The Life of Greece

Sculpture in relief was so old that a pretty legend could undertake to describe its origin. A lass of Corinth drew upon a wall the outline of the shadow that the lamplight cast of her lover’s head. Her father Butades, a potter, filled in the outline with clay, pressed the form to hardness, took it down, and baked it; so, Pliny assures us, bas-relief was born.⁶¹ The art became even more important than sculpture in the adornment of temples and graves. Already in 520 Aristocles made a funeral relief of Aristion, which is one of the many treasures of the Athens Museum.

Since reliefs were nearly always painted, sculpture, relief, and painting were allied arts, usually handmaids to architecture; and most artists were skilled in all four forms. Temple moldings, friezes, metopes, and pediment backgrounds were usually painted, while the main structure was ordinarily left in the natural color of the stone. Of painting as a separate art we have only negligible remains from Greece; but we know through passages in the poets that panel painting, with colors mixed in melted wax, was already practiced in the days of Anacreon.⁶² Painting was the last great art to develop in Greece, and the last to die.

All in all, the sixth century failed to rise, in any Greek art except architecture, to the boldness of conception or the perfection of form attained in the same age by Greek philosophy and poetry. Perhaps artistic patronage was slow to develop in an aristocracy still rural and poor, or in a business class too young to have graduated from wealth to taste. Nevertheless the age of the dictators was a period of stimulation and improvement in every Greek art—above all, under Peisistratus and Hippias in Athens. Towards the end of this period the old rigidity of sculpture began to thaw, the rule of frontality was broken down; legs began to move, arms to leave the side, hands to open up, faces to take on feeling and character, bodies to bend in a variety of poses revealing new studies in anatomy and action. This revolution in sculpture, this animation of stone with life, became a major event in Greek history; the escape from frontality was one of the signal accomplishments of Greece. Egyptian and Oriental influences were set aside, and Greek art became Greek.

3. Architecture

The science of building recovered slowly from the Dorian invasion, and redeemed beyond its deserts the Dorian name. Across the Dark Age from Agamemnon to Terpander, the Mycenaean megaron transmitted the essentials of its structure to Greece; the rectangular shape of the building, the use of columns within and without, the circular shaft and simple square capital, the triglyphs and metopes of the entablature, were all preserved in the greatest achievement of Greek art, the Doric style. But whereas Mycenaean architecture was apparently secular, devoted to palaces and homes, classical Greek architecture was almost entirely religious. The royal megaron was transformed into a civic temple as monarchy waned and religion and democracy united the affections of Greece in honoring the personified city in its god.

The earliest Greek temples were of wood or brick, as befitted the poverty of the Dark Age. When stone became the orthodox material of temple building the architectural features remained as set by timber construction; the rectangular naos or temple proper, the circular shafts, the “master-beam” architraves, the beam-end triglyphs, the gabled roof, confessed the wooden origin of their form; even the first Ionic spiral was apparently a floral figure painted upon a block of wood.⁶³ The use of stone increased as Greek wealth and travel grew; the transition was most rapid after the opening of Egypt to Greek trade about 660 B.C. Limestone was the favored material of the new styles before the sixth century; marble came in towards 580, at first for decorative portions, then for façades, finally for the entire temple from base to tiles.

Three “orders” of architecture were developed in Greece: the Doric, the Ionic, and, in the fourth century, the Corinthian. Since the interior of the temple was reserved for the god and his ministrants, and worship was held outside, all three orders devoted themselves to making the exterior impressively beautiful. They began at the ground, usually in some elevated place, with the stereobate—two or three layers of foundation stone in receding steps. From the uppermost layer, or stylobate, rose directly, without individual base, the Doric column—”fluted” with shallow, sharp-edged grooves, and widening perceptibly at the middle in what the Greeks called entasis, or stretching. Furthermore, the Doric column tapered slightly towards the top, thereby emulating the tree, and successfully contradicting the Minoan-Mycenaean style. (An undiminished shaft—worse yet, one that tapers downward—seems top-heavy and graceless to the eye, while the wider base heightens that sense of stability which all architecture should convey. Perhaps, however, the Doric column is too heavy, too thick in proportion to its height, too stolidly engrossed in sturdiness and strength.) Upon the Doric column sat its simple and powerful capital: a “necking” or circular band, a cushionlike echinus, and, topmost, a square abacus to spread the supporting thrust of the pillar beneath the architrave.

While the Dorians were developing this style from the megaron, modified probably by acquaintance with the Egyptian “proto-Doric” colonnades of Derel-Bahri and Beni-Hasan, the Ionian Greeks were altering the same fundamental form under Asiatic influence. In the resultant Ionic order a slender column rose upon an individual base, and began at the bottom, as it ended at the top, with a narrow fillet or band; its height was usually greater, and its diameter smaller, than in the Doric shaft; the upward tapering was scarcely perceptible; the flutings were deep, semicircular grooves separated by flat edges. The Ionic capital was composed of a narrow echinus, a still narrower abacus, and between them—almost concealing them—emerged the twin spirals of a volute, like an infolded scroll—a graceful element adapted from Hittite, Assyrian, and other Oriental forms.⁶⁴ These characteristics, together with the elaborate adornment of the entablature, described not only a style but a people; they represented in stone the Ionian expressiveness, suppleness, sentiment, elegance, and love of delicate detail, even as the Doric order conveyed the proud reserve, the massive strength, the severe simplicity of the Dorian; the sculpture, literature, music, manners, and dress of the rival groups differed in harmony with their architectural styles. Dorian architecture is mathematics, Ionian architecture is poetry, both seeking the durability of stone; the one is “Nordic,” the other Oriental; together they constitute the masculine and feminine themes in a basically harmonious form.

Greek architecture distinguished itself by developing the column into an element of beauty as well as a structural support. The essential function of the external colonnade was to uphold the eaves, and to relieve the walls of the naos, or inner temple, from the outward thrust of the gabled roof. Above the columns rose the entablature—i.e., the superstructure of the edifice. Here again, as in the supporting elements, Greek architecture sought a clear differentiation, and yet an articulated connection, of the members. The architrave—the great stone that connected the capitals—was in the Doric order plain, or carried a simple painted molding; in Ionic it was composed of three layers, each projecting below, and was topped with a marble cornice segmented with a confusing variety of ornamental details. Since the sloping beams that made the framework of the roof in the Doric style came down, and were secured, between two horizontal beams at the eaves, the united ends of the three beams formed—at first in wood, then imitatively in stone—a triglyph or triply divided surface. Between each triglyph and the next a space was left as an open window when the roof was of wood or of terra-cotta tiles; when translucent marble tiles were used these metopes, or “seeing-between” places, were filled in with marble slabs carved in low relief. In the Ionic style a band or frieze of reliefs might run around the upper outer walls of the naos or cella; in the fifth century both forms of relief—metopes and frieze—were often used in the same building, as in the Parthenon. In the pediments—the triangles formed by the gabled roof in front and rear—the sculptor found his greatest opportunity; the figures here might be drawn out in high relief and enlarged for view from below; and the cramped corners, or tympana, tested the subtlest skill. Finally, the roof itself might be a work of art, with brilliantly colored tiles and decorative rain-disposing acroteria, or pinnacle figures, rising from the angles of the pediments. All in all, there was probably a surplus of sculpture on the Greek temple, between the columns, along the walls, or within the edifice. The painter also was involved: the temple was colored in whole or in part, along with its statues, moldings, and reliefs. Perhaps we do the Greeks too much honor today, when time has worn the paint from their temples and divinities, and ferrous strains have lent to the marble natural and incalculable hues that set off the brilliance of the stone under the clear Greek sky. Some day even contemporary art may become beautiful.

The two rival styles achieved grandeur in the sixth century, and perfection in the fifth. Geographically they divided Greece unevenly: Ionic prevailed in Asia and the Aegean, Doric on the mainland and in the west. The salient achievements of sixth-century Ionic were the temples of Artemis at Ephesus, of Hera at Samos, and of the Branchidae near Miletus; but only ruins survive of Ionic architecture before Marathon. The finest extant buildings from the sixth century are the older temples of Paestum and Sicily, all in the Doric style. The ground plan remains of the great temple built at Delphi, between 548 and 512, from the designs of the Corinthian Spintharus; it was destroyed by earthquake in 373, was rebuilt on the same plan, and in that form still stood when Pausanias made his tour of Greece. Athenian architecture of the period was almost wholly Doric: in this style Peisistratus began, about 530, the gigantic temple of the Olympian Zeus, on the plain at the foot of the Acropolis. After the Persian conquest of Ionia in 546, hundreds of Ionian artists migrated to Attica, and introduced or developed the Ionic style in Athens. By the end of the century Athenian architects were using both orders, and had laid all the technical groundwork for the Periclean age.

4. Music and the Dance

The word mousike among the Greeks meant originally any devotion to any Muse. Plato’s Academy was called a Museion or Museum—i.e., a place dedicated to the Muses and the many cultural pursuits which they patronized; the Museum at Alexandria was a university of literary and scientific activity, not a collection of museum pieces. In the narrower and modern sense music was at least as popular among the Greeks as it is among ourselves today. In Arcadia all freemen studied music to the age of thirty; everyone knew some instrument; and to be unable to sing was accounted a disgrace.⁶⁵ Lyric poetry was so named because, in Greece, it was composed to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, the harp, or the flute. The poet usually wrote the music as well as the words, and sang his own songs; to be a lyric poet in ancient Greece was far more difficult than to compose, as poets do today, verses for silent and solitary reading. Before the sixth century there was hardly any Greek literature divorced from music. Education and letters, as well as religion and war, were bound up with music: martial airs played an important part in military training, and nearly all instruction of the memory was through verse. By the eighth century Greek music was already old, with hundreds of varieties and forms.

The instruments were simple, and were based, like our vaster armory of sound, upon percussion, wind, or strings. The first class were not popular. The flute was favored at Athens until Alcibiades, laughing at his music master’s inflated cheeks, refused to play so ridiculous an instrument, and set a fashion against it among Athenian youth. (Besides, said the Athenians, the Boeotians surpassed them with the flute, which branded the art as a vulgar one.⁶⁶) The simple flute, or aulos, was a tube of cane or bored wood with a detachable mouthpiece and from two to seven finger holes into which movable stopples might be inserted to modify the pitch. Some players used the double flute—a “masculine” or bass flute in the right hand and a “feminine” or treble flute in the left, both held to the mouth by a strap around the cheeks, and played in simple harmony. By attaching the flute to a distensible bag the Greeks made a bagpipe; by uniting several graduated flutes they made a syrinx, or Pipe of Pan; by extending and opening the end, and closing the finger holes, they made a salpinx, or trumpet.⁶⁷ Flute music, says Pausanias,⁶⁸ was usually gloomy, and was always used in dirges or elegies; but the auletridai—the flute-playing geisha girls of Greece—do not seem to have purveyed gloom. String music was confined to plucking the strings with finger or plectrum; bowing was unknown.⁶⁹ The lyre, phorminx, or kithara were essentially alike—four or more strings of sheep gut stretched over a bridge across a resonant body of metal or tortoise shell. The kithara was a small harp, used for accompanying narrative poetry; the lyre was like a guitar, and was chosen to accompany lyric poetry and songs.

The Greeks told many strange tales of how the gods—Hermes, Apollo, Athena—had invented these instruments; how Apollo had pitted his lyre against the pipes and flutes of Marsyas (a priest of the Phrygian goddess Cybele), had won—unfairly, as Marsyas thought—by adding his voice to the instrument, and had topped the performance by having poor Marsyas flayed alive: so legend personified the conquest of the flute by the lyre. Prettier stories were told of ancient musicians who had established or developed the musical art: of Olympus, Marsyas’ pupil, who, towards 730, invented the enharmonic scale;* of Linus, Heracles’ teacher, who invented Greek musical notation and established some of the “modes”;⁷⁰ of Orpheus, Thracian priest of Dionysus; and of his pupil Musaeus, who said that “song is a sweet thing to mortals.”⁷¹ These tales reflect the probable fact that Greek music derived its forms from Lydia, Phrygia, and Thrace.*⁷²

Song entered into almost every phase of Greek life. There were dithyrambs for Dionysus, paeans for Apollo, hymns for any god; there were enkomia, or songs of praise, for rich men, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for athletes; there were symposiaka, skolia, erotika, hymenaioi, elegiai, and threnoi for dining, drinking, loving, marrying, mourning, and burying; herdsmen had their bukolika, reapers their lityerses, vinedressers their epilenia, spinners their iouloi, weavers their elinoi.⁷⁷ And then as now, presumably, the man in the market or the club, the lady in the home and the woman of the streets, sang songs not quite as learned as Simonides’; vulgar music and polite music have come down distantly together through the centuries.

The highest form of music, in the belief and practice of the Greeks, was choral singing; to this they gave the philosophical depth, the structural complexity, the emotional range, which in modern music tend to find place in the concerto or the symphony. Any festival—a harvest, a victory, a marriage, a holyday—might be celebrated with a chorus; and now and then cities and groups would organize great contests in choral song. The performance was in most cases prepared far in advance: a composer was appointed to write the words and music, a rich man was persuaded to pay the expense, professional singers were engaged, and the chorus was carefully trained. All the singers sang the same note, as in the music of the Greek Church today; there was no “part song” except that in later centuries the accompaniment was played a fifth above or below the voice, or ran counter to it; this is as near as the Greeks seem to have come to harmony and counterpoint.⁷⁸

The dance in its highest development was woven into one art with choral singing, just as many forms and terms of modern music were once associated with the dance;* and dancing rivaled music in age and popularity among the Greeks. Lucian, unable to trace its earthly beginnings, sought the origins of the dance in the regular motions of the stars.⁸⁰ Homer tells us not only of the dancing floor made by Daedalus for Ariadne, but of an expert dancer among the Greek warriors at Troy, Meriones, who, dancing while he fought, could never be found by any lance.⁸¹ Plato described or chests, or dancing, as “the instinctive desire to explain words by gestures of the entire body”—which is rather a description of certain modern languages; Aristotle better defined the dance as “an imitation of actions, characters, and passions by means of postures and rhythmical movements.”⁸² Socrates himself danced, and praised the art as giving health to every part of the body;⁸³ he meant, of course, Greek dancing.

For the Greek dance was quite different from ours. Though in some of its forms it may have served as a sexual stimulant, it rarely brought men into physical contact with women. It was an artistic exercise rather than a walking embrace, and, like the Oriental dance, it used arms and hands as much as legs and feet.⁸⁴ Its forms were as varied as the types of poetry and song; ancient authorities listed two hundred.⁸⁵ There were religious dances, as among the Dionysiac devotees; there were athletic dances, like Sparta’s Gymnopedia, or Festival of Naked Youth; there were martial dances, like the Pyrrhic, taught to children as part of military drill; there was the stately hyporchema, a choral hymn or play performed by two choirs of which one alternately sang or danced while the other danced or sang; there were folk dances for every major event of life and every season or festival of the year. And as for everything else, there were dance contests, usually involving choral song.

All these arts—lyric poetry, song, instrumental music, and the dancewere closely allied in early Greece, and formed in many ways one art. As time went on, and already in the seventh century, specialization and professionalism set in. The rhapsodes abandoned song for recitation, and separated narrative verse from music.⁸⁶ Archilochus sang his lyrics without accompaniment,⁸⁷ and began that long degeneration which at last reduced poetry to a fallen angel silent and confined. The choral dance broke up into singing without dancing, and dancing without singing; for, as Lucian put it, “The violent exercise caused shortness of breath, and the song suffered for it.”⁸⁸ In like manner there appeared musicians who played without singing, and won the applause of devotees by their precise and rapid execution of quarter tones.⁸⁹ Some famous musicians, then as now, engrossed the receipts; Amoebeus, harpist and singer, received a talent ($6000) each time that he performed.⁹⁰ The common player, doubtless, lived from hand to mouth, for the musician, like other artists, belongs to a profession that has had the honor of starving in every generation.

The highest repute went to those who, like Terpander, Arion, Alcman, or Stesichorus, were skilled in all forms, and wove choral song, instrumental music, and the dance into a complex and harmonious whole probably more profoundly beautiful and satisfying than the operas and orchestras of today. The most famous of these masters was Arion. About him the Greeks told the tale how, on a voyage from Taras to Corinth, the sailors stole his money, and then gave him a choice between being stabbed to death or drowned. Having sung a final song, he dived into the sea, and was carried on the back of a dolphin (perhaps his harp) to the shore. It was he who, chiefly at Corinth and towards the close of the seventh century, transformed the inebriated singers of impromptu Dionysiac dithyrambs into a sober and trained “cycle” chorus of fifty voices, singing in strophe and antistrophe, with arias and recitatives as in our oratorios. The theme was usually the suffering and death of Dionysus; and in honor of the god’s traditional attendants the chorus was dressed in goatlike satyr guise. Out of this, in fact and name, came the tragic theater of the Greeks.

5. The Beginnings of the Drama

The sixth century, already distinguished in so many fields and lands, crowned its accomplishments by laying the foundations of the drama. It was one of the creative moments in history; never before, so far as we know, had men passed from pantomime or ritual to the spoken and secular play.

Comedy, says Aristotle,⁹¹ developed “out of those who led the phallic procession.” A company of people carrying sacred phalli, and singing dithyrambs to Dionysus, or hymns to some other vegetation god, constituted, in Greek terminology, a komos, or revel. Sex was essential, for the culmination of the ritual was a symbolic marriage aimed at the magic stimulation of the soil;⁹² hence in early Greek comedy, as in most modern comedies and novels, marriage and presumptive procreation form the proper ending of the tale. The comic drama of Greece remained till Menander obscene because its origin was frankly phallic; it was in its beginnings a joyous celebration of reproductive powers, and sexual restraints were in some measure removed. It was a day’s moratorium on morals; free speech (parrhasia) was then particularly free;⁹³ and many of the paraders, dressed in Dionysian satyr style, wore a goat’s tail and a large artificial phallus of red leather as part of their costume. This garb became traditional on the comic stage; it was a matter of sacred custom, religiously observed in Aristophanes; indeed, the phallus continued to be the inseparable emblem of the clown until the fifth century of our era in the West, and the last century of the Byzantine Empire in the East.⁹⁴ Along with the phallus, in the Old Comedy, went the licentious kordax dance.⁹⁵

Strange to say, it was in Sicily that the rustic vegetation revel was first transformed into the comic drama. About 560 one Susarion of Megara Hyblaea, near Syracuse, developed the processional mirth into brief plays of rough satire and comedy.⁹⁶ From Sicily the new art passed into the Peloponnesus and then into Attica; comedies were performed in the villages by traveling players or local amateurs. A century passed before the authorities—to quote Aristotle’s phrase⁹⁷—treated the comic drama seriously enough to give it (465 B.C.) a chorus for representation at an official festival.

