CHAP.XIX)	THE   PHILOSOPHER  KINGS
to Antoninus and Faustina both.* He paid the Senate every courtesy and rejoiced to see that many of his philosopher friends had found their way into its membership. All ltaly and all the provinces acclaimed him as Plato's dream come true: the philosopher was king. But he had no thought of attempting a Utopia. Like Antoninus he was a conservative; radicals do not grow up in palaces. He was a philosopher-king in the Stoic rather than the Platonic sense. "Never hope," he admonished himself, "to realize Plato's Republic. Let it be sufficient that you have in some degree ameliorated mankind, and do not think such improvement a matter of small importance. Who can change the opinions of men? And without a change of sentiments what can you make but reluctant slaves and hypocrites?" He had discovered that not all men wished to be saints; and he sadly reconciled himself to a world of corruption and wickedness. "The immortal gods consent for countless ages to endure without anger, and even to surround with blessings, so many and such evil men; but thou, who hast so short a time to live, art thou already weary?" 48 He decided to rely on example rather than law. He made him self in fact a public servant; he carried all the burdens of administration and judgment, even that part which Lucius had agreed to take but was neglect ing; he allowed himself no luxury, treated all men with simple fellowship, and wore himself out by being easy of access. He was not a great states man: he spent too much of the public funds in cash gifts to the people and the army,·gave each member of the Pnet01;ian Guard 20,000 sesterces, in creased the number of those who could apply for free corn, provided fre quent and costly games, and remitted large sums in unpaid taxes and tribute; it was generosity with many precedents, but unwise at a time when rebellion or war visibly threatened, or was breaking out, in several provinces and on far-spread frontiers.
Marcus continued sedulously that reform of law which Hadrian had begun. He increased the number of court days and reduced the length of trials. He himself often sat as judge, inflexible against grave offenses, but usually merciful. He devised legal protection for wards against dishonest guardians, for debtors against creditors, for provinces against governors. He connived at the rejuvenation of the forbidden collegia, legalized those associations which were chiefly burial societies, made them legal persons eligible for bequests, and established a fund for the bterment of poor citizens. He gave the alimenta the widest extension in their history. After the death of his wife he created an endowment for the aid of young women; a pretty bas-relief shows ussuch girls crowding around the younger Faustina,
Its ten Corinthian monolithic columns are among the finest remains in the Forum. The portico is intact, and the cella, though shorn of its marble facing, has survived as the Church of San Lorenzo in l\liranda.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
who pours wheat into their laps. He abo_lished mix d bathing, f_orbade e  travagant remuneration to actors and gladiators, restricted accordmg to the1r wealth the expenditures of the cities on games, required the use of foiled weapons in gladiatorial contests, and did all that sanguinary custom would allow to banish death from the arena. The people loved him but not his laws. When he enlisted gladiators in his army for the .Marcomannic \Vars the popu lace cried out in good-humored anger: "He is taking our amusement from us; he wants to force us to be philosophers." 49 Rome was preparing, but not quite ready, to be puritan.
It was his misfortune that his fame as a philosopher, and the long peace under Hadrian and Antoninus, encouraged rebels within and barbarians without. In 162 revolt broke out in Britain, the Chatti invaded Roman Ger many, and the Parthian king Vologases III declared war upon Rome. Marcus chose able generals to put down the revolt in the north, but he delegated to Lucius Verus the major task of fighting Parthia. Lucius got no farther than Antioch. For there lived Panthea, so beautiful and accomplished that Lucian thought all the perfections of all sculptural masterpieces had come together in her; to which were added a voice of intoxicating melody, fingers skilled on the lyre, and a mind enriched with literature and philosophy. Lucius saw her, and, like Gilgamesh, forgot when he was born. He abandoned himself to pleasure, to hunting, at last to debauchery, while the Parthians rode into terror-stric)cen Syria. Marcus made no comment on Lucius but sent to Avidius Cassius, second in charge in Lucius' army, a plan of campaign whose military excellence helped the general's own ability not only to drive the Parthians back across Mesopotamia, but to plant the Roman standards once more in Seleucia and Ctesiphon. This time the two cities were burned to the ground lest they serve again as bases for Parthian campaigns. Lucius returned from Antioch to Rome and was awarded a triumph, which he magnanimously insisted that Marcus should share.
