of the Areopagus was to try all cases of homicide. The last was a basic and progressive change; but to enforce it, indeed to persuade vengeful men to accept it as more certain and severe than their own revenge, he attached to his laws penalties so drastic that after most of his legislation had been superseded by Solon’s he was remembered for his punishments rather than for his laws. Draco’s code congealed the cruel customs of an unregulated feudalism; it did nothing to relieve debtors of slavery, or to mitigate the exploitation of the weak by the strong; and though it slightly extended the franchise it left to the Eupatrid class full control of the courts, and the power to interpret in their own way all laws and issues affecting their interests.⁴⁴ The owners of property were protected more zealously than ever before; petty theft, even idleness, was punished in the case of citizens with disfranchisement, in the case of others with death.*⁴⁵

As the seventh century drew to a close the bitterness of the helpless poor against the legally entrenched rich had brought Athens to the edge of revolution. Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal. “The disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor,” says Plutarch, “had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances . . . seemed possible but a despotic power.”⁴⁶ The poor, finding their situation worse with each year—the government and the army in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them⁴⁷—began to talk of a violent revolt, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth.⁴⁸ The rich, unable any longer to collect the debts legally due them, and angry at the challenge to their savings and their property, invoked ancient laws,⁴⁹ and prepared to defend themselves by force against a mob that seemed to threaten not only property but all established order, all religion, and all civilization.

3. The Solonian Revolution

It seems incredible that at this juncture in Athenian affairs, so often repeated in the history of nations, a man should have been found who, without any act of violence or any bitterness of speech, was able to persuade the rich and the poor to a compromise that not only averted social chaos but established a new and more generous political and economic order for the entire remainder of Athens’ independent career. Solon’s peaceful revolution is one of the encouraging miracles of history.

His father was a Eupatrid of purest blood, related to the descendants of King Codrus and, indeed, tracing his origin to Poseidon himself. His mother was cousin to the mother of Peisistratus, the dictator who would first violate and then consolidate the Solonian constitution. In his youth Solon participated lustily in the life of his time: he wrote poetry, sang the joys of “Greek friendship,”⁵⁰ and, like another Tyrtaeus, stirred the people with his verses to conquer Salamis.⁵¹ In middle age his morals improved in inverse ratio to his poetry; his stanzas became dull, and his counsel excellent. “Many undeserving men are rich,” he tells us, “while their betters are poor. But we will not exchange what we are for what they have, since the one gift abides while the other passes from man to man.” The riches of the rich “are no greater than his whose only possessions are stomach, lungs and feet that bring him joy, not pain; the blooming charms of lad or maid; and an existence ever in harmony with the changing seasons of life.”⁵² Once, when a sedition occurred in Athens, he remained neutral, luckily before his own reputed legislation making such caution a crime.⁵³ But he did not hesitate to denounce the methods by which the wealthy had reduced the masses to a desperate penury.⁵⁴

If we may believe Plutarch, Solon’s father “ruined his estate in doing benefits and kindnesses to other men.” Solon took to trade, and became a successful merchant with far-flung interests that gave him wide experience and travel. His practice was as good as his preaching, for he acquired among all classes an exceptional reputation for integrity. He was still relatively young—forty-four or forty-five—when, in 594, representatives of the middle classes asked him to accept election nominally as archon eponymos, but with dictatorial powers to soothe the social war, establish a new constitution, and restore stability to the state. The upper classes, trusting to the conservatism of a moneyed man, reluctantly consented.

His first measures were simple but drastic economic reforms. He disappointed the extreme radicals by making no move to redivide the land; such an attempt would have meant civil war, chaos for a generation, and the rapid return of inequality. But by his famous Seisachtheia, or Removal of Burdens, Solon canceled, says Aristotle, “all existing debts, whether owing to private persons or to the state”;*⁵⁵ and at one blow cleared Attic lands of all mortgages. All persons enslaved or attached for debt were released; those sold into servitude abroad were reclaimed and freed; and such enslavement was forbidden for the future. It was characteristic of humanity that certain of Solon’s friends, getting wind of his intention to cancel debts, bought on mortgage large tracts of land, and later retained these without paying the mortgages; this, Aristotle tells us with a rare twinkle in his style, was the origin of many fortunes, that were later “supposed to be of immemorial antiquity.”⁵⁷ Solon was under suspicion of having connived at this and of having profited by it, until it was discovered that as a heavy creditor he himself had lost by his law.⁵⁸ The rich protested unanswerably that such legislation was confiscation; but within a decade opinion became almost unanimous that the act had saved Attica from revolution.⁵⁹

Of another Solonian reform it is difficult to speak with clearness or certainty. Solon, says Aristotle, “superseded the Pheidonian measures”—that is, the Aeginetan coinage theretofore used in Attica—“by the Euboic system on a larger scale, and made the mina,* which had contained seventy drachmas, now contain a hundred.”⁶⁰ According to Plutarch’s fuller account, Solon “made the mina, which before passed for seventy-three drachmas, go for a hundred, so that, though the number of pieces in a payment was equal, the value was less; which proved a considerable benefit to those that were to discharge great debts, and no loss to the creditors.”⁶¹ Only the genial and generous Plutarch could devise a form of inflation that would relieve debtors without hurting creditors—except that doubtless in some cases half a loaf is better than none.†

More lasting than these economic reforms were those historic decrees that created the Solonian constitution. Solon prefaced them with an act of amnesty freeing or restoring all persons who had been jailed or banished for political offenses short of trying to usurp the government. He went on to repeal, directly or by implication, most of Draco’s legislation; the law concerning murder remained.⁶⁴ It was in itself a revolution that the laws of Solon were applied without distinction to all freemen; rich and poor were now subject to the same restraints and the same penalties. Recognizing that his reforms had been made possible by the support of the mercantile and industrial classes and signified their accession to a substantial share in the government, Solon divided the free population of Attica into four groups according to their wealth: first, the pentacosiomedimni, or five-hundred-bushel men, whose annual income reached five hundred measures of produce, or the equivalent thereof;* second, the hippes, whose income was between three and five hundred measures; third, the zeugitai, with incomes between two and three hundred measures; and fourth, the thetes, all other freemen. Honors and taxes were determined by the same rating, and the one could not be enjoyed without paying the other; furthermore, the first class was taxed on twelve times, the second class on ten times, the third class on only five times, the amount of its annual income; the property tax was in effect a graduated income tax.⁶⁵ The fourth class was exempt from direct taxation. Only the first class was eligible to the archonship or to military commands; the second class was eligible to lower offices and to the cavalry; the third was privileged to join the heavyarmed infantry; the fourth was expected to provide the common soldiers of the state. This peculiar classification weakened the kinship organization upon which the oligarchy had rested its power, and established the new principle of “timocracy”—government by honor or prestige as frankly determined by taxable wealth. A similar “plutocracy” prevailed, throughout the sixth and part of the fifth century, in most of the Greek colonies.

At the head of the new government Solon’s code left the old Senate of the Areopagus, a little shorn of its exclusiveness and powers, open now to all members of the first class, but still with supreme authority over the conduct of the people and the officers of the state.⁶⁶ Next below it he created a new boule, a Council of Four Hundred, to which each of the four tribes elected a hundred members; this Council selected, censored, and prepared all business that could be brought before the Assembly. Beneath this oligarchic superstructure, ingratiating to the strong, Solon, perhaps with good will aforethought, placed fundamentally democratic institutions. The old ekklesia of Homer’s day was brought back to life, and all citizens were invited to join in its deliberations. This Assembly annually elected, from among the five-hundred-bushel men, the archons who heretofore had been appointed by the Areopagus; it could at any time question these officers, impeach them, punish them; and when their terms expired it scrutinized their official conduct during the year, and could debar them, if it chose, from their usual graduation into the Senate. More important still, though it did not seem so, was the admission of the lowest class of the citizens to full parity with the higher classes in being eligible to selection by lot to the heliaea—a body of six thousand jurors that formed the various courts before which all matters except murder and treason were tried, and to which appeal could be made from any action of the magistrates. “Some believe,” says Aristotle, “that Solon intentionally introduced obscurity into his laws, to enable the commons to use their judicial power for their own political aggrandizement”; for since, as Plutarch adds, “their differences could not be adjusted by the letter, they would have to bring all their causes to the judges, who were in a manner masters of the laws.”⁶⁷ This power of appeal to popular courts was to prove the wedge and citadel of Athenian democracy.

To this basic legislation, the most important in Athenian history, Solon added a miscellany of laws aimed at the less fundamental problems of the time. First he legalized that individualization of property which custom had already decreed. If a man had sons he was to divide his property among them at his death; if he died childless he might bequeath to anyone the property that in such cases had heretofore reverted automatically to the clan.⁶⁸ With Solon begins, in Athens, the right and law of wills. Himself a businessman, Solon sought to stimulate commerce and industry by opening citizenship to all aliens who had a skilled trade and came with their families to reside permanently at Athens. He forbade the export of any produce of the soil except olive oil, hoping to turn men from growing surplus crops to practicing an industry. He enacted a law that no son should be obliged to support a father who had not taught him some specific trade.⁶⁹ To Solon—not to the later Athenians—the crafts had their own rich honor and dignity.

