The Life of Greece

When Heracleitus applies to ethics these four basic concepts of his thought—energy, change, the unity of opposites, and the reason of the whole—he illuminates all life and conduct. Energy harnessed to reason, wedded to order, is the greatest good. Change is not an evil but a boon; “in change one finds rest; it is weariness to be always toiling at the same things and always beginning afresh” (72-3). The mutual necessity of contraries makes intelligible and therefore forgivable the strife and suffering of life. “For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest” (104). He rebukes those who desire an end of strife in the world (43); without this tension of opposites there would be no “attunement,” no weaving of the living web, no development. Harmony is not an ending of conflict, it is a tension in which neither element definitely wins, but both function indispensably (like the radicalism of youth and the conservatism of old age). The struggle for existence is necessary in order that the better may be separated from the worse, and may generate the highest. “Strife is the father of all and the king of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men; some he has made slaves, and some free” (44). In the end, “strife is justice” (62); the competition of individuals, groups, species, institutions, and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.

All in all, the philosophy of Heracleitus, concentrated for us now in 130 fragments, is among the major products of the Greek mind. The theory of the Divine Fire passed down into Stoicism; the notion of a final conflagration was transmitted through Stoicism to Christianity; the Logos, or reason in nature, became in Philo and Christian theology the Divine Word, the personified wisdom with which or through whom God creates and governs all things; in some measure it prepared for the early modern view of natural law. Virtue as obedience to nature became a catchword of Stoicism; the unity of opposites revived vigorously in Hegel; the idea of change came back into its own with Bergson. The conception of strife and struggle as determining all things reappears in Darwin, Spencer, and Nietzsche—who carries on, after twenty-four centuries, the war of Heracleitus against democracy.

We know almost nothing of Heracleitus’ life; and of his death we have only an unsupported story in Diogenes Laertius, which may illustrate the prosaic ends to which our poetry may return:

And at last becoming a complete misanthrope, he used to spend his time walking about the mountains, feeding on grasses and plants; and in consequence of these habits he was attacked by the dropsy, and so he returned to the city, and asked the physicians, in a riddle, whether they were able to produce a drought after wet weather. And as they did not understand him, he shut himself up in a stable for oxen, and covered himself with cow dung, hoping to cause the wet to evaporate from him by the warmth that this produced. And as he did himself no good in this way, he died, having lived seventy years.⁵⁸

4. Anacreon of Teos

Colophon, a few miles north of Ephesus, derived its name, presumably, from the hill on whose slope it rose.* Xenophanes the anticlerical, born among them about 576, described the Colophonians as “richly clothed in purple garments, proud of their luxuriously dressed hair wet with costly and sweet-smelling oils”; vanity has a long history.⁶⁰ Here, and perhaps at Smyrna, the poet Mimnermus (610) sang, for a people already infected with the languid pessimism of the East, his melancholy odes of fleeting youth and love. He lost his heart to Nanno, the girl who accompanied his songs with the plaintive obbligato of the flute; and when she rejected his love (perhaps on the ground that a poet married is a poet dead), he immortalized her with a sheaf of delicate elegiac verse.

We blossom like the leaves that come in Spring,

What time the sun begins to flame and glow,

And in the brief span of youth’s gladdening

Nor good nor evil from the gods we know;

But always at the goal dark spirits stand

Holding, one grievous Age, one Death, within her hand.⁶¹

A more famous poet lived a century later in the near-by town of Teos. Anacreon wandered much, but in Teos he was born (563) and died (478). Many a court sought him, for among his contemporaries only Simonides rivaled him in fame. We find him joining a band of emigrants to Thracian Abdera, serving as soldier for a campaign or two, abandoning his shield in the poetic fashion of the time, and thereafter content to brandish a pen; spending some years at the court of Polycrates in Samos; brought thence in official state, on a fifty-oared galley, to grace the palace of Hipparchus in Athens; and at last, after the Persian War, returning to Teos to ease his declining years with song and drink. He paid for his excesses by living to a great age, and died at eighty-five, we are told, of a grape pit sticking in his throat.⁶²

Alexandria knew five books of Anacreon, but only disordered couplets remain. His subjects were wine, women, and boys; his manner was one of polished banter in tripping iambics. No topic seemed impure in his impeccable diction, or gross in his delicate verse. Instead of the vulgar virulence of Hipponax, or the trembling intensity of Sappho, Anacreon offered the urbane chatter of a court poet who would play Horace to any Augustus that pleased his fancy and paid for his wine. Athenaeus thinks that his tipsy songs and changeful loves were a pose;⁶³ perhaps Anacreon hid his fidelities that he might be interesting to women, and concealed his sobriety to augment his fame. A choice legend tells how, in his cups, he stumbled against a child and abused it with harsh words, and how, in his age, he fell in love with this lad and did penance with doting praise.⁶⁴ His Eros was ambidextrous, and reached impartially for either sex; but in his later years he gallantly gave the preference to women. “Lo, now,” says a pretty fragment, “golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball, and calls me forth to play with a motley-slippered maid. But she hails from lofty Lesbos, and so finds fault with my white hair, and goes a-searching for other prey.”⁶⁵ A wit of a later age wrote for Anacreon’s grave a revealing epitaph:

All-enchanting nurse of the wine, O Vine, grow lush and long above the tomb of Anacreon. So shall the tippling friend of neat liquor, who thrummed in night-long revel the lute of a lover of lads, yet sport above his buried head the glorious cluster of some teeming bough, and be wet evermore with the dew whose delicious scent was the breath of his mild old mouth.⁶⁶

5. Chios, Smyrna, Phocaea

From Teos the mainland staggers westward in vacillating bays and promontories until, across ten miles of sea, the traveler reaches Chios. Here, amid groves of figs and olives, and Anacreontic vines, Homer may have spent his youth. Wine making was a major industry in Chios, and used many slaves; in 431 the island had 30,000 freemen, 100,000 slaves.⁶⁷ Chios became a clearinghouse for slaves; slave dealers bought the families of insolvent debtors from their creditors, and purchased boys to make eunuchs of them for the palaces of Lydia and Persia.⁶⁸ In the sixth century Drimachus led his fellow slaves in revolt, defeated all armies sent against him, established himself in a mountain fastness, levied toll upon the richer citizens by discriminating robbery, offered them “protection” for a consideration after our own fashion, terrified them into dealing more justly with their slaves, gave his voluntarily severed head to his friends so that they might claim the reward that had been promised for it, and was worshiped for centuries afterward as the patron deity of slaves:⁶⁹ here is an excellent epic for some Spartacus of the pen. Art and literature flourished amid the wealth and bondage of Chios; here the Homeridae, a guild and succession of bards, had their seat; here Ion the dramatist and Theopompus the historian would be born; here Glaucus (tradition said) discovered, about 560, the technique of welding iron; here Archermus and his sons, Bupalus and Athenis, made the finest statuary in sixth-century Greece.

Returning to the mainland, the traveler passes by the sites of Erythrae and Clazomenae—birthplace of Pericles’ teacher and friend, Anaxagoras. Farther east, on a well-sheltered inlet, is Smyrna. Settled by Aeolians as far back as 1015⁷⁰ it was changed by immigration and conquest into an Ionian city. Already famous in the days of Achilles, sacked by Alyattes of Lydia about 600 B.C., destroyed again and again, and recently by the Greeks in A.D. 1924, Smyrna, rivaling Damascus in age, has known all the vicissitudes of history.* The remains of the ancient town suggest its rich and varied life; a gymnasium, an acropolis, a stadium, and a theater have been dug out of the earth. The avenues were broad and well paved; temples and palaces adorned them; the main street, called Golden, was famous throughout Greece.

The northernmost of Ionia’s cities was Phocaea, still functioning as Fokia. The river Hermus connected it almost with Sardis itself, and gave it a lucrative advantage in the commerce of the Greeks with Lydia. Phocaean merchants undertook distant voyages in the search for markets; it was they who brought Greek culture to Corsica, and founded Marseilles.

Such were the Twelve Cities of Ionia, seen superficially as if in an hour’s flight through space and time. Though they were too competitive and jealous to form a union for mutual defense, their citizens acknowledged some solidarity of background and interest, and met periodically on the promontory of Mycale near Priene, in the great festival of the Panionium. Thales begged them to form a sympolity in which every adult male would be a citizen both of his city and of a Panionian union; but commercial rivalries were too strong, and led rather to internecine wars than to political unity. Hence, when the Persian attack came (546-5), the alliance improvised for defense proved rootlessly weak, and the Ionian cities came under the power of the Great King. Nevertheless this spirit of independence and rivalry gave to the Ionian communities the stimulus of competition and the zest of liberty. It was under these conditions thatJonia developed science, philosophy, history, and the Ionic capital, while at the same time it produced so many poets that the sixth century in Hellas seems almost as fertile as the fifth. When Ionia fell her cities bequeathed their culture to the Athens that had fought to save them, and transmitted to it the intellectual leadership of Greece.

V. SAPPHO OF LESBOS

Above the Ionian Dodecapolis lay the twelve cities of mainland Aeolis, settled by Aeolians and Achaeans from northern Greece soon after the fall of Troy had opened Asia Minor to Greek immigration. Most of these cities were small, and played a modest role in history; but the Aeolian isle of Lesbos rivaled the Ionian centers in wealth, refinement, and literary genius. Its volcanic soil made the island a very garden of orchards and vines. Of its five cities Mytilene was the greatest, almost as rich, through its commerce, as Miletus, Samos, and Ephesus. Towards the end of the seventh century a coalition of the mercantile classes with the poorer citizens overthrew the landed aristocracy, and made the brave, rough Pittacus dictator for ten years, with powers like those of his friend and fellow Wise Man, Solon. The aristocracy conspired to recapture power, but Pittacus foiled them and exiled their leaders, including Alcaeus and Sappho, first from Mytilene and then from Lesbos itself.

Alcaeus was a roistering firebrand who mingled politics with poetry and made every other lyric raise the tocsin of revolt. Of aristocratic birth, he attacked Pittacus with a lusty scurrility that merited the crown of banishment. He molded his own poetic forms, to which posterity gave the name “alcaics”; and every stanza, we are told, had melody and charm. For a while he sang of war, and described his home as hung with martial trophies and accouterments;⁷¹ however, when his own chance for heroism came he threw away his shield, fled like Archilochus, and complimented himself lyrically on the valor of his discretion. Occasionally he sang of love, but dearest to his pen was the wine for which Lesbos was as famous as for its poetry. Nun chre methusthen, he advises us: nunc bibamus, let us drink deeply; in summer to cool our thirst, in autumn to put a bright color upon death, in winter to warm our blood, in spring to celebrate nature’s resurrection.

The rain of Zeus descends, and from high heaven

A storm is driven,

And on the running water-brooks the cold

Lays icy hold.

Then up! beat down the winter, make the fire

Blaze higher and higher;

Mix wine as sweet as honey of the bee

Abundantly;

Then drink, with comfortable wool around

Your temples bound.

We must not yield our hearts to woe, or wear

With wasting care;

For grief will profit us no whit, my friend,

Nor nothing mend;

But this is our best medicine, with wine fraught

To cast out thought.⁷²

It was his misfortune—though he bore it with lighthearted unconsciousness—to have among his contemporaries the most famous of Greek women. Even in her lifetime all Greece honored Sappho. “One evening over the wine,” says Stobaeus, “Execestides, the nephew of Solon, sang a song of Sappho’s which his uncle liked so much that he bade the boy teach it to him; and when one of the company asked, ‘What for?’ he answered, ‘I want to learn it and die!’”⁷³ Socrates, perhaps hoping for similar lenience, called her “The Beautiful,” and Plato wrote about her an ecstatic epigram:

Some say there are Nine Muses. How careless they are!

Behold, Sappho of Lesbos is the Tenth!⁷⁴

“Sappho was a marvelous woman,” said Strabo; “for in all the time of which we have record I do not know of any woman who could rival her even in a slight degree in the matter of poetry.”⁷⁵ As the ancients meant Homer when they said “the Poet,” so all the Greek world knew whom men signified when they spoke of “the Poetess.”

Psappha, as she called herself in her soft Aeolic dialect, was born at Eresus, on Lesbos, about 612; but her family moved to Mytilene when she was still a child. In 593 she was among the conspiring aristocrats whom Pittacus banished to the town of Pyrrha; already at nineteen she was playing a part in public life through politics or poetry. She was not known for beauty: her figure was small and frail, her hair and eyes and skin were darker than the Greeks desired;⁷⁶ but she had the charm of daintiness, delicacy, refinement, and a brilliant mind that was not too sophisticated to conceal her tenderness. “My heart,” she says, “is like that of a child.”⁷⁷ We know from her verses that she was of a passionate nature, one whose words, says Plutarch, “were mingled with flames”;⁷⁸ a certain sensuous quality gave body to the enthusiasms of her mind. Atthis, her favorite pupil, spoke of her as dressed in saffron and purple, and garlanded with flowers. She must have been attractive in her minuscule way, for Alcaeus, exiled with her to Pyrrha, soon sent her an invitation to romance. “Violet-crowned, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho, I want to say something to you, but shame prevents me.” Her answer was less ambiguous than his proposal; “If thy wishes were fair and noble, and thy tongue designed not to utter what is base, shame would not cloud thine eyes, but thou wouldst speak thy just desires.”⁷⁹ The poet sang her praises in odes and serenades, but we hear of no further intimacy between them.

Perhaps they were separated by Sappho’s second exile. Pittacus, fearing her maturing pen, banished her now to Sicily, probably in the year 591, when one would have thought her still a harmless girl. About this time she married a rich merchant of Andros; some years later she writes: “I have a little daughter, like a golden flower, my darling Cleis, for whom I would not take all Lydia, nor lovely Lesbos.”⁸⁰ She could afford to reject the wealth of Lydia, having inherited that of her husband on his early death. After five years of exile she returned to Lesbos, and became a leader of the island’s society and intellect. We catch the glamour of luxury in one of her surviving fragments: “But I, be it known, love soft living, and for me brightness and beauty belong to the desire of the sun.”⁸¹ She became deeply attached to her young brother Charaxus, and was vexed to her finger tips when, on one of his mercantile journeys to Egypt, he fell in love with the courtesan Doricha, and, ignoring his sister’s entreaties, married her.⁸²

Meanwhile Sappho too had felt the fire. Eager for an active life, she had opened a school for young women, to whom she taught poetry, music, and dancing; it was the first “finishing school” in history. She called her students not pupils but hetairai—companions; the word had not yet acquired a promiscuous connotation. Husbandless, Sappho fell in love with one after another of these girls. “Love,” says one fragment, “has shaken my mind as a down-rushing wind that falls upon the oak-trees.”⁸³ “I loved you, Atthis, long ago,” says another fragment, “when my own girlhood was still all flowers, and you seemed to me an awkward little child.” But then Atthis accepted the attentions of a youth from Mytilene, and Sappho expressed her jealousy with unmeasured passion in a poem preserved by Longinus and translated haltingly into “sapphic” meter by John Adding-ton Symonds:

Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful

Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,

Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee

Silverly speaking,

Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh, this, this only

Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!

For should I but see thee a little moment,

Straight is my voice hushed;

Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me,

’Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling.

Nothing see mine eyes, and a voice of roaring

Waves in my ear sounds;

Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes

All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,

Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,

Lost in the love-trance.*⁸⁴

Atthis’ parents removed her from the school; and a letter ascribed to Sappho gives what may be her account of the parting.

She (Atthis?) wept full sore to leave me behind, and said: “Alas, how sad our lot! Sappho, I swear ‘tis against my will I leave you.” And I answered her: “Go your way rejoicing, but remember me, for you know how I doted upon you. And if you remember not, oh, then I will remind you of what you forget, how dear and beautiful was the life we led together. For with many a garland of violets and sweet roses mingled you have decked your flowing locks by my side, and with many a woven necklet, made of a hundred blossoms, your dainty throat; and with unguent in plenty, both precious and royal, have you anointed your fair young skin in my bosom. And no hill was there, nor holy place, nor water-brook, whither we did not go; nor ever did the teeming noises of the early spring fill any wood with the medley-song of the nightingales but you wandered thither with me.”⁸⁵

After which, in the same manuscript, comes the bitter cry, “I shall never see Atthis again, and indeed I might as well be dead.” This surely is the authentic voice of love, rising to a height of sincerity and beauty beyond good and evil.

The later scholars of antiquity debated whether these poems were expressions of “Lesbian love,” or merely exercises of poetic fancy and impersonation. It is enough for us that they are poetry of the first order, tense with feeling, vivid with imagery, and perfect in speech and form. A fragment speaks of “the footfall of the flowering spring”; another of “Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment”; another compares the unattainable love to “the sweet apple that reddens on the end of the bough, the very end of the bough, which the gatherers missed, nay missed not, but could not reach so far.”⁸⁶ Sappho wrote of other topics than love, and used, even for our extant remains, half a hundred meters; and she herself set her poems to music for the harp. Her verse was collected into nine books, of some twelve thousand lines; six hundred lines survive, seldom continuous. In the year 1073 of our era the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus was publicly burned by ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople and Rome.⁸⁷ Then, in 1897, Grenfell and Hunt discovered, at Oxyrhynchus in the Fayum, coffins of papier-mâché, in whose making certain scraps of old books had been used; and on these scraps were some poems of Sappho.⁸⁸

Male posterity avenged itself upon her by handing down or inventing the tale of how she died of unrequited love for a man. A passage in Suidas⁸⁹ tells how “the courtesan Sappho”—usually identified with the poetess-leaped to death from a cliff on the island of Leucas because Phaon the sailor would not return her love. Menander, Strabo, and others refer to the story, and Ovid recounts it in loving detail;⁹⁰ but it has many earmarks of legend, and must be left hovering nebulously between fiction and fact. In her later years, tradition said, Sappho had relearned the love of men. Among the Egyptian morsels is her touching reply to a proposal of marriage: “If my breasts were still capable of giving suck, and my womb were able to bear children, then to another marriage-bed not with trembling feet would I come. But now on my skin age has brought many lines, and Love hastens not to me with his gift of pain”—and she advises her suitor to seek a younger wife.⁹¹ In truth we do not know when she died, or how; we know only that she left behind her a vivid memory of passion, poetry, and grace; and that she shone even above Alcaeus as the most melodious singer of her time. Gently, in a final fragment, she reproves those who would not admit that her song was finished:

You dishonor the good gifts of the Muses, my children, when you say, “We will crown you, dear Sappho, best player of the clear, sweet lyre.” Know you not that my skin is all wrinkled with age, and my hair is turned from black to white? . . . Surely as starry Night follows rose-armed Dawn and brings darkness to the ends of the earth, so Death tracketh everything living, and catcheth it in the end.⁹²

VI. THE NORTHERN EMPIRE

North of Lesbos is little Tenedos, whose women were accounted by some ancient travelers to be the most beautiful in Greece.⁹³ Then one follows the adventurous Hellenes into the northern Sporades: to Imbros, and Lemnos, and Samothrace. The Milesians, seeking to control the Hellespont, founded, about 560, the still-living town of Abydos on its south shore;* here Leander and Byron swam the straits, and Xerxes’ army crossed to Europe on a bridge of boats. Farther eastward the Phocaeans settled Lampsacus, birthplace of Epicurus. Within the Propontis lay two groups of islands: the Proconnesus, rich in the marble that gave the Propontis its current name, the Sea of Marmora; and the Arctonnesus, on whose southernmost tip the Milesians established in 757 the great port of Cyzicus. Along the coast rose one Greek city after another: Panormus, Dascylium, Apameia, Cius, Astacus, Chalcedon. Up through the Bosporus the Greeks advanced, hungry for metals, grain, and trade, founding Chrysopolis (now Scutari) and Nicopolis—“city of victory.” Then they made their way along the southern shore of the Black Sea, depositing towns at Heracleia, Pontica, Tieum, and Sinope—a city splendidly adorned, says Strabo,⁹⁴ with gymnasium, agora, and shady colonnades; Diogenes the Cynic was not above being born here. Then Amisus, Oenoe, Tripolis, and Trapezus (Trebizond, Trabzon)—where Xenophon’s Ten Thousand shouted with joy at the sight of the longed-for sea. The opening up of this region to Greek colonization, perhaps by Jason, later by the Ionians, gave the mother cities the same outlet for surplus population and trade, the same resources in food, silver, and gold, that the discovery of America gave to Europe at the beginning of modern times.⁹⁵

Following the eastern shores of the Euxine northward into Medea’s Colchis, the Greeks founded Phasis and Dioscurias, and Theodosia and Panticapaeum in the Crimea. Near the mouths of the Bug and the Dnieper they established the city of Olbia (Nikolaev); at the mouth of the Dniester, the town of Tyras; and on the Danube, Troesmis. Then, moving southward along the west shore of the Black Sea, they built the cities of Istrus (Constanta, Kustenje), Tomi (where Ovid died), Odessus (Varna), and Apollonia (Burgas). The historically sensitive traveler stands appalled at the antiquity of these living towns; but today’s residents, engrossed in the tasks of their own generation, are undisturbed by the depth of the centuries that lie silent beneath them.