Lucius brought with him the invisible victor of the war-pestilence. It had appea:ed first amon_g the tro ps of A_vidius in captu ed Seleucia; it spread so rapidly that he withdrew his army mto Mesopotamia, while the Parthians rejoiced at the vengeance of their gods. The retreating leaions carried the plague with them to Syria; Lucius took some of these soldiers to Rome to
march in his t umph; they inf cted eve17 city through ,:vhich they passed and every region of the Empire to which they were later assigned. The ancient historians tell us more of its ravages than of its nature; their descrip tions suggest exanthematous typhus or possibly bubonic plaQUe.52 Galen thought it similar to the disease that had wasted the Athenians ud'der Pericles: in both cases black pustules almost covered the body, the victim was racked with a hoarse cough, and his "breath stank." 53 Rapidly it swept through
CHAP.XIX)	THE   PHILOSOPHER  KINGS	429
Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, arid Gaul; within a year ( 1 66-67) it had killed more men than had been lost in the war. In Rome 2000 died of it in one day, including many of the aristocracy;54 corpses were carried out of the city in heaps. Marcus, helpless before this intangible enemy, did all he could to mitigate the evil; but the medical science of his day could off er him no guidance, and the epidemic ran its course until it had established an immunity or had killed all its carriers. The effects were endless. Many locali ties were so despoiled of population that they reverted to jungle or desert; food production fell, transport was disorganized, floods destroyed great quantities of grain, and famine succeeded plague. The happy hilaritas that had marked the beginning of Marcus' reign vanished; men yielded to a be wildered pessimism, flocked to soothsayers and oracles, clouded the altars with incense and sacrifice, and sought consolation where alone it was offered them-in the new religions of personal immortality and heavenly peace.
Amid these domestic difficulties news came ( 167) that the tribes along the Danube-Chatti, Quadi, l\larcomanni, Iazyges-had crossed the river,. overwhelmed a Roman garrison of 20,000 men, and were pouring un hindered into Dacia, Raetia, Pannonia, Noricum; that some had made their way over the Alps, had defeated every army sent against them, were be sieging Aquileia (near Venice), were threatening Verona, and were laying waste the rich fields of northern Italy. Never before had the German tribes moved with such unity or so closely threatened Rome. Marcus acted with surprising decisiveness. He put away the pleasures of philosophy and de termined to take the field in what he foresaw would be the most momentous of Roman wars since Hannibal. He shocked Italy by enrolling policemen, gladiators, slaves, brigands, and barbarous mercenaries into legions depleted by war and pestilence. Even the gods were conscripted to his purpose: he bade the priests of alien faiths to offer sacrifice for Rome according to their various rites; and he himself burned such hecatombs at the altars that a wit circulated a message sent him by white oxen, begging him not to be too victorious; "if thou shouldst conquer, we are lost." 55 To raise war funds without levying special taxes he auctioned off in the Forum the wardrobes, art objects, and jewels of the imperial palaces. He took careful measures of defense-fortified the border towns from Gaul to the Aegean, blocked the passes into Italy, and bribed German and Scythian tribes to attack the in vaders in the rear. \Vith energy and courage all the more admirable in a man who hated war, he trained his army into disciplined strength, led them through a hard campaign mapped out with strategic skill, drove the be siegers from Aquileia, and routed them even to the Danube, until nearly all were captured or dead.