Even into the dangerous realm of morals and manners Solon offered laws. Persistent idleness was made a crime, and no man who lived a life of debauchery was permitted to address the Assembly.⁷⁰ He legalized and taxed prostitution, established public brothels licensed and supervised by the state, and erected a temple to Aphrodite Pandemos from the revenues. “Hail to you, Solon!” sang a contemporary Lecky. “You bought public women for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of the morality of a city that is full of vigorous young men who, in the absence of your wise institution, would give themselves over to the disturbing annoyance of the better women.”⁷¹ He enacted the un-Draconian penalty of a hundred drachmas for the violation of a free woman, but anyone who caught an adulterer in the act was allowed to kill him there and then. He limited the size of dowries, wishing that marriages should be contracted by the affection of mates and for the rearing of children; and with childlike trustfulness he forbade women to extend their wardrobes beyond three suits. He was asked to legislate against bachelors, but refused, saying that, after all, “a wife is a heavy load to carry.”⁷² He made it a crime to speak evil of the dead, or to speak evil of the living in temples, courts, or public offices, or at the games; but even he could not tie the busy tongue of Athens, in which, as with us, gossip and slander seemed essential to democracy. He laid it down that those who remained neutral in seditions should lose their citizenship, for he felt that the indifference of the public is the ruin of the state. He condemned pompous ceremonies, expensive sacrifices, or lengthy lamentations at funerals, and limited the goods that might be buried with the dead. He established the wholesome law—a source of Athenian bravery for generations—that the sons of those who died in war should be brought up and educated at the expense of the government.

To all of his laws Solon attached penalties, milder than Draco’s but still severe; and he empowered any citizen to bring action against any person whom he might consider guilty of crime. That his laws might be the better known and obeyed he wrote them down in the court of the archon basileus upon wooden rollers or prisms that could be turned and read. Unlike Lycurgus, Minos, Hammurabi, and Numa, he made no claim that a god had given him these laws; this circumstance, too, revealed the temper of the age, the city, and the man. Invited to make himself a permanent dictator he refused, saying that dictatorship was “a very fair spot, but there was no way down from it.”⁷³ Radicals criticized him for failing to establish equality of possessions and power; conservatives denounced him for admitting the commons to the franchise and the courts; even his friend Anacharsis, the whimsical Scythian sage, laughed at the new constitution, saying that now the wise would plead and the fools would decide. Besides, added Anacharsis, no lasting justice can be established for men, since the strong or clever will twist to their advantage any laws that are made; the law is a spider’s web that catches the little flies and lets the big bugs escape. Solon accepted all this criticism genially, acknowledging the imperfections of his code; asked had he given the Athenians the best laws, he answered, “No, but the best that they could receive”⁷⁴—the best that the conflicting groups and interests of Athens could at that time be persuaded conjointly to accept. He followed the mean and preserved the state; he was a good pupil of Aristotle before the Stagirite was born. Tradition attributed to him the motto that was inscribed upon the temple of Apollo at Delphi—meden agon, nothing in excess;⁷⁵ and all Greeks agreed in placing him among the Seven Wise Men.

The best proof of his wisdom was the lasting effect of his legislation. Despite a thousand changes and developments, despite intervening dictatorships and superficial revolutions, Cicero could say, five centuries later, that the laws of Solon were still in force at Athens.⁷⁶ Legally his work marks the end of government by incalculable and changeable decrees, and the beginning of government by written and permanent law. Asked what made an orderly and well-constituted state, he replied, “When the people obey the rulers, and the rulers obey the laws.”⁷⁷ To his legislation Attica owed the liberation of its farmers from serfdom, and the establishment of a peasant proprietor class whose ownership of the soil made the little armies of Athens suffice to preserve her liberties for many generations. When, at the close of the Peloponnesian War, it was proposed to limit the franchise to freeholders, only five thousand adult freemen in all Attica failed to satisfy this requirement.⁷⁸ At the same time trade and industry were freed from political disabilities and financial inconveniences, and began that vigorous development which was to make Athens the commercial leader of the Mediterranean. The new aristocracy of wealth put a premium upon intelligence rather than birth, stimulated science and education, and prepared, materially and mentally, for the cultural achievements of the Golden Age.

In 572, at the age of sixty-six, and after serving as archon for twenty-two years, Solon retired from office into private life; and having bound Athens, through the oath of its officials, to obey his laws unchanged for ten years,⁷⁹ he set out to observe the civilizations of Egypt and the East. It was now, apparently, that he made his famous remark—“I grow old while always learning.”⁸⁰ At Heliopolis, says Plutarch, he studied Egyptian history and thought under the tutelage of the priests; from them, it is said, he heard of the sunken continent Atlantis, whose tale he told in an unfinished epic which two centuries later would fascinate the imaginative Plato. From Egypt he sailed to Cyprus and made laws for the city that in his honor changed its name to Soli.* Herodotus⁸¹ and Plutarch describe with miraculous memory his chat at Sardis with Croesus, the Lydian king: how this paragon of wealth, having arrayed himself in all his paraphernalia, asked Solon did he not account him, Croesus, a happy man; and how Solon, with Greek audacity, replied:

The gods, O King, have given the Greeks all other gifts in moderate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is a cheerful and a homely, not a noble and kingly, wisdom; and this, observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyment, or to admire any man’s happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with every possible variety of fortune; and him only to whom the divinity has continued happiness unto the end do we call happy; to salute as happy one that is still in the midst of life and hazard we think as little safe and conclusive as to crown and proclaim as victorious the wrestler that is yet in the ring.⁸²

This admirable exposition of what the Greek dramatists mean by hybris—insolent prosperity—has the ring of Plutarch’s eclectic wisdom; we can only say that it is better phrased than Herodotus’ report, and that both accounts belong, presumably, to the realm of imaginary conversations. Certainly both Solon and Croesus, in the manner of their deaths, justified the skepticism of this homily. Croesus was dethroned by Cyrus in 546, and (if we may rephrase Herodotus with Dante) knew the bitterness of remembering, in his misery, the happy time of his splendor, and the stern warning of the Greek. And Solon, returning to Athens to die, saw in his last years the overthrow of his constitution, the establishment of a dictatorship, and the apparent frustration of all his work.

4. The Dictatorship of Peisistratus

The conflicting groups which he had dominated for a generation had resumed, upon his departure from Athens, the natural play of politics and intrigue. As in the passionate days of the French Revolution, three parties struggled for power: the “Shore,” led by the merchants of the ports, who favored Solon; the “Plain,” led by the rich landowners, who hated Solon; and the “Mountain,” a combination of peasants and town laborers who still fought for a redistribution of the land. Like Pericles a century later, Peisistratus, though an aristocrat by birth and fortune, manners and tastes, accepted the leadership of the commons. At a meeting of the Assembly he displayed a wound, claiming that it had been inflicted upon him by the enemies of the people, and asked for a bodyguard. Solon protested; knowing the subtlety of his cousin, he suspected that the wound had been self-inflicted, and that the bodyguard would open the way to a dictatorship. “Ye men of Athens,” he warned them, “I am wiser than some of you, and braver than others: wiser than those of you who do not perceive the treachery of Peisistratus, and braver than those who are aware of it, but out of fear hold their peace.”⁸³ Nevertheless the Assembly voted that Peisistratus should be allowed a force of fifty men. Peisistratus collected four hundred men instead of fifty, seized the Acropolis, and declared a dictatorship. Solon, having published to the Athenians his opinion that “each man of you, individually, walketh with the tread of a fox, but collectively ye are geese,”⁸⁴ placed his arms and shield outside his door as a symbol of resigning his interest in politics, and devoted his last days to poetry.

The wealthy forces of the Shore and the Plain united for a moment and expelled the dictator (556). But Peisistratus secretly made his peace with the Shore, and, probably with their connivance, re-entered Athens under circumstances that seemed to corroborate Solon’s judgment of the collective intelligence. A tall and beautiful woman, arrayed in the armor and costume of the city’s goddess Athena, and seated proudly in a chariot, led the forces of Peisistratus into the city, while heralds announced that the patron deity of Athens was herself restoring him to power (550). “The people of the city, fully persuaded,” says Herodotus, “that the woman was the veritable goddess, prostrated themselves before her, and received Peisistratus back.”⁸⁵ The leaders of the Shore turned against him again and drove him into a second exile (549); but in 546 Peisistratus once more returned, defeated the troops sent out against him, and this time maintained his dictatorship for nineteen years, during which the wisdom of his policies almost redeemed the picturesque unscrupulousness of his means.