Then again at the Bosporus the Megarians, about 660, built Byzantium*—yesterday Constantinople, now Istanbul. Even before Pericles this strategic port was becoming what Napoleon would call it at the Peace of Tilsit—the key to Europe; in the third century B.C. Polybius described its maritime position as “more favorable to security and prosperity than that of any other city in the world known to us.”⁹⁷ Byzantium grew rich by exacting tolls from passing vessels, and exporting to the Greek world the grain of southern Russia (“Scythia”) and the Balkans, and the fish that were netted with shameful ease as they crowded through the narrow straits. It was its curving form, and the wealth derived from this fishing industry, that gave the city its later name, the “Golden Horn.” Under Pericles Athens dominated Byzantine polities, levied tolls there to fill her treasury in time of emergency, and regulated the export of grain from the Black Sea as a contraband of war.⁹⁸

Along the northern or Thracian shore of the Propontis the Greeks built towns at Selymbria, Perinthus (Eregli), Bisanthe, Callipolis (Gallipoli), and Sestus. Later settlements were established on the southwestern coast of Thrace at Aphrodisias, Aenus, and Abdera—where Leucippus and Democritus would propound the philosophy of atomistic materialism. Off the coast of Thrace lay the island of Thasos, “bare and ugly as a donkey’s back in the sea,” Archilochus described it,⁹⁹ but so rich in gold mines that their proceeds paid all the expenses of the government. On or near the eastern coast of Macedonia Greek goldseekers, chiefly Athenians, founded Neapolis and Amphipolis—whose capture by Philip would lead to the war in which Athens was to lose her liberty. Other Greeks, mostly from Chalcis and Eretria, conquered and named the three-fingered peninsula of Chalcidice, and by 700 had established thirty towns there, several of them destined to play a role in Greek history: Stageirus (birthplace of Aristotle), Scione, Mende, Potidaea, Acanthus, Cleonae, Torone, and Olynthus—captured by Philip in 348 and known to us now through the oratory of Demosthenes. Recent excavations at Olynthus have unearthed a town of considerable extent, with many houses of two stories and some of twenty-five rooms. In the time of Philip Olynthus appears to have had 60,000 inhabitants; we may judge from this figure for a minor city the abounding fertility and energetic expansion of the pre-Periclean Greeks.

Finally, between Chalcidice and Euboea, Ionian migrants peopled the Euboean Isles—Gerontia, Polyaegos, Icos, Peparethos, Scandile, Scyros. The orbit of empire in east and north had come full turn, the circuit was complete; Greek enterprise had transformed the islands of the Aegean and the coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, the Black Sea, Macedonia, and Thrace into a busy network of Hellenized cities, throbbing with agriculture, industry, trade, politics, literature, religion, philosophy, science, art, eloquence, chicanery, and venery. It only remained to conquer another Greece in the West, and build a bridge between ancient Hellas and the modern world.

CHAPTER VII

The Greeks in the West

I. THE SYBARITES

SKIRTING Sunium again, our ship of fancy, sailing westward, finds Cythera, island haunt of Aphrodite, and therefore the goal of Watteau’s Embarkation.* There, about A.D. 160, Pausanias saw “the most holy and ancient of all the temples that the Greeks have built to Aphrodite”;¹ and there, in 1887, Schliemann dug its ruins out of the earth.² Cythera was the southernmost of the Ionian Islands that bordered the west coast of Greece, and so named because Ionian immigrants settled them; Zacynthos, Cephallenia, Ithaca, Leucas, Paxos, and Corcyra made the rest. Schliemann thought that Ithaca was the island of Odysseus, and vainly sought under its soil some confirmation of Homer’s tale;³ but Dorpfeld believed that Odysseus’ home was on rocky Leucas. From the cliffs of Leucas, as an annual sacrifice to Apollo, the ancient Leucadians, says Strabo, were in the habit of hurling a human victim; but being men as well as theologians, they mercifully attached to him powerful birds whose wings might break his fall:⁴ probably the story of Sappho’s leap is bound up with memories of this rite. Corinthian colonists occupied Corcyra (Corfu) about 734 B.C., and soon became so strong that they defeated Corinth’s navy and established their independence. From Corcyra some Greek adventurers sailed up the Adriatic as far as Venice; some made small settlements on the Dalmatian coast and in the valley of the Po;⁵ others crossed at last through fifty miles of stormy water to the heel of Italy.

They found a magnificent shore line, curved into natural harbors and backed by a fertile hinterland that had been almost neglected by the aborigines.⁶ The Greek invaders took possession of this coastal region by the ruthless law of colonial expansion—that natural resources unexploited by the native population will draw in, by a kind of chemical attraction, some other people to exploit them and pour them into the commerce and usage of the world. From Brentesium (Brindisi) the newcomers, chiefly Dorian, traversed the heel of the peninsula to establish a major city at Taras—the Roman Tarentum (Taranto).* There they grew olives, raised horses, manufactured pottery, built ships, netted fish, and gathered mussels to make a purple dye more highly valued than the Phoenician.⁸ As in most of the Greek colonies, the government began as an oligarchy of landowners, passed under dictators financed by the middle class, and enjoyed vigorous and turbulent intervals of democracy. Here the romantic Pyrrhus would land, in 281 B.C., and undertake to play Alexander to the West.

Across the Tarentine Gulf a new wave of immigrants, mostly Achaeans, founded the cities of Sybaris and Crotona. The murderous jealousy of these kindred states illustrates the creative energy and destructive passions of the Greeks. Trade between eastern Greece and western Italy had a choice of two routes, one by water, the other in part by land. Ships following the water route touched at Crotona, and exchanged many goods there; thence they passed to Rhegium, paid tolls, and moved cautiously through pirate-ridden seas and the swirling currents of the Messina Straits to Elea and Cumae—the northernmost Greek settlement in Italy. To avoid these tolls and perils, and a hundred extra miles of rowing and sailing, merchants who chose the other route unloaded their cargoes at Sybaris, carried them overland some thirty miles to the western coast at Laus, and reshipped them to Poseidonia, whence they were marketed into the interior of Italy.

Strategically situated on this line of trade, Sybaris prospered until it had (if we may believe Diodorus Siculus⁹) 300,000 population and such wealth as few Greek cities could match. Sybarite became a synonym for epicurean. All physical labor was performed by slaves or serfs while the citizens, dressed in costly robes, took their ease in luxurious homes and consumed exotic delicacies,† Men whose work was noisy, such as carpenters and smiths, were forbidden to practice their crafts within the confines of the city. Some of the roads in the richer districts were covered with awnings as a protection against heat and rain.¹¹ Alcisthenes of Sybaris, says Aristotle, had a robe of such precious stuffs that Dionysius I of Syracuse later sold it for 120 talents ($720,000).¹² Smyndyrides of Sybaris, visiting Sicyon to sue for the hand of Cleisthenes’ daughter, brought with him a thousand servants.¹³

All went well with Sybaris until it slipped into war with its neighbor Crotona (510). We are unreliably informed that the Sybarites marched out to battle with an army of 300,000 men¹⁵ The Crotoniates, we are further assured, threw this force into confusion by playing the tunes to which the Sybarites had taught their horses to dance.¹⁶ The horses danced, the Sybarites were slaughtered, and their city was so conscientiously sacked and burned that it disappeared from history in a day. When, sixty-five years later, Herodotus and other Athenians established near the site the new colony of Thurii, they found hardly a trace of what had been the proudest community in Greece.

II. PYTHAGORAS OF CROTONA

Crotona lasted longer; founded about 710 B.C., it is, as Crotone, still noisy with industry and trade. It had the only natural harbor between Taras and Sicily, and could not forgive those ships that discharged their cargoes at Sybaris. Enough trade remained to give the citizens a comfortable prosperity, while a wholesome defeat in war, a long economic depression, a brisk climate, and a certain Dorico-Puritan mood in the population conspired to keep them vigorous despite their wealth. Here grew famous athletes like Milo, and the greatest school of medicine in Magna Grecia.*

Perhaps it was its reputation as a health resort that drew Pythagoras to Crotona. The name means “mouthpiece of the Pythian” oracle at Delphi; many of his followers considered him to be Apollo himself, and some laid claim to having caught a flash of his golden thigh.¹⁷ Tradition assigned his birth to Samos about 580, spoke of his studious youth, and gave him thirty years of travel. “Of all men,” says Heracleitus, who praised parsimoniously, “Pythagoras was the most assiduous inquirer.”¹⁸ He visited, we are told, Arabia, Syria, Phoenicia, Chaldea, India, and Gaul, and came back with an admirable motto for tourists: “When you are traveling abroad look not back at your own borders”;¹⁹ prejudices should be checked at every port of entry. More surely he visited Egypt, where he studied with the priests and learned much astronomy and geometry, and perhaps a little nonsense.²⁰ Returning to Samos and finding that the dictatorship of Polycrates interfered with his own, he migrated to Crotona, being now over fifty years of age.²¹

There he set up as a teacher; and his imposing presence, his varied learning and his willingness to receive women as well as men into his school, soon brought him several hundred students. Two centuries before Plato he laid down the principle of equal opportunity for both sexes, and did not merely preach it but practiced it. Nevertheless he recognized natural differences of function; he gave his women pupils considerable training in philosophy and literature, but he had them instructed as well in maternal and domestic arts, so that the “Pythagorean women” were honored by antiquity as the highest feminine type that Greece ever produced.²²

For the students in general Pythagoras established rules that almost turned the school into a monastery. The members bound themselves by a vow of loyalty, both to the Master and to one another. Ancient tradition is unanimous that they practiced a communistic sharing of goods while they lived in the Pythagorean community.²³ They were not to eat flesh, or eggs, or beans. Wine was not forbidden, but water was recommended—a dangerous prescription in lower Italy today. Possibly the prohibition of flesh food was a religious taboo bound up with the belief in the transmigration of souls: men must beware of eating their ancestors. Probably there were dispensations, now and then, from the letter of these rules; English historians in particular find it incredible that the wrestler Milo, who was a Pythagorean, had become the strongest man in Greece without the help of beef²⁴—though the calf that became a bull in his arms* managed well enough on grass. The members were forbidden to kill any animal that does not injure man, or to destroy a cultivated tree. They were to dress simply and behave modestly, “never yielding to laughter, and yet not looking stern.” They were not to swear by the gods, for “every man ought so to live as to be worthy of belief without an oath.” They were not to offer victims in sacrifice, but they might worship at altars that were unstained with blood. At the close of each day they were to ask themselves what wrongs they had committed, what duties they had neglected, what good they had done.²⁵

Pythagoras himself, unless he was an excellent actor, followed these rules more rigorously than any student. Certainly his mode of life won for him such respect and authority among his pupils that no one grumbled at his pedagogical dictatorship, and autos epha—ipse dixit—“he himself has said it”—became their formula for a final decision in almost any field of conduct or theory. We are told, With touching reverence, that the Master never drank wine by day, and lived for the most part on bread and honey, with vegetables as dessert; that his robe was always white and spotless; that he was never known to eat too much, or to make love; that he never indulged in laughter, or jests, or stories; that he never chastised any one, not even a slave²⁶ Timon of Athens thought him “a juggler of solemn speech, engaged in fishing for men”;²⁷ but among his most devoted followers were his wife Theano and his daughter Damo, who had facilities for comparing his philosophy with his life. To Damo, says Diogenes Laertius, “he entrusted his Commentaries, and charged her to divulge them to no person out of the house. And she, though she might have sold his discourses for much money, would not abandon them, for she thought obedience to her father’s injunctions more valuable than gold; and that, too, though she was a woman.”²⁸

Initiation into the Pythagorean society required, in addition to purification of the body by abstinence and self-control, a purification of the mind by scientific study. The new pupil was expected to preserve for five years the “Pythagorean silence”—i.e., presumably, to accept instruction without questions or argument—before being accounted a full member, or being permitted to “see” (study under?) Pythagoras.²⁹ The scholars were accordingly divided into exoterici, or outer students, and esoterici, or inner members, who were entitled to the secret wisdom of the Master himself. Four subjects composed the curriculum: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Mathematics came first;* not as the practical science that the Egyptians had made it, but as an abstract theory of quantities, and an ideal logical training in which thinking would be compelled to order and clarity by the test of rigorous deduction and visible proof. Geometry now definitely received the form of axiom, theorem, and demonstration; each step in the sequence of propositions raised the student to a new platform, as the Pythagoreans put it, from which he might view more widely the secret structure of the world.³¹ Pythagoras himself, according to Greek tradition, discovered many theorems: above all, that the sum of the angles within any triangle equals two right angles, and that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Apollodorus tells us that when the Master discovered this theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb—a hundred animals—in thanksgiving;³² but this would have been scandalously un-Pythagorean.

From geometry, inverting the modern order, Pythagoras passed to arithmetic—not as a practical art of reckoning, but as the abstract theory of numbers. The school seems to have made the first classification of numbers into odd or even, prime or factorable;³³ it formulated the theory of proportion, and through this and the “application of areas” created a geometrical algebra.³⁴ Perhaps it was the study of proportion that led Pythagoras to reduce music to number. One day, as he passed a blacksmith’s shop, his ear was attracted by the apparently regular musical intervals of the sounds that came from the anvil. Finding that the hammers were of different weights, he concluded that tones depend upon numerical ratios. In one of the few experiments which we hear of in classical science, he took two strings of equal thickness and equal tension, and discovered that if one was twice as long as the other they sounded an octave when he plucked them; if one was half again the length of the other they gave a fifth (do, sol); if one was a third longer than the other they gave a fourth (do, fa);³⁵ in this way every musical interval could be mathematically calculated and expressed. Since all bodies moving in space produce sounds, whose pitch depends upon the size and speed of the body, then each planet in its orbit about the earth (argued Pythagoras) makes a sound proportioned to its rapidity of translation, which in turn rises with its distance from the earth; and these diverse notes constitute a harmony or “music of the spheres,” which we never hear because we hear it all the time.³⁶

The universe, said Pythagoras, is a living sphere, whose center is the earth. The earth too is a sphere, revolving, like the planets, from west to east. The earth, indeed the whole universe, is divided into five zonesarctic, antarctic, summer, winter, and equatorial. More or less of the moon is visible to us according to the degree in which that half of it which is facing the sun is also turned toward the earth. Eclipses of the moon are caused by the interposition of the earth, or some other body, between the moon and the sun.³⁷ Pythagoras, says Diogenes Laertius, “was the first person to call the earth round, and to give the name of kosmos to the world.”³⁸

Having with these contributions to mathematics and astronomy done more than any other man to establish science in Europe, Pythagoras proceeded to philosophy. The very word is apparently one of his creations. He rejected the term sophia, or wisdom, as pretentious, and described his own pursuit of understanding as philosophia—the love of wisdom.³⁹ In the sixth century philosopher and Pythagorean were synonyms.⁴⁰ Whereas Thales and the other Milesians had sought the first principle of all things in matter, Pythagoras sought it in form. Having discovered numerically regular relations and sequences in music, and having postulated them in the planets, he made the philosopher’s leap at unity by announcing that such numerically regular relations and sequences existed everywhere, and that the essential factor in everything was number. Just as Spinoza would argue* that there were two worlds—one the people’s world of things perceived by sense, the other the philosopher’s world of laws and constancies perceived by reason—and that only the second world was permanently real; so Pythagoras felt that the only basic and lasting aspects of anything were the numerical relationships of its parts.† Perhaps health was a proper mathematical relationship, or proportion, in the parts or elements of the body. Perhaps even the soul was number.

At this point the mysticism in Pythagoras, nurtured in Egypt and the Near East, disported itself freely. The soul, he believed, is divided into three parts: feeling, intuition, and reason. Feeling is centered in the heart, intuition and reason in the brain. Feeling and intuition belong to animals as well as men;‡ reason belongs to man alone, and is immortal.⁴² After death the soul undergoes a period of purgation in Hades; then it returns to earth and enters a new body in a chain of transmigration that can be ended only by a completely virtuous life. Pythagoras amused, or perhaps edified, his followers by telling them that he had been in one incarnation a courtesan, in another the hero Euphorbus; he could remember quite distinctly his adventures at the siege of Troy, and recognized, in a temple at Argos, the armor that he had worn in that ancient life.⁴³ Hearing the yelp of a beaten dog, he went at once to the rescue of the animal, saying that he distinguished in its cries the voice of a dead friend.⁴⁴ We catch again a glimpse of the trade in ideas that bound sixth-century Greece, Africa, and Asia when we reflect that this idea of metempsychosis was at one and the same time capturing the imagination of India, of the Orphic cult in Greece, and of a philosophical school in Italy.

We feel the hot breath of Hindu pessimism mingling, in the ethics of Pythagoras, with the clear, bright air of Plato. The purpose of life in the Pythagorean system is to gain release from reincarnation; the method is through virtue; and virtue is a harmony of the soul within itself and with God. Sometimes this harmony can be artificially induced, and the Pythagoreans, like Greek priests and doctors, used music to heal nervous disorders. More often harmony comes to the soul through wisdom, a quiet understanding of underlying truths; for such wisdom teaches a man modesty, measure, and the golden mean. The opposite way—the way of discord, excess, and sin—leads by inevitable fate to tragedy and punishment; justice is a “square number,” and sooner or later every wrong will be “squared” with an equivalent penalty.⁴⁵ Here in germ are the moral philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.

Pythagorean politics is Plato’s philosophy realized before its conception. According to the common tradition of antiquity the school of Pythagoras was a communistic aristocracy: men and women pooling their goods, educated together, trained to virtue and high thinking by mathematics, music, and philosophy, and offering themselves as the guardian rulers of the state. Indeed it was Pythagoras’ effort to make his society the actual government of his city that brought ruin upon himself and his followers. The initiates entered so actively into politics, and took so decidedly the aristocratic side, that the democratic or popular party of Crotona, in an ecstasy of rage, burned down the house in which the Pythagoreans were gathered, killed several of them, and drove the rest out of the city. Pythagoras himself, in one account, was captured and slain when, in his flight, he refused to tread upon a field of beans; another story lets him escape to Metapontum, where he abstained from food for forty days and—perhaps feeling that eighty years were enough—starved himself to death.⁴⁶

His influence was lasting; even today he is a potent name. His society survived for three centuries in scattered groups throughout Greece, producing scientists like Philolaus of Thebes and statesmen like Archytas, dictator of Taras and friend of Plato. Wordsworth, in his most famous ode, was an unconscious Pythagorean. Plato himself was enthralled by the vague figure of Pythagoras. At every turn he takes from him—in his scorn of democracy, his yearning for a communistic aristocracy of philosopherrulers, his conception of virtue as harmony, his theories of the nature and destiny of the soul, his love of geometry, and his addiction to the mysticism of number. All in all, Pythagoras was the founder, so far as we know them, of both science and philosophy in Europe—an achievement sufficient for any man.