430	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XIX
He understood that this action had not ended the German danger; but thinking the situation safe for a ti.'Tle, he returned with his colleague to Rome. On the way Lucius died of an apoplectic stroke, and gossip, which, like politics, has no bowels of mercy, whispered that Marcus had poisoned him. From January to September, 169, the Emperor rested at home from efforts that had strained his frail body close to the breaking point. He suf fered from a stomach ailment that often left him too weak to talk; he con trolled it by eating sparingly, one light meal a day. Those who knew his condition and his diet marveled at his laqors in the palace and the field and could only say that he made up in resolution what he lacked in strength. On several occasions he called in the most famous physician of the age, Galen of Pergamum, and praised him for the unpretentious remedies he prescribed.56
Perhaps a succession of domestic disappointments co-operated with
political and military crises to aggravate his illness and make him old at forty eight. His wife Faustina, whose pretty face has come down to us in many a sculptured portrait, may not have relished sharing bed and board with incarnate philosophy; she was a lively creature, who longed for a gayer life than his sober nature could give her. The talk of the town assumed her infidelity; the mimes satirized him as a cuckold and even named his rivals.57 Like Antoninus with Faustina the mother, Marcus said nothing; instead, he promoted the supposed paramours to high office, gave Faustina every sign of tenderness and respect, had her deified when she died ( r 75), and thanked the gods, in his Meditations, for "so obedient and affectionate a wife." 58 No evidence exists upon which to condemn her.59 Of the four children that she gave him-and whom he loved with a passion still warm in his letters to Fronto-one girl died in childhood; the surviving daughter was saddened by Lucius' life, and widowed by his death. Twin sons came in 161; one died at birth, the other was Commodus. Scandalmongers called him a gladiator's gift to Faustina,60 and he strove all his life long to confirm the tale. But he was a handsome and vigorous lad; Marcus forgivably doted on him, pre sented him to the legions in a manner symbolic of naming a successor, and engaged the best teachers in Rome to fit him for rule. The youth preferred to model cups, dance, sing, hunt, and fence; he developed an understandable aversion to books, scholars, and philosophers, but enjoyed the company of gladiators and athletes. Soon he surpassed all comrades in lying, cruelty, and coarse speech•. Marcus was too g od to be great enough to discipline him or renoun e hrm; he kept_on hopm that education and responsibility woul? sober hrm and make him grow mto king. The lonely Emperor, emaciated, beard u_nte ded, eyes weary with anxiety and sleeplessness, turned back from his wife and son to the tasks of government and war.
CHAP.XIX)	THE   PHILOSOPHER  KINGS	431
The assaults of the central European tribes against the frontier had stopped only for a breathing spell; in this struggle to destroy an Empire and make barbarism free, peace was but an armistice. In 169 the Chatti invaded the Roman regions of the upper Rhine. In 170 the Chauci attacked Belgica, and another force besieged Sarmizegetusa; the Ccstoboii crossed the Balkans into Greece and plundered the Temple of the .Mysteries at Eleusis, fourteen miles from Athens; the Mauri or Moors invaded Spain from Africa, and a new tribe, the Longobardi or Lombards, made its first appearance on the Rhine. Despite a hundred defeats, the fertile barbarians were growing stronger, the barren Romans weaker. Marcus saw that it was now a war to the death, that one side must destroy the other or go under. Only a man schooled in the Roman and Stoic sense of duty could have transformed himself so completely from a mystic philosopher into a competent and suc cessful general. The philosopher remained, hidden under the imperator's
armor; in the very tumult of this Second Marcomannic War (169-75), in his camp facing the Quadi on the river Granna,* Marcus wrote that little book of Meditations by which the world chiefly remembers him. This glimpse of a frail and fallible saint, pondering the problems of morality and destiny while leading a great army in a conflict on which the fate of the Empire turned, is one of the most intimate pictures that time has preserved of its great men. Pursuing the Sarmatians by day he could write with sym pathy of them at night: "A spider, when it has caught a fly, thinks it has done a great deed. So does one who has run down a hare    or who has
captured Sarmatians.    Are they not all alike robbers?" 61
Nevertheless, he fought the Sannatians, the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Iazyges, through six hard years, defeated them, and marched his legions as far north as Bohemia. It was apparently his plan to use the Hercynian and Carpathian ranges as a new frontier; if he had succeeded, Roman civilization might have made Germany, like Gaul, Latin in speech and classical in heritage. But at the height of his successes he was shocked to learn that Avidius Cassius, after putting down a revolt in Egypt, had declared himself emperor. Marcus surprised the barbarians with a hasty peace, merely annex ing a ten-mile strip on the north bank of the Danube and leaving strong garrisons on the southern side. He summoned his soldiers, told them that he would gladly yield his place to Avidius if Rome wished it, promised to pardon the rebel, and marched into Asia to encounter him. Meanwhile a centurion killed Cassius, and the rebellion collapsed. Marcus passed through . Asia Minor and Syria to Alexandria, mourning like Caes3r that he had been cheated of a chance for clemency. At Smyrna, Alexandria, and Athens he
Probably the Gran, a tributary of the Danube.
432	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
walked the streets without a guard, wore the mantle of a philosopher, at tended the lectures of the leading teachers, and joined with them in dis cussion, speaking Greek. During his stay at Athens he endowed professor ships in each of the great schools of doctrine-Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean.