Tragedy—tragoidia, or the goat song—arose in like manner from the mimic representations, in dancing and singing, of satyrlike Dionysian revelers dressed in the costume of goats.⁹⁸ These satyr plays remained till Euripides an essential part of the Dionysian drama; each composer of a tragic trilogy was expected to make a concession to ancient custom by offering, as the fourth part of his presentation, a satyr play in honor of Dionysus. “Being a development of the satyr play,” says Aristotle,⁹⁹ “it was quite late before tragedy rose from short plots and comic diction to its full dignity.” Doubtless other seeds matured in the birth of tragedy; perhaps it took something from the ritual worship and appeasement of the dead.¹⁰⁰ But essentially its source lay in mimetic religious ceremonies like the representation, in Crete, of the birth of Zeus, or, in Argos and Samos, his symbolic marriage with Hera, or, in Eleusis and elsewhere, the sacred mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, or, above all, in the Peloponnesus and Attica, the mourning and rejoicing over the death and resurrection of Dionysus. Such representations were called dromena—things performed; drama is a kindred word, and means, as it should, an action. At Sicyon tragic choruses, till the days of the dictator Cleisthenes, commemorated, we are told, the “sufferings of Adrastus,” the ancient king. At Icaria, where Thespis grew up, a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus; perhaps the “goat song” from which tragedy derived its name was a chant sung over the dismembered symbol or embodiment of the drunken god.¹⁰¹ The Greek drama, like ours, grew out of religious ritual.

Hence the Athenian drama, tragic and comic, was performed as part of the festival of Dionysus, under the presidency of his priests, in a theater named after him, by players called “the Dionysian artists.” The statue of Dionysus was brought to the theater and so placed before the stage that he might enjoy the spectacle. The performance was preceded by the sacrifice of an animal to the god. The theater was endowed with the sanctity of a temple, and offenses committed there were punished severely as sacrileges rather than as merely crimes. Just as tragedy held the place of honor on the stage at the City Dionysia, so comedy held the foreground at the festival of the Lenaea; but this festival too was Dionysian. Perhaps originally the theme, as in the drama of the Mass, was the passion and death of the god; gradually the poets were allowed to substitute the sufferings and death of a hero in Greek myth. It may even be that in its early forms the drama was a magic ritual, designed to avert the tragedies it portrayed, and to purge the audience of evils, in a more than Aristotelian sense, by representing these as borne and finished with by proxy.¹⁰² In part it was this religious basis that kept Greek tragedy on a higher plane than that of the Elizabethan stage.

The chorus as developed for mimetic action by Arion and others became the foundation of dramatic structure, and remained an essential part of Greek tragedy until the later plays of Euripides. The earlier dramatists were called dancers because they made their plays chiefly a matter of choral dancing, and were actually teachers of dancing.¹⁰³ Only one thing was needed to turn these choral representations into dramas, and that was the opposition of an actor, in dialogue and action, to the chorus. This inspiration came to one of these dancing instructors and chorus trainers, Thespis of Icaria—a town close to the Peloponnesian Megara, where the rites of Dionysus were popular, and not far from Eleusis, where the ritual drama of Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus Zagreus was annually performed. Helped no doubt by the egoism that propels the world, Thespis separated himself from the chorus, gave himself individual recitative lines, developed the notion of opposition and conflict, and offered the drama in its stricter sense to history. He played various roles with such verisimilitude that when his troupe performed at Athens, Solon was shocked at what seemed to him a kind of public deceit, and denounced this newfangled art as immoral¹⁰⁴—a charge that it has heard in every century. Peisistratus was more imaginative, and encouraged the competitive performance of dramas at the Dionysian festival. In 534 Thespis won the victory in such a contest. The new form developed so rapidly that Choerilus, only a generation later, produced 160 plays. When, fifty years after Thespis, Aeschylus and Athens returned victorious from the battle of Salamis, the stage was set for the great age in the history of the Greek drama.

VI. RETROSPECT

Looking back upon the multifarious civilization whose peaks have been sketched in the foregoing pages, we begin to understand what the Greeks were fighting for at Marathon. We picture the Aegean as a beehive of busy, quarrelsome, alert, inventive Greeks, establishing themselves obstinately in every port, developing their economy from tillage to industry and trade, and already creating great literature, philosophy, and art. It is amazing how quickly and widely this new culture matured, laying in the sixth century all the foundations for the achievements of the fifth. It was a civilization in certain respects finer than that of the Periclean period—superior in epic and lyric poetry, enlivened and adorned by the greater freedom and mental activity of women, and in some ways better governed than in the later and more democratic age. But even of democracy the bases had been prepared; by the end of the century the dictatorships had taught Greece enough order to make possible Greek liberty.

The realization of self-government was something new in the world; life without kings had not yet been dared by any great society. Out of this proud sense of independence, individual and collective, came a powerful stimulus to every enterprise of the Greeks; it was their liberty that inspired them to incredible accomplishments in arts and letters, in science and philosophy It is true that a large part of the people, then as always, harbored and loved superstitions, mysteries, and myths; men must be consoled. Despite this, Greek life had become unprecedentedly secular; politics, law, literature, and speculation had one by one been separated and liberated from ecclesiastical power. Philosophy had begun to build a naturalistic interpretation of the world and man, of body and soul. Science, almost unknown before, had made its first bold formulations; the elements of Euclid were established; clarity and order and honesty of thought had become the ideal of a saving minority of men. A heroic effort of flesh and spirit rescued these achievements, and the promise they held, from the dead hand of alien despotism and the darkness of the Mysteries, and won for European civilization the trying privilege of freedom.

CHAPTER X

The Struggle for Freedom

I. MARATHON

“IN the reigns of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes,” says Herodotus, “Greece suffered more sorrows than in twenty generations before.”¹ The Greek nation had to pay the penalty of its development; spreading everywhere, it was bound sooner or later to come into conflict with a major power. Using water as their highway, the Hellenes had opened up a trade route that extended from the eastern coast of Spain to the farthest ports of the Black Sea. This European water route—Greco-Italian-Sicilian—competed more and more with the Oriental land and water route—Indo-Perso-Phoenician; and thereby arose a lasting and bitter rivalry in which war, by all human precedents, was inevitable, and in which the battles of Lade, Marathon, Plataea, Himera, Mycale, the Eurymedon, the Granicus, Issus, Arbela, Cannae, and Zama were merely incidents. The European system won against the Oriental partly because transport by water is cheaper than transport by land, and partly because it is almost a law of history that the rugged, warlike north conquers the easygoing, art-creating south.

In the year 512 Darius I of Persia crossed the Bosporus, invaded Scythia, and, marching westward, conquered Thrace and Macedon. When he returned to his capitals he had enlarged his realm to embrace Persia, Afghanistan, northern India, Turkestan, Mesopotamia, northern Arabia, Egypt, Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, the eastern Aegean, Thrace, and Macedonia; the greatest empire that the world has yet seen had overextended itself to include and awaken its future conqueror. Only one important nation remained outside this vast system of government and trade, and that was Greece. By 510 Darius had hardly heard of it outside Ionia. “The Athenians,” he asked—“who are they?”² About 506 the dictator Hippias, deposed by revolution at Athens, fled to the Persian satrap at Sardis, begged for help in regaining his power, and offered, in that event, to hold Attica under the Persian dominion.

To this temptation there was added in 500 a timely provocation. The Greek cities of Asia Minor, under Persian rule for half a century, suddenly dismissed their satraps and declared their independence, Aristagoras of Miletus went to Sparta to enlist its aid, without success; he passed on to Athens, mother city of many Ionian towns, and pleaded so well that the Athenians sent a fleet of twenty ships to support the revolt. Meanwhile the Ionians were acting with a chaotic vigor characteristic of the Greeks; each rebel city raised its own troops, but kept them under separate command; and the Milesian army, led with more bravery than wisdom, marched upon Sardis and burned the great city to the ground. The Ionian Confederacy organized a united fleet, but the Samian contingent secretly made terms with the Persian satrap, and when, in 494, the Persian navy met the Ionian at Lade, in one of the major sea battles of history, the half hundred ships of the Samians sailed away without fighting, and many other contingents followed their example.³ The defeat of the Ionians was complete, and Ionian civilization never quite recovered from this physical and spiritual disaster. The Persians laid siege to Miletus, captured it, killed the males, enslaved the women and children, and so completely plundered the city that Miletus became from that day a minor town. Persian rule was re-established throughout Ionia, and Darius, resentful of Athenian interference, resolved to conquer Greece. Little Athens, as the result of her generous assistance to her daughter cities, found herself face to face with an empire literally a hundred times greater than Attica.

In the year 491 a Persian fleet of six hundred ships under Datis struck across the Aegean from Samos, stopped on the way to subdue the Cyclades, and reached the coast of Euboea with 200,000 men. Euboea submitted after a brief struggle, and the Persians crossed the bay to Attica. They pitched their camp near Marathon, because Hippias had advised them that in that plain they could use their cavalry, in which they were overwhelmingly superior to the Greeks.⁴

All Greece was in turmoil at the news. The Persian arms had never yet been defeated, the advance of the Empire had never yet been stopped; how could a nation so weak, so scattered, so unused to unity, hold back this wave of Oriental conquest? The northern Greek states were loath to resist so monstrous a power; Sparta hesitatingly prepared, but allowed superstition to delay its mobilization; little Plataea acted quickly, and sent a large proportion of its citizens by forced marches to Marathon. At Athens Miltiades freed and enlisted slaves as well as freemen, and led them over the mountains to the battlefield. When the rival armies met, the Greeks had some twenty thousand men, the Persians probably one hundred thousand.⁵ The Persians were brave, but they were accustomed to individual fighting, and were not trained for the mass defense and attack of the Greeks. The Greeks united discipline with courage, and though they committed the folly of dividing the command among ten generals, each supreme for a day, they were saved by the example of Aristides, who yielded his leadership to Miltiades.⁶ Under this blunt soldier’s vigorous strategy the small Greek force routed the Persian horde in what was not only one of the decisive battles, but also one of the most incredible victories, of history. If we may accept Greek testimony on such a matter, 6,400 Persians, but only 192 Greeks, fell at Marathon. After the battle was over the Spartans arrived, mourned their tardiness, and praised the victors.

II. ARISTIDES AND THEMISTOCLES

The strange mixture of nobility and cruelty, idealism and cynicism, in Greek character and history was illustrated by the subsequent careers of Miltiades and Aristides. Inflated by the praise of all Greece, Miltiades asked the Athenians to equip a fleet of seventy ships, to be under his unchecked command. When the ships were ready Miltiades led them to Paros, and demanded of its citizens one hundred talents ($600,000) on pain of wholesale death. The Athenians recalled him and fined him fifty talents; but Miltiades died soon after, and the fine was paid by his son Cimon, the future rival of Pericles.⁸

The man who had yielded place to him at Marathon survived the pitfalls of success. Aristides was in life and manners a Spartan at Athens. His quiet, staid character, his modest simplicity and undiscourageable honesty won him the title of the Just; and when, in a drama of Aeschylus’, the passage occurred—

For not at seeming just, but being so,

He aims; and from his depth of soil below

Harvests of wise and prudent counsels grow—

all the audience turned to look at Aristides, as the living embodiment of the poet’s lines.⁹ When the Greeks captured the camp of the Persians at Marathon, and found great wealth in their tents, Aristides was left in charge of it, and “neither took anything for himself, nor suffered others to do it”;¹⁰ and when, after the war, the allies of Athens were induced to contribute annually to the treasury of Delos as a fund for common defense, Aristides was chosen by them to fix their payments, and none protested his decisions. Nevertheless, he was more admired than popular. Though a close friend of Cleisthenes, who had so extended democracy, he was of the opinion that democracy had gone far enough, and that any further empowerment of the Assembly would lead to administrative corruption and public disorder. He exposed malfeasance wherever he found it, and made many enemies. The democratic party, led by Themistocles, used Cleisthenes’ recently established device of ostracism to get rid of him, and in 482 the only man in Athenian history that was at once famous and honest was exiled at the height of his career. All the world knows—though again it may be only a fable—how Aristides inscribed his own name on the ostracon for a letterless citizen who did not know him, but who, with the resentment of mediocrity for excellence, was tired of hearing him called the Just. When Aristides learned of the decision he expressed the hope that Athens would never have occasion to remember him.¹¹

The historian is constrained to admit that the public men of Athens were properly equipped with the unscrupulousness that sometimes enters into statesmanship. As much as Alcibiades at a later age, Themistocles was a very flame of ability; “he has a claim on our admiration quite extraordinary and unparalleled,” says the always moderate Thucydides.¹² Like Miltiades, he saved Athens, but could not save himself; he could defeat a great empire, but not his own lust for power. “He received reluctantly and carelessly,” says Plutarch, “instructions given him to improve his manners and behavior, or to teach him any pleasing or graceful accomplishment; but whatever was said to improve him in sagacity, or in the management of affairs, he would give attention to beyond his years, confident in his natural capacity for such things.”¹³ It was Athens’ misfortune that both Themistocles and Aristides fell in love with the same girl, Stesilaus of Ceos, and that their animosity outlived the beauty that had aroused it.¹⁴ Nevertheless it was Themistocles whose foresight and energy prepared for, and carried through, the victory of Salamis—the most crucial battle in Greek history. As far back as 493 he had planned and begun: a new harbor for Athens at the Piraeus; now, in 482, he persuaded the Athenians to forego a distribution of money due them from the proceeds of the silver mines at Laurium, and to devote the sum to the building of a hundred triremes. Without this fleet there could have been no resistance to Xerxes.

III. XERXES

Darius I died in 485, and was succeeded by Xerxes I. Both father and son were men of ability and culture, and it would be an error to think of the Greco-Persian War as a contest between civilization and barbarism. When Darius, before invading Greece, sent heralds to Athens and Sparta to demand earth and water as symbols of submission, both cities had put the heralds to death. Troubled by portents, Sparta now repented of this violation of international custom, and asked for two citizens to go to Persia and surrender themselves to any punishment that the Great King might exact in retribution. Sperthias and Bulis, both of old and wealthy families, volunteered, made their way to Xerxes, and offered to die in atonement for the killing of Darius’ messengers. Xerxes, says Herodotus,¹⁵ “answered with true greatness of soul that he would not act like the Lacedaemonians, who, by killing the heralds, had broken the laws which all men held in common. As he had blamed such conduct in them, he would never be guilty of it himself.”

Xerxes prepared leisurely but thoroughly for the second Persian attack upon Greece. For four years he collected troops and materials from all the provinces of his realm; and when, in 481, he at last set forth, his army was probably the largest ever assembled in history before our own century. Herodotus reckoned it, without moderation, at 2,641,000 fighting men, and an equal number of engineers, slaves, merchants, provisioners, and prostitutes; he tells us, with perhaps a twinkle in his eye, that when Xerxes’ army drank water whole rivers ran dry.¹⁶ It was, naturally and fatally, a highly heterogeneous force. There were Persians, Medes, Babylonians, Afghans, Indians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Sacae, Assyrians, Armenians, Colchians, Scyths, Paeonians, Mysians, Paphlagonians, Phrygians, Thracians, Thessalians, Locrians, Boeotians, Aeolians, Ionians, Lydians, Carians, Cilicians, Cypriotes, Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Libyans, and many more. There were footmen, cavalrymen, chariots, elephants, and a fleet of transports and fighting triremes numbering, according to Herodotus, 1207 ships in all. When Greek spies were caught in the camp, and a general ordered their execution, Xerxes countermanded the order, spared the men, had them conducted through his forces, and then set them free, trusting that when they had reported to Athens and Sparta the extent of his preparations, the remainder of Greece would hasten to surrender.¹⁷

In the spring of 480 the great host reached the Hellespont, where Egyptian and Phoenician engineers had built a bridge that was among the most admired mechanical achievements of antiquity. If again we may follow Herodotus, 674 ships of trireme or penteconter size were distributed in two rows athwart the strait, each vessel facing the current, and moored with a heavy anchor. Then the builders stretched cables of flax or papyrus over each row of ships from bank to bank, bound the cables to every ship, and made them taut with capstans on the shore. Trees were cut and sawn into planks, and these, laid across the cables, were fastened to them and to one another. The planks were covered with brushwood, and this with earth, and the whole was trodden down to resemble a road. A bulwark was erected on each side of the causeway high enough to keep animals from taking fright at sight of the sea.¹⁸ Nevertheless many of the beasts, and some of the soldiers, had to be driven by the lash to trust themselves to the bridge. It stood the burden well, and in seven days and nights the entire host had passed over it successfully. A native of the region, seeing the spectacle, concluded that Xerxes was Zeus, and asked why the master of gods and men had taken so much trouble to conquer little Greece when he might have destroyed the presumptuous nation with one thunderbolt.¹⁹

The army marched overland through Thrace and down into Macedonia and Thessaly, while the Persian fleet, hugging the coasts, avoided the storms of the Aegean by passing southward through a canal dug by forced labor across the isthmus at Mt. Athos to the length of a mile and a quarter. Wherever the army ate two meals, we are told, the city that fed it was utterly ruined; Thasos spent four hundred silver talents—approximately a million dollars—in playing host to Xerxes for a day.²⁰ The northern Greeks. even to the Attic frontier, surrendered to fear or bribery, and allowed their troops to be added to Xerxes’ millions. Only Plataea and Thespiae, in the north, prepared to fight.

IV. SALAMIS

How can we imagine, today, the terror and desperation of the southern Greeks at the approach of this polyglot avalanche? Resistance seemed insane; the loyal states could not muster one tenth of Xerxes’ force. For once Athens and Sparta worked together with single mind and heart. Delegates were sped to every city in the Peloponnesus to beg for troops or supplies; most of the states co-operated; Argos refused, and never lived down her disgrace. Athens fitted out a fleet that sailed north to meet the Persian armada, and Sparta dispatched a small force under King Leonidas to halt Xerxes for a while at Thermopylae. The two navies met at Artemisium, off the northern coast of Euboea. When the Greek admirals saw the overwhelming number of the enemy’s vessels they were of a mind to withdraw. The Euboeans, fearing a descent of the Persians upon their shores, sent to Themistocles, commander of the Athenian contingent, a bribe of thirty talents ($180,000) on condition that he persuade the Greek leaders to fight; he succeeded by sharing the bribe.²¹ With characteristic subtlety Themistocles had sailors inscribe upon the rocks messages to the Greeks in the Persian fleet begging them to desert, or in any case not to fight against their motherland; he hoped that if the Ionians saw these words they would be moved by them, and that if Xerxes saw and understood them, the King would not dare to use Hellenes in the battle. All day the rival fleets fought, until night put an end to the engagement before either side could win; the Greeks then retired to Artemisium, the Persians to Aphetae. Considering the inequality of numbers, the Greeks justifiably looked upon the battle as a victory. When news came of the disaster at Thermopylae the surviving Greek fleet sailed south to Salamis, to provide a refuge for Athens.

Meanwhile Leonidas, despite the most heroic resistance in history, had been overwhelmed at the “Hot Gates,” not so much by the bravery of the Persians as by the treachery of Hellenes. Certain Greeks from Trachis not only betrayed to Xerxes the secret of the indirect route over the mountains, but led the Persian force by that approach to attack the Spartans in the rear. Leonidas and his three hundred elders (for he had chosen only fathers of sons to go with him, lest any Spartan family should be extinguished) died almost to the last man. Of the two Spartan survivors one fell at Plataea, the other hanged himself for shame.²² The Greek historians assure us that the Persians lost 20,000, the Greeks 300.²³ Over the tomb of the latter heroes was placed the most famous of Greek epitaphs: “Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws.”²⁴

When the Athenians learned that no barrier now remained between Athens and the Persians, proclamation was made that every Athenian should save his family as best he could. Some fled to Aegina, some to Salamis, some to Troezen; some of the men were enlisted to fill up the crews of the fleet that was returning from Artemisium. Plutarch paints²⁵ a touching picture of how the tame animals of the city followed their masters to the shore, and howled when the overladen vessels drew off without them; one dog, belonging to Pericles’ father, Xanthippus, leaped into the sea and swam alongside his ship to Salamis, where it died of exhaustion.²⁶ We may judge of the excitement and passion of those days when we learn that an Athenian who, in the Assembly, advised surrender, was killed there and then, and that a crowd of women went to his house and stoned his wife and children to death.²⁷ When Xerxes arrived he found the city almost deserted, and gave it over to pillage and fire.