III. XENOPHANES OF ELEA

West of Crotona lies the site of ancient Locri. The colony was founded, says Aristotle, by runaway slaves, adulterers, and thieves from Locris in mainland Greece; but perhaps Aristotle had an Old World disdain for the New. Suffering disorder from the defects of their qualities, the colonists applied to the oracle at Delphi for advice, and were told to get themselves laws. Possibly Zaleucus had instructed the oracle, for about 664 he gave to Locri ordinances which, as he said, Athena had dictated to him in a dream. This was the first written code of laws in the history of Greece, though not the first to be handed down by the gods. The Locrians liked it so well that they required any man who wished to propose a new law to speak with a rope around his neck, so that, if his motion failed, he might be hanged with a minimum of public inconvenience.*⁴⁷

Rounding the toe of Italy northward, the traveler reaches flourishing Reggio, founded by the Messenians about 730 under the name of Rhegion, and known to the Romans as Rhegium. Slipping through the Straits of Messina—probably the “Scylla and Charybdis” of the Odyssey—one comes to where Laus stood; and then to ancient Hyele, the Roman Velia, known to history as Elea because Plato wrote it so, and because only its philosophers are remembered. There Xenophanes of Colophon came about 510, and founded the Eleatic School.

He was a personality as unique as his favorite foe, Pythagoras. A man of dauntless energy and reckless initiative, he wandered for sixty-seven years, he tells us,⁴⁸ “up and down the land of Hellas,” making observations and enemies everywhere. He wrote and recited philosophical poems, denounced Homer for his impious ribaldry, laughed at superstition, found a port in Elea, and obstinately completed a century before he died.⁴⁹ Homer and Hesiod, sang Xenophanes, “have ascribed to the gods all deeds that are a shame and a disgrace among men—thieving, adultery, and fraud.”⁵⁰ But he himself was not a pillar of orthodoxy.

There never was, nor ever will be, any man who knows with certainty the things about the gods. . . . Mortals fancy that gods are born, and wear clothes, and have voice and form like themselves. Yet if oxen and lions had hands, and could paint and fashion images as men do, they would make the pictures and images of their gods in their own likeness; horses would make them like horses, oxen like oxen. Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; Thracians give theirs blue eyes and red hair. . . . There is one god, supreme among gods and men; resembling mortals neither in form nor in mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. Without toil he rules all things by the power of his mind.⁵¹

This god, says Diogenes Laertius,⁵² was identified by Xenophanes with the universe. All things, even men, taught the philosopher, are derived from earth and water by natural laws.⁵³ Water once covered nearly all the earth, for marine fossils are found far inland and on mountaintops; and at some future time water will probably cover the whole earth again.⁵⁴ Nevertheless all change in history, and all separateness in things, are superficial phenomena; beneath the flux and variety of forms is an unchanging unity, which is the innermost reality of God.

From this starting point Xenophanes’ disciple, Parmenides of Elea, proceeded to that idealistic philosophy which was in turn to mold the thought of Plato and Platonists throughout antiquity, and of Europe even to our day.

IV. FROM ITALY TO SPAIN

Twenty miles north of Elea lay the city of Poseidonia—the Roman Paestum—founded by colonists from Sybaris as the main Italian terminus of Milesian trade. Today one reaches it by a pleasant ride from Naples through Salerno. Suddenly, by the roadside, amid a deserted field, three temples appear, majestic even in their desolation. For the river, by blocking its own mouth here with centuries of silt, has long since turned this once healthy valley into a swamp, and even the reckless race that tills the slopes of Vesuvius has fled in despair from these malarial plains. Fragments of the ancient walls remain; but better preserved, as if by solitude, are the shrines that the Greeks raised, in modest limestone but almost perfect form, to the gods of the corn and the sea. The oldest of the buildings, lately called the “Basilica,” was more likely a temple to Poseidon; men who owed their living to the fruit and commerce of the Mediterranean dedicated it to him towards the middle of this amazing sixth century B.C., which created great art, literature, and philosophy from Italy to Shantung. The inner as well as the outer colonnades remain, and attest the columnar passion of the Greeks. The following generation built a smaller temple, also Dorically simple and strong; we call it the “temple of Ceres,” but we do not know what god sniffed the savor of its offerings. A yet later generation, just before or after the Persian War,⁵⁵ erected the greatest and best-proportioned of the three temples, probably also to Poseidon—fittingly enough, since from its porticoes one gazes into the inviting face of the treacherous sea. Again almost everything is columns: a powerful and complete Doric peristyle without, and, within, a two-storied colonnade that once upheld a roof. Here is one of the most impressive sights in Italy; it seems incredible that this temple, better preserved than anything built by the Romans, was the work of Greeks almost five centuries before Christ. We can imagine something of the beauty and vitality of a community that had both the resources and the taste to raise such centers for its religious life; and then we can conjure up less inadequately the splendor of richer and vaster cities like Miletus, Samos, Ephesus, Crotona, Sybaris, and Syracuse.

Slightly north of where Naples stands today adventurers from Chalcis, Eretria, Euboean Cyme, and Graia founded, about 750, the great port of Cumae, oldest of Greek towns in the West. Taking the products of eastern Greece and selling them in central Italy, Cumae rapidly acquired wealth, colonized and controlled Rhegium, obtained command of the Straits of Messina, and excluded from them, or subjected to heavy tolls, the vessels of cities not leagued with it in trade.⁵⁶ Spreading southward, the Cumaeans founded Dicaearchia—which became the Roman port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli)—and Neapolis, or New City, our Naples. From these colonies Greek ideas as well as goods passed into the crude young city of Rome, and northward into Etruria. At Cumae the Romans picked up several Greek gods—Apollo and Heracles especially—and bought for more than they were worth the scrolls in which the Cumaean Sibyl—the aged priestess of Apollo—had foretold the future of Rome.

Near the beginning of the sixth century the Phocaeans of Ionia landed on the southern shore of France, founded Massalia (Marseilles), and carried Greek products up the Rhone and its branches as far as Aries and Nîmes. They made friends and wives of the natives, introduced the olive and the vine as gifts to France, and so familiarized southern Gaul with Greek civilization that Rome found it easy to spread its kindred culture there in Caesar’s time. Ranging along the coast to the east, the Phocaeans established Antipolis (Antibes), Nicaea (Nice), and Monoecus (Monaco). Westward they ventured into Spain and built the towns of Rhodae (Rosas), Emporium (Ampurias), Hemeroscopium, and Maenaca (near Malaga). The Greeks in Spain flourished for a while by exploiting the silver mines of Tartessus; but in 535 the Carthaginians and Etruscans combined their forces to destroy the Phocaean fleet, and from that time Greek power in the western Mediterranean waned.

V. SICILY

We have left not quite to the last the richest of all the regions colonized by the Greeks. To Sicily nature had given what she had withheld from continental Greece—an apparently inexhaustible soil fertilized by rain and lava, and producing so much wheat and corn that Sicily was thought to be if not the birthplace at least a favorite haunt of Demeter herself. Here were orchards, vineyards, olive groves, heavy with fruit; honey as succulent as Hymettus’, and flowers blooming in their turn from the beginning to the end of the year. Grassy plains pastured sheep and cattle, endless timber grew in the hills, and the fish in the surrounding waters reproduced faster than Sicily could eat them.

A neolithic culture had flourished here in the third millennium before Christ, a bronze culture in the second; even in Minoan days trade had bound the island with Crete and Greece.⁵⁷ Towards the end of the second millennium three waves of immigration broke upon Sicilian shores: the Sicans came from Spain, the Elymi from Asia Minor, the Sicels from Italy.⁵⁸ About 800 the Phoenicians established themselves at Motya and Panormus (Palermo) in the west. From 735 on* the Greeks poured in, and in quick succession founded Naxos, Syracuse, Leontini, Messana (Messina), Catana, Gela, Himera, Selinus, and Acragas. In all these cases the natives were driven from the coast by force of arms. Most of them retired to till the mountainous interior, some became slaves to the invaders, so many others intermarried with the conquerors that Greek blood, character, and morals in Sicily took on a perceptible native tint of passion and sensuality.⁵⁹ The Hellenes never quite conquered the island; the Phoenicians and Carthaginians remained predominant on the west coast, and for five hundred years periodic war marked the struggle of Greek and Semite, Europe and Africa, for the possession of Sicily. After thirteen centuries of domination by Rome that contest would be resumed, in the Middle Ages, between Norman and Saracen.

Catana was distinguished for its laws, the Lipari Islands for their communism, Himera for its poet, Segesta, Selinus, and Acragas for their temples, Syracuse for its power and wealth. The laws that Charondas gave to Catana, a full generation before Solon, became a model for many cities in Sicily and Italy, and served to create public order and sexual morality in communities unprotected by ancient mores and sacred precedents. A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.⁶⁰ Charondas, according to a typically Greek tale, forbade the citizens to enter the assembly while armed. One day, however, he himself came to the public meeting forgetfully wearing his sword. When a voter reproached him for breaking his own law he answered, “I will rather confirm it,” and slew himself.⁶¹

If we wish to visualize the difficulties of life in colonies carved out by violent conquest we need only contemplate the curious communism of the Lipari—Le., the Glorious—Islands, which lie to the north of eastern Sicily. Here, about 580, some adventurers from Cnidus organized a pirate’s paradise. Preying upon the commerce about the Straits, they brought the booty to their island lairs and shared it with exemplary equality. The land was owned by the community, a part of the population was assigned to till it, and the products were distributed in like shares to all the citizens. In time, however, individualism reasserted itself: the land was divided into plots individually owned, and life resumed the uneven tenor of its competitive way.

On the northern coast of Sicily lay Himera, destined to be the Plataea of the West. There Stesichorus, “Maker of Choruses,” at a time when the Greeks were tiring of epics, recast into the form of choral lyrics the legends of the race, and gave even to Helen and Achilles the passing novelty of “modern dress.” As if to bridge the gap between the dying epic and the future novel, Stesichorus composed love stories in verse; in one of these a pure and timid lass dies of unrequited love, in the style of Provençal madrigals or Victorian fiction. At the same time he opened a pathway for Theocritus by writing a pastoral poem on the death of the shepherd Daphnis, whose love for Chloe was to be the main business of the Greek novel in the Roman age. Stesichorus had his own romance, and with no less a lady than Helen herself. Having lost his sight, he attributed this calamity to his having handed down the tale of Helen’s infidelity; to atone to her (for she was now a goddess) he composed a “palinode,” or second song, assuring the world that Helen had been kidnaped by force, had never yielded to Paris, had never gone to Troy, but had waited intact in Egypt until Menelaus came to rescue her. In his old age the poet warned Himera against giving dictatorial power to Phalaris of Acragas.* Being unheeded, he moved to Catana, where his monumental tomb was one of the sights of Roman Sicily.

West of Himera lay Segesta, of which nothing remains but a peristyle of unfinished Doric columns weirdly rising amid surrounding weeds. To find Sicilian architecture at its best we must cross the island southward to the once great cities of Selinus and Acragas. During its tragic tenure of life from its establishment in 651 to its destruction by Carthaginians in 409, Selinus raised to the silent gods seven Doric temples, immense in size but of imperfect workmanship, covered with painted plaster and decorated with crude reliefs. The demon of earthquake destroyed these temples at a date unknown, and little survives of them but broken columns and capitals sprawling on the ground.

Acragas, the Roman Agrigentum, was in the sixth century the largest and richest city in Sicily. We picture it rising from its busy wharves through a noisy market place to the homes on the slope of the hill, and the stately acropolis whose shrines almost lifted their worshipers to the sky. Here, as in most of the Greek colonies, the landowning aristocracy yielded power to a dictatorship representing chiefly the middle class. In 570 Phalaris seized the government, and secured immortality by roasting his enemies in a brazen bull; he was particularly pleased by a contrivance that made the agonized cries of his victims sound through a mechanism of pipes like the bellowing of the animal.⁶² Nevertheless it was to him and a later dictator, Theron, that the city owed the political order and stability that permitted its economic development. The merchants of Acragas, like those of Selinus, Crotona, and Sybaris, became the American millionaires of their time, upon whom the lesser plutocrats of older Greece looked with secret envy and compensatory scorn; the new world, said the old, was interested in size and show, but had no taste or artistry. The temple of Zeus at Acragas unquestionably sought size, for Polybius describes it as “second to none in Greece in dimensions and design”;⁶³ we cannot directly judge its beauty, for wars and earthquakes destroyed it. A generation later, in the age of Pericles, Acragas raised more modest structures. One of them, the temple of Concord, survives almost completely, and of the temple of Hera there remains an impressive colonnade; enough in either case to show that Greek taste was not confined to Athens, and that even the commercial west had learned that “size is not development.”—In Acragas the great Empedocles would be born; and perhaps it was there, and not in Etna’s crater, that he would die.

Syracuse began as it is today—a village huddled on the promontory of Ortygia. As far back as the eighth century Corinth had sent colonists, armed with righteousness and superior weapons, to seize the little peninsula, which was then perhaps an island. They built or widened the connection with the mainland of Sicily, and drove most of the Sicels into the interior. They multiplied with all the rapidity of a vigorous people on a resource-full soil; in time their city became the largest in Greece, with a circumference of fourteen miles and a population of half a million souls. An aristocracy of landholders was overthrown about 495 by a revolt of the unfranchised plebs in alliance with the enslaved Sicels. The new democracy, if we may believe Aristotle,⁶⁴ proved incapable of establishing an orderly society, and in 485 Gelon of Gela, by a program of enlightened treachery, set up a dictatorship. Like many of his kind he was as able as he was unscrupulous. Scorning all moral codes and political restraints, he transformed Ortygia into an impregnable fortress for his government, conquered Naxos, Leontini, and Messana, and taxed all eastern Sicily to make Syracuse the most beautiful of Greek capitals. “In this way,” says Herodotus, sadly, “Gelon became a great king.”*⁶⁵

He redeemed himself, and became the idolized Napoleon of Sicily when, as Xerxes’ fleet moved upon Athens, the Carthaginians sent an armada only less numerous than the Persian to wrest the island paradise from the Greeks. The fate of Sicily was joined with that of Greece when in the same monthtradition said on the same day—Gelon faced Hamilcar at Himera, and Themistocles confronted Xerxes at Salamis.

VI. THE GREEKS IN AFRICA

The Carthaginians had reason to be disturbed, for even on the north coast of Africa the Greeks had established cities and were capturing trade. As early as 630 the Dorians of Thera had sent a numerous colony to Cyrene, midway between Carthage and Egypt. There, on the desert’s edge, they found good soil, with rain so abundant that the natives spoke of the site as the place where there was a hole in the sky. The Greeks used part of the land for pasturage, and exported wool and hides; they grew from the silphium plant a spice that all Greece was eager to buy; they sold Greek products to Africa, and developed their own handicrafts to such a point that Cyrenaic vases ranked among the best. The city used its wealth intelligently, and adorned itself with great gardens, temples, statuary, and gymnasiums. Here the first famous epicurean philosopher, Aristippus, was born, and here, after much wandering, he returned to found the Cyrenaic School.

Within Egypt itself, normally hostile to any foreign settlement, the Greeks gained a foothold, at last an empire. About 650 the Milesians opened a “factory,” or trading post, at Naucratis on the Canopic branch of the Nile. Pharaoh Psamtik I tolerated them because they made good mercenaries, while their commerce provided rich prey for his collectors of customs revenues.⁶⁷ Ahmose II gave them a large measure of self-government. Naucratis became almost an industrial city, with manufactures of pottery, terra cotta, and faience; still more it became an emporium of trade, bringing in Greek oil and wine, and sending out Egyptian wheat, linen, and wool, African ivory, frankincense, and gold. Gradually, amid these exchanges, Egyptian lore and techniques in religion, architecture, sculpture, and science flowed into Greece, while in return Greek words and ways entered Egypt, and paved the way for Greek domination in the Alexandrian age.

If in imagination we take a merchant vessel from Naucratis to Athens, our tour of the Greek world will be complete. It was necessary that we should make this long circuit in order that we might see and feel the extent and variety of Hellenic civilization. Aristotle described the constitutional history of 158 Greek city-states, but there were a thousand more. Each contributed in commerce, industry, and thought to what we mean by Greece. In the colonies, rather than on the mainland, were born Greek poetry and prose, mathematics and metaphysics, oratory and history. Without them, and the thousand absorbing tentacles which they stretched out into the old world, Greek civilization, the most precious product in history, might never have been. Through them the cultures of Egypt and the Orient passed into Greece, and Greek culture spread slowly into Asia, Africa, and Europe.

CHAPTER VIII

The Gods of Greece

I. THE SOURCES OF POLYTHEISM

WHEN we look for unifying elements in the civilization of these scattered cities we find essentially five: a common language, with local dialects; a common intellectual life, in which only major figures in literature, philosophy, and science are known far beyond their political frontiers; a common passion for athletics, finding outlet in municipal and interstate games; a love of beauty locally expressed in forms of art common to all the Greek communities; and a partly common religious ritual and belief.

Religion divided the cities as much as it united them. Under the polite and general worship of the remote Olympians lay the intenser cults of local deities and powers who served no vassalage to Zeus. Tribal and political separatism nourished polytheism, and made monotheism impossible. In the early days every family had its own god; to him the divine fire burned unextinguished at the hearth, and to him offerings of food and wine were made before every meal. This holy communion, or sharing of food with the god, was the basic and primary act of religion in the home. Birth, marriage, and death were sanctified into sacraments by ancient ritual before the sacred fire; and in this way religion suffused a mystic poetry and a stabilizing solemnity over the elemental events of human life. In like manner the gene, the phratry, the tribe, and the city had each its special god. Athens worshiped Athena, Eleusis Demeter, Samos Hera, Ephesus Artemis, Poseidonia Poseidon. The center and summit of the city was the shrine of the city god; participation in the worship of the god was the sign, the privilege, and the requisite of citizenship. When the city marched out to war it carried the form and emblem of its god in the forefront of the troops, and no important step was taken without consulting him through divination. In return he fought for the city, and sometimes seemed to appear at the head or above the spears of the soldiers; victory was the conquest not only of a city by a city but of a god by a god. The city, like the family or the tribe, kept always burning, at a public altar in the prytaneum or town hall, a sacred fire symbolizing the mystically potent and persistent life of the city’s founders and heroes; and periodically the citizens partook of a common meal before this fire. Just as in the family the father was also the priest, so in the Greek city the chief magistrate or archon was the high priest of the state religion, and all his powers and actions were sanctified by the god. By this conscription of the supernatural, man was tamed from a hunter into a citizen.

Liberated by local independence, the religious imagination of Greece produced a luxuriant mythology and a populous pantheon. Every object or force of earth or sky, every blessing and every terror, every qualityeven the vices—of mankind was personified as a deity, usually in human form; no other religion has ever been so anthropomorphic as the Greek. Every craft, profession, and art had its divinity, or, as we should say, its patron saint; and in addition there were demons, harpies, furies, fairies, gorgons, sirens, nymphs, almost as numerous as the mortals of the earth. The old question—is religion created by priests?—is here settled; it is incredible that any conspiracy of primitive theologians should have begotten such a plethora of gods. It must have been a boon to have so many deities, so many fascinating legends, sacred shrines, and solemn or joyous festivals. Polytheism is as natural as polygamy, and survives as long, suiting well all the contradictory currents of the world. Even today, in Mediterranean Christianity, it is not God who is worshiped, so much as the saints; it is polytheism that sheds over the simple life the inspiring poetry of consolatory myth, and gives to the humble soul the aid and comfort that it would not venture to expect from a Supreme Being unapproachably awful and remote.