The character of Peisistratus was a rare union of culture and intellect, administrative vigor and personal charm. He could fight ruthlessly, and readily forgive; he could move in the foremost currents of the thought of his time, and govern without the intellectual’s vacillation of purpose and timidity of execution. He was mild of manner, humane in his decisions, and generous to all. “His administration,” says Aristotle, “was temperate, and showed the statesman rather than the tyrant.”⁸⁶ He made few reprisals upon regenerate enemies, but he banished irreconcilable opponents, and distributed their estates among the poor. He improved the army and built up the fleet as security against external attack; but he kept Athens out of war, and maintained at home, in a city so recently disturbed by class hostility, such order and content that it was common to say that he had brought back the Golden Age of Cronus’ reign.

He surprised everyone by making little change of detail in the Solonian constitution. Like Augustus he knew how to adorn and support dictatorship with democratic concessions and forms. Archons were elected as usual, and the Assembly and the popular courts, the Council of Four Hundred and the Senate of the Areopagus met and functioned as before, except that the suggestions of Peisistratus found a very favorable hearing. When a citizen accused him of murder he appeared before-the Senate and offered to submit to trial, but the complainant decided not to press the charge. Year by year the people, in inverse proportion to their wealth, became reconciled to his rule; soon they were proud of him, at last fond of him. Probably Athens had needed, after Solon, just such a man as Peisistratus: one with sufficient iron in his blood to beat the disorder of Athenian life into a strong and steady form, and to establish by initial compulsion those habits of order and law which are to a society what the bony structure is to an animal—its shape and strength, though not its creative life. When, after a generation, the dictatorship was removed, these habits of order and the framework of Solon’s constitution remained as a heritage for democracy. Peisistratus, perhaps not knowing it, had come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it.

His economic policies carried on that emancipation of the people which Solon had begun. He settled the agrarian question by dividing among the poor the lands that belonged to the state, as well as those of banished aristocrats; thousands of dangerously idle Athenians were settled upon the soil; and for centuries afterward we hear of no serious agrarian discontent in Attica.⁸⁷ He gave employment to the needy by undertaking extensive public works, building a system of aqueducts and roads, and raising great temples to the gods. He encouraged the mining of silver at Laurium, and issued a new and independent coinage. To finance these undertakings he laid a ten per cent tax upon all agricultural products; later he seems to have reduced this to 5 per cent.⁸⁸ He planted strategic colonies on the Dardanelles, and made commercial treaties with many states. Under his rule trade flourished, and wealth grew not among a few only, but in the community as a whole. The poor were made less poor, the rich not less rich. That concentration of wealth which had nearly torn the city into civil war was brought under control, and the spread of comfort and opportunity laid the economic bases of Athenian democracy.

Under Peisistratus and his sons Athens was physically and mentally transformed. Till their time it had been a second-rate city in the Greek world, lagging behind Miletus, Ephesus, Mytilene, and Syracuse in wealth and culture, in vitality of life and mind. Now new buildings of stone and marble reflected the radiance of the day; the old temple of Athena on the Acropolis was beautified with a Doric peristyle; and work was begun on that temple of Olympian Zeus whose stately Corinthian columns, even in their ruins, brighten the road from Athens to her port. By establishing the Panathenaic games and giving them a Panhellenic character, Peisistratus brought to his city not honor only, but the stimulus of foreign faces, competition, and ways; under his rule the Panathenaea became the great national festival, whose impressive ceremonial still moves on the frieze of the Parthenon. To his court, by public works and private beneficence, Peisistratus attracted sculptors, architects, and poets; in his palace was collected one of the earliest libraries of Greece. A committee appointed by him gave to the Iliad and the Odyssey the form in which we know them. Under his administration and encouragement Thespis and others lifted drama from a mummers’ mimicry to a form of art ready to be filled out by the great triumvirate of the Athenian stage.

The “tyranny” of Peisistratus was part of a general movement in the commercially active cities of sixth-century Greece, to replace the feudal rule of a landowning aristocracy with the political dominance of the middle class in temporary alliance with the poor.* Such dictatorships were brought on by the pathological concentration of wealth, and the inability of the wealthy to agree on a compromise. Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes. Hence the road to power in Greek commercial cities was simple: to attack the aristocracy, defend the poor, and come to an understanding with the middle classes.⁸⁹ Arrived at power, the dictator abolished debts, or confiscated large estates, taxed the rich to finance public works, or otherwise redistributed the overconcentrated wealth; and while attaching the masses to himself through such measures, he secured the support of the business community by promoting trade with state coinage and commercial treaties, and by raising the social prestige of the bourgeoisie. Forced to depend upon popularity instead of hereditary power, the dictatorships for the most part kept out of war, supported religion, maintained order, promoted morality, favored the higher status of women, encouraged the arts, and lavished revenues upon the beautification of their cities. And they did all these things, in many cases, while preserving the forms and procedures of popular government, so that even under despotism the people learned the ways of liberty. When the dictatorship had served to destroy the aristocracy the people destroyed the dictatorship; and only a few changes were needed to make the democracy of freemen a reality as well as a form.

5. The Establishment of Democracy

When Peisistratus died, in 527, he left his power to his sons; his wisdom had survived every test except that of parental love. Hippias gave promise of being a wise ruler, and for thirteen years continued the policies of his father. Hipparchus, his younger brother, was harmlessly, though expensively, devoted to love and poetry; it was at his invitation that Anacreon and Simonides came to Athens. The Athenians were not quite pleased to see the leadership of the state pass down without their consent to the young Peisistratids, and began to realize that the dictatorship had given them everything but the stimulus of freedom. Nevertheless Athens was prosperous, and the quiet reign of Hippias might have gone on to a peaceful close had it not been for the unsmooth course of true Greek love.

Aristogeiton, a man of middle age, had won the love of the young Harmodius, then, says Thucydides,⁹⁰ “in the flower of youthful beauty.” But Hipparchus, equally careless of gender, also solicited the lad’s love. When Aristogeiton heard of this he resolved to kill Hipparchus and at the same time, in self-protection, to overthrow the tyranny. Harmodius and others joined him in the conspiracy (514). They murdered Hipparchus as he was arranging the Panathenaic procession, but Hippias eluded them and had them slain. To complicate the tale a courtesan Leaena, mistress of Harmodius, died bravely under torture, having refused to betray the surviving conspirators; if we may believe Greek tradition, she bit off her tongue and spat it in the face of her torturers to make sure that she would not answer their questions.⁹¹

Though the people lent no visible support to this revolt, Hippias was frightened by it into replacing his hitherto mild rule with a regime of suppression, espionage, and terror. The Athenians, strengthened by a generation of prosperity, could afford now to demand the luxury of liberty; gradually, as the dictatorship grew harsher, the cry for freedom grew louder; and Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who had conspired for love and passion rather than for democracy,* were transformed by popular imagination into the martyrs of liberty. Off in Delphi the Alcmaeonids, who had been re-exiled by Peisistratus, saw their opportunity, raised an army, and marched upon Athens with the announced intention of deposing Hippias. At the same time they bribed the Pythian oracle to tell all Spartans who consulted her that Sparta must overthrow the tyranny at Athens. Hippias successfully resisted the forces of the Alcmaeonids; but when a Lacedaemonian army joined them he withdrew to the Areopagus. Seeking the security of his children in the event of his own death, he sent them secretly out of Athens; but they were captured by the invaders, and Hippias, as the price of their safety, consented to abdication and exile (510). The Alcmaeonids, led by the courageous Cleisthenes,† entered Athens in triumph; and on their heels came the banished aristocrats, prepared to celebrate the return of their property and their power.

In the election that ensued, Isagoras, representing the aristocracy, was chosen to be chief archon. Cleisthenes, one of the defeated candidates, aroused the people to revolt, overthrew Isagoras, and set up a popular dictatorship. The Spartans again invaded Athens, seeking to restore Isagoras; but the Athenians resisted so tenaciously that the Spartans retired, and Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonid aristocrat, proceeded to establish democracy (507).

His first reform struck at the very framework of Attic aristocracy—those four tribes and 360 clans whose leadership, by centuries of tradition, was in the hands of the oldest and richest families. Cleisthenes abolished this kinship classification, and replaced it with a territorial division into ten tribes, each composed of a (varying) number of demes. To prevent the formation of geographical or occupational blocs, such as the old parties of Mountain, Shore, and Plain, each tribe was to be composed of an equal number of demes, or districts, from the city, from the coast, and from the interior. To offset the sanctity that religion had given to the old division, religious ceremonies were instituted for each new tribe or deme, and a famous ancient hero of the locality was made its deity or patron saint. Freemen of foreign origin, who had rarely been admitted to the franchise under the aristocratic determination of citizenship by descent, now automatically became citizens of the demes in which they lived. At one stroke the roll of voters was almost doubled, and democracy secured a new support and a broader base.