Soon afterward the Persian fleet, twelve hundred strong, entered the Bay of Salamis. Against it were ranged three hundred Greek triremes, still under divided command. The majority of the admirals were opposed to risking an engagement. Resolved to force action upon the Greeks, Themistocles resorted to a stratagem that would have cost him his life had the Persians won. He sent a trusted slave to Xerxes to tell him that the Greeks were intending to sail away during the night, and that the Persians could prevent this only by surrounding the Greek fleet. Xerxes accepted the advice, and on the next morning, with every escape blocked, the Greeks were compelled to give fight. Xerxes, seated in state at the foot of Mt. Aegaleus, on the Attic shore across from Salamis, watched the action, and noted the names of those of his men who fought with especial bravery. The superior tactics and seamanship of the Hellenes, and the confusion of tongues, minds, and superfluous ships among the Orientals, finally decided the issue in favor of Greece. According to Diodorus the invaders lost two hundred vessels, the defenders forty; but we do not have the Persian side of the story. Few of the Greeks, even from the lost ships, died; for being all excellent swimmers, they swam to land when their boats foundered.²⁸ The remnant of the Persian fleet fled to the Hellespont, and the subtle Themistocles sent his slave again to Xerxes to say that he had dissuaded the Greeks from pursuit. Xerxes left 300,000 men under command of Mardonius, and with the rest of his troops marched back in humiliation to Sardis, a large part of his force dying of pestilence and dysentery on the way.

In the same year as Salamis—possibly, as the Greeks would have it, on the same day (September 23, 480 B.C.)—the Greeks of Sicily fought the Carthaginians at Himera. We do not know that the Phoenicians of Africa were acting in concert with those who supported Xerxes and so largely manned his fleet; perhaps it was only a coincidence that Greece found itself assaulted in east and west at once.²⁹ In the traditional account Hamilcar, the Carthaginian admiral, arrived at Panormus with 3000 ships and 300,000 troops; he proceeded thence to lay siege to Himera, where he was met by Gelon of Syracuse with 55,000 men. After the fashion of Punic generals, Hamilcar stood aside from the battle, and burned sacrificial victims to his gods as the contest raged; when his defeat became evident he threw himself into the fire. A tomb was erected to him on the site; and there his grandson Himilcon, seventy years afterwards, slaughtered 3000 Greek captives in revenge.³⁰

A year later (August, 479) the liberation of Greece was completed by almost simultaneous engagements on land and sea. Mardonius’ army, living leisurely on the country, had pitched its camp near Plataea on the Boeotian plain. There, after two weeks of waiting for propitious omens, a Greek force of 110,000 men, led by the Spartan king Pausanias, joined issue with them in the greatest land battle of the war. The non-Persians in the invading force had no heart for the conflict, and took to flight as soon as the Persian contingent, which bore the point of the attack, began to waver. The Greeks won so overwhelming a victory that (according to their historians) they lost but 159 men, while of the Persian force 260,000 were slain.* On the same day, the Greeks aver, a Greek squadron met a Persian flotilla off the coast of Mycale, the central meeting place of all Ionia. The Persian fleet was destroyed, the Ionian cities were freed from Persian rule, and control of the Hellespont and the Bosporus was won by the Greeks as they had won it from Troy seven hundred years before.

The Greco-Persian War was the most momentous conflict in European history, for it made Europe possible. It won for Western civilization the opportunity to develop its own economic life—unburdened with alien tribute or taxation—and its own political institutions, free from the dictation of Oriental kings. It won for Greece a clear road for the first great experiment in liberty; it preserved the Greek mind for three centuries from the enervating mysticism of the East, and secured for Greek enterprise full freedom of the sea. The Athenian fleet that remained after Salamis now opened every port in the Mediterranean to Greek trade, and the commercial expansion that ensued provided the wealth that financed the leisure and culture of Periclean Athens. The victory of little Hellas against such odds stimulated the pride and lifted up the spirit of its people; out of very gratitude they felt called upon to do unprecedented things. After centuries of preparation and sacrifice Greece entered upon its Golden Age.

BOOK III

THE GOLDEN AGE

480-399 B.C.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK III

NOTE: Where no city is named for a person, “of Athens” is understood.

B.C.

478:

Pindar of Thebes, poet

478-67:

Hieron I dictator at Syracuse

478:

Pythagoras of Rhegium, sculptor

477:

Delian Confederacy founded

472:

Polygnotus, painter; Aeschylus’ Persae

469:

Birth of Socrates

468:

Cimon defeats Persians at the Eurymedon; first contest between Aeschylus and Sophocles

467:

Bacchylides of Ceos, poet; Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes

464-54:

Helot revolt; siege of Ithome

463-31:

Public career of Pericles

462:

Ephialtes limits the Areopagus; pay for jurors; Anaxagoras at Athens

461:

Cimon ostracized; Ephialtes killed

460:

Empedocles of Acragas, philosopher; Aeschylus’ Promotheus Bound

459-54:

Athenian expedition to Egypt fails

458:

Aeschylus’ Oresteia; the Long Walls

456:

Temple of Zeus at Olympia; Paeonius of Mende, sculptor

454:

Delian treasury removed to Athens

450:

Zeno of Elea, philosopher; Hippocrates of Chios, mathematician; Callimachus develops the Corinthian order; Philolaus of Thebes, astronomer

448:

Peace of Callias with Persia

447-31:

The Parthenon

445:

Leucippus of Abdera, philosopher

443:

Herodotus of Halicarnassus, historian, joins colonists founding Thurii (Italy); Gorgias of Leontini, Sophist

442:

Sophocles’ Antigone; Myron of Eleutherae, sculptor

440:

Protagoras of Abdera, Sophist

438:

Pheidias’ Athene Parthenos; Euripides’ Alcestis

437:

ThePropylaea

435-34:

War between Corinth and Corcyra

433:

Alliance of Athens and Corcyra

432:

Revolt of Potidaea; trials of Aspasia, Pheidias, and Anaxagoras

431-04:

Peloponnesian War

431-24:

Euripides’ Medea, Andromache, and Hecuba; Sophocles’ Electra

430:

Plague at Athens; trial of Pericles

429:

Death of Pericles; Cleon in power; Sophocles’ Oedipus the King

428:

Revolt of Mytilene; Euripides’ Hippolytus; death of Anaxagoras

B.C.

427:

Embassy of Gorgias at Athens; Prodicus and Hippias, Sophists

425:

Siege of Sphacteria; Aristophanes’ Acharnians

424:

Brasidas takes Amphipolis; exile of Thucydides, historian; Aristophanes’ Knights

423:

Aristophanes’ Clouds; Zeuxis of Heraclea and Parrhasius of Ephesus, painters

422:

Aristophanes’ Wasps; death of Cleon and Brasidas

421:

Peace of Nicias; Aristophanes’ Peace

420:

Hippocrates of Cos, physician; Democritus of Abdera, philosopher; Polycleitus of Sicyon, sculptor

420-04:

The Erechtheum

419:

Lysias, orator

418:

Spartan victory at Mantinea; Euripides’ Ion

416:

Massacre at Melos; Euripides’ Electra(?)

415-13:

Athenian expedition to Syracuse

415:

Mutilation of the Hermae; disgrace of Alcibiades; Euripides’ Trojan Women

414:

Siege of Syracuse; Aristophanes’ Birds

413:

Athenian defeat at Syracuse; Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris

412:

Euripides’ Helen and Andromeda

411:

Revolt of the Four Hundred; Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae

410:

Restoration of the democrary; victory of Alcibiades at Cyzicus

408:

Timotheus of Miletus, poet and musician; Euripides’ Orestes

406:

Athenian victory at Arginusae; deaths of Euripides and Sophocles; Euripides’ Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis

405-367:

Dionysius I dictator at Syracuse

405:

Spartan victory at Aegospotami; Aristophanes’ Frogs

404:

End of the Peloponnesian War; rule of the Thirty at Athens

403:

Restoration of the democracy

401:

Defeat of Cyrus II at Cunaxa; retreat of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand; Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus

399:

Trial and death of Socrates

CHAPTER XI

Pericles and the Democratic Experiment

I. THE RISE OF ATHENS

“THE period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle,” wrote Shelley,¹ “is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with reference to the effect which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world.” Athens dominated this period because she had won the allegiance—and the contributions—of most Aegean cities by her leadership in saving Greece; and because, when the war was over, Ionia was impoverished and Sparta was disordered by demobilization, earthquake, and insurrection, while the fleet that Themistocles had created now rivaled with the conquests of commerce its victories at Artemisium and Salamis.

Not that the war was quite over: intermittently the struggle between Greece and Persia continued from the conquest of Ionia by Cyrus to the overthrow of Darius III by Alexander. The Persians were expelled from Ionia in 479, from the Black Sea in 478, from Thrace in 475; and in 468 a Greek fleet under Cimon of Athens decisively defeated the Persians on land and sea at the mouth of the Eurymedon.* The Greek cities of Asia and the Aegean, for their protection against Persia, now (477) organized under Athenian leadership the Delian Confederacy, and contributed to a common fund in the temple of Apollo on Delos. Since Athens donated ships instead of money, it soon exercised, through its sea power, an effective control over its allies; and rapidly the Confederacy of equals was transformed into an Athenian Empire.

In this policy of imperial aggrandizement all the major statesmen of Athens—even the virtuous Aristides and later the impeccable Pericles—joined with the unscrupulous Themistocles. No other man had deserved so well of Athens as Themistocles, and no one was more resolved than he to be repaid for it. When the Greek leaders met to give first and second awards to those men who had most ably defended Greece in the war, each of them voted for himself first, and for Themistocles second. It was he who set the course of Greek history by persuading Athens that the road to supremacy lay not on land but on the sea, and not by war so much as by trade. He negotiated with Persia, and sought to end the strife between the old and the young empire in order that unimpeded commerce with Asia might bring prosperity to Athens. Under his prodding the men, even the women and children, of Athens raised a wall around the city, and another around the ports at the Piraeus and Munychia; under his lead, carried forward by Pericles, great quays, warehouses, and exchanges were erected at the Piraeus, providing every convenience for maritime trade. He knew that these policies would arouse the jealousy of Sparta, and might lead to war between the rival states; but he was stirred on by his vision of Athens’ development, and his confidence in the Athenian fleet.

His aims were as magnificent as his means were venal. He used the navy to force tribute from the Cyclades, on the ground that they had yielded too quickly to the Persians, and had lent Xerxes their troops; and he appears to have accepted bribes to let some cities off.² For like considerations he arranged the recall of exiles, sometimes keeping the money, says Timocreon, though he had failed to obtain the recall.³ When Aristides was placed in charge of the public revenue he found that his predecessors had embezzled public funds, and not least lavishly Themistocles.⁴ Toward 471 the Athenians, fearing his unmoral intellect, passed a vote of ostracism upon him, and he sought a new home in Argos. Shortly thereafter the Spartans found documents apparently implicating Themistocles, in the secret correspondence of their regent Pausanias, whom they had starved to death for entering into traitorous negotiations with Persia. Happy to destroy her ablest enemy, Sparta revealed these papers to Athens, which at once sent out an order for Themistocles’ arrest. He fled to Corcyra, was denied refuge there, found brief asylum in Epirus, and thence sailed secretly to Asia, where he claimed from Xerxes’ successor some reward for restraining the Greek pursuit of the Persian fleet after Salamis. Lured by Themistocles’ promise to help him subjugate Greece,⁵ Artaxerxes I received him into his counsels, and assigned the revenues of several cities for his maintenance. Before Themistocles could carry out the schemes that never let him rest he died at Magnesia in 449 B.C., at the age of sixty-five, admired and disliked by all the Mediterranean world.

After the passing of Themistocles and Aristides the leadership of the democratic faction at Athens descended to Ephialtes, and that of the oligarchic or conservative faction to Cimon, son of Miltiades. Cimon had most of the virtues that Themistocles lacked, but none of the subtlety that ability must depend upon for political success. Unhappy amid the intrigues of the city, he secured command of the fleet, and consolidated the liberties of Greece by his victory at the Eurymedon. Returning to Athens in glory, he at once lost his popularity by advising a reconciliation with Sparta. He won the Assembly’s reluctant consent to lead an Athenian force to the aid of the Spartans against their revolted Helots at Ithome; but the Spartans suspected the Athenians even when bringing gifts, and so clearly distrusted Cimon’s soldiers that these returned to Athens in anger, and Cimon was disgraced. In 461 he was ostracized at the instigation of Pericles, and the oligarchic party was so demoralized by his fall that for two generations the government remained in the hands of the democrats. Four years later Pericles, repentant (or, rumor said, enamored of Cimon’s sister Elpinice), secured his recall, and Cimon died with honors in a naval campaign in Cyprus.

The leader of the democratic party at this time was a man of whom we know strangely little, and yet his activity was a turning point in the history of Athens. Ephialtes was poor but incorruptible, and did not long survive the animosities of Athenian politics. The popular faction had been strengthened by the war, for in that crisis all class divisions among freemen had for a moment been forgotten, and the saving victory at Salamis had been won not by the army—which was dominated by the aristocrats—but by the navy, which was manned by the poorer citizens and controlled by the mercantile middle class. The oligarchic party sought to maintain its privileges by making the conservative Areopagus the supreme authority in the state. Ephialtes replied by a bitter attack upon this ancient senate.* He impeached several of its members for malfeasance, had some of them put to death,⁷ and persuaded the Assembly to vote the almost complete abolition of the powers that the Areopagus still retained. The conservative Aristotle later approved this radical policy, on the ground that “the transfer to the commons of the judicial functions that had belonged to the Senate appears to have been an advantage, for corruption finds an easier material in a small number than in a large one.”⁸ But the conservatives of the time did not see the issue so calmly. Ephialtes, having been found unpurchasable, was assassinated in 461 by an agent of the oligarchy,⁹ and the perilous task of leading the democratic party passed down to the aristocratic Pericles.

II. PERICLES

The man who acted as commander in chief of all the physical and spiritual forces of Athens during her greatest age was born some three years before Marathon. His father, Xanthippus, had fought at Salamis, had led the Athenian fleet in the battle of Mycale, and had recaptured the Hellespont for Greece. Pericles’ mother, Agariste, was a granddaughter of the reformer Cleisthenes; on her side, therefore, he belonged to the ancient family of the Alcmaeonids. “His mother being near her time,” says Plutarch, “fancied in a dream that she was brought to bed of a lion, and a few days after was delivered of Pericles—in other respects perfectly formed, only his head was somewhat longish and out of proportion”;¹⁰ his critics were to have much fun with this very dolicocephalic head, The most famous music teacher of his time, Damon, gave him instruction in music, and Pythocleides in music and literature; he heard the lectures of Zeno the Eleatic at Athens, and became the friend and pupil of the philosopher Anaxagoras. In his development he absorbed the rapidly growing culture of his epoch, and united in his mind and policy all the threads of Athenian civilization—economic, military, literary, artistic, and philosophical. He was, so far as we know, the most complete man that Greece produced.

Seeing that the oligarchic party was out of step with the time, he attached himself early in life to the party of the demos—i.e., the free population of Athens; then, as even in Jefferson’s day in America, the word “people” carried certain proprietary reservations. He approached politics in general, and each situation in it, with careful preparation, neglecting no aspect of education, speaking seldom and briefly, and praying to the gods that he might never utter a word that was not to the point. Even the comic poets, who disliked him, spoke of him as “the Olympian,” who wielded the thunder and lightning of such eloquence as Athens had never heard before; and yet by all accounts his speech was unimpassioned, and appealed to enlightened minds. His influence was due not only to his intelligence but to his probity; he was capable of using bribery to secure state ends, but was himself “manifestly free from every kind of corruption, and superior to all considerations of money”;¹¹ and whereas Themistocles had entered public office poor and left it rich, Pericles, we are told, added nothing to his patrimony by his political career.¹² It showed the good sense of the Athenians in this generation that for almost thirty years, between 467 and 428, they elected and re-elected him, with brief intermissions, as one of their ten strategoi or commanders; and this relative permanence of office not only gave him supremacy on the military board, but enabled him to raise the position of strategos autokrator to the place of highest influence in the government. Under him Athens, while enjoying all the privileges of democracy, acquired also the advantages of aristocracy and dictatorship. The good government and cultural patronage that had adorned Athens in the age of Peisistratus were continued now with equal unity and decisiveness of direction and intelligence, but also with the full and annually renewed consent of a free citizenship. History through him illustrated again the principle that liberal reforms are most ably executed and most permanently secured by the cautious and moderate leadership of an aristocrat enjoying popular support. Greek civilization was at its best when democracy had grown sufficiently to give it variety and vigor, and aristocracy survived sufficiently to give it order and taste.

The reforms of Pericles substantially extended the authority of the people. Though the power of the heliaea had grown under Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes, the lack of payment for jury service had given the well to do a predominating influence in these courts. Pericles introduced (451) a fee of two obols (34 cents), later raised to three, for a day’s duty as juror, an amount equivalent in each case to half a day’s earnings of an average Athenian of the time.¹³ The notion that these modest sums weakened the fiber and corrupted the morale of Athens is hardly to be taken seriously, for by the same token every state that pays its judges or its jurymen would long since have been destroyed. Pericles seems also to have established a small remuneration for military service. He crowned this scandalous generosity by persuading the state to pay every citizen two obols annually as the price of admission to the plays and games of the official festivals; he excused himself on the ground that these performances should not be a luxury of the upper and middle classes, but should contribute to elevate the mind of the whole electorate. It must be confessed, however, that Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch—conservatives all—were agreed that these pittances injured the Athenian character.¹⁴

Continuing the work of Ephialtes, Pericles transferred to the popular courts the various judicial powers that had been possessed by the archons and magistrates, so that from this time the archonship was more of a bureaucratic or administrative office than one that carried the power of forming policies, deciding cases, or issuing commands. In 457 eligibility to the archonship, which had been confined to the wealthier classes, was extended to the third class, or zeugkai; soon thereafter, without any legal form, the lowest citizen class, the thetes, made themselves eligible to the office by romancing about their income; and the importance of the thetes in the defense of Athens persuaded the other classes to wink at the fraud.¹⁵ Moving for a moment in the opposite direction, Pericles (451) carried through the Assembly a restriction of the franchise to the legitimate offspring of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. No legal marriage was to be permitted between a citizen and a noncitizen. It was a measure aimed to discourage intermarriage with foreigners, to reduce illegitimate births, and perhaps to reserve to the jealous burghers of Athens the material rewards of citizenship and empire. Pericles himself would soon have reason to regret this exclusive legislation.