Each of the gods had a mythos, or story, attached to him, which accounted for his place in the city’s life, or for the ritual that honored him. These myths, rising spontaneously out of the lore of the place and the people, or out of the inventions and embellishments of rhapsodists, became at once the faith and the philosophy, the literature and the history of the early Greek; from them came the subjects that adorned Greek vases, and suggested to artists countless paintings, statues, and reliefs. Despite the achievements of philosophy and the attempts of a few to preach a monotheistic creed, the people continued to the end of Hellenic civilization to create myths, and even gods. Men like Heracleitus might allegorize the myths, or like Plato adapt them, or like Xenophanes denounce them; but when Pausanias toured Greece five centuries after Plato he found still alive among the people the legends that had warmed the heart of the Homeric age. The mythopoetic, theopoetic process is natural, and goes on today as always; there is a birth rate as well as a death rate of the gods; deity is like energy, and its quantity remains, through all vicissitudes of form, approximately unchanged from generation to generation.

II. AN INVENTORY OF THE GODS

1. The Lesser Deities

We shall force some order and clarity upon this swarm of gods if we artificially divide them into seven groups: sky-gods, earth-gods, fertility-gods, animal gods, subterranean gods, ancestor or hero gods, and Olympians. “The names of all of them,” as Hesiod said, “it were troublesome for a mortal man to tell.”¹

(1) Originally, so far as we can make out, the great god of the invading Greeks, as of the Vedic Hindus, was the noble and various sky itself; it was probably this sky-god who with progressing anthropomorphism became Uranus, or Heaven, and then the “cloud-compelling,” rain-making, thunder-herding Zeus.² In a land surfeited with sunshine and hungry for rain, the sun, Helios, was only a minor deity. Agamemnon prayed to him,³ and the Spartans sacrified horses to him to draw his flaming chariot through the skies;* the Rhodians, in Hellenistic days, honored Helios as their chief divinity, flung annually into the sea four horses and a chariot for his use, and dedicated to him the famous Colossus;⁴ and Anaxagoras almost lost his life, even in Periclean Athens, for saying that the sun was not a god, but only a ball of fire. Generally, however, there was little worship of the sun in classic Greece; still less of the moon (Selene); least of all, of the planets or the stars.

(2) The earth, not the heavens, was the home of most Greek gods. And first the earth itself was the goddess Ge or Gaea, patient and bountiful mother, pregnant through the embrace of raining Uranus, the sky. A thousand lesser deities dwelt on the earth, in its waters, or in its surrounding air: spirits of sacred trees, especially the oak; Nereids, Naiads, Oceanids, in rivers, lakes, or the sea; gods gushing forth as wells or springs, or flowing as stately streams like the Maeander or the Spercheus; gods of the wind, like Boreas, Zephyr, Notus, and Eurus, with their master Aeolus; or the great god Pan, the horned, cloven-footed, sensual, smiling Nourisher, god of shepherds and flocks, of woods and the wild life lurking in them, he whose magic flute could be heard in every brook and dell, whose startling cry brought panic to any careless herd, and whose attendants were merry fauns and satyrs, and those old satyrs called sileni, half goat and half Socrates. Everywhere in nature there were gods; the air was so crowded with spirits of good or evil that, said an unknown poet, “There is not one empty chink into which you could push the spike of a blade of corn.”⁵

(3) The most mysterious and potent force in nature being reproduction, it was natural that the Greeks, like other ancient peoples, should worship the principle and emblems of fertility in man and woman along with their worship of fertility in the soil. The phallus, as symbol of reproduction, appears in the rites of Demeter, Dionysus, Hermes, even of the chaste Artemis.⁶ In classical sculpture and painting this emblem recurs with scandalous frequency. Even the Great Dionysia, the religious festival at which the Greek drama was played, was introduced by phallic processions, to which Athenian colonies piously sent phalli.⁷ Doubtless such festivals lent themselves to much lusty humor, as one may judge from Aristophanes; but all in all the humor was healthy, and perhaps served the purpose of stimulating Eros and promoting the birth rate.⁸

The more vulgar side of this fertility cult was expressed in the Hellenistic and Roman periods by the worship of Priapus, born of an amour between Dionysus and Aphrodite, and popular with vase painters and the mural artists of Pompeii. A lovelier variation of the reproductive theme was the veneration of goddesses representing motherhood. Arcadia, Argos, Eleusis, Athens, Ephesus, and other localities gave their greatest devotion to feminine deities, often husbandless; such goddesses presumably reflect a primitive matrilinear age before the coming of marriage;⁹ the enthronement of Zeus as Father God over all gods represents the victory of the patriarchal principle.* The probable priority of women in agriculture may have helped to give form to the greatest of these mother deities, Demeter, goddess of the corn or the tilled earth. One of the most beautiful of Greek myths, skillfully narrated in the Hymn to Demeter once attributed to Homer, tells how Demeter’s daughter Persephone, while gathering flowers, was kidnaped by Pluto, god of the underworld, and snatched down to Hades. The sorrowing mother searched for her everywhere, found her, and persuaded Pluto to let Persephone live on the earth nine months in every year—a pretty symbol for the annual death and rebirth of the soil. Because the people of Eleusis befriended the disguised Demeter as she “sat by the way, grieved in her inmost heart,” she taught them and Attica the secret of agriculture, and sent Triptolemus, son of Eleusis’ king, to spread the art among mankind. Essentially it was the same myth as that of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Tammuz and Ishtar in Babylonia, Astarte and Adonis in Syria, Cybele and Attis in Phrygia. The cult of motherhood survived through classical times to take new life in the worship of Mary the Mother of God.

(4) Certain animals, in early Greece, were honored as semideities. Greek religion was too anthropomorphic, in its sculptural age, to admit the divine menageries that we find in Egypt and India; but a vestige of a less classical past appears in the frequent association of an animal with a god. The bull was sacred because of its strength and potency; it was often an associate, disguise, or symbol of Zeus and Dionysus, and perhaps preceded them as a god.¹⁰ In like manner the “cow-eyed Hera” may once have been a sacred cow.¹¹ The pig too was holy because of its fertility; it was associated with the gentle Demeter; at one of her festivals, the Thesmophoria, the sacrifice was ostensibly of a pig, possibly to it.¹² At the feast of the Diasia the sacrifice was nominally to Zeus, really to a subterranean snake that was now dignified with his name.¹³ Whether the snake was holy as supposedly deathless, or as a symbol of reproductive power, we find it passing down as a deity from the snake-goddess of Crete into fifth-century Athens; in the temple of Athena, on the Acropolis, a sacred serpent dwelt to whom, each month, a honey cake was offered in appeasing sacrifice. In Greek art a snake is often seen about the figures of Hermes, Apollo, and Asclepius;¹⁵ under the shield of Pheidias’ Athene Parthenos was wreathed a mighty serpent; the Farnese Athena is half covered with snakes.¹⁶ The snake was often used as a symbol or form of the guardian deity of temple or home;¹⁷ perhaps because it prowled about tombs it was believed to be the soul of the dead.¹⁸ The Pythian games are thought to have been celebrated, at first, in honor of the dead python of Delphi.

(5) The most terrible of the gods were under the earth. In caves and clefts and like nether chambers dwelt those chthonian or earthly deities whom the Greeks worshiped not by day with loving adoration, but at night with apotropaic rites of riddance and fear. These vague nonhuman powers were the real autochthonoi of Greece, older than the Hellenes, older perhaps than the Mycenaeans, who probably transmitted them to Greece; if we could trace them to their origin we might find that they were the vengeful spirits of the animals that had been driven into the forests or under the soil by the advance and multiplication of men. The greatest of these subterranean deities was called Zeus Chthonios; but Zeus here meant merely god¹⁹ Or he was called Zeus Meilichios, the Benevolent God; but here again the words were deceptive and propitiatory, for this god was a fearful snake.—Brother to Zeus was Hades, lord of the underworld that took his name. To placate him the Greeks called him Pluto, the giver of abundance, for he had it in his power to bless or blight the roots of all things that grew in the soil.* Still more ghostly and terrible was Hecate, an evil spirit that came up from the lower world and brought misfortune, through her evil eye, to all whom she visited. The less learned Greeks sacrificed puppies to keep her away.²¹

(6) Before the classical age the dead were regarded as spirits capable of good and evil to men, and were appeased with offerings and prayer. They were not quite gods, but the primitive Greek family, like the Chinese, honored its dead beyond any deity.²² In classical Greece these vague ghosts were more dreaded than loved, and were propitiated with aversion rituals, as in the festival of Anthesteria. The worship of heroes was an extension of the cult of the dead. Great, noble, or beautiful men or women could be raised by the gods to immortal life and become minor deities. So the people of Olympia offered annual sacrifice to Hippodameia; Cassandra was worshiped at Laconian Leuctra, Helen at Sparta, Oedipus at Colonus. Or a god might descend into the body of a mortal, and transform him with divinity; or the god might cohabit with a mortal and beget a hero-god, as Zeus with Alcmena begot Heracles. Many cities, groups, even professions, traced their origin to some god-born hero; so the physicians of Greece looked back to Asclepius. The god was once a dead man, ancestor, or hero; the temple was originally a tomb; the church is still in most lands a shelter for relics of the sacred dead. In general the Greeks made less distinction between men and gods than we do; many of their gods were as human, except in birth, as our saints, and as close to their worshipers; and though they were called Immortals, some of them, like Dionysus, could die.

2. The Olympians

All these were the less famous, though not necessarily the less honored, gods of Greece. How is it that we hear so little of them in Homer, and so much of the Olympians? Probably because the gods of Olympus entered with the Achaeans and Dorians, overlaid the Mycenaean and chthonian deities, and conquered them as their worshipers were conquered. We see the change in action at Dodona and Delphi, where the older god of the earth, Gaea, was displaced in the one case by Zeus, in the other by Apollo. The defeated gods were not wiped out; they remained, so to speak, as subject deities, hiding bitterly underground, but still revered by the common people, while the victorious Olympians received on their mountaintop the worship of the aristocracy; hence Homer, who composed for the elite, says almost nothing of the nether gods. Homer, Hesiod, and the sculptors helped the political ascendancy of the conquerors to spread the cult of the Olympians. Sometimes the minor gods were combined or absorbed into the greater figures, or became their attendants or satellites, very much as minor states were now and then attached or subjected to greater ones; so the satyrs and sileni were given to Dionysus, the sea nymphs to Poseidon, the mountain and forest sprites to Artemis. The more savage rites and myths faded out; the chaos of a demon-haunted earth yielded to a semiorderly divine government that reflected the growing political stability of the Greek world.

At the head of this new regime was the majestic and patriarchal Zeus. He was not first in time; Uranus and Cronus, as we have seen, preceded him; but they and the Titans, like Lucifer’s hosts, were overthrown.* Zeus and his brothers cast lots to divide the world amongst them; Zeus won the sky, Poseidon the sea, Hades the bowels of the earth. There is no creation in this mythology: the world existed before the gods, and the gods do not make man out of the slime but beget him by union among themselves, or with their mortal offspring; God is literally the Father in the theology of the Greeks. Nor are the Olympians omnipotent or omniscient; each limits the other, or even opposes the other; any one of them, especially Zeus, can be deceived. Nevertheless they acknowledge his suzerainty, and crowd his court like the retainers of a feudal lord; and though he consults them on occasion, and now and then yields his preference to theirs,²³ he frequently puts them in their place.²⁴ He begins as a sky-and-mountain-god, provider of the indispensable rain.† Like Yahweh he is, among his earlier forms, a god of war; he debates with himself whether to end the siege of Troy or “make the war more bloody,” and decides for the latter course.²⁶ Gradually he becomes the calm and mighty ruler of gods and men, bestriding Olympus in bearded dignity. He is the head and source of the moral order of the world; he punishes filial neglect, guards family property, sanctions oaths, pursues perjurers, and protects boundaries, hearths, suppliants, and guests. At last he is the serene dispenser of judgment whom Pheidias carves for Olympia.

His one failing is the youthful readiness with which he falls in love. Not having created women, he admires them as wonderful beings, bearing even to the gods the inestimable gifts of beauty and tenderness; and he finds it beyond him to resist them. Hesiod draws up a long list of the divine amours and their glorious offspring.²⁷ His first mate is Dione, but he leaves her in Epirus when he moves to Thessalian Olympus. There his first wife is Metis, goddess of measure, mind, wisdom. Gossip says that her children will dethrone him; therefore he swallows her, absorbs her qualities, and becomes himself the god of wisdom. Metis is delivered of Athena within him, and his head has to be cut open that Athena may be born. Lonely for loveliness, he takes Themis for his mate, and begets by her the twelve Hours; then he takes Eurynome, and begets the three Graces; then Mnemosyne, and engenders the nine Muses; then Leto, and fathers Apollo and Artemis; then his sister Demeter, and has Persephone; finally, having sown his wild oats, he weds his sister Hera, makes her Queen of Olympus, and receives from her Hebe, Ares, Hephaestus, and Eileithyia. But he does not get along well with Hera. She is as old a god as he, and more honored in many states; she is the patron deity of matrimony and motherhood, protectress of the marriage tie; she is prim and grave and virtuous, and frowns upon his escapades; moreover, she is an excellent shrew. He thinks of beating her,²⁸ but finds it easier to console himself with new amours. His first mortal mate is Niobe; his last is Alcmena, who is descended from Niobe in the sixteenth generation.* He loves also, with Greek impartiality, the handsome Ganymede, and snatches him up to be his cupbearer on Olympus.

It was natural that so fertile a father should have some distinguished children. When Athena was, born in full development and armament from the head of Zeus she provided the literature of the world with one of its most hackneyed similes. She was an appropriate goddess for Athens, consoling its maids with her proud virginity, inspiring its men with martial ardor, and symbolizing for Pericles the wisdom that belonged to her as the daughter of Metis and Zeus. When Pallas the Titan tried to make love to her she slew him, and added his name to hers as a warning to other suitors. To her Athens dedicated its loveliest temple and its most splendid festival.

More widely worshiped than Athena was her comely brother Apollo, bright deity of the sun, patron of music, poetry, and art, founder of cities, maker of laws, god of healing and father of Asclepius, “far-darting” archer and god of war, successor to Gaea and Phoebe† at Delphi as the holiest oracle of Greece. As god of the growing crops he received tithe offerings at harvest time, and in return he radiated his golden warmth and light from Delos and Delphi to enrich the soil. Everywhere he was associated with order, measure, and beauty; and whereas in other cults there were strange elements of fear and superstition, in the worship of Apollo, and in his great festivals at Delphi and Delos, the dominant note was the rejoicing of a brilliant people in a god of health and wisdom, reason and song.

Happy, too, was his sister Artemis (Diana), maiden goddess of the chase, so absorbed in the ways of animals and the pleasures of the woods that she had no time for the love of men. She was the goddess of wild nature, of meadows, forests, hills, and the sacred bough. As Apollo was the ideal of Greek youth, so Artemis was the model of Greek girlhood—strong, athletic, graceful, chaste; and yet again she was the patroness of women in childbirth, who prayed to her to ease their pains. At Ephesus she kept her Asiatic character as a goddess of motherhood and fertility. In this way the ideas of virgin and mother became confused in her worship; and the Christian Church found it wise, in the fifth century of our era, to attach the remnants of this cult to Mary, and to transform the mid-August harvest festival of Artemis into the feast of the Assumption.²⁹ In such ways the old is preserved in the new, and everything changes except the essence. History, like life, must be continuous or die; character and institutions may be altered, but slowly; a serious interruption of their development throws them into national amnesia and insanity.

A thoroughly human figure in this pantheon was the master craftsman of Olympus, that lame Hephaestus whom the Romans knew as Vulcan. At first he seems a pitiful and ridiculous figure, this insulted and injured Quasimodo of the skies; but in the end our sympathies are with him rather than with the clever and unscrupulous gods who maltreat him. Perhaps in early days, before he became so human, he had been the leaping spirit of the fire and the forge. In the Homeric theogony he is the son of Zeus and Hera; but other myths assure us that Hera, jealous of Zeus’s unaided delivery of Athena, gave birth to Hephaestus without the aid of any male. Seeing him to be ugly and weak, she cast him down from Olympus. He found his way back, and built for the gods the many mansions in which they dwelt. Though his mother had dealt so cruelly with him, he showed her all kindness and respect, and defended her so zealously in one of her quarrels with Zeus that the great Olympian seized him by the leg and hurled him down to the earth. A whole day Hephaestus fell; at last he landed on the island of Lemnos, and hurt his ankle; certainly thereafter (before that, says Homer) he was painfully lame. Again he found his way back to Olympus. In his resounding workshops he built a mighty anvil with twenty huge bellows, made the shield and armor of Achilles, statues that moved of their own accord, and other very wonderful things. The Greeks worshiped him as the god of all metal trades, then of all handicrafts, and pictured the volcanoes as the chimneys of his subterranean forges. It was his misfortune that he married Aphrodite, for it is difficult for beauty to be virtuous. Learning of her affair with Ares, Hephaestus fashioned a trap that fell upon the lovers as they loved; and then the limping deity had his lame revenge by bringing his fellow gods to look in laughter upon the bound divinities of love and war. But to Hermes, Homer tells us, Apollo said:

“Hermes, son of Zeus . . . wouldst thou in sooth be willing, even though ensnared with strong bonds, to lie on a couch by the side of golden Aphrodite?” Then the messenger answered him: “Would that this might befall, Lord Apollo, that thrice as many bonds inextricable might clasp me about, and that ye gods—aye, and all the goddesses, too—might be looking on, but that I might sleep by the side of golden Aphrodite.”³⁰

Ares (Mars) was never distinguished for intelligence or subtlety; his business was war, and even the charms of Aphrodite could not give him the thrill that came to him from lusty and natural killing. Homer calls him “the curse of men,” and tells with pleasure how Athena laid him low with a stone; “he covered, as he lay, seven acres of the field.”³¹ Hermes (Mercury) is more interesting. In origin he is a stone, and from the cult of sacred stones his worship is derived; the stages of his evolution are still visible. Then he is the tall stone placed upon graves, or he is the daimon, or spirit, in this stone. Then he is the boundary stone or its god, marking and guarding a field; and because his function there is also to promote fertility, the phallus becomes one of his symbols. Then he is the herm or pillar—with carved head, uncarved body, and prominent male member—which was placed before all respectable houses in Athens;³² we shall see how the mutilation of these hermae on the eve of the expedition against Syracuse provided the proximate cause for the ruin of Alcibiades and Athens. Again he is the god of wayfarers and the protector of heralds; their characteristic staff, or caduceus, is one of his favorite insignia. As god of travelers he becomes a god of luck, trade, cunning, and gain, therefore an inventor and guarantor of measures and scales, a patron saint of perjurers, embezzlers, and thieves.³³ He is himself a herald, bearing the billets and decrees of Olympus from god to god or man, and he moves on winged sandals with the speed of an angry wind. His running-about gives him a lithe and graceful form, and prepares him for Praxiteles. As a swift and vigorous youth he is the patron saint of athletes, and his shamelessly virile image has a place in every palaestra.³⁴ As herald he is the god of eloquence; as celestial interpreter he is the first of a long hermeneutical line. One of the “Homeric” Hymns tells how, in his youth, he stretched strings across a tortoise shell, and so invented the lyre. Finally it comes his turn to appease Aphrodite; and their offspring, we are told,³⁵ is a delicate hermaphrodite, sharing their charms and named from their names.

It was characteristic of Greece that in addition to deities of chastity, virginity, and motherhood it should have a goddess of beauty and love. Doubtless in her Near-Eastern origins, and in Cyprus her half-Oriental home, Aphrodite was first of all a mother goddess; to the end of her tenure she remained associated with reproduction and fertility in the whole realm of plant, animal, and human life. But as civilization developed, and increasing security obviated the need for a high birth rate, the esthetic sense was left free to see other values in woman than those of multiplication, and to make Aphrodite not only the embodiment of the ideal of beauty, but the deity of all heterosexual pleasure. The Greeks worshiped her in many forms: as Aphrodite Urania, the Heavenly, the goddess of chaste or sacred love; as Aphrodite Pandemos, the Popular, the goddess of profane love in all its modes; and even as Aphrodite Kallipygos, the Venus of the Lovely Nates.³⁶ At Athens and Corinth the courtesans built temples to her as their patron saint. At the beginning of April various cities in Greece celebrated her great festival, the Aphrodisia; and on that occasion, for those who cared to take part, sexual freedom was the order of the day.³⁷ She was the love goddess of the sensual and passionate south, ancient rival of Artemis, the love goddess of the cold and hunting north. Mythology, almost as ironic as history, made her the wife of the crippled Hephaestus, but she consoled herself with Ares, Hermes, Poseidon, Dionysus, and many a mortal like Anchises and Adonis.* To her, in competition with Hera and Athena, Paris awarded the golden apple as the prize of beauty. But perhaps she was never really beautiful until Praxiteles reconceived her, and gave her the loveliness for which Greece could forgive all her sins.