In the fall of 1 76, after almost seven years of war, Aurelius reached Rome and was accorded a triumph as the savior of the Empire. The Emperor associated Commodus with himself in the victory and now made him, a lad of fifteen, his colleague on the throne. For the first time in nearly a century the principle of adoption was put aside and the hereditary principate was resumed..Marcus knew what perils he was inviting for the Empire; he chose them as a lesser evil than the civil war that Commodus and his friends would wage if he were denied the throne. vVe must not judge him with hind sight; neither did Rome anticipate the consequences of this love. There the plague had burned itself out, and men were beginning to be happy again. The capital had suffered little from the wars, which had been financed with remarkable economy and little extra taxation; while battle raged on the frontiers trade flourished within, and money jingled everywhere. It was the height of Rome's tide and of its Emperor's popularity; all the world ac claimed him as at once a soldier, a sage, and a saint.


THE ENGINEERS
The ships and roads that carried goods, the bridges that bound the roads, the harbors and docks that received the ships, the aqueducts that brought clean water to Rome, the sewers that drained the rural marshes and the city's waste, were the work of Roman, Greek, and Syrian engineers operating with armies of free labor, legionaries, and slaves. They raised or drew heavy loads or stones by pulleys on cranes or vertical beams, worked by windlasses on treadmills turned by animals or men.35 They banked the treacherous Tiber with walls set back in three stages, so that low water would not expose the muddy bed.* They dredged a multiple harbor at Ostia for Claudius, Nero, and Trajan, opened lesser havens at Marseilles, Puteoli, Misenum, Carthage, Brundisium, and Ravenna, and re newed the greatest of all at• Alexandria. They emptied the Fucine Lake and reclaimed its bed for cultivation by boring a tunnel through a mountain of rock. They lined the subsoil of Rome with sewers of concrete, brick, and tile which lasted for hundreds of years. They drained the swamps of Campania sufficiently
to make it habitable, for many sumptuous palaces are indicated by the ruins there.36t They executed the astonishing public works by which Caesar and the
emperors mitigated unemployment and beautified Rome.
The consular roads were among their simpler achievements. How did these highways compare with those of today? They were from sixteen to twenty-four feet wide, but near Rome part of this width was taken up with sidewalks (mar gines) paved with rectangular stone slabs. They went straight to their goal in brave sacrifice of initial economy to permanent saving: they overleaped countless streams with costly bridges, crossed marshes with long, arched viaducts of brick and stone, climbed up and down steep hills with no use of cut and fill, and crept along mountainsides or high embankments secured by powerful retaining walls. Their pavement varied with locally available material. Usually the bottom layer (pavimentum) was a four- to six-inch bed of sand, or one inch of mortar. Upon this were imposed four strata of masonry: the statumen, a foot deep, consisting of stones bound with cement or clay; the rudens, ten inches of rammed concrete; the nucleus, twelve to eighteen inches of successively laid and rolled layers of
In 1870 the Italian government built embankments at a uniform width with unpleasant results in the dry season.	'
t Apparently the Volsci had drained the Pontine marshes before 600 B.c. Their Roman con querors neglected the drainage canals, and the region again became swampv and malarial.
Caesar planned its reclamation, and Augustus and Nero made some progress on the work· but the task was not accomplished till 193 r.	'
CHAP. XV)	ROME  AT  WORK	327
concrete; and the su:mma crusta of silex or lava polygonal slabs, one to three feet in diameter, and eight to twelve inches thick. The upper surface of the slabs was smoothed, and the joints were so well fitted as to be hardly discernible. Occa sionally the surface was of concrete; on less important roads it might be of gravel; in Britain it was composed of flint stones laid in cement upon a gravel bed. The substructure was so deep that little attention was given to drainage. All in all, these were the most durable roads in history. Many of them are still in use; but their steep gradients, designed for pack mules and small vehicles, have compelled their abandonment by modem traffic.37
The bridges that carried these roads were themselves high exemplars of wedded science and art. The Romans inherited from Ptolemaic Egypt the principles of hydraulic engineering; they employed them on an unprecedented scale, and the methods they transmitted remained unchanged till our time. They carried to its ancient limit the building of foundations and piers under water. They drove into the bed a double cylinder of piles, boarded each cylinder tightly, drained the water from between them, covered the exposed bottom with rock or lime, and on this basis raised the pier. Eight bridges crossed the Tiber at Rome: some sacredly ancient like the Pons Sublicius, on which no metal might be used; some so well built that like the Pons Fabricius they are functioning to this day. From these spans the Roman arch would go forth to bridge a hundred thousand streams in the white man's world.