Since any form of government seems good that brings prosperity, and even the best seems bad that hinders it, Pericles, having consolidated his political position, turned to economic statesmanship. He sought to reduce the pressure of population upon the narrow resources of Attica by establishing colonies of poor Athenian citizens upon foreign soil. To give work to the idle,¹⁶ he made the state an employer on a scale unprecedented in Greece: ships were added to the fleet, arsenals were built, and a great corn exchange was erected at the Piraeus. To protect Athens effectively from siege by land, and at the same time to provide further work for the unemployed, Pericles persuaded the Assembly to supply funds for constructing eight miles of “Long Walls,” as they were to be called, connecting Athens with the Piraeus and Phalerum; the effect was to make the city and its ports one fortified enclosure, open in wartime only to the sea—on which the Athenian fleet was supreme. In the hostility with which unwalled Sparta looked upon this program of fortification the oligarchic party saw a chance to recapture political power. Its secret agents invited the Spartans to invade Attica and, with the aid of an oligarchic insurrection, to put down the democracy; in this event the oligarchs pledged themselves to level the Long Walls. The Spartans agreed, and dispatched an army which defeated the Athenians at Tanagra (457); but the oligarchs failed to make their revolution. The Spartans returned to the Peloponnesus empty-handed, dourly awaiting a better opportunity to overcome the flourishing rival that was taking from them their traditional leadership of Greece.

Pericles rejected the temptation to retaliate upon Sparta, and instead, devoted his energies now to the beautification of Athens. Hoping to make his city the cultural center of Hellas, and to rebuild the ancient shrines—which the Persians had destroyed—on a scale and with a splendor that would lift up the soul-of every citizen, he devised a plan for using all the genius of Athens’ artists, and the labor of her remaining unemployed, in a bold program for the architectural adornment of the Acropolis. “It was his desire and design,” says Plutarch, “that the undisciplined mechanic multitude . . . should not go without their share of public funds, and yet should not have these given them for sitting still and doing nothing; and to this end he brought in these vast projects of construction.”¹⁷ To finance the undertaking he proposed that the treasury accumulated by the Delian Confederacy should be removed from Delos, where it lay idle and insecure, and that such part of it as was not needed for common defense should be used to beautify what seemed to Pericles the legitimate capital of a beneficent empire.

The transference of the Delian treasury to Athens was quite acceptable to the Athenians, even to the oligarchs. But the voters were loath to spend any substantial part of the fund in adorning their city—whether through some qualm of conscience, or through a secret hope that the money might be appropriated more directly to their needs and enjoyment. The oligarchic leaders played upon this feeling so cleverly that when the matter neared a vote in the Assembly the defeat of Pericles’ plan seemed certain. Plutarch tells a delightful story of how the subtle leader turned the tide. “‘Very well,’ said Pericles; ‘let the cost of these buildings go not to your account but to mine; and let the inscription upon them stand in my name.’ When they heard him say this, whether it were out of a surprise to see the greatness of his spirit, or out of emulation of the glory of the works, they cried aloud, bidding him spend on . . . and spare no cost till all were finished.”

While the work proceeded, and Pericles’ especial protection and support were given to Pheidias, Ictinus, Mnesicles, and the other artists who labored to realize his dreams, he lent his patronage also to literature and philosophy; and whereas in the other Greek cities of this period the strife of parties consumed much of the energy of the citizens, and literature languished, in Athens the stimulus of growing wealth and democratic freedom was combined with wise and cultured leadership to produce the Golden Age. When Pericles, Aspasia, Pheidias, Anaxagoras, and Socrates attended a play by Euripides in the Theater of Dionysus, Athens could see visibly the zenith and unity of the life of Greece—statesmanship, art, science, philosophy, literature, religion, and morals living no separate career as in the pages of chroniclers, but woven into one many-colored fabric of a nation’s history.

The affections of Pericles wavered between art and philosophy, and he might have found it hard to say whether he loved Pheidias or Anaxagoras the more; perhaps he turned to Aspasia as a compromise between beauty and wisdom. For Anaxagoras he entertained, we are told, “an extraordinary esteem and admiration.”¹⁸ It was the philosopher, says Plato,¹⁹ who deepened Pericles into statesmanship; from long intercourse with Anaxagoras, Plutarch believes, Pericles derived “not merely elevation of purpose and dignity of language, raised far above the base and dishonest buffooneries of mob eloquence, but, besides this, a composure of countenance, and a serenity and calmness in all his movements, which no occurrence whilst he was speaking could disturb.” When Anaxagoras was old, and Pericles was absorbed in public affairs, the statesman for a time let the philosopher drop out of his life; but later, hearing that Anaxagoras was starving, Pericles hastened to his relief, and accepted humbly his rebuke, that “those who have occasion for a lamp supply it with oil.”²⁰

It seems hardly credible, and yet on second thought most natural, that the stern “Olympian” should have been keenly susceptible to the charms of woman; his self-control fought against a delicate sensibility, and the toils of office must have heightened in him the normal male longing for feminine tenderness. He had been many years married when he met Aspasia. She belonged to—she was helping to create—the type of hetaira that was about to play so active a part in Athenian life: a woman rejecting the seclusion that marriage brought to the ladies of Athens, and preferring to live in unlicensed unions, even in relative promiscuity, if thereby she might enjoy the same freedom of movement and conduct as men, and participate with them in their cultural interests. We have no testimony to Aspasia’s beauty, though ancient writers speak of her “small, high-arched foot,” “her silvery voice,” and her golden hair.²¹ Aristophanes, an unscrupulous political enemy of Pericles, describes her as a Milesian courtesan who had established a luxurious brothel at Megara, and had now imported some of her girls into Athens; and the great comedian delicately suggests that the quarrel of Athens with Megara, which precipitated the Peloponnesian War, was brought about because Aspasia persuaded Pericles to revenge her upon Megarians who had kidnaped some of her personnel.²² But Aristophanes was not an historian, and may be trusted only where he himself is not concerned.

Arriving in Athens about 450, Aspasia opened a school of rhetoric and philosophy, and boldly encouraged the public emergence and higher education of women. Many girls of good family came to her classes, and some husbands brought their wives to study with her.²³ Men also attended her lectures, among them Pericles and Socrates, and probably Anaxagoras, Euripides, Alcibiades, and Pheidias. Socrates said that he had learned from her the art of eloquence,²⁴ and some ancient gossips would have it that the Statesman inherited her from the philosopher.²⁵ Pericles now found it admirable that his wife had formed an affection for another man. He offered her her freedom in return for his own, and she agreed; she took a third husband,²⁶ while Pericles brought Aspasia home. By his own law of 451 he could not make her his wife, since she was of Milesian birth; any child he might have by her would be illegitimate, and ineligible to Athenian citizenship. He seems to have loved her sincerely, even uxoriously, never leaving his home or returning to it without kissing her, and finally willing his fortune to the son that she bore him. From that time onward he forewent all social life outside his home, seldom going anywhere except to the agora or the council hall; the people of Athens began to complain of his aloofness. For her part Aspasia made his home a French Enlightenment salon, where the art and science, the literature, philosophy, and statesmanship of Athens were brought together in mutual stimulation. Socrates marveled at her eloquence, and credited her with composing the funeral oration that Pericles delivered aher the first casualties of the “Peloponnesian War.²⁷ Aspasia became the uncrowned queen of Athens, setting fashion’s tone, and giving to the women of the city an exciting example of mental and moral freedom.

The conservatives were shocked at all this, and turned it to their purposes. They denounced Pericles for leading Greeks out to war against Greeks, as in Aegina and Samos; they accused him of squandering public funds; finally, through the mouths of irresponsible comic dramatists abusing the free speech that prevailed under his rule, they charged him with turning his home into a house of ill fame, and having relations with the wife, of his son²⁸. Not daring to bring any of these matters to open trial, they attacked him through his friends. They indicted Pheidias for embezzling, as they alleged, some of the gold assigned to him for his chryselephantine Athena, and apparently succeeded in convicting him; they indieted Anaxagoras on the ground of irreligion, and the philosopher, on Pericles’ advice, fled into exile; they brought against Aspasia a like writ of impiety (graphe asebeias), complaining that she had shown disrespect for the gods of Greece.²⁹ The comic poets satirized her mercilessly as a Deianeira who had ruined Pericles,* and called her, in plain Greek, a concubine; one of them, Hermippus, doubtless in turn a dishonest penny, accused her of serving as Pericles’ procuress, and of bringing freeborn women to him for his pleasure.³⁰ At her trial, which took place before a court of fifteen hundred jurors, Pericles spoke in her defense, using all his eloquence, even to tears; and the case was dismissed. From that moment (432) Pericles began to lose his hold upon the Athenian people; and when, three years later, death came to him, he was already a broken man.

III. ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

1. Deliberation

These strange indictments suffice to show how real was the limited democracy that functioned under the supposed dictatorship of Pericles. We must study this democracy carefully, for it is one of the outstanding experiments in the history of government. It is limited, first, by the fact that only a small minority of the people can read. It is limited physically by the difficulty of reaching Athens from the remoter towns of Attica. The franchise is restricted to those sons, of two free Athenian parents, who have reached the age of twenty-one; and only they and their families enjoy civil rights, or directly bear the military and fiscal burdens of the state. Within this jealously circumscribed circle of 43,000 citizens out of an Attic population of 315,000, political power, in the days of Pericles, is formally equal; each citizen enjoys and insists upon isonomia and isegoria—equal rights at law and in the Assembly. To the Athenian a citizen is a man who not only votes, but takes his turn, by lot and rote, as magistrate or judge; he must be free, ready, and able to serve the state at any time. No one who is subject to another, or who has to labor in order to live, can have the time or the capacity for these services; and therefore the manual worker seems to most Athenians unfit for citizenship, though, with human inconsistency they admit the peasant proprietor. All of the 115,000 slaves of Attica, all women, nearly all workingmen, all of the 28,500 “metics” or resident aliens,* and consequently a great part of the trading class, are excluded from the franchise.†

The voters are not gathered into parties, but are loosely divided into followers of the oligarchic or the democratic factions according as they oppose or favor the extension of the franchise, the dominance of the Assembly, and the governmental succor of the poor at the expense of the rich. The active members of each faction are organized into clubs called hetaireiai, companionships. There are clubs of all kinds in Periclean Athens—religious clubs, kinship clubs, military clubs, workers’ clubs, actors’ clubs, political clubs, and clubs honestly devoted to eating and drinking. The strongest of all are the oligarchic clubs, whose members are sworn to mutual aid in politics and law, and are bound by a common passionate hostility to those lower enfranchised ranks that press upon the toes of the landed aristocracy and the moneyed merchant class.³¹ Against them stand the relatively democratic party of small businessmen, of citizens who have become wage workers, and of those who man the merchant ships and the Athenian fleet; these groups resent the luxuries and privileges of the rich, and raise up to leadership in Athens such men as Cleon the tanner, Lysicles the sheep dealer, Eucrates the tow seller, Cleophon the harp manufacturer, and Hyperbolus the lampmaker. Pericles holds them off for a generation by a subtle mixture of democracy and aristocracy; but when he dies they inherit the government and thoroughly enjoy its perquisites. From Solon to the Roman conquest this bitter conflict of oligarchs and democrats is waged with oratory, votes, ostracism, assassination, and civil war.

Every voter is of right a member of the basic governing body—the ekklesia, or Assembly; there is at this level no representative government. Since transportation is difficult over the hills of Attica, only a fraction of the eligible members ever attend any one meeting; there are rarely more than two or three thousand. Those citizens who live in Athens or at the Piraeus come by a kind of geographical determinism to dominate the Assembly; in this way the democrats gain ascendancy over the conservatives, who are for the most part scattered among the farms and estates of Attica. The Assembly meets four times a month, on important occasions in the agora, in the Theater of Dionysus, or at the Piraeus, ordinarily in a semicircular place called the Pnyx on the slope of a hill west of the Areopagus; in all these cases the members sit on benches under the open sky, and the sitting begins at dawn. Each session opens with the sacrifice of a pig to Zeus. It is usual to adjourn at once in case of a storm, earthquake, or eclipse, for these are accounted signs of divine disapproval. New legislation may be proposed only at the first session of each month, and the member who offers it is held responsible for the result of its adoption; if these are seriously evil another member may within a year of the vote invoke upon him the graphe paranomon, or writ of illegality, and have him fined, disfranchised, or put to death; this is Athens’ way of discouraging hasty legislation. By another form of the same writ a new proposal may be checked by a demand that before its enactment one of the courts shall pass upon its constitutionality—i.e., its agreement with existing law.³² Again, before considering a bill, the Assembly is required to submit it to the Council of Five Hundred for preliminary examination, very much as a bill in the American Congress, before discussion of it on the floor, is referred to a committee presumed to have especial knowledge and competence in the matter involved. The Council may not reject a proposal outright; it may only report it, with or without a recommendation.

Ordinarily the presiding officer opens the Assembly by presenting a probouleuma, or reported bill. Those who wish to speak are heard in the order of their age; but anyone may be disqualified from addressing the Assembly if it can be shown that he is not a landowner, or is not legally married, or has neglected his duties to his parents, or has offended public morals, or has evaded a military obligation, or has thrown away his shield in battle, or owes taxes or other money to the state.³³ Only trained orators avail themselves of the right to speak, for the Assembly is a difficult audience. It laughs at mispronunciations, protests aloud at digressions, expresses its approval with shouts, whistling, and clapping of hands, and, if it strongly disapproves, makes such a din that the speaker is compelled to leave the bema, or rostrum.³⁴ Each speaker is allowed a given time, whose lapse is measured by a clepsydra or water clock.³⁵ Voting is by a show of hands unless some individual is directly and specially affected by the proposal, in which case a secret ballot is taken. The vote may confirm, amend, or override the Council’s report on a bill, and the decision of the Assembly is final. Decrees for immediate action, as distinct from laws, may be enacted more expeditiously than new legislation; but such decrees may with equal expedition be canceled, and do not enter into the body of Athenian law.

Above the Assembly in dignity, inferior to it in power, is the boule, or Council. Originally an upper house, it has by the time of Pericles been reduced in effect to a legislative committee of the ekklesia. Its members are chosen by lot and rote from the register of the citizens, fifty for each of the ten tribes; they serve for a year only, and receive, in the fourth century, five obols per day. Since each councilor is disqualified for re-election until all other eligible citizens have had a chance to serve, every citizen, in the normal course of events, sits on the boule for at least one term during his life. It meets in the bouleuterion, or council hall, south of the agora, and its ordinary sessions are public. Its functions are legislative, executive, and consultative: it examines and reformulates the bills proposed to the Assembly; it supervises the conduct and accounts of the religious and administrative officials of the city; it controls public finances, enterprises, and buildings; it issues executive decrees when action is called for and the Assembly is not in session; and, subject to later revision by the Assembly, it controls the foreign affairs of the state.

To perform these varied tasks the Council divides itself into ten prytanies, or committees, each of fifty members; and each prytany presides over the Council and the Assembly for a month of thirty-six days. Every morning the presiding prytany chooses one of its members to serve as chairman of itself and the Council for the day; this position, the highest in the state, is therefore open by lot and turn to any citizen; Athens has three hundred presidents every year. The lot determines at the last moment which prytany, and which member of it, shall preside over the Council during the month or the day; by this device the corrupt Athenians hope to reduce the corruption of justice to the lowest point attainable by human character. The acting prytany prepares the agenda, convokes the Council, and formulates the conclusions reached during the day. In this way, through Assembly, Council, and prytany, the democracy of Athens carries out its legislative functions. As for the Areopagus, its powers are in the fifth century restricted to trying cases of arson, willful violence, poisoning, or premeditated murder. Slowly the law of Greece has been changed “from status to contract,” from the whim of one man, or the edict of a narrow class, into the deliberate agreement of free citizens.

2. Law

The earliest Greeks appear to have conceived of law as sacred custom, divinely sanctioned and revealed; themis* meant to them both these customs and a goddess who (like India’s Rita or China’s Tao or Tien) embodied the moral order and harmony of the world. Law was a part of theology, and the oldest Greek laws of property were mingled with liturgical regulations in the ancient temple codes.³⁶ Perhaps as old as such religious law were the rules established by the decrees of tribal chieftains or kings, which began as force and ended, in time, as sanctities.

The second phase of Greek legal history was the collection and co-ordination of these holy customs by lawgivers (thesmothetai) like Zaleucus, Charondas, Draco, Solon; when such men put their new codes into writing, the thesmoi, or sacred usages, became nomoi, or man-made laws.* In these codes law freed itself from religion, and became increasingly secular; the intention of the agent entered more fully into judgment of the act; family liability was replaced by individual responsibility, and private revenge gave way to statutory punishment by the state.³⁷

The third step in Greek legal development was the accumulative growth of a body of law. When a Periclean Greek speaks of the law of Athens he means the codes of Draco and Solon, and the measures that have been passed—and not repealed—by the Assembly or the Council. If a new law contravenes an old one, the repeal of the latter is prerequisite; but scrutiny is seldom complete, and two statutes are often found in ludicrous contradiction. In periods of exceptional legal confusion a committee of nomothetai, or law determiners, is chosen by lot from the popular courts to decide which laws shall be retained; in such cases advocates are appointed to defend the old laws against those who propose to repeal them. Under the supervision of these nomothetai the laws of Athens, phrased in simple and intelligible language, are cut upon stone slabs in the King’s Porch; and thereafter no magistrate is allowed to decide a case by an unwritten law.

Athenian law makes no distinction between a civil and a criminal code, except that it reserves murder cases for the Areopagus, and in civil suits leaves the complainant to enforce the court’s decree himself, going to his aid only if he meets with resistance.³⁸ Murder is infrequent, for it is branded as a sacrilege as well as a crime, and the dread of feud revenge remains if the law fails to act. Under certain conditions direct retaliation is still tolerated in the fifth century; when a husband finds his mother, wife, concubine, sister, or daughter in illicit relations he is entitled to kill the male offender at once.³⁹ Whether a killing is intentional or not it has to be expiated as a pollution of the city’s soil, and the rites of purification are painfully rigid and complex. If the victim has granted pardon before dying, no action can be brought against the killer.⁴⁰ Beneath the Areopagus are three tribunals for homicide cases, according to the class and origin of the victim, and according as the act was intentional, or excusable, or not. A fourth tribunal holds court at Phreattys on the coast, and tries those who, while exiled for unpremeditated homicide, are now charged with another and premeditated murder; being polluted by the first crime, they are not allowed to touch Attic soil, and their defense is conducted from a boat near the shore.

The law of property is uncompromisingly severe. Contracts are rigorously enforced; all jurors are required to swear that they “will not vote for an abolition of private debts, or for a distribution of the lands or houses belonging to Athenians”; and every year the head archon, on taking office, has proclamation made by a herald that “what each possesses he shall remain possessor and absolute master thereof.”⁴¹ The right of bequest is still narrowly limited. Where there are male children the old religious conception of property, as bound up with a given family line and the care of ancestral spirits, demands that the estate should automatically pass to the sons; the father owns the property only in trust for the family dead, living, and to be born. Whereas in Sparta (as in England) the patrimony is indivisible and goes to the eldest son, in Athens (very much as in France) it is apportioned among the male heirs, the oldest receiving a moderately larger share than the others.⁴² As early as Hesiod we find the peasant limiting his family in Gallic fashion, lest his estate be ruinously divided among many sons.⁴³ The husband’s property never descends to the widow; all that remains to her is her dowry. Wills are as complex in Pericles’ day as in our own, and are couched in much the same terms as now.⁴⁴ In this as in other matters Greek legislation is the basis of that Roman law which in turn has provided the legal foundations of Western society.