Each of the new tribes was entitled to name one of the ten stratégoi, or generals, who now joined the polemarch in command of the army; and each tribe elected fifty members of the new Council of 501 which now replaced Solon’s Council of Four Hundred and assumed the most vital powers of the Areopagus. These councilors were chosen for a year’s term, not by election but by lot, from the list of all citizens who had reached the age of thirty and had not already served two terms. In this strange inauguration of representative government both the aristocratic principle of birth and the plutocratic principle of wealth were overridden by the new device of the lot, which gave every citizen an equal chance not only to vote, but to hold office in the most influential branch of the government. For the Council so elected determined all matters and proposals to be submitted for approval or rejection to the Assembly, reserved to itself various judicial powers, exercised wide administrative functions, and supervised all officials of the state.

The Assembly was enlarged by the access of new citizens, so that a full meeting of its membership would have meant an attendance of approximately thirty thousand men. All these were eligible for service in the heliaea, or courts; but the fourth class, or thetes, were still, as under Solon, ineligible to individuaroffice. The powers of the Assembly were enlarged by the institution of ostracism, which Cleisthenes seems to have added as a protection for the young democracy. At any time, by a majority of votes written secretly upon potsherds (ostraka), the Assembly, in a quorum of six thousand members, might send into exile for ten years any man who in its judgment had become a danger to the state. In this way ambitious leaders would be stimulated to conduct themselves with circumspection and moderation, and men suspected of conspiracy could be disposed of without the law’s delay. The procedure required that the Assembly should be asked, “Is there any man among you whom you think vitally dangerous to the state? If so, whom?” The Assembly might then vote to ostracize any one citizen—not excepting the mover of the motion.* Such exile involved no confiscation of property, and no disgrace; it was merely democracy’s way of cutting off the “tallest ears of corn.”⁹² Nor did the Assembly abuse its power. In the ninety years between the introduction of ostracism and its disuse at Athens, only ten persons were banished by it from Attica.

One of these, we are told, was Cleisthenes himself. But in truth we do not know his later history; it was absorbed and lost in the brilliance of his work. Beginning with a thoroughly unconstitutional revolt, he had established, in the face of the most powerful families in Attica, a democratic constitution that continued in operation, with only minor changes, to the end of Athenian liberty. The democracy was not complete; it applied only to freemen, and still placed a modest property limitation upon eligibility to individual office.* But it gave all legislative, executive, and judicial power to an Assembly and a Court composed of the citizens, to magistrates appointed by and responsible to the Assembly, and to a Council for whose members all citizens might vote, and in whose supreme authority, by the operation of the lot, at least one third of them actually shared for at least a year of their lives. Never before had the world seen so liberal a franchise, or so wide a spread of political power.

The Athenians themselves were exhilarated by this adventure into sovereignty. They realized that they had undertaken a difficult enterprise, but they advanced to it with courage and pride, and, for a time, with unwonted self-restraint. From that moment they knew the zest of freedom in action, speech, and thought; and from that moment they began to lead all Greece in literature and art, even in statesmanship and war. They learned to respect anew a law that was their own considered will, and to love with unprecedented passion a state that was their unity, their power, and their fulfillment. When the greatest empire of the age decided to destroy these scattered cities called Greece, or to lay them under tribute to the Great King, it forgot that in Attica it would be opposed by men who owned the soil that they tilled, and who ruled the state that governed them. It was fortunate for Greece, and for Europe, that Cleisthenes completed his work, and Solon’s, twelve years before Marathon.

CHAPTER VI

The Great Migration

I. CAUSES AND WAYS

IN carrying the story of Sparta and Athens down to the eve of Marathon we have sacrificed the unity of time to the unity of place. It is true that the cities of the mainland were older than the Greek settlements in the Aegean and Ionia, and that these cities, in many cases, sent out the colonies whose life we must now describe. But, by a confusing inversion of normal sequences, several of those colonies became greater than their mother cities, and preceded them in the development of wealth and art. The real creators of Greek culture were not the Greeks of what we now call Greece, but those who fled before the conquering Dorians, fought desperately for a foothold on foreign shores, and there, out of their Mycenaean memories and their amazing energy, made the art and science, the philosophy and poetry that, long before Marathon, placed them in the forefront of the Western world. Greek civilization was inherited by the parent cities from their children.

There is nothing more vital in the history of the Greeks than their rapid spread throughout the Mediterranean.* They had been nomadic before Homer, and all the Balkan peninsula had seemed fluid with this movement, but the successive Greek waves that broke upon the Aegean isles and the western coasts of Asia were stirred up above all by the Dorian invasion. From every part of Hellas men went out in search of homes and liberty beyond the grasp of the enslaving conquerors. Political faction and family feud in the older states contributed to the migration; the defeated sometimes chose exile, and the victors gave every encouragement to their exodus. Some of the Greek survivors of the Trojan War stayed in Asia; others, through shipwreck or adventure, settled in the islands of the Aegean; some, reaching home after a perilous journey, found their thrones or their wives occupied, and returned to their ships to build new homes and fortunes abroad.² In mainland Greece, as in modern Europe, colonization proved a blessing in varied ways: it provided outlets for surplus population and adventurous spirits, and safety valves against agrarian discontent; it established foreign markets for domestic products, and strategic depots for the import of food and minerals. In the end it created a commercial empire whose thriving interchange of goods, arts, ways, and thoughts made possible the complex culture of Greece.

The migration followed five main lines—Aeolian, Ionian, Dorian, Euxine, Italian. The earliest began in the northern states of the mainland, which were the first to feel the brunt of the invasions from the north and the west. From Thessaly, Phthiotis, Boeotia, and Aetolia, throughout the twelfth and eleventh centuries, a stream of immigrants moved slowly across the Aegean to the region about Troy, and founded there the twelve cities of the Aeolian League. The second line took its start in the Peloponnesus, whence thousands of Mycenaeans and Achaeans fled on the “Return of the Heraclids.” Some of then settled in Attica, some in Euboea; many of them moved out into the Cyclades, ventured across the Aegean, and established in western Asia Minor the twelve cities of the Ionian Dodecapolis. The third line was followed by Dorians who overflowed the Peloponnesus into the Cyclades, conquered Crete and Cyrene, and set up a Dorian Hexapolis around the island of Rhodes. The fourth line, starting anywhere in Greece, settled the coast of Thrace, and built a hundred cities on the shores of the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Euxine Sea. The fifth line moved westward to what the Greeks called the Ionian Isles, thence across to Italy and Sicily, and finally to Gaul and Spain.

Only a sympathetic imagination or a keen recollection of our own colonial history can visualize the difficulties that were surmounted in this century-long migration. It was an adventure of high moment to leave the land consecrated by the graves of one’s ancestors and guarded by one’s hereditary deities, and go forth into strange regions unprotected, presumably, by the gods of Greece. Therefore the colonists took with them a handful of earth from their native state to strew upon the alien soil, and solemnly carried fire from the public altar of their mother city to light the civic fire at the hearth of their new settlement. The chosen site was on or near a shore, where ships—the second home of half the Greeks—might serve as a refuge from attack by land; better still if it were a coastal plain protected by mountains that provided a barrier in the rear, an acropolis for defense in the town, and a promontory-sheltered harbor in the sea; best of all if such a haven could be found on some commercial route, or by a river mouth that received the products of the interior for export or exchange; then prosperity was only a matter of time. Good sites were nearly always occupied, and had to be conquered by stratagem or force; the Greeks, in such matters, recognized no morals loftier than our own. In some cases the conquerors reduced the prior inhabitants to slavery, with all the irony of pilgrims seeking freedom; more often they made friends of the natives by bringing them Greek gifts, charming them with a superior culture, courting their women, and adopting their gods; the colonial Greeks did not bother about purity of race,³ and could always find in their teeming pantheon some deity sufficiently like the local divinity to facilitate a religious entente. Above all, the colonists offered the products of the Greek handicrafts to the natives, secured grain, cattle, or minerals in return, and exported these throughout the Mediterranean—preferably to the metropolis, or mother city, from which the settlers had come, and to which they retained for centuries a certain filial piety.

One by one these colonies took form, until Greece was no longer the narrow peninsula of Homeric days, but a strangely loose association of independent cities scattered from Africa to Thrace and from Gibraltar to the eastern end of the Black Sea. It was an epochal performance for the women of Greece; we shall not always find them so ready to have children. Through these busy centers of vitality and intelligence the Greeks spread into all of southern Europe the seeds of that subtle and precarious luxury called civilization, without which life would have no beauty, and history no meaning.