Pliny thought that the aqueducts were Rome's greatest achievement. "If one will note the abundance of water skillfully brought into the city for many public and private uses; if he will observe the lofty aqueducts required to maintain a proper elevation and grade, the mountains that had to be pierced, the depres sions that had to be filled-he will conclude that the whole globe offers nothing more marvelous." 38 From distant springs fourteen aqueducts, totaling 1 300 miles, brought through tunnels and over majestic arches into Rome some 300,000,000 gallons of water daily-as large a quantity per capita as in any modem city.39 These structures had their faults; leaks developed in the lead pipes and required frequent repair; by the end of the Western Empire all the aqueducts h:id gone out of use.* But when we consider that they fed ample water to homes, tene ments, palaces, fountains, gardens, parks, and public bath2 where thousands bathed at once, and that enough remained to create artificial lakes for naval bat tles, we begin to see that despite terror and corruption Rome was the best managed capital of antiquity and one of the best equipped cities of all time.
At the head of the water department at the close of the first century was Sextus Julius Frontinus, whose books have made him the most famous of Roman engineers. He had already served as praetor, as governor of Britain, and several terms as com::::.!. Like modem British statesmen he found time to \\·rite books as well as to govern states; he published a work on military science, of which the
One of them, the Aqua Virgo, now feeds the Fontana di Tre\.i; three others have bern restored, and supply Rome with water today.
p8	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XV
concluding portion, Stratagemata, remains,* and left us his personal account of the water system of Rome (De aquis urbis R01nae). He describes the corruption and malfeasance that he found in his department on taking office, and how palaces and brothels secretly tapped the water mains, and so greedily that once Rome ran out of water.41 He describes his resolute reforms; tells in proud detail the sources, length, and function of each aqueduct; and concludes like Pliny: "Who will venture to compare with these mighty conduits the idle Pyramids, or the famous but useless works of the Greeks?" 42 We sense here the frankly utilitarian Roman with little taste for beauty apart from use; we can understand him and admit that a city should have clean water before it has Parthenons. Through these anless books we perceive that even in the age of the despots there were Romans of the old type, men of ability and integrity, conscientious ad ministrators who made the Empire prosper under the lords of misrule and opened a way for monarchy's golden age.
THE TRADERS
The improvement of government and transport expanded Mediterranean trade to an unprecedented amplitude. At one end of the busy process of ex change were peddlers hawking through the countryside everything from sulphur matches to costly imported silks; wandering auctioneers who served also as town criers and advertised lost goods and runaway slaves; daily markets and periodical fairs; shopkeepers haggling with customers, cheating with false or tipped scales, and keeping a tangential eye for the aedile's inspectors of weights and measures. A little higher in the commercial hierarchy were shops that manufactured their own merchandise; these were the backbone of both industry and trade. At or near the ports were wholesalers (magnarii) who sold, to retailers or consumers, goods recently brought in from abroad; sometimes the owner or captain of a vessel would sell his cargo directly from the deck.
For two centuries Italy enjoyed an "unfavorable" balance of trade-cheerfully bought more than she sold. She exported some Arretine pottery, some wine and oii some metalware, glass, and perfumes from Campania; for the rest her prod ucts were kept at home. Meanwhile the wholesalers had agents buying goods for Italy in all parts of the Empire, and foreign merchants had Greek or Syrian drummers touting and placing their goods in Italy. By this double process the delicacies of half the planet came to please the palate, clothe the flesh, and adorn the home of the Roman optimate. "Whoever wishes to see all the goods of the world," said Aelius Aristides, "must either journey throughout the world or stay in Rome." 43 From Sicily came com, cattle, hides, wine, wool, fine woodwork, statuary, jewelry; from north Africa com and oil; from Cyrenaica silphium; from central Africa wild beasts for the arena; from Ethiopia and east Africa ivory, apes, tortoise shell, rare marbles, obsidian, spices, and Negro slaves; from
Book III opens with an instructive remark: "The invention of encrines of war has loner since reached its limit, and I see no funher hope for any improvement in the art." 40	"'
CHAP.XV)	ROME  AT  WORK	329