3. Justice

Democracy reaches the judiciary last of all; and the greatest reform accomplished by Ephialtes and Pericles is the transfer of judicial powers from the Areopagus and the archons to the heliaea. The establishment of these popular courts gives to Athens what trial by jury will win for modern Europe. The heliaea* is composed of six thousand dicasts, or jurors, annually drawn by lot from the register of the citizens; these six thousand are distributed into ten dicasteries, or panels, of approximately five hundred each, leaving a surplus for vacancies and emergencies. Minor and local cases are settled by thirty judges who periodically visit the demes or counties of Attica. Since no juror may serve more than a year at a time, and eligibility is determined by rotation, every citizen, in the average of chance, becomes a juror every third year. He does not have to serve, but the payment of two—later three—obols per day obtains an attendance of two or three hundred jurors for each panel. Important cases, like that of Socrates, may be tried before vast dicasteries of twelve hundred men. To reduce corruption to a minimum, the panel before which a case is to be tried is determined by lot at the last minute; and as most trials last but a day we do not hear much of bribery in the courts; even the Athenians find it difficult to bribe in a moment three hundred men.

Despite expedition, the courts of Athens, like courts the world over, are usually behind their calendar, for the Athenians itch to litigate. To cool this fever public arbitrators are chosen by lot from the roster of citizens who have reached their sixtieth year; the parties to a dispute submit their complaint and defense to one of these, again chosen by lot at the last minute; and each party pays him a small fee. If he fails to reconcile them he gives his judgment, solemnized by an oath. Either party may then appeal to the courts, but these usually refuse to hear minor cases that have not been submitted to arbitration. When a case is accepted for trial the plea is entered or sworn to, the witnesses make their depositions and swear to them, and all these statements are presented to the court in written form. They are sealed in a special box, and at a later date they are opened and examined, and judgment is given, by a panel chosen by lot. There is no public prosecutor; the government relies upon private citizens to accuse before the courts anyone guilty of serious offenses against morals, religion, or the state. Hence arises a class of “sycophants,” who make such charges a regular practice, and develop their profession into an art of blackmail; in the fourth century they earn a good living by bringing—or, better, threatening to bring—actions against rich men, believing that a popular court will be loath to acquit those who can pay substantial fines.* The expenses of the courts are mostly covered by fines imposed upon convicted men. Plaintiffs who fail to substantiate their charges are also fined; and if they receive less than a fifth of the jurors’ votes they are subject to a lashing, or to a penalty of a thousand drachmas ($1000). Each party in a trial usually acts as his own lawyer, and has to make in person the first presentation of his case. But as the complexity of procedure rises, and litigants detect in the jurors a certain sensitivity to eloquence, the practice grows of engaging a rhetor or orator, versed in the law, to support the complaint or defense, or to prepare, in his client’s name and character, a speech that the client may read to the court. From these special rhetor-pleaders comes the lawyer. His antiquity in Greece appears from a remark in Diogenes Laertius that Bias, Wise Man of Priene, was an eloquent pleader of causes, who always reserved his talents for the just side. Some of these lawyers are attached to the courts as exegetai, or interpreters; for many of the jurors have no more legal knowledge than the parties to the case.

Evidence is ordinarily presented in writing, but the witness must appear and swear to its accuracy when the grammateus, or clerk of the court, reads it to the jurors. There is no cross-examination. Perjury is so frequent that cases are sometimes decided in the face of explicit sworn evidence. The testimony of women and minors is accepted only in murder trials; that of slaves is admitted only when drawn from them by torture; it is taken for granted that without torture they will lie. It is a barbarous aspect of Greek law, destined to be outdone in Roman prisons and Inquisition chambers, and perhaps rivaled in the secret rooms of police courts in our time. Torture, in Pericles’ day, is forbidden in the case of citizens. Many masters decline to let their slaves be used as witnesses, even when their case may depend upon such testimony; and any permanent injury done to a slave by torture must be made good by those who inflicted it.⁴⁶

Penalties take the form of flogging, fines, disfranchisement, branding, confiscation, exile, and death; imprisonment is seldom used as a punishment. It is a principle of Greek law that a slave should be punished in his body, but a freeman in his property. A vase painting shows a slave hung up by his arms and legs, and mercilessly lashed.⁴⁷ Fines are the usual penalty for citizens, and are assessed on a scale that opens the democracy to the charge of fattening its purse through unjust condemnations. On the other hand a convicted person and his accuser are in many cases allowed to name the fine or punishment that they think just; and the court then chooses between the suggested penalties. Murder, sacrilege, treason, and some offenses that seem minor to us are punished with both confiscation and death; but a prospective death penalty may usually be avoided before trial by voluntary exile and the abandonment of property. If the accused disdains flight, and is a citizen, death is inflicted as painlessly as possible by administering hemlock, which gradually benumbs the body from the feet upward, killing when it reaches the heart. In the case of slaves the death penalty may be effected by a brutal cudgeling.⁴⁸ Sometimes the condemned, before or after death, may be hurled over a cliff into a pit called the barathron. When a sentence of death is laid upon a murderer it is carried out by the public executioner in the presence of the relatives of the victim, as a concession to the old custom and spirit of revenge.

The Athenian code is not as enlightened as we might expect, and advances only moderately upon Hammurabi’s. Its basic defect is the limitation of legal rights to freemen constituting hardly a seventh of the population. Even free women and children are excluded from the proud isonomia of the citizens; metics, foreigners, and slaves can bring suit only through a patron citizen. Sycophantic blackmail, frequent torture of slaves, capital punishment for minor offenses, personal abuse in forensic debate, the diffusion and weakening of judicial responsibility, the susceptibility of jurors to oratorical displays, their inability to temper present passions with a knowledge of the past or a wise calculation of the future—these are black marks against a system of law envied throughout Greece for its comparative mildness and integrity, and sufficiently dependable and practical to give to Athenian life and property that orderly protection which is so necessary for economic activity and moral growth. One test of Athenian law is the reverence that nearly every citizen feels for it: the law is for him the very soul of his city, the essence of its beneficence and strength. The best judgment of the Athenian code is the readiness with which other Greek states adopt a large part of it. “Everyone would admit,” says Isocrates, “that our laws have been the source of very many and very great benefits to the life of humanity.”⁴⁹ Here for the first time in history is a government of laws and not of men.

Athenian law prevails throughout the Athenian Empire of two million souls while that Empire endures; but for the rest Greece never achieves a common system of jurisprudence. International law makes as sorry a picture in fifth-century Athens as in the world today. Nevertheless external trade requires some legal code, and commercial treaties (symbola) are described by Demosthenes as so numerous in his time that the laws governing commercial disputes “are everywhere identical.”⁵⁰ These treatises establish consular representation, guarantee the execution of contracts, and make the judgments given in one signatory nation valid in the others.⁵¹ This, however, does not put an end to piracy, which breaks out whenever the dominant fleet is weakened, or relaxes its watchfulness. Eternal vigilance is the price of order as well as of liberty; and lawlessness stalks like a wolf about every settled realm, seeking some point of weakness which may give it entry. The right of a city to lead foraging expeditions upon the persons and property of other cities is accepted by some Greek states so long as no treaty specifically forbids it.⁵² Religion succeeds in making temples inviolable unless used as military bases; it protects heralds and pilgrims to Panhellenic festivals; it requires a formal declaration of war before hostilities, and the granting of a truce, when asked, for the return and burial of the dead in battle. Poisoned weapons are avoided by general custom, and prisoners are usually exchanged or ransomed at the recognized tariff of two minas—later one mina ($100)—each;⁵³ otherwise war is nearly as brutal among the Greeks as in modern Christendom. Treaties are numerous, and are solemnized with pious oaths; but they are almost always broken. Alliances are frequent, and sometimes generate lasting leagues, like the Delphic Amphictyony in the sixth century and the Achaean and Aetolian Leagues in the third. Occasionally two cities exchange the courtesy of isopoliteia, by which each gives to the other’s freemen the rights of citizenship. International arbitration may be arranged, but the decisions arrived at in such cases are as often as not rejected or ignored. Towards foreigners the Greek feels no moral obligation, and no legal one except by treaty; they are barbaroi*—not quite “barbarians,” but outsiders—aliens speaking outlandish tongues. Only in the Stoic philosophers of the cosmopolitan Hellenistic era will Greece rise to the conception of a moral code embracing all mankind.

4. Administration

As early as 487, perhaps earlier, the method of election in the choice of archons is replaced by lot; some way must be found to keep the rich from buying, or the knaves from smiling, their way into office. To render the selection less than wholly accidental, all those upon whom the lot falls are subjected, before taking up their duties, to a rigorous dokimasia, or character examination, conducted by the Council or the courts. The candidate must show Athenian parentage on both sides, freedom from physical defect and scandal, the pious honoring of his ancestors, the performance of his military assignments, and the full payment of his taxes; his whole life is on this occasion exposed to challenge by any citizen, and the prospect of such a scrutiny presumably frightens the most worthless from the sortition. If he passes this test the archon swears an oath that he will properly perform the obligations of his office, and will dedicate to the gods a golden statue of life-size if he should accept presents or bribes.⁵⁴ The fact that chance is allowed to play so large a part in the naming of the nine archons suggests the diminution which the office has suffered since Solon’s day; its functions are now in the nature of administrative routine. The archon basileus, whose name preserves the empty title of king, has become merely the chief religious official of the city. Nine times yearly the archon is required to obtain a vote of confidence from the Assembly; his actions and judgments may be appealed to the boule or the heliaea; and any citizen may indict him for malfeasance. At the end of his term all his official acts, accounts, and documents are reviewed by a board of logistai responsible to the Council; and severe penalties, even death, may avenge serious misconduct. If the archon escapes these democratic dragons he becomes, at the end of his year of office, a member of the Areopagus; but this, in the fifth century, is a well-nigh empty honor, since that body has lost nearly all its powers.

The archons are but one of many committees which, under the direction and scrutiny of the Assembly, the Council, and the courts, administer the affairs of the city. Aristotle names twenty-five such groups, and estimates the number of municipal officials at seven hundred. Nearly all of these are chosen annually by lot; and since no man may be a member of the same committee twice, every citizen may expect to be a city dignitary for at least one year of his life. Athens does not believe in government by experts.

More importance is attached to military than to civil office. The ten strategoi, or commanders, though they too are appointed for a year only, and are at all times subject to examination and recall, are chosen not by lot but by open election in the Assembly. Here ability, not popularity, is the road to preferment; and the ekklesia of the fourth century shows its good sense by choosing Phocion general forty-five times, despite the fact that he is the most unpopular man in Athens and makes no secret of his scorn for the crowd. The functions of the strategoi expand with the growth of international relations, so that in the later fifth century they not only manage the army and the navy, but conduct negotiations with foreign states, and control the revenues and expenditures of the city. The commander in chief, or strategos autokrator, is therefore the most powerful man in the government; and since he may be re-elected year after year, he can give to the state a continuity of purpose which its constitution might otherwise render impossible. Through this office Pericles makes Athens for a generation a democratic monarchy, so that Thucydides can say of the Athenian polity that though it is a democracy in name it is really government by the greatest of the citizens.

The army is identical with the electorate; every citizen must serve, and is subject, until the age of sixty, to conscription in any war. But Athenian life is not militarized; after a period of youthful training there is little of martial drill, no strutting of uniforms, no interference of soldiery with the civilian population. In active service the army consists of light-armed infantry, chiefly the poorer citizens, carrying slings or spears; the heavy-armed infantry, or hoplites, those prosperous citizens who can afford armor, shield, and javelin; and the cavalry of rich men, clad in armor and helmet, and equipped with lance and sword. The Greeks excel the Asiatics in military discipline, and perhaps owe their achievements to a striking combination of loyal obedience on the battlefield with vigorous independence in civil affairs. Nevertheless there is no science of war among them, no definite principles of tactics on strategy, before Epaminondas and Philip. Cities are usually walled, and defense is—among the Greeks as among ourselves—more effective than offense; otherwise man might have no civilization to record. Siege armies bring up great beams suspended by chains, and, drawing the beams back, drive them forward against the wall; this is as far as siege machinery develops before Archimedes. As for the navy, it is kept up by choosing, each year, four hundred trierarchs, rich men whose privilege it is to recruit a crew, equip a trireme with materials supplied by the state, pay for its building and launching, and keep it in repair; in this way Athens supports in peacetime a fleet of some sixty ships.⁵⁵

The maintenance of the army and the navy constitutes the chief expenditure of the state. Revenues come from traffic tolls, harbor dues, a two per cent tariff on imports and exports, a twelve-drachma annual poll tax on metics, a half-drachma tax on freedmen and slaves, a tax on prostitutes, a sales tax, licenses, fines, confiscations, and the imperial tribute. The tax on farm produce, which financed Athens under Peisistratus, is abandoned by the democracy as derogatory to the dignity of agriculture. Most taxes are farmed out to publicans, who collect them for the state and pocket a share as their profit. Considerable income is derived from state ownership of mineral resources. In emergencies the city resorts to a capital levy, the rate rising with the amount of property owned; by this method, for example, the Athenians in 428 raise two hundred talents ($1,200,000) for the siege of Mytilene. Rich men are also invited to undertake certain leiturgiai, i.e., public services, such as equipping embassies, fitting out ships for the fleet, or paying for plays, musical contests, and games. These “liturgies” are voluntarily undertaken by some of the wealthy, and are forced by public opinion upon others. To add to the discomfort of the well to do, any citizen assigned to a liturgy may compel any other to take it from him, or exchange fortunes with him, if he can prove the other to be richer than himself. As the democratic faction grows in power it finds ever more numerous occasions and reasons for using this device; and in return the financiers, merchants, manufacturers, and landed proprietors of Attica study the arts of concealment and obstruction, and meditate revolution.

Excluding such gifts and levies, the total internal revenue of Athens in the time of Pericles amounts to some four hundred talents ($2,400,000) a year; to which is added six hundred talents of contributions from subjects and allies. This income is spent without any budget, or advance estimate and allocation of funds. Under Pericles’ thrifty management, and despite his unprecedented expenditures, the treasury shows a growing surplus, which in 440 stands at 9700 talents ($58,200,000); a pretty sum for any city in any age, and quite extraordinary in Greece, where few states—in the Peloponnesus none—have any surplus at all.⁵⁶ In cities that have such a reserve it is deposited, usually, in the temple of the city’s god—at Athens, after 434, in the Parthenon. The state claims the right to use not only this surplus, but, as well, the gold in the statues which it raises to its god; in the case of Pheidias’ Athene Parthenos this amounts to forty talents ($240,000), and is so affixed as to be removable.⁵⁷ In the temple the city keeps also its “theoric fund,” from which it makes the payments annually due the citizens for attendance at the sacred plays and games.

Such is Athenian democracy—the narrowest and fullest in history: narrowest in the number of those who share its privileges, fullest in the directness and equality with which all the citizens control legislation, and administer public affairs. The faults of the system will appear vividly as its history unfolds; indeed, they are already noised about in Aristophanes. The irresponsibility of an Assembly that may without check of precedent or revision vote its momentary passion on one day, and on the next day its passionate regret, punishing then not itself but those who have misled it; the limitation of legislative authority to those who can attend the ekklesia; the encouragement of demagogues and the wasteful ostracism of able men; the filling of offices by lot and rotation, changing the personnel yearly and creating a chaos of government; the disorderliness of faction perpetually disturbing the guidance and administration of the state—these are vital defects, for which Athens will pay the full penalty to Sparta, Philip, Alexander, and Rome.

But every government is imperfect, irksome, and mortal; we have no reason to believe that monarchy or aristocracy would govern Athens better, or longer preserve it; and perhaps only this chaotic democracy can release the energy that will lift Athens to one of the peaks of history. Never before or since has political life, within the circle of citizenship, been so intense or so creative. This corrupt and incompetent democracy is at least a school: the voter in the Assembly listens to the cleverest men in Athens, the juror in the courts has his wits sharpened by the taking and sifting of evidence, the holder of office is molded by executive responsibility and experience into a deeper maturity of understanding and judgment; “the city,” says Simonides, “is the teacher of the man.”⁵⁸ For these reasons, it may be, the Athenians can appreciate, and thereby call into existence, Aeschylus and Euripides, Socrates and Plato; the audience at the theater has been formed in the Assembly and the courts, and is ready to receive the best. This aristocratic democracy is no laissez-faire state, no mere watchman of property and order; it finances the Greek drama, and builds the Parthenon; it makes itself responsible for the welfare and development of its people, and opens up to them the opportunity ou monon tou zen, alla tou eu zen—“not only to live, but to live well.” History can afford to forgive it all its sins.

CHAPTER XII

Work and Wealth in Athens

I. LAND AND FOOD

AT the base of this democracy and this culture lies the production and distribution of wealth. Some men can govern states, seek truth, make music, carve statues, paint pictures, write books, teach children, or serve the gods because others toil to grow food, weave clothing, build dwellings, mine the earth, make useful things, transport goods, exchange them, or finance their production or their movement. Everywhere this is the foundation.

Supporting all society is the peasant, the poorest and most necessary of men. In Attica he has at least the franchise; only citizens are permitted to own land, and nearly all peasants own the soil that they till. Clan control of the land has disappeared, and private ownership is solidly established. As in modern France and America, this great class of small proprietors is a steadying conservative force in a democracy where the propertyless city dwellers are always driving toward reform. The ancient war between the country and the city—between those who want high returns for agriculture and low prices for manufactured goods, and those who want low prices for food and high wages or profits in industry—is especially conscious and lively in Attica. Whereas industry and trade are accounted plebeian and degrading by the Athenian citizen, the pursuits of husbandry are honored as the groundwork of national economy, personal character, and military power; and the freemen of the countryside tend to look down upon the denizens of the city as either weakling parasites or degraded slaves.¹

The soil is poor: of 630,000 acres in Attica a third is unsuitable for cultivation, and the rest is impoverished by deforestation, meager rainfall, and rapid erosion by winter floods. The peasants of Attica shirk no toil—for themselves or their handful of slaves—to remedy this dry humor of the gods; they gather the surplus flow of headwaters into reservoirs, dike the channels of the streams to control the floods, reclaim the precious humus of the swamps, build thousands of irrigation canals to bring to their thirsty fields the trickle of the rivulets, patiently transplant vegetables to improve their size and quality, and let the land lie fallow in alternate years to regain its strength. They alkalinize the soil with salts like carbonate of lime, and fertilize it with potassium nitrate, ashes, and human waste;² the gardens and groves about Athens are enriched with the sewage of the city, brought by a main sewer to a reservoir outside the Dipylon, and led thence by bricklined canals into the valley of the Cephisus River.³ Different soils are mixed to their mutual benefit, and green crops like beans in flower are plowed in to nourish the earth. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and planting are crowded into the brief days of the fall; the grain harvest comes at the end of May, and the rainless summer is the season of preparation and rest. With all this care Attica produces only 675,000 bushels of grain yearly—hardly enough to supply a quarter of its population. Without imported food Periclean Athens would starve; hence the urge to imperialism, and the necessity for a powerful fleet.