To the legitimate or illegitimate children of Zeus we must add, as major Olympians, his sister Hestia, goddess of the hearth, and his unruly brother Poseidon. This Greek Neptune, secure in his watery realms, considered himself fully the equal of Zeus. Even landlocked nations worshiped him, for he commanded not only the sea but the rivers and the springs; it was he who guided the mysterious subterranean streams, and made earthquakes with tidal waves.³⁹ To him Greek mariners prayed, and raised appeasing temples on perilous promontories.

Subordinate deities were numerous even on Olympus, for there was no end to personifications. There was Hestia (the Roman Vesta), goddess of the hearth and its sacred fire. There was Iris, the rainbow, sometimes messenger for Zeus; Hebe, goddess of youth; Eileithyia, who helped women in childbirth; Dike or Justice; Tyche, Chance; and Eros, Love, whom Hesiod made the creator of the world, whom Sappho called “a limb-dissolving, bitter-sweet, impracticable wild beast.”⁴⁰ There was Hymeneus, the Marriage Song; Hypnos, Sleep; Oneiros, Dream; Geras, Old Age; Lethe, Oblivion; Thanatos, Death, and others beyond naming. There were nine Muses to inspire artists and poets: Clio for history, Euterpe for lyric poetry accompanied by the flute, Thalia for comic drama and idyllic poetry, Melpomene for tragedy, Terpsichore for choral dance and song, Erato for love verse and mimicry; Polymnia for hymns, Urania for astronomy, Calliope for epic poetry. There were three Graces, and their twelve attendants, the Hours. There was Nemesis, who meted out good and evil to men, and visited with disaster all who were guilty of hybris—insolence in prosperity. There were the terrible Erinnyes, the Furies who left no wrong unrevenged; the Greeks with deprecating euphemism called them Well-Wishers, Eumenides. And finally there were the Moirai, the Fates or Allotters who regulated inevitably the affairs of life, and ruled, some said, both gods and men. In that conception Greek religion found its limit, and flowed over into science and law.

We have left for the last the most troublesome, the most popular, the most difficult to classify, of all the Greek gods. Only late in his career was Dionysus received into Olympus. In Thrace, which gave him as a Greek gift to Greece, he was the god of liquor brewed from barley, and was known as Sabazius; in Greece he became a god of wine, the nourisher and guardian of the vine; he began as a goddess of fertility, became a god of intoxication, and ended as a son of god dying to save mankind. Many figures and legends were mingled to make his myth. The Greeks thought of him as Zagreus, “the horned child” borne to Zeus by his daughter Persephone. He was the best beloved of his father, and was seated beside him on the throne of heaven. When the jealous Hera incited the Titans to kill him, Zeus, to disguise him, changed him into a goat, then a bull; in this form, nevertheless, the Titans captured him, cut his body into pieces, and boiled them in a caldron. Athena, like another Trelawney, saved the heart, and carried it to Zeus; Zeus gave it to Semele, who, impregnated with it, gave to the god a second birth under the name of Dionysus.*

Mourning for Dionysus’ death, and joyful celebration of his resurrection, formed the basis of a ritual extremely widespread among the Greeks. In springtime, when the vine was bursting into blossom, Greek women went up into the hills to meet the reborn god. For two days they drank without restraint, and like our less religious bacchanalians, considered him witless who would not lose his wits. They marched in wild procession, led by Maenads, or mad women, devoted to Dionysus; they listened tensely to the story they knew so well, of the suffering, death, and resurrection of their god; and as they drank and danced they fell into a frenzy in which all bonds were loosed. The height and center of their ceremony was to seize upon a goat, a bull, sometimes a man (seeing in them incarnations of the god); to tear the live victim to pieces in commemoration of Dionysus’ dismemberment; then to drink the blood and eat the flesh in a sacred communion whereby, as they thought, the god would enter them and possess their souls. In that divine enthusiasm† they were convinced that they and the god became one in a mystic and triumphant union; they took his name, called themselves, after one of his titles, Bacchoi, and knew that now they would never die. Or they termed their state an ecstasis, a going out of their souls to meet and be one with Dionysus; thus they felt freed from the burden of the flesh, they acquired divine insight, they were able to prophesy, they were gods. Such was the passionate cult that came down from Thrace into Greece like a medieval epidemic of religion, dragging one region after another from the cold and clear Olympians of the state worship into a faith and ritual that satisfied the craving for excitement and release, the longing for enthusiasm and possession, mysticism and mystery. The priests of Delphi and the rulers of Athens tried to keep the cult at a distance, but failed; all they could do was to adopt Dionysus into Olympus, Hellenize and humanize him, give him an official festival, and turn the revelry of his worshipers from the mad ecstasy of wine among the hills into the stately processions, the robust songs, and the noble drama of the Great Dionysia. For a while they won Dionysus over to Apollo, but in the end Apollo yielded to Dionysus’ heir and conqueror, Christ.

III. MYSTERIES

There were essentially three elements and stages in Greek religion: chthonian, Olympian, and mystic. The first was probably of Pelasgo-Mycenaean origin, the second probably Achaeo-Dorian, the third Egypto-Asiatic. The first worshiped subterranean, the second celestial, the third resurrected, gods. The first was most popular among the poor, the second among the well to do, the third in the lower middle class. The first predominated before the Homeric age, the second in it, the third after it. By the time of the Periclean Enlightenment the most vigorous element in Greek religion was the mystery. In the Greek sense a mystery was a secret ceremony in which sacred symbols were revealed, symbolic rites were performed, and only initiates were the worshipers. Usually the rites represented or commemorated, in semidramatic form, the suffering, death, and resurrection of a god, pointed back to old vegetation themes and magic, and promised the initiate a personal immortality.

Many places in Greece celebrated such mystic rites, but no other place in this respect could rival Eleusis. The mysteries there were of pre-Achaean origin, and appear to have been originally an autumn festival of plowing and sowing.⁴³ A myth explained how Demeter, rewarding the people of Attica for their kindness to her in her wanderings, established at Eleusis her greatest temple, which was destroyed and rebuilt many times during the history of Greece. Under Solon, Peisistratus, and Pericles the festival of Demeter at Eleusis was adopted by Athens, and raised to higher elaboration and pomp. In the Lesser Mysteries, held near Athens in the spring, candidates for initiation underwent a preliminary purification by self-immersion in the waters of the Ilissus. In September the candidates and others walked in grave but happy pilgrimage for fourteen miles along the Sacred Way to Eleusis, bearing at their head the image of the chthonian deity Iacchus. The procession arrived at Eleusis under torchlight, and solemnly placed the image in the temple; after which the day was ended with sacred dances and songs.

The Greater Mysteries lasted four days more. Those who had been purified with bathing and fasting were now admitted to the lesser rites; those who had received such rites a year before were taken into the Hall of Initiation, where the secret ceremony was performed. The mystai, or initiates, broke their fast by participating in a holy communion in memory of Demeter, drinking a holy mixture of meal and water, and eating sacred cakes. What mystic ritual was then performed we do not know; the secret was well kept throughout antiquity, under penalty of death; even the pious Aeschylus narrowly escaped condemnation for certain lines that might have given the secret away. The ceremony was in any case a symbolic play, and had a part in generating the Dionysian drama. Very probably the theme was the rape of Persephone by Pluto, the sorrowful wandering of Demeter, the return of the Maiden to earth, and the revelation of agriculture to Attica. The summary of the ceremony was the mystic marriage of a priest representing Zeus with a priestess impersonating Demeter. These symbolic nuptials bore fruit with magic speed, for it was soon followed, we are told, by a solemn announcement that “Our Lady has borne a holy boy”; and a reaped ear of corn was exhibited as symbolizing the fruit of Demeter’s labor—the bounty of the fields. The worshipers were then led by dim torchlight into dark subterranean caverns symbolizing Hades, and, again, to an upper chamber brilliant with light, representing, it appears, the abode of the blessed; and they were now shown, in solemn exaltation, the holy objects, relics, or icons that till that moment had been concealed. In this ecstasy of revelation, we are assured, they felt the unity of God, and the oneness of God and the soul; they were lifted up out of the delusion of individuality, and knew the peace of absorption into deity.⁴⁴

In the age of Peisistratus the mysteries of Dionysus entered into the Eleusinian liturgy by a religious infection: the god Iacchus was identified with Dionysus as the son of Persephone, and the legend of Dionysus Zagreus was superimposed upon the myth of Demeter.⁴⁵ But through all forms the basic idea of the mysteries remained the same: as the seed is born again, so may the dead have renewed life; and not merely the dreary, shadowy existence of Hades, but a life of happiness and peace. When almost everything else in Greek religion had passed away, this consoling hope, reunited in Alexandria with that Egyptian belief in immortality from which the Greek had been derived, gave to Christianity the weapon with which to conquer the Western world.

In the seventh century there came into Hellas, from Egypt, Thrace, and Thessaly, another mystic cult, even more important in Greek history than the mysteries of Eleusis. At its source we find, in the age of the Argonauts, the obscure but fascinating figure of Orpheus, a Thracian who “in culture, music, and poetry,” says Diodorus, “far surpassed all men of whom we have a record.”⁴⁶ Very probably he existed, though all that we now know of him bears the marks of myth. He is pictured as a gentle spirit, tender, meditative, affectionate; sometimes a musician, sometimes a reforming ascetic priest of Dionysus. He played the lyre so well, and sang to it so melodiously, that those who heard him almost began to worship him as a god; wild animals became tame at his voice, and trees and rocks left their places to follow the sound of his harp. He married the fair Eurydice, and almost went mad when death took her. He plunged into Hades, charmed Persephone with his lyre, and was allowed to lead Eurydice up to life again on condition that he should not look back upon her until the surface of the earth was reached. At the last barrier anxiety overcame him lest she should no longer be following; he looked back, only to see her snatched down once more into the nether world. Thracian women, resenting his unwillingness to console himself with them, tore him to pieces in one of their Dionysian revels; Zeus atoned for them by placing the lyre of Orpheus as a constellation among the stars. The severed head, still singing, was buried at Lesbos in a cleft that became the site of a popular oracle; there, we are told, the nightingales sang with especial tenderness.⁴⁷

In later days it was claimed that he had left behind him many sacred songs; and perhaps it was so. At the behest of Hipparchus, says Greek tradition, a scholar named Onomacritus, about 520, edited these as the Homeric lays had been edited a generation before. In the sixth century, or earlier, these hymns had acquired a sacred character as divinely inspired, and formed the basis of a mystical cult related to that of Dionysus but far superior to it in doctrine, ritual, and moral influence. The creed was essentially an affirmation of the passion (suffering), death, and resurrection of the divine son Dionysus Zagreus, and the resurrection of all men into a future of reward and punishment. Since the Titans, who had slain Dionysus, were believed to have been the ancestors of man, a taint of original sin rested upon all humanity; and in punishment for this the soul was enclosed in the body as in a prison or a tomb. But man might console himself by knowing that the Titans had eaten Dionysus, and that therefore every man harbored, in his soul, a particle of indestructible divinity. In a mystic sacrament of communion the Orphic worshipers ate the raw flesh of a bull as a symbol of Dionysus to commemorate the slaying and eating of the god, and to absorb the divine essence anew.⁴⁸

After death, said Orphic theology, the soul goes down to Hades, and must face judgment by the gods of the underworld; the Orphic hymns and ritual, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, instructed the faithful in the art of preparing for this comprehensive and final examination. If the verdict was guilty there would be severe punishment. One form of the doctrine conceived this punishment as eternal,⁴⁹ and transmitted to later theology the notion of hell. Another form adopted the idea of transmigration: the soul was reborn again and again into lives happier or bitterer than before according to the purity or impurity of its former existence; and this wheel of rebirth would turn until complete purity was achieved, and the soul was admitted to the Islands of the Blest.⁵⁰ Another variant offered hope that the punishment in Hades might be ended through penances performed in advance by the individual, or, after his death, by his friends. In this way a doctrine of purgatory and indulgences arose; and Plato describes with almost the anger of a Luther the peddling of such indulgences in the Athens of the fourth century B.C.:

Mendicant prophets go to rich men’s doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them of making atonement for their sins or those of their fathers by sacrifices or charms. . . . And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus . . . according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals but whole cities that expiations and atonements may be made by sacrifices and amusements [ceremonies?] which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead. The latter [ceremonies] they call mysteries, and these redeem us from the Pains of Hell; but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.⁵¹

Nevertheless there were in Orphism idealistic trends that culminated in the morals and monasticism of Christianity. The reckless looseness of the Olympians was replaced by a strict code of conduct, and the mighty Zeus was slowly dethroned by the gentle figure of Orpheus, even as Yahweh was to be dethroned by Christ. A conception of sin and conscience, a dualistic view of the body as evil and of the soul as divine, entered into Greek thought; the subjugation of the flesh became a main purpose of religion, as a condition of the release for the soul. The brotherhood of Orphic initiates had no ecclesiastical organization and no separate life; but they were distinguished by the wearing of white garments, the avoidance of flesh food, and a degree of asceticism not usually associated with Hellenic ways. They represented, in several aspects, a Puritan Reformation in the history of Greece. Their rites encroached more and more upon the public worship of the Olympian gods.

The influence of the sect was extensive and enduring. Perhaps it was here that the Pythagoreans took their diet, their dress, and their theory of transmigration; it is worthy of note that the oldest Orphic documents now extant were found in southern Italy.⁵² Plato, though he rejected much in Orphism, accepted its opposition of body and soul, its puritan tendency, its hope of immortality. Part of the pantheism and asceticism of Stoicism may be traced to an Orphic origin. The Neo-Platonists of Alexandria possessed a large collection of Orphic writings, and based upon them much of their theology and their mysticism. The doctrines of hell, purgatory, and heaven, of the body versus the soul, of the divine son slain and reborn, as well as the sacramental eating of the body and blood and divinity of the god, directly or deviously influenced Christianity, which was itself a mystery religion of atonement and hope, of mystic union and release. The basic ideas and ritual of the Orphic cult are alive and flourishing amongst us today.

IV. WORSHIP

Greek ritual was as varied as the kinds of deities that it honored. The chthonian gods received a gloomy ritual of appeasement and riddance, the Olympians a joyful ritual of welcome and praise. Neither form of ceremony required a clergyman: the father acted as priest for the family, the chief magistrate for the state. Life in Greece was not as secular as it has been described; religion played a major part in it everywhere, and each government protected the official cult as vital to social order and political stability. But whereas in Egypt and the Near East the priesthood dominated the state, in Greece the state dominated the priesthood, took the leadership of religion, and reduced the clergy to minor functionaries in the temples. The property of the temples, in real estate, money, and slaves, was audited and administered by officials of the state.⁵³ There were no seminaries for the training of priests; anyone could be quietly chosen or appointed priest if he knew the rites of the god; and in many places the office was let out to the highest bidder.⁵⁴ There was no hierarchy of priestly caste; the priests of one temple or state had usually no association with those of another.⁵⁵ There was no church, no orthodoxy, no rigid creed; religion consisted not in professing certain beliefs, but in joining in the official ritual;⁵⁶ any man might have his own creed provided that he did not openly deny or blaspheme the city’s gods. In Greece church and state were one.

The place of worship could be the domestic hearth, the municipal hearth in the city hall, some cleft in the earth for a chthonian deity, some temple for an Olympian god. The precincts of the temple were sacred and inviolable; here the worshipers met, and here all pursued persons, even if tainted with serious crime, could find sanctuary. The temple was not for the congregation but for the god; there, in his home, his statue was erected, and a light burned before it which was not allowed to die. Often the people identified the god with the statue; they washed, dressed, and tended the image carefully, and sometimes scolded it for negligence; they told how, at various times, the statue had sweated, or wept, or closed its eyes.⁵⁷ In the temple records a history was kept of the festivals of the god, and of the major events in the life of the city or group that worshiped him; this was the source and first form of Greek historiography.

The ceremony consisted of procession, chants, sacrifice, prayer, and sometimes a sacred meal. Magic and masquerade, tableaux and dramatic representations might be part of the procession. In most cases the basic ritual was prescribed by custom, and every movement of it, every word of the hymns and prayers, was preserved in a book kept sacred by the family or the state; rarely was any syllable or action altered, or any rhythm; the god might not like or comprehend the novelty. The living speech changed, the ritual speech remained as before; in time the worshipers ceased to understand the words they used,⁵⁸ but the thrill of antiquity supplied the place of understanding. Often the ceremony outlasted even the memory of the cause that had prompted it; then new myths were invented to explain its establishment: the myth or creed might change, but not the ritual. Music was essential to the whole process, for without music religion would be difficult; music generates religion as much as religion generates music. Out of the temple and processional chants came poetry, and the meters that later adorned the robust profanity of Archilochus, the reckless passion of Sappho, and the scandalous delicacies of Anacreon.

Having reached the altar—usually in front of the temple—the worshipers sought with sacrifice and prayer to avert the wrath or win the aid of their god. As individuals they might offer almost anything of value—statues, reliefs, furniture, weapons, caldrons, tripods, garments, pottery; when the gods could make no use of such articles the priests could. Armies might offer part of their spoils, as Xenophon’s Ten Thousand did in their retreat.⁵⁹ Groups would offer the fruits of the field, the vines or the trees; more often an animal appetizing to the god; sometimes, on occasions of great need, a human being. Agamemnon offered Iphigenia for a wind; Achilles slaughtered twelve Trojan youths on the pyre of Patroclus;⁶⁰ human victims were hurled from the cliffs of Cyprus and Leucas to satiate Apollo; others were presented to Dionysus in Chios and Tenedos; Themistocles is said to have sacrificed Persian captives to Dionysus at the battle of Salamis;⁶¹ the Spartans celebrated the festival of Artemis Orthia by flogging youths, sometimes to death, at her altar;⁶² in Arcadia Zeus received human sacrifice till the second century A.D.;⁶³ at Massalia, in time of pestilence, one of the poorer citizens was fed at public expense, clad in holy garments, decorated with sacred boughs, and cast over a cliff to death with prayers that he might bear punishment for all the sins of his people.⁶⁴ In Athens it was the custom, in famine, plague, or other crisis, to offer to the gods, in ritual mimicry or in actual fact, one or more scapegoats for the purification of the city; and a similar rite, mimic or literal, was annually performed at the festival of the Thargelia.*⁶⁵ In the course of time human sacrifice was mitigated by restricting its victims to condemned criminals, and dulling their senses with wine; finally it was replaced by the sacrifice of an animal. When, on the night before the battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.), the Boeotian leader Pelopidas had a dream that seemed to demand a human sacrifice at the altar as the price of victory, some of his councilors advised it, but others protested against it, saying “that such a barbarous and impious obligation could not be pleasing to any Supreme Beings; that typhons and giants did not preside over the world, but the general father of gods and mortals; that it was absurd to imagine any divinities and powers delighting in slaughter and sacrifice of men.”⁶⁸

Animal sacrifice, then, was a major step in the development of civilization. The beasts who bore the brunt of this advance in Greece were the bull, the sheep, and the pig. Before any battle the rival armies sent up sacrifices in proportion to their desired victory; before any assembly in Athens the meeting place was purified by the sacrifice of a pig. The piety of the people, however, broke down at the crucial point: only the bones and a little flesh, wrapped in fat, went to the god; the rest was kept for the priests and the worshipers. To excuse themselves the Greeks told how, in the days of the giants, Prometheus had wrapped the edible portions of the sacrificial animal in skin, and the bones in fat, and had asked Zeus to choose which he preferred. Zeus had “with both hands” chosen the fat. It was true that Zeus was enraged upon finding that he had been deceived; but he had made his choice, and must abide by it forever.⁶⁹ Only in sacrifice to the chthonian gods was everything surrendered to the deity, and the entire animal burnt to ashes in a holocaust; the divinities of the lower world were more feared than those of Olympus. No common meal followed a chthonic sacrifice, for that might tempt the god to come and join the feast. But after sacrifice to the Olympians the worshipers, not in awed atonement to the god but in joyous communion with him, consumed the consecrated victim; the magic formulas pronounced over it had, they hoped, imbued it with the life and power of the god, which would now pass mystically into his communicants. In like manner wine was poured upon the sacrifice, and then into the cups of the worshipers, who drank, so to speak, with the gods.⁷⁰ In the thiasoi, or fraternities, into which so many trade and social groups in Athens were organized, this idea of divine communion in a common religious meal formed the binding tie.⁷¹

Animal sacrifice continued throughout Greece until ended by Christianity,⁷² which wisely substituted for it the spiritual and symbolical sacrifice of the Mass. In some measure prayer too became a substitute for sacrifice; it was a clever amendment that commuted offerings of blood into litanies of praise. In this gentler way man, subject to chance and tragedy at every step, consoled and strengthened himself by calling to his aid the mysterious powers of the world.