II. THE IONIAN CYCLADES

Sailing south from the Piraeus along the Attic coast, and bearing east around Sunium’s templed promontory, the traveler reaches the little isle of Ceos, where, if we may believe the incredible on the authority of Strabo and Plutarch, “there was once a law that appears to have commanded those who were sixty years of age to drink hemlock, in order that the food might be sufficient for the rest,” and “there was no memory of a case of adultery or seduction over a period of seven hundred years.”⁴

Perhaps that is why her greatest poet exiled himself from Ceos after reaching middle age; he might have found it difficult to attain, at home, the eighty-seven years that Greek tradition gives him. All the Hellenic world knew Simonides at thirty, and when he died, in 469, he was by common consent the most brilliant writer of his time. His fame as poet and singer won him an invitation from Hipparchus, codictator of Athens, at whose court he found it possible to live in amity with another poet, Anacreon. He survived the war with Persia, and was chosen again and again to write epitaphs for memorials of the honored dead. In his old age he lived at the court of Hieron I, dictator of Syracuse; and his repute was then so high that in 475 he made peace in the field between Hieron and Theron, dictator of Acragas, as hostilities were about to begin.⁵ Plutarch, in his perennially pertinent essay on “Should Old Men Govern?” tells us that Simonides continued to win the prize for lyric poetry and choral song into very old age. When finally he consented to die he was buried at Acragas with the honors of a king.

He was a personality as well as a poet, and the Greeks denounced and loved him for his vices and eccentricities. He had a passion for money, and his muse was dumb in the absence of gold. He was the first to write poetry for pay, on the ground that poets had as much right to eat as anyone else; but the practice was new to Greece, and Aristophanes echoed the resentment of the public when he said that Simonides “would go to sea on a hurdle to earn a groat.”⁶ He prided himself on having invented a system of mnemonics, which Cicero adopted gratefully;⁷ its essential principle lay in arranging the things to be remembered into some logical classification and sequence, so that each item would naturally lead to the next. He was a wit, and his sharp repartees passed like a mental currency among the cities of Greece; but in his old age he remarked that he had often repented of speaking, but never of holding his tongue.⁸

We are surprised to find, in the extant fragments of a poet so widely acclaimed and so liberally rewarded, that indispersible gloom which broods over so much of Greek literature after Homer—in whose days men were too active to be pessimists, and too violent to be bored.

Few and evil are the days of our life; but everlasting will be our sleep beneath the earth. . . . Small is the strength of man, and invincible are his errors; grief treads upon the heels of grief through his short life; and death, whom no man escapes, hangs over him at last; to this come good and bad alike. . . . Nothing human is everlasting. Well said the bard of Chios that the life of man is even as that of a green leaf; yet few who hear this bear it in mind, for hope is strong in the breast of the young. When youth is in flower, and the heart of man is light, he nurses idle thought, hoping he will never grow old or die; nor does he think of sickness in good health. Fools are they who dream thus, nor know how short are the days of our youth and our life.⁹

No hope of Blessed Isles comforts Simonides, and the divinities of Olympus, like those of Christianity in some modern verse, have become instruments of poetry rather than consolations of the soul. When Hieron challenged him to define the nature and attributes of God he asked for a day’s time to prepare his answer, and the next day begged for two days more, and on each occasion doubled the period that he required for thought. When at last Hieron demanded an explanation, Simonides replied that the longer he pondered the matter the more obscure it became.¹⁰

Out of Ceos came not only Simonides, but his nephew and lyric successor Bacchylides, and, in Alexandrian days, the great anatomist Erasistratus. We cannot say so much for Seriphos, or Andros, or Tenos, or Myconos, or Sicinos, or Ios. On Syros lived Pherecydes (ca. 550), who was reputed to have taught Pythagoras, and to have been the first philosopher to write in prose. On Delos, said Greek story, Apollo himself had been born. So sacred was the island as his sanctuary that both death and birth were forbidden within its borders; those about to give birth or to die were hurriedly conveyed from its shores; and all known graves were emptied that the island might be purified.¹¹ There, after the repulse of the Persians, Athens and her Ionian allies would keep the treasure of the Delian Confederacy; there, every fourth year, the Ionians met in pious but convivial assemblage to celebrate the festival of the handsome god. A seventh-century hymn describes the “women with fine girdles,”¹² the eager merchants busy at their booths, the crowds lining the road to watch the sacred procession; the tense ritual and solemn sacrifice in the temple; the joyous dances and choral hymns of Delian and Athenian maidens chosen for their comeliness as well as their song; the athletic and musical contests, and the plays in the theater under the open sky. Annually the Athenians sent an embassy to Delos to celebrate Apollo’s birthday; and no criminal might be executed in Athens until this embassy’s return. Hence the long interval, so fortunate for literature and philosophy, between the conviction of Socrates and his execution.

Naxos is the largest, as Delos is almost the smallest, of the Cyclades. It was famous for its wine and its marble, and became rich enough, in the sixth century, to have its own navy and its own school of sculpture. Southeast of Naxos lies Amorgos, home of the unamiable Semonides, whose ungallant satire on women has been carefully preserved by man-written history.* To the west lies Paros, almost composed of marble; its citizens made their homes of it, and Praxiteles found there the translucent stone which he would carve and polish into the warmth and texture of human flesh. On this island, about the end of the eighth century, Archilochus was born, son of a slave woman, but one of the greatest lyric singers of Greece. A soldier’s fortune led him north to Thasos where, in a battle with the natives, he found his heels more valuable than his shield; he took to the one and abandoned the other, and lived to turn many a merry quip about his flight. Back in Paros he fell in love with Neobule, daughter of the rich Lycambes. He describes her as a modest lass with tresses falling over her shoulders, and sighs, as so many centuries have sighed, “only to touch her hand.”¹⁴ But Lycambes, admiring the poet’s verses more than his income, put an end to the affair; whereupon Archilochus aimed at him and Neobule and her sister such barbs of satiric verse that all three of them, legend assures us, hanged themselves. Archilochus turned his back sourly upon the “figs and fishes” of Paros, and became again a soldier of fortune. Finally, his heels having failed him, he was killed in battle against the Naxians.

We learn from his poems that he was a man of rough speech to both friends and foes, with a disappointed lover’s penchant for adultery.¹⁵ We picture him as an inspired pirate, a melodious buccaneer coarse in prose and polished in verse; taking the iambic meter already popular in folk songs and fashioning it into short and stinging lines of six feet; this was the “iambic trimeter” that would become the classic medium of Greek tragedy. He experimented gaily with dactylic hexameters, trochaic tetrameters, and a dozen other meters,* and gave to Greek poetry the metrical forms that it would keep to the end. Only a few broken lines survive, and we must accept the word of the ancients that he was the most popular of all Greek poets after Homer. Horace loved to imitate his technical diversities; and the great Hellenistic critic, Aristophanes of Byzantium, when asked which of Archilochus’ poems he liked best, voiced in two words the feeling of Greece when he answered, “The longest.”¹⁶

A morning’s sail west of Paros is Siphnos, famous for its mines of silver and gold. These were owned by the people through their government. The yield was so rich that the island could set up at Delphi the Siphnian Treasury with its placid caryatides, erect many another monument, and yet distribute a substantial balance among the citizens at the end of every year.¹⁷ In 524 a band of freebooters from Samos landed on the island and exacted a tribute of a hundred talents—the equivalent of $600,000 today. The rest of Greece accepted this heroic robbery with the equanimity and fortitude with which men are accustomed to bear the misfortunes of their friends.

III. THE DORIAN OVERFLOW

The Dorians, too, colonized the Cyclades, and tamed their warlike spirits to terrace the mountain slopes patiently, that the parsimonious rain might be held and coaxed to nourish their crops and vines. In Melos they took over from their Bronze Age predecessors the quarrying of obsidian, and made the island so prosperous that the Athenians, as we shall see, spared no pains to Melos to win its support in the struggle with Sparta. Here, in 1820, was found that Aphrodite of Melos* which is now the most famous statue in the Western world.

Moving east and then south, the Dorians conquered Thera and Crete, and from Thera sent a further colony to Cyrene. A few of them settled in Cyprus, where, from the eleventh century, a small colony of Arcadian Greeks had struggled for mastery against the old Phoenician dynasties. It was one of these Phoenician kinglets, Pygmalion, of whom legend told how he so admired an ivory Aphrodite carved by his hands that he fell in love with it, begged the goddess to give it life, and married his creation when the goddess complied.¹⁸ The coming of iron probably lessened the demand for Cyprian copper, and left the island off the main line of Greek economic advance. The cutting of the timber by the natives to burn the copper ore, by the Phoenicians for ships and by the Greeks for agricultural clearings, slowly transformed Cyprus into the hot and half-barren derelict that it is today. The art of the island, like its population, was in the Greek period a medley of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Hellenic influences, and never attained a homogeneous character of its own.†

The Dorians were but a minority of the Greek population in Cyprus; but in Rhodes and the southern Sporades and on the adjoining mainland they became the ruling class. Rhodes prospered in the centuries between Homer and Marathon, though its zenith would not come till the Hellenistic age. On a promontory jutting out from Asia, Dorian settlers developed the city of Cnidus, well situated to be a port of the coastal trade. Here the astronomer Eudoxus would be born, and the historian (or fabulist) Ctesias, and that Sostratus who was to build the Pharos at Alexandria. Here, among the ruins of ancient temples, would be found the sad and matronly Demeter of the British Museum.