The countryside tries to atone for its parsimonious grain by generous harvests of olives and grapes. Hillsides are terraced and watered, and asses are encouraged to make the vine more fruitful by gnawing off the twigs.⁴ Olive trees cover many a landscape in Periclean Greece, but it is Peisistratus and Solon who deserve the credit for introducing them. The olive tree takes sixteen years to come to fruit, forty years to reach perfection; without the subsidies of Peisistratus it might never have grown on Attic soil; and the devastation of the olive orchards in the Peloponnesian War will play a part in the decline of Athens. To the Greek the olive has many uses: one pressing gives oil for eating, a second, oil for anointing, a third, oil for illumination; and the remainder is used as fuel.⁵ It becomes Attica’s richest crop, so valuable that the state assumes a monopoly of its export, and pays with it and wine for the grain that it must import.

It forbids altogether the export of figs, for these are a main source of health and energy in Greece. The fig tree grows well even in arid soil; its spreading roots gather whatever moisture the earth will yield, and its stinted foliage offers scant surface for evaporation. Furthermore, the husbandman learns from the East the secret of caprification: he hangs branches of the wild male goat fig (caprificus) among the boughs of the female cultivated tree, and relies upon gall wasps to carry the fertilizing pollen of the male into the fruit of the female, which then bears richer and sweeter figs.

These products of the soil—cereals, olive oil, figs, grapes, and wine—are the staples of diet in Attica. Cattle rearing is negligible as a source of food; horses are bred for racing, sheep for wool, goats for milk, asses, mules, cows, and oxen for transport, but chiefly pigs for food; and bees are kept as providers of honey for a sugarless world. Meat is a luxury; the poor have it only on feast days; the heroic banquets of Homeric days have disappeared. Fish is both a commonplace and a delicacy; the poor man buys it salted and dried; the rich man celebrates with fresh shark meat and eels.⁶ Cereals take the form of porridge, flat loaves, or cakes, often mixed with honey. Bread and cake are seldom baked at home, but are bought from women peddlers or in market stalls. Eggs are added, and vegetables—particularly beans, peas, cabbage, lentils, lettuce, onions, and garlic. Fruits are few; oranges and lemons are unknown. Nuts are common, and condiments abound. Salt is collected in salt pans from the sea, and is traded in the interior for slaves; a cheap slave is called a “salting,” and a good one is “worth his salt.” Nearly everything is cooked and dressed with olive oil, which makes an excellent substitute for petroleum. Butter is hard to keep in Mediterranean lands, and olive oil takes its place. Honey, sweetmeats, and cheese provide dessert; cheesecakes are so fancied that many classic treatises are devoted to their esoteric art.⁷ Water is the usual drink, but everyone has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or stimulants. Snow and ice are kept in the ground to cool wine in the hot months.⁸ Beer is known but scorned in Periclean days. All in all, the Greek is a moderate eater, and contents himself with two meals daily. “Yet there are many,” says Hippocrates, “who, if accustomed to it, can easily bear three full meals a day.”⁹

II. INDUSTRY

Out of the earth come minerals and fuels as well as food. Lighting is provided by graceful lamps or torches—burning refined olive oil, or resin—or by candles. Heat is derived from dry wood or charcoal, burning in portable braziers. The cutting of trees for fuel and building denudes the woods and hills near the towns; already in the fifth century timber for houses, furniture, and ships is imported. There is no coal.

Greek mining is not for fuels but for minerals. The soil of Attica is rich in marble, iron, zinc, silver, and lead. The mines at Laurium, near the southern tip of the peninsula, are in the phrase of Aeschylus “a fountain running silver”¹⁰ for Athens; they are a main support of the government, which retains all subsoil rights, and leases the mines to private operators for a talent ($6000) fee and one twenty-fourth of the product yearly.¹¹ In 483 a prospector discovers the first really profitable veins at Laurium, and a silver rush takes place to the region of the mines. Only citizens are allowed to lease the properties, and only slaves perform the work. The pious Nicias, whose superstition will help to ruin Athens, makes $170 a day by leasing a thousand slaves to the mine operators at a rental of one obol (17 cents) each per day; many an Athenian fortune is made in this way, or by lending money to the enterprise. The slaves in the mine number some twenty thousand, and include the superintendents and engineers. They work in ten-hour shifts, and the operations continue without interruption, night and day. If the slave rests he feels the foreman’s lash; if he tries to escape he is attached to his work by iron shackles; if he runs away and is captured his forehead is branded with a hot iron.¹² The galleries are but three feet high and two feet wide; the slaves, with pick or chisel and hammer, work on their knees, their stomachs, or their backs.¹³ The broken ore is carried out in baskets or bags handed from man to man, for the galleries are too narrow to let two men pass each other conveniently. The profits are enormous: in 483 the share received by the government is a hundred talents ($600,000)—a windfall that builds a fleet for Athens and saves Greece at Salamis. Even for others than the slaves there is evil in this as well as good; the Athenian treasury becomes dependent upon the mines, and when, in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans capture Laurium the whole economy of Athens is upset. The exhaustion of the veins in the fourth century co-operates with many other factors in Athenian decay. For Attica has no other precious metal in her soil.

Metallurgy advances with mining. The ore at Laurium is crushed in huge mortars with a heavy iron pestle worked by slave power; then it goes to mills where it is ground between revolving stones of hard trachyte; then it is sized by screening; the material that passes through the screen is sent to an ore washer, where jets of water are discharged from cisterns upon inclined rectangular tables of stone covered with a smooth thin coat of hard cement; the current is turned at sharp angles, where pockets snare the metal particles. The collected metal is thrown into small smelting furnaces equipped with blowers to raise the heat; at the bottom of each furnace are openings through which the molten metal is drawn. Lead is separated from the silver by heating the molten metal on cupels of porous material and exposing it to the air; by this simple process the lead is converted into litharge, and the silver is freed. The processes of smelting and refining are competently performed, for the silver coins of Athens are ninety-eight per cent pure. Laurium pays the price of the wealth it produces, as mining always pays the price for metal industry; plants and men wither and die from the furnace fumes, and the vicinity of the works becomes a scene of dusty desolation.¹⁴

Other industries are not so toilsome. Attica has many of them now, small in scale but remarkably specialized. It quarries marble and other stones, it makes a thousand shapes of pottery, it dresses hides in great tanneries like those owned by Cleon, rival of Pericles, and Anytus, accuser of Socrates; it has wagon-makers, shipbuilders, saddlers, harness makers, shoe manufacturers; there are saddlers who make only bridles, and shoemakers who make only men’s or women’s shoes.¹⁵ In the building trades are carpenters, molders, stonecutters, metalworkers, painters, veneerers. There are blacksmiths, swordmakers, shieldmakers, lampmakers, lyre tuners, millers, bakers, sausage men, fishmongers—everything necessary to an economic life busy and varied, but not mechanized or monotonous. Common textiles are still for the most part produced in the home; there the women weave and mend the ordinary clothing and bedding of the family, some carding the wool, some at the spinning wheel, some at the loom, some bent over an embroidery frame. Special fabrics come from workshops, or from abroad—fine linens from Egypt, Amorgos, and Tarentum, dyed woolens from Syracuse, blankets from Corinth, carpets from the Near East and Carthage, colorful coverlets from Cyprus; and the women of Cos, late in the fourth century, learn the art of unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm and weaving the filaments into silk.¹⁶ In some homes the women become so highly skilled in textile arts that they produce more than their families can use; they sell the surplus at first to consumers, then to middlemen; they employ helpers, freedmen or slaves; and in this way a domestic industry develops as a step to a factory system.

Such a system begins to take form in the age of Pericles. Pericles himself, like Alcibiades, owns a factory.¹⁷ No machinery is available, but slaves can be had in abundance; it is because muscle power is cheap that there is no incentive to develop machinery. The ergasteria of Athens are rather workshops than factories; the largest of them, Cephalus’ shield factory, has 120 workmen, Timarchus’ shoe factory has ten, Demosthenes’ cabinet factory twenty, his armor factory thirty.¹⁸ At first these shops produce only to order; later they manufacture for the market, and finally for export; and the spread and abundance of coinage, replacing barter, facilitates their operations. There are no corporations; each factory is an independent unit, owned by one or two men; and the owner often works beside his slaves. There are no patents; crafts are handed down from father to son, or are learned by apprentices; the Athenians are exempted by law from caring for the old age of parents who have failed to teach them a trade.¹⁹ Hours are long but work is leisurely; master and man labor from dawn to twilight, with a siesta at summer noons. There are no vacations, but there are some sixty workless holydays every year.

III. TRADE AND FINANCE

When an individual, a family, or a city creates a surplus, and wishes to exchange it, trade begins. The first difficulty here is that transport is costly, for roads are poor, and the sea is a snare. The finest road is the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis; but this is mere dirt, and is often too narrow to let vehicles pass. The bridges are precarious causeways formed by earthen dikes, which as likely as not have been washed away by floods. The usual draft animal is the ox, who is too philosophical to enrich the trader that depends upon him for transport; wagons are fragile, and always break down, or get bogged in the mud; it is better to pack the goods on the back of a mule, for he goes a trifle faster, and does not take up so much of the road. There is no postal service in Greece, even for the governments; they are content with runners, and private correspondence must wait the chance of using these. Important news can be flashed by fire beacons from hill to hill, or sent by carrier pigeons.²⁰ There are inns here and there on the road, but they are favored by robbers and vermin; even the god Dionysus, in Aristophanes, inquires of Heracles for “the eating-houses and hostels where there are the fewest bugs.”²¹

Sea transport is cheaper, especially if voyages are limited, as most of them are, to the calm summer months. Passenger tariffs are low: for two drachmas ($2) a family can secure passage from the Piraeus to Egypt or the Black Sea,²² but ships do not cater to passengers, being made to carry goods or wage war or do either at need. The main motive power is wind upon a sail, but slaves ply the oars when the wind is contrary or dead. The smallest seagoing merchant vessels are triaconters with thirty oars, all on one level; the penteconter has fifty. Back about 700 the Corinthians launched the first trireme, with a crew of two hundred men plying three banks or tiers of oars; by the fifth century such ships, beautiful with their long and lofty prows, have grown to 256 tons, carry seven thousand bushels of grain, and become the talk of the Mediterranean by making eight miles an hour.²³

The second problem of trade is to find a reliable medium of exchange. Every city has its own system of weights and measures, and its own individual coinage; at every one of a hundred frontiers one must transvalue all values skeptically, for every Greek government except the Athenian cheats by debasing its coins.²⁴ “In most cities,” says an anonymous Greek, “merchants are compelled to ship goods for the return journey, for they cannot get money that is of any use to them elsewhere.”²⁵ Some cities mint coins of electrum—a compound of silver and gold—and rival one another in getting as little gold as possible into the mixture. The Athenian government, from Solon onward, helps Athenian trade powerfully by establishing a reliable coinage, stamped with the owl of Athena; “taking owls to Athens” is the Greek equivalent of “carrying coals to Newcastle.”²⁶ Because Athens, through all her vicissitudes, refuses to depreciate her silver drachmas, these “owls” are accepted gladly throughout the Mediterranean world, and tend to displace local currencies in the Aegean. Gold at this stage is still an article of merchandise, sold by weight, rather than a vehicle of trade; Athens mints it only in rare emergencies, usually in a ration to silver of 14 to I.²⁷ The smallest Athenian coins are of copper; eight of these make an obol—a coin of iron or bronze, named from its resemblance to nails or spits (obeliskoi). Six obols make a drachma, i.e., a handful; two drachmas make a gold stater; one hundred drachmas make a mina; sixty minas make a talent. A drachma in the first half of the fifth century buys a bushel of grain, as a dollar does in twentieth-century America.*²⁸ There is no paper money in Athens, no government bonds, no joint-stock corporations, no stock exchange.

But there are banks. They have a hard struggle to get a footing, for those who have no need for loans denounce interest as a crime, and the philosophers agree with them. The average fifth-century Athenian is a hoarder; if he has savings he prefers to hide them rather than entrust them to the banks. Some men lend money on mortgages, at 16 to 18 per cent; some lend it, without interest, to their friends; some deposit their money in temple treasuries. The temples serve as banks, and lend to individuals and states at a moderate interest; the temple of Apollo at Delphi is in some measure an international bank for all Greece. There are no private loans to governments, but occasionally one state lends to another. Meanwhile the money-changer at his table (trapeza) begins in the fifth century to receive money on deposit, and to lend it to merchants at interest rates that vary from 12 to 30 per cent according to the risk; in this way he becomes a banker, though to the end of ancient Greece he keeps his early name of trapezite, the man at the table. He takes his methods from the Near East, improves them, and passes them on to Rome, which hands them down to modern Europe. Soon after the Persian War Themistocles deposits seventy talents ($420,000) with the Corinthian banker Philostephanus, very much as political adventurers feather foreign nests for themselves today; this is the earliest known allusion to secular—nontemple—banking. Towards the end of the century Antisthenes and Archestratus establish what will become, under Pasion, the most famous of all private Greek banks. Through such trapezitai money circulates more freely and rapidly, and so does more work, than before; and the facilities that they offer stimulate creatively the expansion of Athenian trade.

Trade, not industry or finance, is the soul of Athenian economy. Though many producers still sell directly to the consumer, a growing number of them require the intermediary of the market, whose function it is to buy and store goods until the consumer is ready to purchase them. In this way a class of retailers arises, who peddle their wares through the streets, or in the wake of armies, or at festivals or fairs, or offer them for sale in shops or stalls in the agora or elsewhere in the town. To the shops come freemen or metics or slaves to haggle with tradesmen and buy for the home. One of the severest disabilities suffered by the “free” women of Athens is that custom does not allow them to shop.²⁹

Foreign commerce advances even faster than domestic trade, for the Greek states have learned the advantages of an international division of labor, and each specializes in some product; the shieldmaker, for example, no longer goes from city to city at the call of those who need him, but makes his shields in his shop and sends them out to the markets of the classic world. In one century Athens moves from household economy—wherein each household makes nearly all that it needs—to urban economy—wherein each town makes nearly all that it needs—to international economy—where each state is dependent upon imports, and must make exports to pay for them. The Athenian fleet for two generations keeps the Aegean clear of pirates, and from 480 to 430 commerce thrives as it never will again until Pompey suppresses piracy in 67 B.C. The docks, warehouses, markets, and banks of the Piraeus offer every facility for trade; soon the busy port becomes the chief center of distribution and reshipment for the commerce between the East and the West. “The articles which it is difficult to get, one here, one there, from the rest of the world,” says Isocrates, “all these it is easy to buy in Athens.”³⁰ “The magnitude of our city,” says Thucydides, “draws the produce of the world into our harbor, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury as those of his own.”³¹ From the Piraeus merchants carry the wine, oil, wool, minerals, marble, pottery, arms, luxuries, books, and works of art produced by the fields and shops of Attica; to the Piraeus they bring grain from the Byzantium, Syria, Egypt, Italy, and Sicily, fruit and cheese from Sicily and Phoenicia, meat from Phoenicia and Italy, fish from the Black Sea, nuts from Paphlagonia, copper from Cyprus, tin from England, iron from the Pontic coast, gold from Thasos and Thrace, timber from Thrace and Cyprus, embroideries from the Near East, wools, flax, and dyes from Phoenicia, spices from Cyrene, swords from Chalcis, glass from Egypt, tiles from Corinth, beds from Chios and Miletus, boots and bronzes from Etruria, ivory from Ethiopia, perfumes and ointments from Arabia, slaves from Lydia, Syria, and Scythia. The colonies serve not only as markets, but as shipping agents to send Athenian goods into the interior; and though the cities of Ionia decay in the fifth century because the trade that once passed there is diverted to the Propontis and Caria during and after the Persian War, Italy and Sicily replace them as outlets for the surplus products and population of mainland Greece. We may estimate the amount of Aegean commerce from the return of 1200 talents from a 5 per cent tax laid in 413 upon the imports and exports of the cities in the Athenian Empire, indicating a trade of $144,000,000 a year.

The danger lurking in this prosperity is the growing dependence of Athens upon imported grain; hence her insistence upon controlling the Hellespont and the Black Sea, her persistent colonizing of the coasts and isles on the way to the straits, and her disastrous expeditions to Egypt in 459 and to Sicily in 415. It is this dependence that persuades Athens to transform the Confederacy of Delos into an empire; and when, in 405, the Spartans destroy the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont, the starvation and surrender of Athens are inevitable results. Nevertheless it is this trade that makes Athens rich, and provides, with the imperial tribute, the sinews of her cultural development. The merchants who accompany their goods to all quarters of the Mediterranean come back with changed perspective, and alert and open minds; they bring new ideas and ways, break down ancient taboos and sloth, and replace the familial conservatism of a rural aristocracy with the individualistic and progressive spirit of a mercantile civilization. Here in Athens East and West meet, and jar each other from their ruts. Old myths lose their grasp on the souls of men, leisure rises, inquiry is supported, science and philosophy grow. Athens becomes the most intensely alive city of her time.

IV. FREEMEN AND SLAVES

Who does all this work? In the countryside it is done by citizens, their families, and free hired men; in Athens it is done partly by citizens, partly by freedmen, more by metics, mostly by slaves. The shopkeepers, artisans, merchants, and bankers come almost entirely from the voteless classes. The burgher looks down upon manual labor, and does as little of it as he may. To work for a livelihood is considered ignoble; even the professional practice or teaching of music, sculpture, or painting is accounted by many Greeks “a mean occupation.”* Hear blunt Xenophon, who speaks, however, as a proud member of the knightly class:

The base mechanic arts, so called . . . are held in ill repute by civilized communities, and not unreasonably; seeing they are the ruin of the bodies of all concerned in them, workers and overseers alike, who are forced to remain in sitting postures or to hug the gloom, or else to crouch whole days confronting a furnace. Hand in hand with physical enervation follows apace an enfeebling of soul, while the demand which these base mechanic arts make on the time of those employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims of friendship and the state.³²

Trade is similarly scorned; to the aristocratic or philosophical Greek it is merely money-making at the expense of others; it aims not to create goods but to buy them cheap and sell them dear; no respectable citizen will engage in it, though he may quietly invest in it and profit from it so long as he lets others do the work. A freeman, says the Greek, must be free from economic tasks; he must get slaves or others to attend to his material concerns, even, if he can, to take care of his property and his fortune; only by such liberation can he find time for government, war, literature, and philosophy. Without a leisure class there can be, in the Greek view, no standards of taste, no encouragement of the arts, no civilization. No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.

Most of the functions associated in history with the middle class are in Athens performed by metics—freemen of foreign birth who, though ineligible to citizenship, have fixed their domicile in Athens. For the most part they are professional men, merchants, contractors, manufacturers, managers, tradesmen, craftsmen, artists, who, in the course of their wandering, have found in Athens the economic liberty, opportunity, and stimulus which to them is far more vital than the vote. The most important industrial undertakings, outside of mining, are owned by metics; the ceramic industry is theirs completely; and wherever middlemen can squeeze themselves in between producer and consumer they are to be found. The law harasses them and protects them. It taxes them like citizens, lays “liturgies” upon them, exacts military service from them, and adds a poll tax for good measure; it forbids them to own land or to marry into the family of a citizen; it excludes them from its religious organization, and from direct appeal to its courts. But it welcomes them into its economic life, appreciates their industry and skill, enforces their contracts, gives them religious freedom, and guards their wealth against violent revolution. Some of them flaunt their riches vulgarly, but some of them, too, work quietly in science, literature, and the arts, practice law or medicine, and create schools of rhetoric and philosophy. In the fourth century they will provide the authors and subject of the comic drama, and in the third they will set the cosmopolitan tone of Hellenistic society. They itch for citizenship, but they love Athens proudly, and contribute painfully to finance her defense against her enemies. Through them, chiefly, the fleet is maintained, the empire is supported, and the commercial supremacy of Athens is preserved.