V. SUPERSTITIONS

Between these upper and nether poles of Greek religion, the Olympian and the subterranean, surged an ocean of magic, superstition, and sorcery; behind and below the geniuses whom we shall celebrate were masses of people poor and simple, to whom religion was a mesh of fears rather than a ladder of hope. It was not merely that the average Greek accepted miracle stories—of Theseus rising from the dead to fight at Marathon, or of Dionysus changing water into wine:⁷³ such stories appear among every people, and are part of the forgivable poetry with which imagination brightens the common life. One could even pass over the anxiety of Athens to secure the bones of Theseus, and of Sparta to bring back from Tegea the bones of Orestes;⁷⁴ the miraculous power officially attributed to these relics may well have been part of the technique of rule. What oppressed the pious Greek was the cloud of spirits that surrounded him, ready and able, he believed, to spy upon him, interfere with him, and do him evil. These demons were always seeking to enter into him; he had to be on his guard against them at all times, and to perform magical ceremonies to disperse them.

This superstition verged on science, and in some measure forecast our germ theory of disease. All sickness, to the Greek, meant possession by an alien spirit; to touch a sick person was to contract his uncleanliness or “possession”; our bacilli and bacteria are the currently fashionable forms of what the Greeks called keres or little demons.⁷⁵ So a dead person was “unclean”; the keres had gotten him once for all. When the Greek left a house where a corpse lay, he sprinkled himself with water, from a vessel placed for such purposes at the door, to drive away from himself the spirit that had conquered the dead man.⁷⁶ This conception was extended to many realms where even our bacteriophobia would hardly apply it. Sexual intercourse rendered a person unclean; so did birth, childbirth, and homicide (even if unintentional). Madness was possession by an alien spirit; the madman was “beside himself.” In all these cases a ceremony of purification was considered necessary. Periodically homes, temples, camps, even whole cities were purified, and very much as we disinfect them—by water, smoke, or fire.⁷⁷ A bowl of clean water stood at the entrance to every temple, so that those who came to worship might cleanse themselves,⁷⁸ perhaps by a suggestive symbolism. The priest was an expert in purification; he could exorcise spirits by striking bronze vessels, by incantations, magic, and prayer; even the intentional homicide might, by adequate ritual, be purified.⁷⁹ Repentance was not indispensable in such cases; all that was needed was to get rid of the evil possessive demons; religion was not so much a matter of morals as a technique of manipulating spirits. Nevertheless the multiplication of taboos and purificatory rites produced in the religious Greek a state of mind surprisingly akin to the Puritan sense of sin. The notion that the Greeks were immune to the ideas of conscience and sin will hardly survive a reading of Pindar and Aeschylus.

Out of this belief in an enveloping atmosphere of spirits came a thousand superstitions, which Theophrastus, successor to Aristotle, summarized in one of his Characters:

Superstitiousness would seem to be a sort of cowardice with respect to the divine. . . . Your Superstitious Man will not sally forth for the day till he have washed his hands and sprinkled himself at the Nine Springs, and put a bit of bay-leaf from a temple in his mouth. And if a cat cross his path he will not proceed on his way till some one else be gone by, or he have cast three stones across the street. Should he espy a snake in his house, if it be one of the red sort he will call upon Dionysus; if it be a sacred snake he will build a shrine then and there. When he passes one of the smooth stones set up at crossroads he anoints it with oil from his flask, and will not go his ways till he have knelt down and worshiped it. If a mouse gnaw a bag of his meal, he will off to the wizard and ask what he must do; and if the advice be, “Send the bag to the cobblers to be patched,” he neglects the advice and frees himself of the ill by rites of aversion. . . . If he catches sight of a madman or an epileptic, he shudders and spits into his bosom.⁸⁰

The simpler Greeks believed, or taught their children to believe, in a great variety of bogies. Whole cities were disturbed, at short intervals, by “portents” or strange occurrences, like deformed births of animals or men.⁸¹ The belief in unlucky days was so widespread that on such days no marriage might take place, no assembly might be held, no courts might meet, no enterprise might begin. A sneeze, a stumble, might be reason for abandoning a trip or an undertaking; a minor eclipse could stop or turn back armies, and bring great wars to a disastrous end. Again, there were persons gifted with the power of effective cursing: an angered parent, a neglected beggar might lay upon one a curse that would ruin one’s life. Some persons possessed magic arts; they could mix love philters or aphrodisiacs, and could by secret drugs reduce a man to impotence or a woman to sterility.⁸² Plato did not consider his Laws complete without an enactment against those who injure or slay by magic arts.⁸³ Witches are not medieval inventions; note Euripides’ Medea, and Theocritus’ Simaetha. Superstition is one of the most stable of social phenomena; it remains almost unchanged through centuries and civilizations, not only in its bases but even in its formulas.

VI. ORACLES

In a world so crowded with supernatural powers, the events of life seemed to depend upon the will of demons and gods. To discover that will the curious Greeks consulted soothsayers and oracles, who divined the future by reading the stars, interpreting dreams, examining the entrails of animals, or observing the flight of birds. Professional soothsayers hired themselves out to families, armies, and states;⁸⁴ Nicias, before setting out upon the expedition to Sicily, engaged a troop of sacrificers, augurs, diviners;⁸⁵ and though not all generals were as pious as this great slaveowner, nearly all were as superstitious. Men and women appeared who claimed inspiration and clairvoyance; in Ionia particularly certain women called Sibyls (i.e., the Will of God) issued oracles believed by millions of Greeks.⁸⁶ From Erythrae the Sibyl Herophila was said to have wandered through Greece to Cumae in Italy, where she became the most famous of her kind, and lived, we are told, a thousand years. Athens, like Rome, had a collection of ancient oracles, and the government maintained in the prytaneum men skilled in their interpretation.⁸⁷

Public oracles were set up at many temples in all parts of Greece; but the most famous and honored were in early days the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, and in the historical period that of Apollo at Delphi. “Barbarians” as well as Greeks consulted this oracle; even Rome sent messengers to ask or suggest the will of the god. Since the power of divination was supposed to belong particularly to the intuitive sex, three priestesses, each at least half a century old, were trained to consult Apollo through the medium of a trance. From a hollow in the earth below the temple came a peculiar gas, ascribed to the eternal decomposition of the python that Apollo had slain there; the officiating priestess, called Pythia, took her seat on a high tripod over this cleft, inhaled the divine stench, chewed narcotic laurel leaves, fell into delirium and convulsions, and, thus inspired, uttered incoherent words which the priests translated to the people. Very often the final reply admitted of diverse, even contrary, interpretations, so that the infallibility of the oracle was maintained whatever the event.⁸⁸ Possibly the priests were no less puppets than the priestesses; sometimes they accepted bribes;⁸⁹ and in most cases the voice of the oracle harmonized melodiously with the dominant influence in Greece.⁹⁰ Nevertheless, where external powers did not constrain them, the priests taught valuable lessons of moderation and political wisdom to the Greeks. Though they condoned human sacrifice even after the moral sense of Greece had begun to revolt against it, and made no protest against the immoralities of Olympus, they aided the establishment of law, encouraged the manumission of slaves, and bought many slaves in order to give them liberty.⁹¹ They were not in advance of Greek thought, but they did not hinder it by doctrinal intolerance. They gave a helpful supernatural sanction to necessary Greek policies, and provided some degree of international conscience and moral unity for the scattered cities of Greece.

Out of this unifying influence came the oldest known confederation of Greek states. The Amphictyonic League was originally the religious alliance of the peoples “dwelling around” the sanctuary of Demeter near Thermopylae. The chief constituent states were Thessaly, Magnesia, Phthiotis, Doris, Phocis, Boeotia, Euboea, and Achaea. They met semiannually, in spring at Delphi, in autumn at Thermopylae. They bound themselves never to destroy one another’s cities, never to allow the water supply of any member city to be shut off, never to plunder—or permit to be plundered—the treasury of Apollo at Delphi, and to attack any nation that violated these pledges. Here was the outline of a League of Nations; an outline whose completion was prevented by the natural fluctuations of wealth and power among states, and the inherent rivalries of men and groups. Thessaly formed a bloc of vassal states, and permanently dominated the League.⁹² Other amphictyonies were established; Athens, for example, belonged to the Amphictyony of Calauria; and the rival leagues, while promoting peace within their membership, became against other groups vast instruments of intrigue and war.

VII. FESTIVALS

If it could not end war Greek religion succeeded in alleviating the routine of economic life with numerous festivals. “How many victims offered to the gods!” cried Aristophanes; “how many temples, statues . . . sacred processions! At every moment of the year we see religious feasts and garlanded victims” of sacrifice.⁹³ The rich paid the cost, the state provided the theorika, or divine funds, to pay to the populace the price of admission to the games or plays that distinguished the holyday.

The calendar at Athens was essentially a religious calendar, and many months were named from their religious festivals. In the first month, Hecatombaion (July-August), came the Cronia (corresponding to the Roman Saturnalia), when masters and slaves sat down together to a joyful feast; in the same month, every fourth year, occurred the Panathenaea, when, after four days of varied contests and games, the entire citizenship formed a solemn and colorful procession to carry to the priestess of Athena the sacred peplos, a gorgeously embroidered robe which was to be placed upon the image of the city’s goddess; this, as all the world knows, was the theme that Pheidias chose for the frieze of the Parthenon. In the second month, Metageitnion, came the Metageitnia, a minor festival in honor of Apollo. In the third month, Boedromion, Athens sallied forth to Eleusis for the Greater Mysteries. The fourth month, Pyanepsion, celebrated the Pyanepsia, the Oscophoria, and the Thesmophoria; in this the women of Athens honored Demeter Thesmophoros (the Lawgiver) with a strange chthonian ritual, parading phallic emblems, exchanging obscenities, and symbolically going down to Hades and returning, apparently as magical ceremonies to promote fertility in the soil and man.⁹⁴ Only the month of Maimakterion had no festival.

In the month of Poseideon Athens held the Italoa, a feast of first fruits; in Gamelion the Lenaea, in honor of Dionysus. In Anthesterion came three important celebrations: the Lesser or preparatory Mysteries; the Diasia, or sacrifice to Zeus Meilichios; and, above all, the Anthesteria, or Feast of Flowers. In this three-day spring festival to Dionysus wine flowed freely, and everybody was more or less drunk;⁹⁵ there was a competition in wine drinking, and the streets were alive with revelry. The king-archon’s wife rode on a car beside the image of Dionysus, and was married to it in the temple as a symbol of the union of the god with Athens. Beneath this jolly ritual ran a somber undertone of fear and propitiation of the dead; the living ate a solemn meal in commemoration of their ancestors, and left for them pots full of food and drink. At the end of the feast the people chased the spirits of the departed from the house with a formula of exorcism: “Out of the door with you, souls! Anthesteria is over”—words that became a proverbial phrase for dismissing importunate beggars.*

In the ninth month, Elaphebolion, came the Great Dionysia, established by Peisistratus in 534; in that year Thespis inaugurated the drama at Athens as part of the festival. It was the end of March, spring was in the air, the sea was navigable, merchants and visitors crowded the city and swelled the attendance at the ceremonies and the plays. All business was suspended, all courts were closed; prisoners were released to let them share in the festivities. Athenians of every age and class, brilliantly attired, took part in the procession that brought the statue of Dionysus from Eleutherae and placed it in his theater. The rich drove chariots, the poor marched on foot; a long train of animals followed as destined gifts for the gods. Choruses from the towns of Attica joined or competed in song and dance.—In the tenth month, Munychion, Athens celebrated the Munychia, and Attica, every fifth year, celebrated the Brauronia in honor of Artemis. In Thargelion occurred the Thargelia, or feast of the grain harvest. In the twelfth month, Skirophorion, came the festivals of Skirophoria, Arretophoria, Dipolia, and Bouphonia. Not all these feasts were annual; but even for a four-year period they represented a grateful relief from daily toil.

Other states had similar holidays; and in the countryside every sowing and every harvest was greeted with festal conviviality. Greater than all these were the Panhellenic festivals, the panegyreis, or universal gatherings. There were the Panionia on Mycale, the feast of Apollo at Delos, the Pythian festival at Delphi, the Isthmian at Corinth, the Nemean near Argos, the Olympic in Elis. These were the occasions of interstate games, but basically they were holydays. It was the good fortune of Greece to have a religion human enough—in later days humane enough—to associate itself joyfully and creatively with art, poetry, music, and games, even, at last, with morality.

VIII. RELIGION AND MORALS

At first sight Greek religion does not seem to have been a major influence for morality. It was in origin a system of magic rather than of ethics, and remained so, in large measure, to the end; correct ritual received more emphasis than good conduct, and the gods themselves, on Olympus or on earth, had not been exemplars of honesty, chastity, or gentleness. Even the Eleusinian Mysteries, though they offered supernatural hopes, made salvation depend upon ritual purifications rather than upon nobility of life. “Pataikion the thief,” said the sarcastic Diogenes, “will have a better fate after his death than Agesilaus or Epaminondas, for Pataikion has been initiated at Eleusis.”⁹⁷

Nevertheless, in the more vital moral relations Greek religion came subtly to the aid of the race and the state. The purification ritual, however external in form, served as a stimulating symbol of moral hygiene. The gods gave a general, if vague and inconstant, support to virtue; they frowned upon wickedness, revenged themselves upon pride, protected the stranger and the suppliant, and lent their terror to the sanctity of oaths. Dike, we are told, punished every wrong, and the awful Eumenides pursued the murderer, like Orestes, to madness or death. The central acts and institutions of human life—birth, marriage, the family, the clan, the statereceived a sacramental dignity from religion, and were rescued from the chaos of hasty desire. Through the worship or honoring of the dead, the generations were bound together in a stabilizing continuity of obligations, so that the family was not merely a couple and their children, or even a patriarchal assemblage of parents, children, and grandchildren, but a holy union and sequence of blood and fire stretching far into the past and the future, and holding the dead, the living, and the unborn in a sacred unity stronger than any state. Religion not only made the procreation of children a solemn duty to the dead, but encouraged it through the fear of the childless man that no posterity would inter him or tend his grave. So long as this religion kept its influence, the Greek people reproduced themselves vigorously, and as plentifully among the best as among the worst; and in this way, with the help of a merciless natural selection, the strength and quality of the race were maintained. Religion and patriotism were bound together in a thousand impressive rites; the god or goddess most revered in public ceremony represented the apotheosis of the city; every law, every meeting of the assembly or the courts, every major enterprise of the army or the government, every school and university, every economic or political association, was surrounded with religious ceremony and invocation. In all these ways Greek religion was used as a defense by the community and the race against the natural egoism of the individual man.

Art, literature, and philosophy first strengthened this influence, and then weakened it. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles poured their own ethical fervor or insight into the Olympian creed, and Pheidias ennobled the gods with beauty and majesty; Pythagoras and Plato associated philosophy with religion, and supported the doctrine of immortality as a stimulus to morals. But Protagoras doubted, Socrates ignored, Democritus denied, Euripides ridiculed the gods; and in the end Greek philosophy, hardly willing it, destroyed the religion that had molded the moral life of Greece.

CHAPTER IX

The Common Culture of Early Greece

I. THE INDIVIDUALISM OF THE STATE

THE two rival zeniths of European culture—ancient Hellas and Renaissance Italy—rested upon no larger political organization than the citystate. Geographical conditions presumably contributed to this result in Greece. Everywhere mountains or water intervened; bridges were rare and roads were poor; and though the sea was an open highway, it bound the city with its commercial associates rather than with its geographical neighbors. But geography does not altogether explain the city-state. There was as much separatism between Thebes and Plataea, on the same Boeotian plain, as between Thebes and Sparta; more between Sybaris and Crotona on the same Italian shore than between Sybaris and Syracuse. Diversity of economic and political interest kept the cities apart; they fought one another for distant markets or grain, or formed rival alliances for control of the sea. Distinctions of origin helped to divide them; the Greeks considered themselves to be all of one race,¹ but their tribal divisions—Aeolian, Ionian, Achaean, Dorian—were keenly felt, and Athens and Sparta disliked each other with an ethnological virulence worthy of our own age. Differences of religion strengthened, as they were strengthened by, political divisions. Out of the unique cults of locality and clan came distinct festivals and calendars, distinct customs and laws, distinct tribunals, even distinct frontiers; for the boundary stones limited the realm of the god as well as of the community; cujus regio, ejus religio. These and many other factors united to produce the Greek city-state.

It was not a new administrative form: we have seen that there were citystates in Sumeria, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Crete hundreds or thousands of years before Homer or Pericles. Historically the city-state was the village community in a higher stage of fusion or development—a common market, meeting ground, and judgment seat for men tilling the same hinterland, belonging to the same stock, and worshiping the same god. Politically it was to the Greek the best available compromise between those two hostile and fluctuating components of human society—order and liberty; a smaller community would have been insecure, a larger one tyrannical. Ideally—in the aspirations of philosophers—Greece was to consist of sovereign city-states co-operating in a Pythagorean harmony. Aristotle conceived the state as an association of freemen acknowledging one government and capable of meeting in one assembly; a state with more than ten thousand citizens, he thought, would be impracticable. In the Greek language one word—polis—sufficed for both city and state.

All the world knows that this political atomism brought to Hellas many a tragedy of fraternal strife. Because Ionia was unable to unite for defense it fell subject to Persia; because Greece, despite confederacies and leagues, was unable to stand together, the freedom which it idolized was in the end destroyed. And yet Greece would have been impossible without the city-state. Only through this sense of civic individuality, this exuberant assertion of independence, this diversity of institutions, customs, arts, and gods, was Greece stimulated, by competition and emulation, to live human life with a zest and fullness and creative originality that no other society had ever known. Even in our own times, with all our vitality and variety, our mechanisms and powers, is there any community of like population or extent that pours into the stream of civilization such a profusion of gifts as flowed from the chaotic liberty of the Greeks?