Opposite Cnidus lay the island of Cos, home of Hippocrates and rival of Cnidus as a center of Greek medical science. Apelles the painter would be born here, and Theocritus the poet. A little to the north, on the coast, was Halicarnassus, birthplace of Herodotus and royal seat, in Hellenistic days, of the Carian King Mausolus and his fond Artemisia. This city, with Cos and Cnidus and the chief towns of Rhodes (Lindus, Camirus, and Ialysus) formed the Dorian Hexapolis, or Six Cities, of Asia Minor—weak rivals, for a time, of the Twelve Cities of Ionia.

IV. THE IONIAN DODECAPOLIS

1. Miletus and the Birth of Greek Philosophy

Running northwest of Caria for some ninety miles was the strip of mountainous coastland, twenty to thirty miles wide, anciently known as Ionia. Here, said Herodotus, “the air and climate are the most beautiful in the whole world.”¹⁹ Its cities lay for the most part at the mouths of rivers, or at the ends of roads, that carried the goods of the hinterland down to the Mediterranean for shipment everywhere.

Miletus, southernmost of the Ionian Twelve, was in the sixth century the richest city of the Greek world. The site had been inhabited by Carians from Minoan days; and when, about 1000 B.C., the Ionians came there from Attica, they found the old Aegean culture, though in a decadent form, waiting to serve as the advanced starting point of their civilization. They brought no women with them to Miletus, but merely killed the native males and married the widows;²⁰ the fusion of cultures began with a fusion of blood. Like most of the Ionian cities, Miletus submitted at first to kings who led them in war, then to aristocrats who owned the land, then to “tyrants” representing the middle class. Under the dictator Thrasybulus, at the beginning of the sixth century, industry and trade reached their peak, and the growing-wealth of Miletus flowered forth in literature, philosophy, and art. Wool was brought down from the rich pasture lands of the interior, and turned into clothing in the textile mills of the city. Taking a lesson from the Phoenicians and gradually bettering their instruction, Ionian merchants established colonies as trading posts in Egypt, Italy, the Propontis, and the Euxine. Miletus alone had eighty such colonies, sixty of them in the north. From Abydos, Cyzicus, Sinope, Olbia, Trapezus, and Dioscurias, Miletus drew flax, timber, fruit, and metals, and paid for these with the products of her handicrafts. The wealth and luxury of the city became a proverb and a scandal throughout Greece. Milesian merchants, overflowing with profits, lent money to enterprises far and wide, and to the municipality itself. They were the Medici of the Ionian Renaissance.

It was in this stimulating environment that Greece first developed two of its most characteristic gifts to the world—science and philosophy. The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins. Here in Miletus, as later in Athens, were men from a hundred scattered states; mentally active through competitive commerce, and freed from the bondage of tradition by long absences from their native altars and homes. Milesians themselves traveled to distant cities, and had their eyes opened by the civilizations of Lydia, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Egypt; in this way, among others, Egyptian geometry and Babylonian astronomy entered the Greek mind. Trade and mathematics, foreign commerce and geography, navigation and astronomy, developed hand in hand. Meanwhile wealth had created leisure; an aristocracy of culture was growing up in which freedom of thought was tolerated because only a small minority could read. No powerful priesthood, no ancient and inspired text limited men’s thinking; even the Homeric poems, which were to become in some sense the Bible of the Greeks, had hardly taken yet a definite form; and in that final form their mythology was to bear the imprint of Ionian skepticism and scandalous merriment. Here for the first time thought became secular, and sought rational and consistent answers to the problems of the world and man.*

Nevertheless the new plant, mutation though it was, had its roots and ancestry. The hoary wisdom of Egyptian priests and Persian Magi, perhaps even of Hindu seers, the sacerdotal science of the Chaldeans, the poetically personified cosmogony of Hesiod, were mingled with the natural realism of Phoenician and Greek merchants to produce Ionian philosophy. Greek religion itself had paved the way by talking of Moira, or Fate, as ruler of both gods and men: here was that idea of law, as superior to incalculable personal decree, which would mark the essential difference between science and mythology, as well as between despotism and democracy. Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law. That the Greeks, so far as our knowledge goes, were the first to achieve this recognition and this freedom in both philosophy and government is the secret of their accomplishment, and of their importance in history.

Since life proceeds by heredity as well as by variation, by stabilizing custom as well as by experimental innovation, it was to be expected that the religious roots of philosophy would form as well as feed it, and there should remain in it, to the very end, a vigorous element of theology. Two currents run side by side in the history of Greek philosophy: one naturalistic, the other mystical. The latter stemmed from Pythagoras, and ran through Parmenides, Heracleitus, Plato, and Cleanthes to Plotinus and St. Paul; the other had its first world figure in Thales, and passed down through Anaximander, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Hippocrates, and Democritus to Epicurus and Lucretius. Now and then some great spirit—Socrates, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius—merged the two currents in an attempt to do justice to the unformulable complexity of life. But even in these men the dominant strain, characteristic of Greek thought, was the love and pursuit of reason.

Thales was born about 640, probably at Miletus, reputedly of Phoenician parentage,²¹ and derived much of his education from Egypt and the Near East; here, as if personified, we see the transit of culture from East to West. He appears to have engaged in business only so far as to provide himself with the ordinary goods of life; everyone knows the story of his successful speculation in oil presses.* For the rest he gave himself to study, with the absorbed devotion suggested by the tale of his falling into a ditch while watching the stars. Despite his solitude, he interested himself in the affairs of his city, knew the dictator Thrasybulus intimately, and advocated the federation of the Ionian states for united defense against Lydia and Persia.²²

To him tradition unanimously ascribed the introduction of mathematical and astronomical science into Greece. Antiquity told how, in Egypt, he calculated the heights of the pyramids by measuring their shadows when a man’s shadow equaled his height. Returning to Ionia, Thales pursued the fascinatingly logical study of geometry as a deductive science, and demonstrated several of the theorems later collected by Euclid.* As these theorems founded Greek geometry, so his studies of astronomy established that science for Western civilization, and disentangled it from its Oriental associations with astrology. He made several minor observations, and startled all Ionia by successfully predicting an eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.C.,²⁵ probably on the basis of Egyptian records and Babylonian calculations. For the rest his theory of the universe was not appreciably superior to the current cosmology of the Egyptians and the Jews. The world, he thought, was a hemisphere resting on an endless expanse of water, and the earth was a flat disk floating on the flat side of the interior of this hemisphere. We are reminded of Goethe’s remark that a man’s vices (or errors) are common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own.

As some Greek myths made Oceanus the father of all creation,²⁶ so Thales made water the first principle of all things, their original form and their final destiny. Perhaps, says Aristotle, he had come to this opinion from observing “that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that . . . the seeds of everything have a moist nature;. . . and that from which everything is generated is always its first principle.”²⁷ Or perhaps he believed that water was the most primitive or fundamental of the three forms—gas, liquid, solid—into which, theoretically, all substances may be changed. The significance of his thought lay not in reducing all things to water, but in reducing all things to one; here was the first monism in recorded history. Aristotle describes Thales’ view as materialistic; but Thales adds that every particle of the world is alive, that matter and life are inseparable and one, that there is an immortal “soul” in plants and metals as well as in animals and men; the vital power changes form, but never dies.²⁸ Thales was wont to say that there is no essential difference between living and dead. When someone sought to nettle him by asking why, then, he chose life instead of death, he answered, “Because there is no difference.”²⁹

In his old age he received by common consent the title of sophos, or sage; and when Greece came to name its Seven Wise Men it placed Thales first. Being asked what was very difficult, he answered, in a famous apophthegm, “To know thyself.” Asked what was very easy, he answered, “To give advice.” To the question, what is God? he replied, “That which has neither beginning nor end.” Asked how men might live most virtuously and justly, he answered, “If we never do ourselves what we blame in others.”³⁰ He died, says Diogenes Laertius,³¹ “while present as a spectator at a gymnastic contest, being worn out with heat and thirst and weakness, for he was very old.”