Mingled with the metics in political disabilities and economic opportunities are the freedmen—those who once were slaves. For though it is inconvenient to liberate a slave, since usually he must be replaced by another, yet the promise of freedom is an economical stimulus to a young slave; and many Greeks, as death approaches, reward their most loyal slaves with manumission. The slave may be freed through ransoming by relatives or friends, as in the case of Plato; or the state, indemnifying his owner, may free him for service in war; or he himself may save his obols until he can buy his liberty. Like the metic, the freedman engages in industry, trade, or finance; at the lowest he may do for pay the work of a slave, at the top he may become a magnate of industry. Mylias manages Demosthenes’ armor factory; Pasion and Phormio become the richest bankers in Athens. The freedman is especially valued as an executive, for no one is more severe with slaves than the man who has come up from slavery,³³ and has known only oppression all the days of his life.

Beneath these three classes—citizens, metics, and freedmen—are the 115,000 slaves of Attica.* They are recruited from unransomed prisoners of war, victims of slave raids, infants rescued from exposure, wastrels, and criminals. Few of them in Greece are Greeks. The Hellene looks upon foreigners as natural slaves, since they so readily give absolute obedience to a king, and he does not account the servitude of such men to Greeks as unreasonable. But he balks at the enslavement of a Greek, and seldom stoops to it. Greek traders buy slaves as they would merchandise, and offer them for sale at Chios, Delos, Corinth, Aegina, Athens, and wherever else they can find purchasers. The slave dealers at Athens are among the richest of the metics. In Delos it is not unusual for a thousand slaves to be sold in a day; Cimon, after the battle of the Eurymedon, puts 20,000 prisoners on the slave market.³⁴ At Athens there is a mart where slaves stand ready for naked inspection and bargaining purchase at any time. They cost from half a mina to ten minas ($50 to $1000). They may be bought for direct use, or for investment; men and women in Athens find it profitable to buy slaves and rent them to homes, factories, or mines; the return is as high as 33 per cent.³⁵ Even the poorest citizen has a slave or two; Aeschines, to prove his poverty, complains that his family has only seven; rich homes may have fifty.³⁶ The Athenian government employs a number of slaves as clerks, attendants, minor officials, or policemen; many of these receive their clothing and a daily “allowance” of half a drachma, and are permitted to live where they please.

In the countryside the slaves are few, and are chiefly women servants in the home; in northern Greece and most of the Peloponnesus serfdom makes slavery superfluous. In Corinth, Megara, and Athens slaves do most of the manual labor, and women slaves most of the domestic toil; but slaves do also a great part of the clerical, and some of the executive work, in industry, commerce, and finance. Most skilled labor is performed by freemen, freedmen or metics; and there are no learned slaves as there will be in the Hellenistic period and in Rome. The slave is seldom allowed to bring up children of his own, for it is cheaper to buy a slave than to rear one. If the slave misbehaves he is whipped; if he testifies he is tortured; when he is struck by a freeman he must not defend himself. But if he is subjected to great cruelty he may flee to a temple, and then his master must sell him. In no case may his master kill him. So long as he labors he has more security than many who in other civilizations are not called slaves; when he is ill, or old, or there is no work for him to do, his master does not throw him upon public relief, but continues to take care of him. If he is loyal he is treated like a faithful servant, almost like a member of the family. lie is often allowed to go into business, provided he will pay his owner a part of his earnings. He is free from taxation and from military service. Nothing in his costume distinguishes him, in fifth-century Athens, from the freeman; indeed the “Old Oligarch” who about 425 writes a pamphlet on The Polity of the Athenians complains that the slave does not make way for citizens on the street, that he talks freely, and acts in every detail as if he were the equal of the citizen.³⁹ Athens is known for mildness to her slaves; it is a common judgment that slaves are better off in democratic Athens than poor freemen in oligarchic states.⁴⁰ Slave revolts, though feared, are rare in Attica.⁴¹

Nevertheless the Athenian conscience is disturbed by the existence of slavery, and the philosophers who defend it reveal almost as clearly as those who denounce it that the moral development of the nation has outrun its institutions. Plato condemns the enslavement of Greeks by Greeks, but for the rest accepts slavery on the ground that some people have underprivileged minds.⁴² Aristotle looks upon the slave as an animate tool, and thinks that slavery will continue in some form until all menial work can be done by self-operating machines.⁴³ The average Greek, though kind to his slaves, has no notion of how a cultured society can get along without slavery; to abolish slavery, he feels, it would be necessary to abolish Athens. Others are more radical. The Cynic philosophers condemn slavery outright; their successors, the Stoics, will condemn it more politely; Euripides again and again stirs his audiences by sympathetic pictures of war-captured slaves; and the sophist Alcidamas goes about Greece preaching, unmolested, the doctrine of Rousseau almost in the words of Rousseau: “God has sent all men into the world free, and nature has made no man a slave.”⁴⁴ But slavery goes on.

V. THE WAR OF THE CLASSES

The exploitation of man by man is less severe in Athens and Thebes than in Sparta or Rome, but it is adequate to the purpose. There are no castes among the freemen in Athens, and a man may by resolute ability rise to anything but citizenship; hence, in part, the fever and turbulence of Athenian life. There is no tense class distinction between employer and employee except in the mines; usually the master works beside his men, and personal acquaintance dulls the edge of exploitation. The wage of nearly all artisans, of whatever class, is a drachma for each actual day of work;⁴⁵ but unskilled workers may get as low as three obols (50 cents) a day.⁴⁶ Piecework tends to replace timework as the factory system develops; and wages begin to vary more widely. A contractor may hire slaves from their owner for a rental of one to four obols a day.⁴⁷ We may estimate the buying power of these wages by comparing Greek prices with our own. In 414 a house and estate in Attica cost twelve hundred drachmas; a medimnus, or 1½ bushels, of barley costs a drachma in the sixth century, two at the close of the fifth, three in the fourth, five in the time of Alexander; a sheep costs a drachma in Solon’s day, ten to twenty at the end of the fifth century;⁴⁸ in Athens as elsewhere currency tends to increase faster than goods, and prices rise. At the close of the fourth century prices are five times as high as at the opening of the sixth; they double from 480 to 404, and again from 404 to 330.⁴⁹

A single man lives comfortably on 120 drachmas ($120) a month;⁵⁰ we may judge from this the condition of the worker who earns thirty drachmas per month, and has a family. It is true that the state comes to his relief in times of great stress, and then distributes corn at a nominal price. But he observes that the goddess of liberty is no friend to the goddess of equality, and that under the free laws of Athens the strong grow stronger, the rich richer, while the poor remain poor.*⁵¹ Individualism stimulates the able, and degrades the simple; it creates wealth magnificently, and concentrates it dangerously. In Athens, as in other states, cleverness gets all that it can, and mediocrity gets the rest. The landowner profits from the rising value of his land; the merchant does his best, despite a hundred laws, to secure corners and monopolies; the speculator reaps, through the high rate of interest on loans, the lion’s share of the proceeds of industry and trade. Demagogues arise who point out to the poor the inequality of human possessions, and conceal from them the inequality of human economic ability; the poor man, face to face with wealth, becomes conscious of his poverty, broods over his unrewarded merits, and dreams of perfect states. Bitterer than the war of Greece with Persia, or of Athens with Sparta, is, in all the Greek states, the war of class with class.

In Attica it begins with the conflict between the new rich and the landed aristocracy. The ancient families still love the soil, and live for the greater part on their estates. Division of the patrimony through many generations has made the average holding small⁵³ (the rich Alcibiades has only seventy acres), and the squire in most cases labors personally on the soil, or in the management of his property. But though the aristocrat is not rich, he is proud; he adds his father’s name to his own as a title of nobility, and he remains aloof as long as he can from the mercantile bourgeoisie which is capturing the wealth of Athens’ growing trade. His wife, however, cries for a city home and the varied life and opportunities of the metropolis; his daughters wish to live in Athens and snare rich husbands; his sons hope to find hetairai there and to give gay parties in the style of the nouveaux riches. As the aristocrat cannot compete in luxury with the merchants and manufacturers, he accepts them, or their children, as sons-in-law or daughters-in-law; they are anxious to climb, and willing to pay. The upshot is a union of the rich in land with the rich in money, and the formation of an upper class of oligarchs, envied and hated by the poor, angry at the excesses and extravagance of democracy, and fearful of revolution.

It is the insolence of the new wealth that brings on the second phase of the class war—the struggle of the poorer citizens against the rich. Many of the bourgeoisie flaunt their wealth like Alcibiades, but few others can so charm the “mechanic multitude” by dramatic audacity and elegance of person or speech. Young men conscious of ability and frustrated with poverty translate their personal need for opportunity and place into a general gospel of revolt; and intellectuals eager for new ideas and the applause of the oppressed formulate for them the aims of their rebellion.⁵⁴ They call not for the socialization of industry and trade but for the abolition of debts and the redistribution of the land—among the citizens; for the radical movement in fifth-century Athens is confined to the poorer voters, and never dreams, at this stage, of liberating the slaves, or letting the metics in on the reallotment of the soil. The leaders talk of a golden past in which all men were equal in possessions, but they do not wish to be taken too literally when they speak of restoring that paradise. It is an aristocratic communism that they have in mind—not a nationalization of the land by the state, but an equal sharing of it by the citizens. They point out how unreal is the equality of the franchise in the face of mounting economic inequality; but they are resolved to use the political power of the poorer citizenry to persuade the Assembly to sluice into the pockets of the needy—by fines liturgies, confiscations, and public works⁵⁵—some of the concentrated wealth of the rich.⁵⁶ And to give a lead to future rebels they adopt red as the symbolic color of their revolt.⁵⁷

In the face of this threat the rich band themselves in secret organizations pledged to take common action against what Plato, despite his communism, will call the “monstrous beast” of the aroused and hungry mob.⁵⁸ The free workers also organize—have at least since Solon organized—themselves into clubs (eranoi, thiasoi) of stonemasons, marble cutters, woodworkers, ivory-workers, potters, fishermen, actors, etc.; Socrates is a member of a sculptor’s thiasos.*⁵⁹ But these groups are not so much trade-unions as mutual benefit societies: they come together in meeting places called synods or synagogues, have banquets and games, and worship a patron deity; they make payments to sick members, and contract collectively for specific enterprises; but they do not enter visibly into the Athenian class war. The battle is fought on the fields of literature and politics. Pamphleteers like the “Old Oligarch” issue denunciations or defenses of democracy. The comic poets, since their plays require rich men to finance their production, are on the side of the drachmas, and pour ridicule upon the radical leaders and their utopias. In the Ecclesiazusae (392) Aristophanes introduces us to the lady communist Praxagora, who makes an oration as follows:

I want all to have a share of everything, and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; no longer shall we see one man harvesting vast tracts of land, while another has not ground enough to be buried in. . . . I intend that there shall only be one and the same condition of life for all. . . . I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. . . . Women shall belong to all men in common.⁶¹

“But who,” asks Blepyrus, “will do the work?” “The slaves,” is her reply. In another comedy, the Plutus (408), Aristophanes allows Poverty, who is threatened with extinction, to defend herself as the necessary goad to human toil and enterprise:

I am the sole cause of all your blessings, and your safety depends upon me alone. . . . Who would wish to hammer iron, build ships, sew, turn, cut up leather, bake bricks, bleach linen, tan hides, or break up the soil with the plow and garner the gifts of Demeter if he could live in idleness and free from all this work? . . . If your system [communism] is applied . . . you will not be able to sleep in a bed, for no more will ever be manufactured; nor on carpets, for who would weave them if he had gold?⁶²

The reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles are the first achievement of the democratic revolt. Pericles is a man of judgment and moderation; he does not wish to destroy the rich but to preserve them and their enterprise by easing the condition of the poor; but after his death (429) the democracy becomes so radical that the oligarchic party conspires again with Sparta, and makes in 411, and once more in 404, a rich man’s revolution. Nevertheless, because wealth is great in Athens and trickles down to many, and because fear of a slave uprising gives the citizenry pause, the class war in Athens is milder, and sooner reaches a working compromise, than in Greek states where the middle class is not strong enough to mediate between rich and poor. At Samos, in 412, the radicals seize the government, execute two hundred aristocrats, banish four hundred more, divide up the lands and houses among themselves,⁶³ and develop another society like that which they have overthrown. At Leontini, in 422, the commoners expel the oligarchs, but soon afterward take to flight. At Corcyra, in 427, the oligarchs assassinate sixty leaders of the popular party; the democrats seize the government, imprison four hundred aristocrats, try fifty of them before a kind of Committee of Public Safety, and execute all fifty at once; seeing which a considerable number of the surviving prisoners slay one another, others kill themselves, and the rest are walled up in the temple in which they have sought sanctuary, and are starved to death. Thucydides describes the class war in Greece in a timeless passage:

During seven days the Corcyraeans were engaged in butchering those of their fellow-citizens whom they regarded as their enemies; and although the crime imputed was that of attempting to put down the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by their debtors because of the monies owed to them. Death thus raged in every shape, and as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants were dragged from the altar or slain upon it. . . . Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places where it arrived last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions . . . and the atrocity of their reprisals. . . . Corcyra gave the first example of these crimes . . . of the revenge exacted by the governed—who had never experienced equitable treatment, or, indeed, aught but violence from their rulers—when their hour came; of the iniquitous resolves of those who desired to get rid of their accustomed poverty, and ardently coveted their neighbors’ goods; and the savage and pitiless excesses into which men who had begun the struggle not in a class but in a party spirit, were hurried by their passions. . . . In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for justice, and the enemy of all superiority. . . . Reckless audacity came now to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question was accounted inability to act on any. . . .

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition. . . . The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of the political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish; and, recoiling from no means in their struggle for ascendancy, engaged in the direst excesses. . . . Religion was in honor with neither party, but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. . . . The ancient simplicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down, and disappeared; and society became divided into Camps in which no man trusted his fellow. . . . Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape. . . . The whole Hellenic world was convulsed.⁶⁴

Athens survives this turbulence because every Athenian is at heart an individualist, and loves private property; and because the Athenian government finds a practicable medium between socialism and individualism in a moderate regulation of business and wealth. The state is not afraid to regulate: it sets a limit upon the size of dowries, the cost of funerals, and the dress of women;⁶⁵ it taxes and supervises trade, enforces fair weights and measures and honest quality so far as the ingenuity of human rascality permits;⁶⁶ it limits the export of food, and enacts sharp laws to govern and chasten the practices of merchants and tradesmen. It watches the grain trade carefully, and legislates severely against corners—even to the death penalty—by forbidding the purchase of more than seventy-five bushels of wheat at a time; it interdicts loans on outgoing cargoes unless the return shipment is to bring grain to the Piraeus; it requires that all corn loaded by vessels owned in Athens shall be brought to the Piraeus; and it prohibits the export of more than a third of any corn cargo that reaches that port.⁶⁷ By keeping a reserve of grain in state-owned storehouses, and pouring this upon the market when prices rise too rapidly, Athens sees to it that the price of bread shall never be exorbitant, that millionaires shall not be created out of the hunger of the people, and that no Athenian shall starve.⁶⁸ The state regulates wealth through taxation and liturgies, and persuades or compels rich men to supply funds for the fleet, the drama, and the theoric payments that enable the poor to attend the plays and the games. For the rest Athens protects freedom of trade, private property, and the opportunity to profit, deeming them the necessary implements of human liberty, and the most powerful stimuli to industry, commerce, and prosperity.

Under this system of economic individualism tempered with socialistic regulation, wealth accumulates in Athens, and spreads sufficiently to prevent a radical revolution; to the end of ancient Athens private property remains secure. The number of citizens with a comfortable income doubles between 480 and 431;⁶⁹ the public revenue grows, public expenditures rise, and yet the treasury is full beyond any precedent in Greek history. The economic basis of Athenian freedom, enterprise, art, and thought is firmly laid, and will bear without strain every extravagance of the Golden Age except the war by which all Greece will be ruined.

CHAPTER XIII

The Morals and Manners of the Athenians

I. CHILDHOOD

EVERY Athenian citizen is expected to have children, and all the forces of religion, property, and the state unite to discountenance childlessness. Where no offspring comes, adoption is the rule, and high prices are paid for prepossessing orphans. At the same time law and public opinion accept infanticide as a legitimate safeguard against excess population and a pauperizing fragmentation of the land; any father may expose a newborn child to death either as doubtfully his, or as weak or deformed. The children of slaves are seldom allowed to live. Girls are more subject to exposure than boys, for every daughter has to be provided with a dowry, and at marriage she passes from the home and service of those who have reared her into the service of those who have not. Exposure is effected by leaving the infant in a large earthenware vessel within the precincts of a temple or in some other place where it can soon be rescued if any wish to adopt it. The parental right to expose permits a rough eugenics, and co-operates with a rigorous natural selection by hardship and competition to make the Greeks a strong and healthy people. The philosophers almost unanimously approve of family limitation: Plato will call for the exposure of all feeble children, and of those born of base or elderly parents;¹ and Aristotle will defend abortion as preferable to infanticide.² The Hippocratic code of medical ethics will not allow the physician to effect abortion, but the Greek midwife is an experienced hand in this field, and no law impedes her.*³

On or before the tenth day after birth the child is formally accepted into the family with a religious ritual around the hearth, and receives presents and a name. Usually a Greek has but one name, like Socrates or Archimedes; but since it is customary to call the eldest son after the paternal grandfather, repetition is frequent, and Greek history is confounded with a multiplicity of Xenophons, Aeschineses, Thucydideses, Diogeneses, and Zenos. To avoid ambiguity the father’s name or the place of birth may be added, as with Kimon Miltiadou—Cimon son of Miltiades—or Diodorus Siculus—Diodorus of Sicily; or the problem may be solved by some jolly nickname, like Callimedon—The Crab.⁵

Once the child is so accepted into the family it cannot lawfully be exposed, and is reared with all the affection that parents lavish upon their children in every age. Themistocles describes his son as the real ruler of Athens; for he, Themistocles, the most influential man in the city, is ruled by his wife, who is ruled by their child.⁶ Many an epigram in The Greek Anthology reveals a tender parental love:

I wept at the death of my Theonoe, but the hopes centered in our child lightened my sorrows. And now envious Fate has bereaved me of the boy as well. Alas! I am cheated of thee, my child, all that was left to me. Persephone, hear this cry of a father’s grief, and lay the child upon his dead mother’s breast.⁷

The tragedies of adolescence are eased with many games, some of which will survive the memory of Greece. On a white perfume vase made for a child’s grave a little boy is seen taking his toy cart with him down to Hades.⁸ Babies have terra-cotta rattles containing pebbles; girls keep house with their dolls, boys fight great campaigns with clay soldiers and generals, nurses push children on swings or balance them on seesaws, boys and girls roll hoops, fly kites, spin tops, play hide-and-seek or blindman’s buff or tug of war, and wage a hundred merry contests with pebbles, nuts, coins, and balls. The marbles of the Golden Age are dried beans shot from the fingers, or smooth stones shot or tossed into a circle to dislodge enemy stones and come to rest as near as possible to the center. As children approach the “age of reason”—seven or eight—they take up the game of dice by throwing square knucklebones (astragali), the highest throw, six, being counted the best.⁹ The games of the young are as old as the sins of their fathers.