II. LETTERS

Nevertheless there were common factors in the life of these watchfully separatist states. As far back as the thirteenth century B.C. we find one language throughout the Greek peninsula. It belonged to the “Indo-European” group, like Persian and Sanskrit, Slavonic and Latin, German and English; thousands of words denoting the primary relations or objects of life have common roots in these tongues, and suggest not only the predispersion antiquity of the things denoted, but the kinship or association of the peoples who used them in the dawn of history.* It is true that the Greek language was diversified into dialects—Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, Attic; but these were mutually intelligible, and yielded, in the fifth and fourth centuries, to a koine dialektos, or common dialect, which emanated principally from Athens, and was spoken by nearly all the educated classes of the Hellenic world. Attic Greek was a noble tongue, vigorous, supple, melodious; as irregular as any vital speech, but lending itself readily to expressive combinations, delicate gradations and distinctions of meaning, subtle philosophical conceptions, and every variety of literary excellence from the “many-billowed surge” of Homer’s verse to the placid flow of Plato’s prose.*

Greek tradition attributed the introduction of writing into Greece to Phoenicians in the fourteenth century B.C., and we know nothing to the contrary. The oldest Greek inscriptions, dating from the eighth and seventh centuries, show a close resemblance to the Semitic characters on the ninth-century Moabite stone.³ These inscriptions were written, in Semitic fashion, from right to left; sixth-century inscriptions (e.g., at Gortyna) were made alternately from right to left and from left to right; later inscriptions are from left to right throughout, and certain letters are turned around accordingly, as and to B and E. The Semitic names for the letters were adopted with minor modifications;† but the Greeks made several basic changes. Above all, they added vowels, which the Semites had omitted; certain Semitic characters denoting consonants or breathings were used to represent a, e, i, o, and ü. Later the Ionians added the long vowels eta (long e) and o-mega (long or double o). Ten different Greek alphabets struggled for ascendancy as part of the war of the city-states; in Greece the Ionian form prevailed, and was transmitted to eastern Europe, where it survives today; in Rome the Chalcidian form was adopted from Cumae to become the Latin alphabet, and ours. The Chalcidic alphabet lacked the long e and o, but, unlike the Ionian, retained the Phoenician vau as a consonant (a v with approximately the sound of w); hence the Athenians called wine oinos, the Chalcidians called it voinos, the Romans called it vinum, we call it wine. Chalcis kept the Semitic koppa or q, and passed it on to Rome and ourselves; Ionia abandoned it, content with k. Ionia represented L as A, Chalcis as L; Rome straightened up the latter form and gave it to Europe. The Ionians used P for R, but in Greek Italy the P sprouted a tail, and became R.⁴

The earliest uses of writing in Greece were probably commercial or religious; apparently priestly charms and chants are the mother of poetry, and bills of lading are the father of prose. Writing split into two varieties: the formal for literary or epigraphic purposes, the cursive for ordinary use. There were no accents, no spaces between words, no punctuation points;⁵ but a change of topic was marked off by a horizontal dividing stroke called the paragraphos—i.e., a sign “written on the side.” The materials used to receive writing were various: at first, if we may believe Pliny, leaves or the bark of trees;⁶ for inscriptions, stone, bronze, or lead; for ordinary writing, clay tablets as in Mesopotamia;* then wooden tablets covered with wax, which were popular, in retrospect, with schoolboys;⁷ for more permanent purposes papyrus, which the Phoenicians brought from Egypt, and (in the Hellenistic and Roman periods) parchment, made from the skins or membranes of goats or sheep. A metal stylus was used on wax tablets; on papyrus or parchment a reed dipped in ink. Wax writing was erased with the flat butt of the stylus, ink with a sponge; so the poet Martial sent a sponge with his poems to his friend, so that they might be wiped out with a stroke.⁸ Many a critic will mourn the passing of this courtesy.

In no field have the old words so regularly come down to us as in that of writing. Paper, of course, is papyrus, and once again, in the cycle of fashion, the substance is a compressed plant. A line of writing was a stichos or row; the Latins called it a versus or verse—i.e., a turning back. The text was written in columns upon a strip of papyrus or parchment from twenty to thirty feet long, wound about a stick. Such a roll was called a biblos, from the Phoenician city, so named, whence papyrus came to Greece. A smaller roll was called biblion; our Bible was originally ta biblia, the rolls.† When a roll formed part of a larger work it was called a tomos, or cutting. The first sheet of a roll was called the protokollon—i.e., the first sheet glued to the stick. The edges‡ of the roll were smoothed with pumice and sometimes colored; if the author could afford the expense, or the roll contained important matter, it might be wrapped in a diphthera (membrane), or, as the Latins called it, a vellum. Since a large roll would be inconvenient for handling or reference, literary works were usually divided into several rolls, and the word biblos, or book, was applied not to each work as a whole, but to each roll or part. These divisions were seldom made by the author; later editors divided the Histories of Herodotus into nine books, the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides into eight, Plato’s Republic into ten, the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four. Since papyrus was costly, and each copy had to be written by hand, books were very limited in the classic world; it was easier than now to be educated, though as hard as now to be intelligent. Reading was not a universal accomplishment; most knowledge was handed down by oral tradition from one generation or craftsman to the next; most literature was read aloud by trained reciters to persons who learned through the ear.§ There was no reading public in Greece before the seventh century; there were no Greek libraries till those collected by Polycrates and Peisistratus in the sixth.⁹ In the fifth century we hear of the private libraries of Euripides and the archon Eucleides; in the fourth, of Aristotle’s. We know of no public library before Alexandria’s, none in Athens till Hadrian.¹⁰ Perhaps the Greeks of Pericles’ day were so great because they did not have to read many books, or any long one.

III. LITERATURE

Literature, like religion, divided and united Greece. The poets sang in their local dialects, and often of their native scenes; but all Hellas listened to the more eloquent voices, and stirred them now and then to broader themes. Time and prejudice have destroyed too much of this early poetry to let us feel its wealth and scope, its reputed vigor of utterance and finish of form; but as we move through the isles or cities of sixth-century Greece our wonder rises at the abundance and excellence of Greek literature before the Periclean age. The lyric poetry reflected an aristocratic society in which feeling, thought, and morals were free so long as they observed the amenities of breeding; this style of urbane and polished verse tended to disappear under the democracy. It had a rich variety of structure and meter, but seldom shackled itself with rhyme; poetry meant to the Greeks, feeling imaginatively and rhythmically expressed.*

While the lyric singers tuned their lyres to love and war, the wandering bards, in great men’s halls, recited in epic measures the heroic deeds of the race. Guilds of “rhapsodes”† built up through generations a cycle of lays centering around the sieges of Thebes and Troy and the homing of the warriors. Song was socialized among these minstrels; each stitched his story together from earlier fragments, and none pretended to have composed a whole sequence of these tales. In Chios a clan of such rhapsodes called themselves Homeridae, and claimed descent from a poet Homer who, they said, was the author of the epics that they recited throughout eastern Greece.¹¹ Perhaps this blind bard was but an eponym, the imaginary ancestor of a tribe or group, like Hellen, Dorus, or Ion.¹² The Greeks of the sixth century attributed to Homer not only the Iliad and the Odyssey but all the other epics then existing. The Homeric poems are the oldest epics known to us; but their very excellence, as well as their many references to earlier bards, suggest that the surviving epics stand at the end of a long line of development from simple lays to lengthy “stitched” songs. In sixth-century Athens—possibly under Solon,¹³ probably under Peisistratus—a governmental commission selected or collated the Iliad and the Odyssey from the epic literature of the preceding centuries, assigned them to Homer, and edited—perhaps wove—them into substantially their present shape.¹⁴

It is one of the miracles of literature that poems so complex in origin achieved in the end so artistic a result. It is quite true that both in language and in structure the Iliad falls considerably this side of perfection: that Aeolian and Ionic forms are mingled as if by some polyglot Smyrnan, and that the meter requires now one dialect and now the other; that the plot is marred by inconsistencies, changes of plan and emphasis, and contradictions of character; that the same heroes are killed two or three times over in the course of the tale; that the original theme—the wrath of Achilles and its results—is interrupted and obscured by a hundred episodes apparently taken from other lays and sewn into the epic at every seam. Nevertheless, in its larger aspects the story is one, the language is powerful and vivid, the poem is all in all “the greatest that ever sounded on the lips of men.”¹⁵ Such an epic could have been begun only in the active and exuberant youth of the Greeks, and could have been completed only in their artistic maturity. Its characters are nearly all warriors or their women; even the philosophers, like Nestor, put up an enviably good fight. These individuals are intimately and sympathetically conceived; and perhaps the finest thing in all Greek literature is the unbiased manner in which we are made to feel now with Hector and now with Achilles. In his tent Achilles is a thoroughly unheroic and unlikable figure, complaining to his mother that his luck does not befit his semidivinity, and that Agamemnon has stolen his plum, the unhappy Briseis; letting the Greeks die by the thousands while he eats and pouts and sleeps in his ship or his tent; sending Patroclus unaided to death, and then rending the air with unmanly lamentations. When finally he goes into battle he is not stirred by patriotism but mad with grief over the loss of his friend. In his rage he loses all decency, and sinks to savage cruelty with both Lycaon and Hector. In truth he is an undeveloped mind, unsettled and uncontrolled, and overshadowed with prophecies of death. “Nay, friend,” he says to the fallen Lycaon, who sues for mercy, “die like another! What wouldst thou vainly weeping? Patroclus died, who was far better than thou. Look upon me! Am I not beautiful and tall, and sprung of a good father, and a goddess the mother that bare me? Yet, lo, Death is over me, and the mighty hand of Doom. There cometh a dawn of day, a noon or an evening, and a hand that I know not shall lay me dead.”¹⁶ So he stabs the unresisting Lycaon through the neck, flings the body into the river, and makes one of those grandiose speeches that adorn the slaughter in the Iliad, and laid the foundation for oratory among the Greeks. Half of Hellas worshiped Achilles for centuries as a god;¹⁷ we accept him, and forgive him, as a child. At the worst he is one of the supreme creations of the poetic mind.

What carries us along through the Iliad when we do not have to study or translate it is not merely these characterizations, so numerous and diverse, nor merely the flow and turmoil of the tale, but the rushing splendor of the verse. It must be admitted that Homer repeats as well as nods; it is part of his plan to recall as in refrain certain epithetis and lines; so he sings with fond repetition, of Emos d’erigeneia phane rhododactylos Eos—“when appeared the morning’s daughter, rosy-fingered Dawn.”¹⁸ But if these are flaws they are lost in the brilliance of the language, and the wealth of similes that now and then, amid the shock of war, calm us with the quiet beauty of peaceful fields. “As when flies in swarming myriads haunt the herdsman’s stalls in spring time, when new milk has filled the pails—in such vast multitudes mustered the long-haired Greeks upon the plain.”¹⁹ Or

As when, among

The deep dells of an arid mountain-side,

A great fire burns its way, and the thick wood

Before it is consumed, and shifting winds

Hither and thither sweep the flames—so ranged

Achilles in his fury through the field

From side to side, and everywhere o’ertook

His victims, and the earth ran dark with blood.²⁰

The Odyssey is so different from all this that from the outset one suspects its separate authorship. Even some of the Alexandrian scholars suggested this, and all the critical authority of Aristarchus was required to hush the dispute.²¹ The Odyssey agrees with the Iliad in certain standard phrases—“owl-eyed Athena,” “long-haired Greeks,” “wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered Dawn”—which may have been taken from the same hoard and poetical tradition into which the authors of the Iliad had dipped their pens. But the Odyssey contains an array of words apparently brought into use after the Iliad was composed.²² In the second epic we hear frequently of iron, where the earlier one spoke of bronze; we hear of writing, of private property in land, of freedmen and emancipation—none of which are mentioned in the Iliad; the very gods and their functions are different.²³ The meter is the same dactylic hexameter, as in all the Greek epics; but the style and spirit and substance are so far from the Iliad that if one author wrote both poems he was a paragon of complexity and a master of all moods. The new poet is more literary and philosophical, less violent and warlike, than the old; more self-conscious and meditative, leisurely and civilized; so gentle, indeed, that Bentley thought the Odyssey had been composed for the special benefit of women.²⁴

Whether here too we have poets rather than a poet is harder to say than in the case of the Iliad. There are signs of suture, but the stitching seems more skillful than in the older epic; the plot, though devious, turns out in the end to be remarkably consistent, worthy almost of contemporary fictioneers. From the beginning the conclusion is foreshadowed, every episode advances it, and its coming binds all the books into a whole. Probably the epic was built upon pre-existing lays, as in the case of the Iliad; but the work of unification is far more complete. We may conclude with a high degree of diffidence that the Odyssey is a century younger than the Iliad, and is predominantly the work of one man.

The characters are less vigorously and vividly conceived than in the Iliad. Penelope is shadowy, and never quite emerges from behind her loom except in the end, when a moment of doubt, perhaps of regret, flits through her mind at the return of her master. Helen is clearer, and unique; here the launcher of a thousand ships and the cause of ten thousand deaths is still “a goddess among women,” maturely lovely in her middle age, gentler and quieter than before, but as proud as ever, and taking gracefully for granted all the attentions that hedge in a queen.²⁵ Nausicaa is a pretty essay in the male understanding of women; we hardly expected so delicate and romantic a picture from a Greek. Telemachus is uncertainly drawn, infected with hesitation as by some Hamlet touch; but Odysseus is the most complete and complex portrait in Greek poetry. All in all, the Odyssey is a fascinating novel in engaging verse, full of tender sentiment and adventurous surprise; more interesting, to an unwarlike and aging soul, than the majestic and bloody Iliad.

These poems—sole survivors of a long succession of epics—became the most precious element in the literary heritage of Greece. “Homer” was the staple of Greek education, the repository of Greek myth, the source of a thousand dramas, the foundation of moral training, and—strangest of all—the very Bible of orthodox theology. It was Homer and Hesiod, said Herodotus (probably with some hyperbole), who gave definite and human form to the Olympians, and order to the hierarchy of heaven.²⁶ There is much that is magnificent in Homer’s gods, and we come to like them for their failings; but scholars have long since detected in the poets who pictured them a rollicking skepticism hardly befitting a national Bible. These deities quarrel like relatives, fornicate like fleas, and share with mankind what seemed to Alexander the stigmata of mortality—the need for love and sleep; they do everything human but hunger and die. Not one of them could bear comparison with Odysseus in intelligence, with Hector in heroism, with Andromache in tenderness, or with Nestor in dignity. Only a poet of the sixth century, versed in Ionian doubt, could have made such farcelings of the gods.²⁷ It is one of the humors of history that these epics, in which the Olympians have essentially the function of comic relief, were reverenced throughout Hellas as props of respectable morality and belief. Eventually the anomaly proved explosive; the humor destroyed the belief, and the moral development of men rebelled against the superseded morals of the gods.

IV. GAMES

Religion failed to unify Greece, but athletics—periodically—succeeded. Men went to Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea not so much to honor the gods—for these could be honored anywhere—as to witness the heroic contests of chosen athletes, and the ecumenical assemblage of varied Greeks. Alexander, who could see Greece from without, considered Olympia the capital of the Greek world.

Here under the rubric of athletics we find the real religion of the Greeks—the worship of health, beauty, and strength. “To be in health,” said Simonides, “is the best thing for man; the next best, to be of form and nature beautiful; the third, to enjoy wealth gotten without fraud; and the fourth, to be in youth’s bloom among friends.”^27a “There is no greater glory for a man as long as he lives,” said the Odyssey,²⁸ “than that which he wins by his own hands and feet.” Perhaps it was necessary for an aristocratic people, living among slaves more numerous than themselves and frequently called upon to defend their soil against more populous nations, to keep in good condition. Ancient war depended upon physical vigor and skill, and these were the original aim of the contests that filled Hellas with the noise of their fame. We must not think of the average Greek as a student and lover of Aeschylus or Plato; rather, like the typical Briton or American, he was interested in sport, and his favored athletes were his earthly gods.

Greek games were private, local, municipal, and Panhellenic. Even the fragmentary remains of antiquity reveal an interesting range of sports. A relief in the Athens Museum shows on one side a wrestling match, on another a hockey game.²⁹ Swimming, bareback riding, throwing or dodging missiles while mounted, were not so much sports as general accomplishments of all citizens. Hunting became a sport when it ceased to be a necessity. Ball games were as varied then as now, and as popular; at Sparta the terms ballplayer and youth were synonyms. Special rooms were built in the palaestra for games of ball; these rooms were called sphairisteria, and the teachers were sphairistai. On another relief we see men bouncing a ball against the floor or the wall, and striking it back with the flat of the hand;³⁰ we do not know whether the players did this in turn as in modern handball. One ball game resembled Canadian lacrosse, being a form of hockey played with racquets. Pollux, writing in the second century of our era, describes it in almost modern terms:

Certain youths, divided into two equal groups, leave in a level place—which they have prepared and measured—a ball made of leather, about the size of an apple. They rush at it, as if it were a prize lying between them, from their fixed starting-points. Each of them has in his right hand a racquet (rhabdon) . . . ending in a sort of flat bend whose center is woven with gut strings . . . plaited like a net. Each side strives to be the first to drive the ball to the opposite end of the ground from that allotted to them.³¹

The same author pictures a game in which one team tries to throw a ball over or through an opposed group, “until one side drives the other back over their goal line.” Antiphanes, in an imperfect fragment from the fourth century B.C., describes a “star”: “When he got the ball he delighted to give it to one player while dodging another; he knocked it away from one and urged on another with noisy cries. Outside, a long pass, beyond him, overhead, a short pass. . . .”³²

From these private sports came local and incidental games, as after the death of a hero like Patroclus, or the successful issue of some great enterprise, like the march of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand to the sea. Then came municipal games, in which the contestants represented various localities and groups within one city-state. Almost but not quite international were the quadrennial Panathenaic games, established by Peisistratus in 566; here the entries were mostly from Attica, but outsiders were welcomed. Besides the usual athletic events there were chariot races, a torch race, a rowing race, musical competitions for voice, harp, lyre, and flute, dances, and recitations, chiefly from Homer. Each of the ten divisions of Attica was represented by twenty-four men chosen for their health, vigor, and good looks; and a prize was awarded to the most impressive twenty-four for “fine manhood.”³³

Since athletics were necessary for war, and yet would die without competitions, the cities of Greece, to provide the highest stimulus, arranged Panhellenic games. The oldest of these were organized as a regular quadrennial event at Olympia in 776 B.C.—the first definite date in Greek history. Originally confined to Eleans, within a century they were drawing entries from all Greece; by 476 the list of victors ranged from Sinope to Marseilles. The feast of Zeus became an international holyday; a truce was proclaimed to all wars in Greece for the month of the festival, and fines were levied by the Eleans upon any Greek state in whose territory a traveler to the games suffered molestation. Philip of Macedon humbly paid a fine because some of his soldiers had robbed an Athenian en route to Olympia.

We picture the pilgrims and athletes starting out from distant cities, a month ahead of time, to come together at the games. It was a fair as well as a festival; the plain was covered not only with the tents that sheltered the visitors from the July heat, but with the booths where a thousand concessionaires exposed for sale everything from wine and fruit to horses and statuary, while acrobats and conjurors performed their tricks for the crowd. Some juggled balls in the air, others performed marvels of agility and skill, others ate fire or swallowed swords: modes of amusement, like forms of superstition, enjoy a reverend antiquity. Famous orators like Gorgias, famous sophists like Hippias, perhaps famous writers like Herodotus, delivered addresses or recitations from the porticoes of the temple of Zeus. It was a special holiday for men, since married women were not allowed to attend the festival; these had their own games at the feast of Hera. Menander summed up such a scene in five words: “crowd, market, acrobats, amusements, thieves.”³⁴

Only freeborn Greeks were allowed to compete in the Olympic games. The athletes (from athlos, a contest) were selected by local and municipal elimination trials, after which they submitted for ten months to rigorous training under professional paidotribai (literally, youth rubbers) and gymnastai. Arrived at Olympia, they were examined by the officials, and took an oath to observe all the rules. Irregularities were rare; we hear of Eupolis bribing other boxers to lose to him,³⁵ but the penalty and dishonor attached to such offenses were discouragingly great. When everything was ready the athletes were led into the stadium; as they entered, a herald announced their names and the cities that had entered them. All the contestants, whatever their age or rank, were naked; occasionally a girdle might be worn at the loins.³⁶ Of the stadium itself nothing remains but the narrow stone slabs toed by the runners at the starting point. The 45,000 spectators kept their places in the stadium all day long, suffering from insects, heat, and thirst; hats were forbidden, the water was bad, and flies and mosquitoes infested the place as they do today. Sacrifices were offered at frequent intervals to Zeus Averter of Flies.³⁷

The most important events were grouped together as the pentathlon, or five contests. To promote all-around development in the athlete each entry in any of these events was required to compete in all of them; to secure the victory it was necessary to win three contests out of the five. The first was a broad jump; the athlete held weights like dumbbells in his hands, and leaped from a standing start. Ancient writers assure us that some jumpers spanned fifty feet;³⁸ but it is not necessary to believe everything that we read. The second event was throwing the discus, a circular plate of metal or stone weighing about twelve pounds; the best throws are said to have covered a hundred feet.³⁹ The third contest was in hurling the javelin or spear, with the aid of a leather thong attached to the center of the shaft. The fourth and principal event of the group was the stadium sprint—i.e., for the length of the stadium, usually some two hundred yards. The fifth contest was wrestling. It was a highly popular form of competition in Greece, for the very name palaistra was taken from it, and many a story was told of its champions.