Thales, says Strabo,³² was the first of those who wrote on physiologia—i.e., on the science of nature (physis), or on the principle of being and development in things. His work was vigorously advanced by his pupil Anaximander, who, though he lived from 611 to 549 B.C., expounded a philosophy surprisingly like that which Herbert Spencer, trembling before his own originality, published in A.D. 1860. The first principle, says Anaximander, was a vast Indefinite-Infinite (apeiron), a boundless mass possessing no specific qualities, but developing, by its inherent forces, into all the varied realities of the universe.* This animate and eternal but impersonal and unmoral Infinite is the only God in Anaximander’s system; it is the unvarying and everlasting One, as distinguished from the mutable evanescent Many of the world of things. (Here stems the metaphysics of the Eleatic School—that only the eternal One is real.) From this characterless Infinite are born new worlds in endless succession, and to it in endless succession they return as they evolve and die. In the primordial Infinite all opposites are contained—hot and cold, moist and dry, liquid and solid and gas . . . ; in development these potential qualities become actual, and make diverse and definite things; in dissolution these opposed qualities are again resolved into the Infinite. (A source for Heracleitus as well as for Spencer.) In this rise and fall of worlds the various elements struggle with one another, and encroach upon each other as hostile opposites. For this opposition they pay with dissolution; “Things perish into those from which they have been born.”

Anaximander, though he too can be guilty of astronomic bizarferies forgivable in an age without instruments, advanced on Thales by conceiving the earth as a cylinder freely suspended in the center of the universe, and sustained only by being equidistant from all things.³⁴ The sun, moon, and stars, he thought, moved in circles around the earth. To illustrate all this Anaximander, probably on Babylonian models, constructed at Sparta a gnomon, or sundial, on which he showed the movement of the planets, the obliquity of the ecliptic,* and the succession of solstices, equinoxes, and seasons.³⁵ With the collaboration of his fellow Milesian, Hecataeus, he established geography as a science by drawing—apparently upon a tablet of brass—the first known map of the inhabited world.†

In its earliest form, said Anaximander, the earth was in a fluid state; external heat dried some of it into land, and evaporated some of it into clouds; while the variations of heat in the atmosphere so formed caused the motions of the winds. Living organisms arose by gradual stages from the original moisture; land animals were at first fishes, and only with the drying’of the earth did they acquire their present shape. Man too was once a fish; he could not at his earliest appearance have been born as now, for he would have been too helpless to secure his food, and would have been destroyed.³⁶

A slighter figure is Anaximander’s pupil Anaximenes, whose first principle was air. All other elements are produced from air by rarefaction, which gives fire, or by condensation, which forms progressively wind, cloud, water, earth, and stone. As the soul, which is air, holds us together, so the air, or pneuma, of the world is its pervasive spirit, breath, or God.³⁷ Here was an idea that would ride out all the storms of Greek philosophy, and find a haven in Stoicism and Christianity.

This heyday of Miletus produced not only the earliest philosophy, but the earliest prose, and the first historiography, in Greece.‡ Poetry seems natural to a nation’s adolescence, when imagination is greater than knowledge, and a strong faith gives personality to the forces of nature in field, wood, sea, and sky; it is hard for poetry to avoid animism, or for animism to avoid poetry. Prose is the voice of knowledge freeing itself from imagination and faith; it is the language of secular, mundane, “prosaic” affairs; it is the emblem of a nation’s maturity, and the epitaph of its youth. Up to this time (600) nearly all Greek literature had taken a poetic form; education had transmitted in verse the lore and morals of the race; even early philosophers, like Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles, gave their systems a poetic dress. Just as science was at first a form of philosophy, struggling to free itself from the general, the speculative, the unverifiable, so philosophy was at first a form of poetry, striving to free itself from mythology, animism, and metaphor.

It was therefore an event when Pherecydes and Anaximander expounded their doctrines in prose. Other men of the age, whom the Greeks called logographoi—reason writers, prose writers—began to chronicle in the new medium the annals of their states; so Cadmus (550) wrote a chronicle of Miletus, Eugaeon wrote of Samos, Xanthus wrote of Lydia. Towards the end of the century Hecataeus of Miletus advanced both history and geography in epochal works—the Historiai, or Inquiries, and the Ges periodos, or Circuit of the Earth. The latter divided the known planet into two continents, Europe and Asia, and included Egypt in Asia; if (as many doubt) the existing fragments are genuine, it was especially informative about Egypt, and provided a rich field for unacknowledged poaching by Herodotus. The Histories began with a skeptical blast: “I write what I consider to be the truth; for the traditions of the Greeks seem to me many and ridiculous.” Hecataeus accepted Homer as history, and swallowed some tales with his eyes shut; nevertheless he made an honest effort to distinguish fact from myth, to trace real genealogies, and to arrive at a credible history of the Greeks. Greek historiography was old when the “Father of History” was born.

To Hecataeus and the other logographoi who appeared in this age in most of the cities and colonies of Hellas, historia* meant any inquiry into the facts of any matter, and was applied to science and philosophy as well as to historiography in the modern sense. The term had a skeptical connotation in Ionia; it signified that the miracle stories of gods and demigod heroes were to be replaced with secular records of events, and rational interpretations of causes and effects. In Hecataeus the process begins; in Herodotus it advances; in Thucydides it is complete.

The poverty of Greek prose before Herodotus is bound up with the conquest and impoverishment of Miletus in the very generation in which prose literature began. Internal decay followed the custom of history in smoothing the path of the conqueror. The growth of wealth and luxury made epicureanism fashionable, while stoicism and patriotism seemed antiquated and absurd; it became a byword among the Greeks that “once upon a time the Milesians were brave.”³⁸ Competition for the goods of the earth became keener as the old faith lost its power to mitigate class strife by giving scruples to the strong and consolations to the weak. The rich, supporting an oligarchic dictatorship, became a united party against the poor, who wanted a democracy. The poor secured control of the government, expelled the rich, collected the remaining children of the rich on threshing floors, set oxen upon them, and had them trampled to death. The rich returned, recaptured power, coated the leaders of the democracy with pitch, and then burnt them alive.³⁹ De nobis fabula narrabitur. When, about 560, Croesus began to subject to Lydian rule the Greek coast of Asia from Cnidus to the Hellespont, Miletus saved its independence by refusing to help her sister states. But in 546 Cyrus conquered Lydia, and without much difficulty absorbed the faction-torn cities of Ionia into the Persian Empire. The great age of Miletus was over. Science and philosophy, in the history of states, reach their height after decadence has set in; wisdom is a harbinger of death.

2. Poly crates of Samos

Across the bay from Miletus, near the outlets of the Maeander, stood the modest town of Myus, and the more famous city of Priene. There, in the sixth century, lived Bias, one of the Seven Wise Men. As Hermippus said, the Seven Wise Men were seventeen; for different Greeks made different lists of them, most frequently agreeing upon Thales, Solon, Bias, Pittacus of Mytilene, Periander of Corinth, Chilon of Sparta, and Cleobolus of Lindus in Rhodes. Greece respected wisdom as India respected holiness, as Renaissance Italy respected artistic genius, as young America naturally respects economic enterprise. The heroes of Greece were not saints, or artists, or millionaires, but sages; and her most honored sages were not theorists but men who had made their wisdom function actively in the world. The sayings of these men became proverbial among the Greeks, and were in some cases inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. People liked to quote, for example, the remarks of Bias—that the most unfortunate of men is he who has not learned how to bear misfortune; that men ought to order their lives as if they were fated to live both a long and a short time; and that “wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession.”⁴⁰

West of Priene lay Samos, second largest of Ionia’s isles. The capital stood on the southeastern shore; and as one entered the well-protected harbor, passing the famous red ships of the Samian fleet, the city rose as if in tiers on the hill: first the wharves and shops, then the homes, then the fortress-acropolis and the great temple of Hera; and behind these a succession of ranges and peaks rising to a height of five thousand feet. It was a sight to stir the patriotism of every Samian soul.