II. EDUCATION

Athens provides public gymnasiums and palaestras, and exercises some loose supervision over teachers; but the city has no public schools or state universities, and education remains in private hands. Plato advocates state schools,¹⁰ but Athens seems to believe that even in education competition will produce the best results. Professional schoolmasters set up their own schools, to which freeborn boys are sent at the age of six. The name paidagogos is given not to the teacher but to the slave who conducts the boy daily to and from school; we hear of no boarding schools. Attendance at school continues till fourteen or sixteen, or till a later age among the well to do.¹¹ The schools have no desks but only benches; the pupil holds on his knee the roll from which he reads or the material upon which he writes. Some schools, anticipating much later fashions, are adorned with statues of Greek heroes and gods; a few are elegantly furnished. The teacher teaches all subjects, and attends to character as well as intellect, using a sandal.*¹²

The curriculum has three divisions—writing, music, and gymnastics; eager modernists will add, in Aristotle’s day, drawing and painting.¹⁴ Writing includes reading and arithmetic, which uses letters for numbers. Everyone learns to play the lyre, and much of the material of instruction is put into poetical and musical form.¹⁵ No time is spent in acquiring any foreign language, much less a dead one, but great care is taken in learning the correct usage of the mother tongue. Gymnastics are taught chiefly in the gymnasium and the palaestra, and no one is considered educated who has not learned to wrestle, swim, and use the bow and the sling.

The education of girls is carried on at home, and is largely confined to “domestic science.” Outside of Sparta girls take no part in public gymnastics. They are taught by their mothers or nurses to read and write and reckon, to spin and weave and embroider, to dance and sing and play some instrument. A few Greek women are well educated, but these are mostly hetairai; for respectable ladies there is no secondary education, until Aspasia lures a few of them into rhetoric and philosophy. Higher education for men is provided by professional rhetors and sophists, who offer instruction in oratory, science, philosophy, and history. These independent teachers engage lecture halls near the gymnasium or palaestra, and constitute together a scattered university for pre-Platonic Athens. Only the prosperous can study under them, for they charge high fees; but ambitious youths work by night in mill or field in order to be able to attend by day the classes of these nomadic professors.

When boys reach the age of sixteen they are expected to pay special attention to physical exercises, as fitting them in some measure for the tasks of war. Even their sports give them indirectly a military preparation: they run, leap, wrestle, hunt, drive chariots, and hurl the javelin. At eighteen they enter upon the second of the four stages of Athenian life (pais, ephebos, aner, geron—child, youth, man, elder), and are enrolled into the ranks of Athens’ soldier youth, the epheboi.† Under moderators chosen by the leaders of their tribes they are trained for two years in the duties of citizenship and war. They live and eat together, wear an impressive uniform, and submit to moral supervision night and day. They organize themselves democratically on the model of the city, meet in assembly, pass resolutions, and erect laws for their own governance; they have archons, strategoi, and judges.¹⁶ For the first year they are schooled with strenuous drill, and hear lectures on literature, music, geometry, and rhetoric.¹⁷ At nineteen they are assigned to garrison the frontier, and are entrusted for two years with the protection of the city against attack from without and disorder within. Solemnly, in the presence of the Council of Five Hundred, with hands stretched over the altar in the temple of Agraulos, they take the oath of the young men of Athens:

I will not disgrace the sacred arms, nor will I abandon the man next to me, whoever he may be. I will bring aid to the ritual of the state, and to the holy duties, both alone and in company with many. I will transmit my native commonwealth not lessened, but larger and better than I have received it. I will obey those who from time to time are judges; I will obey the established statutes, and whatever other regulations the people shall enact. If anyone shall attempt to destroy the statutes I will not permit it, but will repel him both alone and with all. I will honor the ancestral faith.¹⁸

The epheboi are assigned a special place at the theater, and play a prominent role in the religious processions of the city; perhaps it is such young men that we see riding so handsomely on the Parthenon frieze. Periodically they exhibit their accomplishments in public contests, above all in the relay torch race from the Piraeus to Athens. All the city comes out for this picturesque event, and lines the four-and-a-half-mile road; the race is run at night, and the way is not illuminated; all that can be seen of the runners is the leaping light of the torches that they carry forward and pass on. When, at the age of twenty-one, the training of the epheboi is completed, they are freed from parental authority, and formally admitted into the full citizenship of the city.

Such is the education—eked out by lessons learned in the home and in the street—that produces the Athenian citizen. It is an excellent combination of physical and mental, moral and esthetic, training, of supervision in youth with freedom in maturity; and in its heyday it turns out young men as fine as any in history. After Pericles theory grows and beclouds practice; philosophers debate the goals and methods of education—whether the teacher should aim chiefly at intellectual development or at moral character, chiefly at practical ability or the promotion of abstract science. But all agree in attaching the highest importance to education. When Aristippus is asked in what way the educated are superior to the untutored he answers, “as broken horses are to the unbroken”; and Aristotle to the same question replies, “as the living are to the dead.” At least, adds Aristippus, “If the pupil derives no other good, he will not, when he attends the theater, be one stone upon another.”¹⁹

III. EXTERNALS

The citizens of Athens, in the fifth century, are men of medium height, vigorous, bearded, and not all as handsome as Pheidias’ horsemen. The ladies of the vases are graceful, and those of the stelae have a dignified loveliness, and those molded by the sculptors are supremely beautiful; but the actual ladies of Athens, limited in their mental development by an almost Oriental seclusion, are at best as pretty as their Near Eastern sisters, but no more. The Greeks admire beauty even beyond other nations, but they do not always embody it. Greek women, like others, find their figures a little short of perfection. They lengthen them with high cork soles on their shoes, pad out deficiencies with wadding, compress abundances with lacing, and support the breasts with a cloth brassiere.*²⁰

The hair of the Greeks is usually dark; blondes are exceptional, and much admired; many women, and some men, dye their hair to make it blonde, or to conceal the grayness of age.²² Both sexes use oils to help the growth of the hair and to protect it against the sun; the women, and again some men, add perfumes to the oil.²³ Both sexes, in the sixth century, wear the hair long, usually bound in braids around or behind the head. In the fifth century the women vary their coiffure by knotting the hair low on the nape of the neck, or letting it fall over the shoulders, or around the neck and upon the breast. The ladies like to bind their hair with gay ribbons, and to adorn these with a jewel on the forehead.²⁴ After Marathon the men begin to cut their hair; after Alexander they will shave their mustaches and beards with sickle-shaped razors of iron. No Greek ever wears a mustache without a beard. The beard is neatly trimmed, usually to a point. The barber not only cuts the hair and shaves or trims the beard, but he manicures his customer and otherwise polishes him up for presentation; when he has finished he offers him a mirror in the most modern style.²⁵ The barber has his shop, which is a center for the “wineless symposia” (as Theophrastus calls them) of the local gossips and gadflies; but he often works outside it under the sky. He is garrulous by profession; and when one of his kind asks King Archelaus of Macedon how he would like to have his hair cut the king answers, “In silence.”²⁶ The women also shave here and there, using razors or depilatories of arsenic and lime.

Perfumes—made from flowers, with a base of oil—are numbered in the hundreds; Socrates complains that men make so much use of them.²⁷ Every lady of class has an armory of mirrors, pins, hairpins, safety pins, tweezers, combs, scent bottles, and pots for rouge and creams. Cheeks and lips are painted with sticks of minium or alkanet root; eyebrows are penciled with lampblack or pulverized antimony; eyelids are shaded with antimony or kohl; eyelashes are darkened, and then set with a mixture of egg white and gum ammoniac. Creams and washes are used for removing wrinkles, freckles, and spots; disagreeable applications are kept on the face for hours in the patient lust to seem, if one cannot be, beautiful. Oil of mastic is employed to prevent perspiration, and specific perfumed unguents are applied to various parts of the body; a proper lady uses palm oil on the face and breast, marjoram on the eyebrows and hair, essence of thyme on the throat and knees, mint on the arms, myrrh on the legs and feet.²⁸ Against this seductive armament men protest to as much effect as in other ages. A character in Athenian comedy reproves a lady in cosmetic detail: “If you go out in summer, two streaks of black run from your eyes; perspiration makes a red furrow from your cheeks to your neck; and when your hair touches your face it is blanched by the white lead.”²⁹ Women remain the same, because men do.

Water is limited, and cleanliness seeks substitutes. The well to do bathe once or twice daily, using a soap made of olive oil mixed with an alkali into a paste; then they are anointed with fragrant essences. Comfortable homes have a paved bathroom in which stands a large marble basin, usually filled by hand; sometimes water is brought by pipes and channels into the house and through the wall of the bathroom, where it spouts from a metal nozzle in the shape of an animal’s head, and falls upon the floor of a small shower-bath enclosure, whence it runs out into the garden.³⁰ Most people, unable to spare water for a bath, rub themselves with oil, and then scrape it off with a crescent-shaped strigil, as in Lysippus’ Apoxyomenos. The Greek is not fastidiously clean; his hygiene is not so much a matter of indoor toilette as of abstemious diet and an active outdoor life. He seldom sits in closed homes, theaters, churches, or halls, rarely works in closed factories or shops; his drama, his worship, even his government, proceed under the sun; and his simple clothing, which lets the air reach every part of his body, can be thrown aside with one swing of the arm for a bout of wrestling or a bath of sunshine.

Greek dress consists essentially of two squares of cloth, loosely draped about the body, and seldom tailored to fit the individual; it varies in minor detail from city to city, but remains constant for generations. The chief garment at Athens is for men the chiton, or tunic, for women the peplos, or robe, both made of wool. If the weather requires it these may be covered with a mantle (himation) or cloak (chlamys), suspended like them from the shoulders, and falling freely in those natural folds that so please us in Greek statuary. In the fifth century clothing is usually white; women, rich men, and gay youths, however, go in for color, even for purple and dark red, and colored stripes and embroidered hems; and the women may bind a colored girdle about the waist. Hats are unpopular on the ground that they keep moisture from the hair and so make it prematurely gray;³¹ the head is covered only in traveling, in battle, and at work under the hot sun; women may wear colored kerchiefs or bandeaux; workers sometimes wear a cap and nothing else.³² Shoes are sandals, high shoes, or boots; usually of leather, black for men, colored for women. The ladies of Thebes, says Dicaearchus, “wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare feet.”³³ Most children and workingmen dispense with shoes altogether; and no one bothers with stockings.³⁴

Both sexes announce or disguise their incomes with jewelry. Men wear at least one ring; Aristotle wears several.³⁵ The walking sticks of the men may have knobs of silver or gold. Women wear bracelets, necklaces, diadems, earrings, brooches and chains, jeweled clasps and buckles, and sometimes jeweled bands about the ankles or the upper arms. Here, as in most mercantile cultures, luxury runs into excess among those to whom wealth is a novelty. Sparta regulates the headdress of its ladies, and Athens forbids women to take more than three dresses on a journey.³⁶ Women smile at these restrictions, and, without lawyers, get around them; they know that to most men and to some women dress makes the woman; and their behavior in this matter reveals a wisdom gathered through a thousand centuries.

IV. MORALS

The Athenians of the fifth century are not exemplars of morality; the progress of the intellect has loosened many of them from their ethical traditions, and has turned them into almost unmoral individuals. They have a high reputation for legal justice, but they are seldom altruistic to any but their children; conscience rarely troubles them, and they never dream of loving their neighbors as themselves. Manners vary from class to class; in the dialogues of Plato life is graced with a charming courtesy, but in the comedies of Aristophanes there are no manners at all, and in public oratory personal abuse is relied upon as the very soul of eloquence; in such matters the Greeks have much to learn from the time-polished “barbarians” of Egypt or Persia or Babylon. Salutation is cordial but simple; there is no bowing, for that seems to the proud citizens a vestige of monarchy; handshaking is reserved for oaths or solemn farewells; usually the greeting is merely Chaire—“Rejoice”—followed, as elsewhere, by some brilliant remark about the weather.³⁷

Hospitality has lessened since Homeric days, for travel is a little more secure than then, and inns provide food and shelter for transients; even so it remains an outstanding virtue of the Athenians. Strangers are welcomed though without introduction; if they come with letters from a common friend, they receive bed and board, and sometimes parting gifts. An invited guest is always privileged to bring an uninvited guest with him. This freedom of entry gives rise in time to a class of parasites—parasitoi—a word originally applied to the clergy who ate the “corn left over” from the temple supplies. The well to do are generous givers in both public and private philanthropy; the practice as well as the word is Greek. Charity—charitas, or love—is also present; there are many institutions for the care of strangers, the sick, the poor, and the old.³⁸ The government provides pensions for wounded soldiers, and brings up war orphans at the expense of the state; in the fourth century it will make payments to disabled workmen.³⁹ In periods of drought, war, or other crisis, the state pays two obols (34 cents) a day to the needy, in addition to the regular fees for attendance at the Assembly, the courts, and the plays. There are the normal scandals; a speech of Lysias concerns a man who, though on public relief, has rich men for his friends, earns money by his handicraft, and rides horses for recreation.⁴⁰

The Greek might admit that honesty is the best policy, but he tries everything else first. The chorus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes expresses the tenderest sympathy for the wounded and deserted soldier, and then takes advantage of his slumber to counsel Neoptolemus to betray him, steal his weapons, and leave him to his fate. Everyone complains that the Athenian retailers adulterate their goods, give short weight and short change despite the government inspectors, shift the fulcrum of their scales towards the measuring weights,^40a and lie at every opportunity; the sausages, for example, are accused of being dogs.⁴¹ A comic dramatist calls the fishmongers “assassins”; a gentler poet calls them “burglars.”⁴² The politicians are not much better; there is hardly a man in Athenian public life that is not charged with crookedness;⁴³ an honest man like Aristides is considered exciting news, almost a monstrosity; even Diogenes’ daytime lantern does not find another. Thucydides reports that men are more anxious to be called clever than honest, and suspect honesty of simplicity.⁴⁴ It is an easy matter to find Greeks who will betray their country: “At no time,” says Pausanias, “was Greece wanting in people afflicted with this itch for treason.”⁴⁵ Bribery is a popular way to political advancement, criminal impunity, diplomatic accomplishments; Pericles has large sums voted to him for secret uses, presumably for lubricating international negotiations. Morality is strictly tribal; Xenophon, in a treatise on education, frankly advises lying and robbery in dealing with the enemies of one’s country.⁴⁶ The Athenian envoys at Sparta in 432 defend their empire in plain terms: “It has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger . . . no one has ever allowed the cry for justice to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by might”⁴⁷—though this passage, and the supposed speech of the Athenian leaders at Melos,⁴⁸ may be exercises of Thucydides’ philosophical imagination, inflamed by the cynical discourses of certain Sophists; it would be as fair to judge the Greeks from the unconventional ethics of Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Thucydides as it would be to describe the modern European by the brilliant bizarreries of Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, and Stirner—not saying how fair that would be. That something of this superiority to morals is an active ingredient in the Greek character appears in the readiness with which the Spartans agree with the Athenians on these mooted points of morals. When the Lacedaemonian Phoebidas, despite a treaty of peace, treacherously seizes upon the citadel of Thebes, and the Spartan King Agesilaus is questioned about the justice of this action, he replies: “Inquire only if it is useful; for whenever an action is useful to our country it is right.” Time and again truces are violated, solemn promises are broken, envoys are slain.⁴⁹ Perhaps, however, the Greeks differ from ourselves not in conduct but in candor; our greater delicacy makes it offensive to us to preach what we practice.

Custom and religion among the Greeks exercise a very modest restraint upon the victor in war. It is a regular matter, even in civil wars, to sack the conquered city, to finish off the wounded, to slaughter or enslave all unransomed prisoners and all captured noncombatants, to burn down the houses, the fruit trees, and the crops, to exterminate the live stock, and to destroy the seed for future sowings.⁵⁰ At the opening of the Peloponnesian War the Spartans butcher as enemies all Greeks whom they find on the sea, whether allies of Athens or neutrals;⁵¹ at the battle of Aegospotami, which closes the war, the Spartans put to death three thousand Athenian prisoners⁵²—almost the selected best of Athens’ depleted citizenry. War of some kind—of city against city or of class against class—is a normal condition in Hellas. In this way the Greece that defeated the King of Kings turns upon itself, Greek meets Greek in a thousand battles, and in the course of a century after Marathon the most brilliant civilization in history consumes itself in a prolonged national suicide.

V. CHARACTER

If we are still attracted to these reckless disputants it is because they cover the nakedness of their sins with an exhilarating vigor of enterprise and intellect. The nearness of the sea, the opportunities of trade, the freedom of economic and political life form the Athenian to an unprecedented excitability and resilience of temper and thought, a very fever of mind and sense. What a change from the Orient to Europe, from the drowsy southern regions to these intermediate states where winter is cold enough to invigorate without dulling, and summer warm enough to liberate without enfeebling body and soul! Here is faith in life and man, a zest of living never rivaled again until the Renaissance.

Out of this stimulating milieu comes courage, and an impulsiveness all the world away from the sophrosyne—self-control—which the philosophers vainly preach, or the Olympian serenity which young Winckelmann and old Goethe will foist upon the passionate and restless Greeks. A nation’s ideals are usually a disguise, and are not to be taken as history. Courage and temperance—andreia, or manliness, and the meden agan, or “nothing in excess” of the Delphic inscription—are the rival mottoes of the Greek; he realizes the one frequently enough, but the other only in his peasants, philosophers, and saints. The average Athenian is a sensualist, but with a good conscience; he sees no sin in the pleasures of sense, and finds in them the readiest answer to the pessimism that darkens his meditative intervals. He loves wine, and is not ashamed to get drunk now and then; he loves women, in an almost innocently physical way, easily forgives himself for promiscuity, and does not look upon a lapse from virtue as an irremediable disaster. Nevertheless he dilutes two parts of wine with three of water, and considers repeated drunkenness an offense against good taste. Though he seldom practices moderation he sincerely worships it, and formulates more clearly than any other people in history the ideal of self-mastery.

The Athenians are too brilliant to be good, and scorn stupidity more than they abominate vice. They are not all sages, and we must not picture their woman as all lovely Nausicaas or stately Helens, or their men as combining the courage of Ajax with Nestor’s wisdom; history has remembered the geniuses of Greece and has ignored her fools (except Nicias); even our age may seem great when most of us are forgotten, and only our mountain peaks have escaped the obscurity of time. Discounting the pathos of distance, the average Athenian remains as subtle as an Oriental, as enamored of novelty as an American; endlessly curious and perpetually mobile; always preaching a Parmenidean calm and always tossed upon a Heracleitean sea. No people ever had a livelier fancy, or a readier tongue. Clear thought and clear expression seem divine things to the Athenian; he has no patience with learned obfuscation, and looks upon informed and intelligent conversation as the highest sport of civilization. The secret of the exuberance of Greek life and thought lies in this, that to the Greek, man is the measure of all things. The educated Athenian is in love with reason, and seldom doubts its ability to chart the universe. The desire to know and understand is his noblest passion, and as immoderate as the rest. Later he will discover the limits of reason and human effort, and by a natural reaction will fall into a pessimism strangely discordant with the characteristic buoyancy of his spirit. Even in the century of his exuberance the thought of his profoundest men—who are not his philosophers but his dramatists—will be clouded over with the elusive brevity of delight and the patient pertinacity of death.