Boxing was an ancient game, almost visibly handed down from Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. The boxers practiced with punching balls hung on a level with the head and filled with fig seeds, meal, or sand. In the classic age of Greece (i.e., the fifth and fourth centuries), they wore “soft gloves” of oxhide dressed with fat and reaching almost to the elbow. Blows were confined to the head, but there was no rule against hitting a man who was down. There were no rests or rounds; the boxers fought till one surrendered or succumbed. They were not classified by weight; any man of any weight might enter the lists. Hence weight was an asset, and boxing degenerated in Greece from a competition in skill into a contest in brawn.

In the course of time, as brutality increased, boxing and wrestling were combined into a new contest called the pankration, or game of all powers. In this everything but biting and eye-gouging was permitted, even to a kick in the stomach.⁴⁰ Three heroes whose names have come down to us won by breaking the fingers of their opponents;⁴¹ another struck so ferociously with straight extended fingers and strong sharp nails that he pierced the flesh of his adversary and dragged out his bowels.⁴² Milo of Crotona was a more amiable pugilist. He had developed his strength, we are told, by carrying a calf every day of its life until it was a full-grown bull. People loved him for his tricks: he would hold a pomegranate so fast in his fist that no one could get it from him, and yet the fruit was uninjured; he would stand on an oiled quoit and resist all efforts to dislodge him; he would tie a cord around his forehead and burst the cord by holding his breath and so forcing blood to his head. In the end he was destroyed by his virtues. “For he chanced,” says Pausanias, “on a withered tree, into which some wedges had been driven to separate the wood, and he took it into his head to keep the wood apart with his hands. But the wedges slipped out, he was imprisoned in the tree, and became a prey to the wolves.”⁴³

In addition to the pentathlon sprint, there were other foot races at the games. One was for four hundred yards, another for twenty-four stadia, or 2⅔ miles; a third was an armed race, in which each runner carried a heavy shield. We have no knowledge of the records made in these races; the stadium differed in length in different cities, and the Greeks had no instruments for measuring small intervals of time. Stories tell of a Greek runner who could outdistance a hare; of another who raced a horse from Coronea to Thebes (some twenty miles) and beat it; and of how Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta—150 miles—in two days⁴⁴ and, at the cost of his life, brought to Athens the news of the victory at Marathon, twentyfour miles away. But there were no “marathon races” in Greece.

In the plain below the stadium Olympia built a special hippodrome for horse races. Women as well as men might enter their horses, and, as now, the prize went to the owner and not to the jockey, though the horse was sometimes rewarded with a statue.⁴⁵ The culminating events of the games were the chariot races, with two or four horses running abreast. Often ten four-horse chariots competed together; and as each had to negotiate twentythree turns around the posts at the ends of the course, accidents were the chief thrill of the game; in one race with forty starters a single chariot finished. We may imagine the tense excitement of the spectators at these contests, their wordy arguments about their favorites, their emotional abandonment as the survivors rounded the last turn.

When the toils of five days were over the victors received their rewards. Each bound a woolen fillet about his head, and upon this the judges placed a crown of wild olive, while a herald announced the name and city of the winner. This laurel wreath was the only prize given at the Olympic games, and yet it was the most eagerly contested distinction in Greece. So important were the games that not even the Persian invasion stopped them; and while a handful of Greeks withstood Xerxes’ army at Thermopylae the customary thousands watched Theagenes of Thasos, on the very day of the battle, win the pancratiast’s crown. “Good heavens!” exclaimed a Persian to his general; “what manner of men are these against whom you have brought us to fight?—men who contend with one another not for money but for honor!”⁴⁶ He, or the Greek inventor of the tale, did the Greeks too much credit, and not merely because the Greeks should on that day have been at Thermopylae rather than at Olympia. Though the direct prize at the games was little, the indirect rewards were great. Many cities voted substantial sums to the victors on their return from their triumphs; some cities made them generals; and the crowd idolized them so openly that jealous philosophers complained.⁴⁷ Poets like Simonides and Pindar were engaged by the victor or his patrons to write odes in his honor, which were sung by choruses of boys in the procession that welcomed him home; sculptors were paid to perpetuate him in bronze or stone; and sometimes he was given free sustenance in the city hall. We may judge the cost of this item when we learn, on questionable authority, that Milo ate a fouryear-old heifer, and Theagenes an ox, in a day.⁴⁸

The sixth century saw the peak of the splendor and popularity of athletics in Greece. In 582 the Amphictyonic League established the Pythian games in honor of Apollo at Delphi; in the same year the Isthmian games were instituted at Corinth in honor of Poseidon; six years later the Nemean games were inaugurated to celebrate the Nemean Zeus; and all three occasions became Panhellenic festivals. Together with the Olympic games they formed a periodos, or cycle, and the great ambition of a Greek athlete was to win the crown at all of them. In the Pythian games contests in music and poetry were added to the physical competitions; and indeed such musical tilts had been celebrated at Delphi long before the establishment of the athletic games. The original event was a hymn in honor of Apollo’s victory over the Delphic python; in 582 contests were added in singing, and in playing the lyre and the flute. Similar musical contests were held at Corinth, Nemea, Delos, and elsewhere; for the Greeks believed that by frequent public competitions they could stimulate not only the ability of the performer but the taste of the public as well. The principle was applied to almost every art—to pottery, poetry, sculpture, painting, choral singing, oratory, and drama. ⁴⁹ In this way and others the games had a profound influence upon art and literature, and even upon the writing of history; for the chief method of reckoning time, in later Greek historiography, was by Olympiads, designated by the name of the victor in the one-stadium foot race. The physical perfection of the all-around athlete in the sixth century generated that ideal of statuary which reached its fullness in Myron and Polycleitus. The nude contests and games in the palaestra and at the festivals gave the sculptor unequaled opportunities to study the human body in every natural form and pose; the nation unwittingly became models to its artists, and Greek athletics united with Greek religion to generate Greek art.

V. ARTS

Now that we come at last to the most perfect products of Greek civilization we find ourselves tragically limited in the quantity of the remains. The devastation caused in Greek literature by time and bigotry and mental fashions is negligible compared with the destruction of Greek art. One classic bronze survives—the Charioteer of Delphi; one classic marble statue—the Hermes of Praxiteles; not one temple—not even the Theseum—has come down to us in the form and color that it had for ancient Greece. Greek work in textiles, in wood, in ivory, silver, or gold, is nearly all gone; the material was too perishable or too precious to escape vandalism and time. We must reconstruct the ship from a few planks of the wreckage.

The sources of Greek art were the impulses to representation and decoration, the anthropomorphic quality of Greek religion, and the athletic character and ideal. The early Greek, like other primitives, when he outgrew the custom of sacrificing living beings to accompany and serve the dead, buried carved or painted figures as substitutes. Later he placed images of his ancestors in his home; or he dedicated in the temple likenesses of himself, or of those whom he loved, as votive figurines that might magically win for their models the protection of the god. Minoan religion, Mycenaean religion, even the chthonic cults of Greece, were too vague and impersonal, sometimes too horrible and grotesque, to lend themselves to esthetic form; but the frank humanity of the Olympian gods, and their need of temple homes for their earthly stays, opened a wide road for sculpture, architecture, and a hundred ancillary arts. No other religion—possibly excepting Catholicism—has so stimulated and influenced literature and art: almost every book or play, statue or building or vase, that has come down to us from ancient Greece touches upon religion in subject, purpose, or inspiration.

But inspiration alone would not have made Greek art great. There was needed a technical excellence rising out of cultural contacts and the transmission and development of crafts; indeed art to the Greek was a form of handicraft, and the artist grew so naturally out of the artisan that Greece never quite distinguished them. There was needed a knowledge of the human body, as in its healthy development the norm of proportion, symmetry, and beauty; there was needed a sensuous, passionate love of beauty, that would hold no toil too great that might give to the living moment of loveliness a lasting form. The women of Sparta placed in their sleeping chambers figures of Apollo, Narcissus, Hyacinthus, or some other handsome deity, in order that they might bear beautiful children.⁵⁰ Cypselus established a beauty contest among women far back in the seventh century; and according to Athenaeus this periodical competition continued down to the Christian era.⁵¹ In some places, says Theophrastus, “there are contests between the women in respect of modesty and good management . . .; and also there are contests about beauty, as for instance . . . in Tenedos and Lesbos.”⁵²

1. Vases

There was a pretty legend in Greece that the first cup was molded upon Helen’s breast.⁵³ If so, the mold was lost in the Dorian invasion, for what pottery has come down to us from early Greece does not remind us of Helen. The invasion must have profoundly disturbed the arts, impoverishing craftsmen, scattering schools, and ending for a time the transmission of technology; for Greek vases after the invasion begin again with primitive simplicity and crudity, as if Crete had never lifted pottery into an art.

Probably the rough mood of the Dorian conquerors, using what survived of Minoan-Mycenaean techniques, produced that Geometric style which dominates the oldest Greek pottery after the Homeric age. Flowers, scenery, and plants, so luxuriant in Cretan ornament, were swept away, and the stern spirit that made the glory of the Doric temple contrived the passing ruin of Greek pottery. The gigantic jars that characterize this period made small pretense to beauty; they were designed to store wine or oil or grain rather than to interest a ceramic connoisseur. The decoration was almost all by repeated triangles, circles, chains, checkers, lozenges, swastikas, or simple parallel horizontal lines; even the human figures that intervened were geometrical—torsos were triangles, thighs and legs were cones. This lazy style of ornament spread through Greece, and determined the form of the Dipylon vases* at Athens; but on these enormous containers (usually made to receive the human dead) black silhouettes of mourners, chariots, and animals were drawn, however awkwardly, between the pattern’s lines. Towards the end of the eighth century more life entered into the painting of Greek pottery; two colors were used for the ground, curves replaced straight lines, palmettes and lotuses, prancing horses and hunted lions took form upon the clay, and the ornate Oriental succeeded the bare Geometric style.

An age of busy experimentation followed. Miletus flooded the market with its red vases, Samos with its alabasters, Lesbos with its black wares, Rhodes with its whites, Clazomenae with its grays, and Naucratis exported faience and translucent glass. Erythrae was famous for the thinness of its vases, Chalcis for brilliance of finish, Sicyon and Corinth for their delicate “Proto-Corinthian” scent bottles and elaborately painted jugs like the Chigi vase in Rome. A kind of ceramic war engaged the potters of the rival cities; one or another of them found purchasers in every port of the Mediterranean, and in the interior of Russia, Italy, and Gaul. In the seventh century Corinth seemed to be winning; its wares were in every land and hand, its potters had found new techniques of incision and coloring, and had shown a fresh inventiveness in forms. But about 550 the masters of the Ceramicus—the potters’ quarter on the outskirts of Athens—came to the front, threw off Oriental influence, and captured with their Black-Figure ware the markets of the Black Sea, Cyprus, Egypt, Etruria, and Spain. From that time onward the best ceramic craftsmen migrated to Athens or were born there; a great school and tradition formed as through many generations son succeeded father in the art; and the making of fine pottery became one of the great industries, finally one of the conceded monopolies, of Attica.

The vases themselves, now and then, bear pictures of the potter’s shop, the master working with his apprentices, or watchfully supervising the various processes: mixing the pigments and the clay, molding the form, painting the ground, engraving the picture, firing the cup, and feeling the happiness of those who see beauty taking form under their hands. More than a hundred of these Attic potters are known to us; but time has broken up their masterpieces, and they are only names. Here on a drinking cup are the proud words, Nikosthenes me poiesen—“Nicosthenes made me.”^53a A greater than he was Execias, whose majestic amphora is in the Vatican; he was one of many artists encouraged by patronage and peace under the Peisistratids. From the hands of Clitias and Ergotimus came, about 560, the famous François vase, found in Etruria by a Frenchman of that name, and now treasured in the Archeological Museum at Florence—a great mixing bowl covered with row upon row of figures and scenes from Greek mythology.⁵⁴ These men were the outstanding masters of the Black-Figure style in sixth-century Attica. We need not exaggerate the excellence of their work; it cannot compare, either in conception or in execution, with the best work of the T’ang or Sung Chinese. But the Greek had a different aim from the Oriental: he sought not color but line, not ornament but form. The figures on the Greek vases are conventional, stylized, improbably magnificent in the shoulders and thin in the legs; and as this continued through the classic age, we must assume that the Greek potter never dreamed of realistic accuracy. He was writing poetry, not prose, speaking to the imagination rather than the eye. He limited himself in materials and pigments: he took the fine red clay of the Ceramicus, quieted its color with yellow, carefully engraved the figures, and filled out the silhouettes with brilliant black glaze. He transformed the earth into a profusion of vessels that wedded beauty and use: hydria, amphora, oenochoe, kylix, krater, lekythos—i.e., water jug, two-handled jar, wine bowl, drinking cup, mixing bowl, and unguent flask. He conceived the experiments, created the subjects, and developed the techniques that were taken up by bronzeworkers, sculptors, and painters; he made the first essays in foreshortening, perspective, chiaroscuro, and modeling;⁵⁵ he paved the way for statuary by molding terra-cotta figures in a thousand themes and forms. He freed his own art from Dorian geometry and Oriental excess, and made the human figure the source and center of its life.

Towards the last quarter of the sixth century the Athenian potter tired of black figures on a red ground, inverted the formula, and created that RedFigure style which ruled the markets of the Mediterranean for two hundred years. The figures were still stiff and angular, the body in profile with the eyes in full view; but even within these limits there was a new freedom, a wider scope, of conception and execution. He sketched the figures upon the clay with a light point, drew them in greater detail with a pen, filled in the background with black, and added minor touches with colored glaze. Here, too, some of the masters made lasting names. One amphora is signed, “Painted by Euthymides, son of Pollias, as never Euphronius”⁵⁶—which was to challenge Euphronius to equal it. Nevertheless this Euphronius is still rated as the greatest potter of his age; to him, some think, belongs the great krater on which Heracles wrestles with Antaeus. To his contemporary Sosias is attributed one of the most famous of Greek vases, whereon Achilles binds the wounded arm of Patroclus; every detail is lovingly carried out, and the silent pain of the young warrior has survived the centuries. To these men, and now nameless others, we owe such masterpieces as the cup in whose interior we see Dawn mourning over her dead son, and the hydria, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, that shows a Greek soldier, perhaps Achilles, plunging his lance into a fair and not breastless Amazon. It was before such a vase as one of these that John Keats stood enthralled one day, until its “wild ecstasy” and “mad pursuit” fired his brain with an ode greater than any Grecian urn.

2. Sculpture

The Greek settlement of western Asia, and the opening of Egypt to Greek trade towards 660 B.C., allowed Near Eastern and Egyptian forms and methods of statuary to enter Ionia and European Greece. About 580 two Cretan sculptors, Dipoenus and Scyllis, accepted commissions at Sicyon and Argos, and left behind them there not only statues but pupils; from this period dates a vigorous school of sculpture in the Peloponnese. The art had many purposes: it commemorated the dead first with simple pillars, then with herms whose head alone was carved, then with forms completely chiseled in the round, or with funeral-stelae reliefs; it made statues of victorious athletes, first as types, later as individuals; and it was encouraged by the lively imagination of Greek faith to make countless images of the gods.

Until the sixth century its material was most frequently wood. We hear a great deal of the chest of Cypselus, dictator of Corinth. According to Pausanias, it was made of cedar, inlaid with ivory and gold, and adorned with complicated carvings. As wealth increased, wooden statues might be covered, in whole or part, by precious materials; indeed it was thus that Pheidias made his chryselephantine (i.e., gold and ivory) statues of Athene Parthenos and the Olympian Zeus. Bronze rivaled stone as sculptural material to the end of classical art. Few ancient bronzes have survived the temptation to melt them down, but we may judge from the perhaps too ministerial Charioteer of the Delphi Museum (ca. 490) how near to perfection the art of hollow casting had been carried since Rhoecus and Theodorus of Samos had introduced it into Greece. The most famous group in Athenian statuary, the Tyrannicides (Harmodius and Aristogeiton), was cast in bronze by Antenor at Athens shortly after the expulsion of Hippias. Many forms of soft stone were used before the sculptors of Greece undertook to mold harder varieties with hammer and chisel; but once they had learned the art they almost denuded Naxos and Paros of marble. In the archaic period (1100-490) the figures were often painted; but towards the end of that age it was found that a better effect could be secured, in representing the delicate skin of women, by leaving the polished marble without artificial tint.

The Greeks of Ionia were the first to discover the uses of drapery as a sculptural element. Egypt and the Near East had left the clothing rigid—a vast stone apron nullifying the living form; but in sixth-century Greece the sculptors introduced folds into the drapery, and used the garment to reveal that ultimate source and norm of beauty, the healthy human body. Nevertheless the Egypto-Asiatic influence remained so strong that in most archaic Greek sculpture the figure is heavy, graceless, and stiff; the legs are strained even, in repose; the arms hang helpless at the sides; the eyes have the almond form, and occasionally an Oriental slant; the face is stereotyped, immobile, passionless. Greek statuary, in this period, accepted the Egyptian rule of frontality—i.e., the figure was made to be seen only from the front, and so rigidly bisymmetrical that a vertical line would pass through the nose, mouth, navel, and genitals with never a right or left deviation, and no flexure of either motion or rest. Perhaps convention was responsible for this dull rigidity: the law of the Greek games forbade a victor to set up a portrait statue of himself unless he had won all contests in the pentathlon; only then, the Greeks argued, would he achieve the harmonious physical development that would merit individual modeling.⁵⁷ For this reason, and perhaps because, as in Egypt, religious convention before the fifth century governed the representation of the gods, the Greek sculptor confined himself to a few poses and types, and devoted himself to their mastery.

Two types above all won his study: the youth, or kouros, nearly nude, slightly advancing the left leg, with arms at the side or partly extended, fists closed, countenance quiet and stern; and the kore, or maiden, carefully coiffured, modestly posed and draped, one hand gathering up the robe, the other offering some gift to the gods. History till lately called the kouroi “Apollos,” but they were more probably athletes or funerary monuments. The most famous of the type is the Apollo of Tenea; the largest, the Apollo of Sunium; the most pretentious, the Throne of Apollo at Amyclae, near Sparta. One of the finest is the small Strangford Apollo in the British Museum; finer still is the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo, a Roman copy of an early fifth-century original.⁵⁸ To at least the male eye the korai are more pleasing: their bodies are gracefully slender, their faces are softened with a Mona Lisa smile, their drapery begins to escape the stiffness of convention; some of them, like those in the Athens Museum would be called masterpieces in any other land;⁵⁹ one of them, which we may call the Kore of Chios,* is a masterpiece even in Greece. In them the sensuous Ionian touch breaks through the Egyptian immobility and Dorian austerity of the “Apollos.” Archermus of Chios created another type, or followed lost models, in the Nike, or Victory, of Delos; out of this would come the lovely Nike of Paeonius at Olympia, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and, in Christian art, the winged figures of cherubim.⁶⁰ Near Miletus unknown sculptors carved a series of draped and seated females for the temple of the Branchidae, figures powerful but crude, dignified but ponderous, profound but dead.†