The zenith of Samos came in the third quarter of the sixth century, under Polycrates. The revenues from the busy port enabled the dictator to end a dangerous period of unemployment by a program, of public works that called forth the admiration of Herodotus. The greatest of these undertakings was a tunnel that carried the city’s water supply 4500 feet through a mountain; we catch some idea of Greek ability in mathematics and engineering when we learn that the two bores, begun at opposite ends, met in the center with an error of eighteen feet in direction and nine in height.*⁴¹

Samos had been a cultured center long before Polycrates. Here, about 590, the fabulous Aesop had been the Phrygian slave of the Greek Iadmon. An unconfirmed tradition tells how Iadmon freed him, how Aesop traveled widely, met Solon, lived at the court of Croesus, embezzled the money that Croesus had commissioned him to distribute at Delphi, and met a violent death at the hands of the outraged Delphians.⁴² His fables, largely taken from Eastern sources, were well known at Athens in the classic age; Socrates, says Plutarch, put them into verse.⁴³ Though their form was Oriental, their philosophy was characteristically Greek. “Sweet are the beauties of Nature, the earth and sea, the stars, and the orbs of sun and moon. But all the rest is fear and pain,”⁴⁴ especially if one embezzles. We can still meet him in the Vatican, where a cup from the Periclean age represents him with half-bald head and Vandyke beard, listening profitably to a merry fox.⁴⁵

The great Pythagoras was born in Samos, but left it in 529 to live at Crotona in Italy. Anacreon came from Teos to sing Polycrates’ charms and to tutor his son. The greatest figure at the court was the artist Theodoras, the Leonardo of Samos, Jack-of-all-trades and master of most. The Greeks ascribed to him, perhaps as a cloture on research, the invention of the level, the square, and the lathe;⁴⁶ he was a skilled engraver of gems, a metalworker, stoneworker, woodworker, sculptor, and architect. He took part in designing the second temple of Artemis at Ephesus, built a vast skias, or pavilion, for Sparta’s public assemblies, helped to introduce clay modeling into Greece, and shared with Rhoecus the honor of bringing from Egypt or Assyria to Samos the hollow casting of bronze.⁴⁷ Before Theodoras the Greeks had made crude bronze statues by riveting plates of the metal to a “bridge” of wood;⁴⁸ now they were prepared to produce such masterpieces in bronze as the Charioteer of Delphi and the Discus Thrower of Myron. Samos was famous also for its pottery; Pliny recommends it to us by telling us that the priests of Cybele would use nothing but Samian potsherds in depriving themselves of their manhood.⁴⁹

3. Heracleitus of Ephesus

Across the Caystrian Gulf from Samos stood Ionia’s most famous city—Ephesus. Founded about 1000 by colonists from Athens, it prospered by tapping the trade of both the Cayster and the Maeander. Its population, its religion, and its art contained a strong Eastern element; the Artemis worshiped there began and ended as an Oriental goddess of motherhood and fertility. Her renowned temple had many deaths, and almost as many resurrections. On the site of an ancient altar twice built and twice destroyed, the first temple was erected about 600, and was probably the earliest important edifice in the Ionic style. The second temple was raised about 540, partly through the generosity of Croesus; Paeonius of Ephesus, Theodoras of Samos, and Demetrius, a priest of the shrine, shared in designing it. It was the largest Greek temple that had yet been built, and was ranked without dispute among the Seven Wonders of the World.*

The city was known not only for its temple but for its poets, its philosophers, and its expensively gowned women.⁵¹ Here, as early as 690 B.C., lived Callinus, the earliest known elegiac poet of Greece. Far greater and uglier was Hipponax, who, towards 550, composed poems so coarse in subject, obscure in language, pointed in wit, and refined in metrical style, that all Greece began to talk about him, and all Ephesus to hate him. He was short and thin, lame and deformed, and completely disagreeable. Woman, he tells us, in one of his surviving fragments, brings two days of happiness to a man—“one when he marries her, the other when he buries her.”⁵² He was a ruthless satirist, and lampooned every notable in Ephesus from the lowest criminal to the highest priest of the temple. When two sculptors, Bupalus and Athenis, exhibited an elegant caricature of him he attacked them with such corrosive verse that some of it has proved more durable than their stone, and sharper than the teeth of time. “Hold my coat,” says a typically polished morsel; “I shall hit Bupalus in the eye. I am ambidextrous, and I never miss my aim.”⁵³ Tradition said that Hipponax died by suicide; but perhaps this was only a universal wish.

The most illustrious son of Ephesus was Heracleitus the Obscure. Born about 530, he belonged to a noble family, and thought that democracy was a mistake. “There are many bad but few good,” he said (111*), and “one man to me is as ten thousand if he be the best” (113). But even aristocrats did not please him, nor women, nor scholars. “Abundant learning,” he wrote with genial particularity, “does not form the mind; if it did it would have instructed Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus” (16). “For the only real wisdom is to know that idea which by itself will govern everything on every occasion” (19). So he went off, like a Chinese sage, to live in the mountains and brood over the one idea that would explain all things. Disdaining to expound his conclusions in words intelligible to common men, and seeking in obscurity of life and speech some safety from individuality-destroying parties and mobs, he expressed his views in pithy and enigmatical apophthegms On Nature, which he deposited in the temple of Artemis for the mystification of posterity.

Heracleitus has been represented in modern literature as building his philosophy around the notion of change; but the extant fragments hardly support this interpretation. Like most philosophers he longed to find the One behind the Many, some mind-steadying unity and order amid the chaotic flux and multiplicity of the world. “All things are one,” he said, as passionately as Parmenides (1); the problem of philosophy was, what is this one? Heracleitus answered, Fire. Perhaps he was influenced by the Persian worship of fire; probably, as we may judge from his identification of Fire with Soul and God, he used the term symbolically as well as literally, to mean energy as well as fire; the fragments permit no certainty. “This world . . . was made neither by a god nor by man, but it ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out” (20). Everything is a form of Fire, either in Fire’s “downward path” through progressive condensation into moisture, water, and earth; or in its “upward path” from earth to water to moisture to Fire.*⁵⁴

Though he finds a consoling constancy in the Eternal Fire, Heracleitus is troubled by its endless transformations; and the second nucleus of his thought is the eternity and ubiquity of change. He finds nothing static in the universe, the mind, or the soul. Nothing is, everything becomes; no condition persists unaltered, even for the smallest moment; everything is ceasing to be what it was, and is becoming what it will be. Here is a new emphasis in philosophy: Heracleitus does not merely ask, like Thales, what things are, but, like Anaximander, Lucretius, and Spencer, how they became what they are; and he suggests, like Aristotle, that a study of the second question is the best approach to the first. The extant apophthegms do not contain the famous formula, panta rei, ouden menei—“all things flow, nothing abides”; but antiquity is unanimous in attributing it to Heracleitus.⁵⁶ “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you” (41); “we are and we are not” (81); here, as in Hegel, the universe is a vast Becoming. Multiplicity, variety, change are as real as unity, identity, being; the Many are as real as the One.⁵⁷ The Many are the One; every change is a passage of things towards or from the condition of Fire. The One is the Many; in the very heart of Fire flickers restless change.

Hence Heracleitus passes to the third element in his philosophy—the unity of opposites, the interdependence of contraries, the harmony of strife. “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger” (36). “Good and bad are the same; goodness and badness are one” (57-8); “life and death are the same; so are waking and sleeping, youth and age” (78). All these contraries are stages in a fluctuating movement, moments of the ever-changing Fire; each member in an opposing pair is necessary to the meaning and existence of the other; reality is the tension and interplay, the alternation and exchange, the unity and harmony, of opposites. “They understand not how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There sits attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the harp” (45). As the tension of the string, loosened or drawn taut, creates the harmony of vibrations called music or a note, so the alternation and strife of opposites creates the essence and meaning and harmony of life and change. In the struggle of organism with organism, of man with man, of man with woman, of generation with generation, of class with class, of nation with nation, of idea with idea, of creed with creed, the warring opposites are the warp and woof on the loom of life, working at cross-purposes to produce the unseen unity and hidden concord of the whole. “From things that differ comes the fairest attunement” (46); any lover will understand.

All three of these principles—fire, change, and the tension unity of contraries—enter into Heracleitus’ conception of soul and God. He smiles at men who “seek in vain to purify themselves from blood-guiltiness by defiling themselves with blood” (130), or who “offer prayers to these statues here—as if one should try to converse with houses; such men know nothing of the real nature of gods” (126). Nor will he admit personal immortality; man too, like everything else, is a changeful and fitful flame, “kindled and put out like a light in the night” (77). Even so, man is Fire; the soul or vital principle is part of the eternal energy in all things; and as such it never dies. Death and birth are arbitrary points taken in the current of things by the human analyzing mind; but from the impartial standpoint of the universe they are merely phases in the endless change of forms. At every instant some part of us dies while the whole lives; at every second one of us dies while Life lives. Death is a beginning as well as an ending; birth is an ending as well as a beginning. Our words, our thoughts, even our morals, are prejudices, and represent our interests as parts or groups; philosophy must see things in the light of the whole. “To God all things are beautiful and good and right; men deem some things wrong and some right” (61).

As the soul is a passing tongue of the endlessly changing flame of life, so God is the everlasting Fire, the indestructible energy of the world. He is the unity binding all opposites, the harmony of all tensions, the sum and meaning of all strife. This Divine Fire, like life (for the two are everywhere and one), is always altering its form, always passing upward or downward on the ladder of change, always consuming and remaking things; indeed, some distant day, “Fire will judge and convict all things” (26), destroy them, and make way for new forms, in a Last Judgment or cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the operations of the Undying Fire are not without sense and order; if we could understand the world as a whole we should see in it a vast impersonal wisdom, a Logos or Reason or Word (65); and we should try to mold our lives into accord with this way of Nature, this law of the universe, this wisdom or orderly energy which is God (91). “It is wise to hearken not to me, but to the Word” (1), to seek and follow the infinite reason of the whole.