west Africa oil, beasts, citron, wood, pearls, dyes, copper; from Spain fish, cattle, wool, gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron, cinnabar, wheat, linen, cork, horses, ham, bacon, and the finest olives and olive oil; from Gaul clothing, wine, wheat, timber, vegetables, cattle, poultry, pottery, cheese; from Britain tin, lead, silver, hides, wheat, cattle, slaves, oysters, dogs, pearls, and wooden goods. From Bel gium flocks of geese were driven all the way to Italy to supply goose livers for aristocratic bellies. From Germany came amber, slaves, and furs; from the Danube wheat, cattle, iron, silver, and gold; from Greece and the Greek isles cheap silk, linen, wine, oil, honey, timber, marble, emeralds, drugs, artworks, perfumes, diamonds, and gold. From the Black Sea came corn, fish, furs, hides, slaves; from Asia Minor fine linen and woolen fabrics, parchment, wine, Smyrna and other figs, honey, cheese, oysters, carpets, oil, wood; from Syria wine, silk, linen, glass, oil, apples, pears, plums, figs, dates, pomegranates, nuts, nard, balsam, Tyrian purple, and the cedar of Lebanon; from Palmyra textiles, perfumes, drugs; from Arabia incense, gums, aloes, myrrh, laudanum, ginger, cinnamon, and pre cious stones; from Egypt com, paper, linen, glass, jewelry, granite, basalt, ala baster, and porphyry. Finished products of a thousand kinds came to Rome and the West from Alexandria, Sidon, Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Rhodes, Miletus, Ephesus, and the other great cities of the East, while the East received raw mate rials and money from the West.
In addition to all this there was a substantial import trade from outside the Empire. From Parthia and Persia came gems, rare essences, morocco leather, rugs, wild beasts, and eunuchs. From China-through Parthia, or India, or the Caucasus-came silk, raw or manufactured; the Romans thought it a vegetable product combed from trees and valued it at its weight in gold.44 Much of this silk came to the island of Cos, where it was woven into dresses for the ladies of Rome and other cities; in A.n. 91 the relatively poor state of .1\.fessenia had to for bid its women to wear transparent silk dresses at religious initiations; it was with such garments that Cleopatra touched the hearts of Caesar and Antony.45 In return the Chinese imported from the Empire carpets, jewels, amber, metals, dyes, drugs, and glass. Chinese historians speak of an embassy coming by sea to the Emperor Huan-ti in 166 from the Emperor "An-Tun"-Marcus Aurelius An toninus; more probably it was a band of merchants posing as ambassadors. Six teen Roman coins, dating from Tiberius to Aurelius, have been found in Shansi. From India came pepper, spikenard, and other spices (the same that Columbus would seek), herbs, ivory, ebony, sandalwood, indigo, pearls, sardonyx, onyx, amethyst, carbuncle, diamonds, iron products, cosmetics, textiles, tigers, and ele phants. We may judge the extent of this trade, and the Roman hunger for luxuries, by noting that Italy imported more from India than from any other country except Spain.46 From one Egyptian port alone, Strabo avers, 120 ships sailed every year for India and Ceylon.41 In exchange India took a modest quan tity of wine, metals, and purple, and the rest-over 100,000,000 sesterces per year
-in bullion or coin. A like amount went to Arabia and China, and probably to
Spain.48


510	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
ing and high philosophy-capturing the citadel of the finest imagination in Greek history. Plato's plan for a communistic aristocracy was the brilliant endeavor of a rich conservative to reconcile his scorn of democracy with the radical idealism of his time.
He came of a family so ancient that on his mother's side his pedigree went back to Solon, and on his father's side to the early kings of Athens, even to Poseidon, god of the sea.00 His mother was the sister of Charmides and the niece of Critias, so that opposition to democracy was almost in his blood. Named Aristocles-"best and renowned"-the youth distinguished himself in almost every field: he excelled in the study of music, mathematics, rhet oric, and poetry; he charmed the women, and doubtless the men, with his good looks; he wrestled at the Isthmian games, and was nicknamed Plat<m, or broad, because of his robust frame; he fought in three battles, and won a prize for bravery.81 He wrote epigrams, amorous verses, and a tragic tetralogy; he was hesitating between poetry and politics as a career when, at the age of twenty, he succumbed to the fascination of Socrates. He must have known him before, since the great gadfly had long been a friend of his uncle Charmides; but now he could understand Socrates' teaching, and enjoy the sight of the old man tossing ideas, like an acrobat, into the air, and impaling them on the prongs of his questioning. He burned his poems, forgot Euripides, athletics, and women, and followed the master as if under an hypnotic spell. Perhaps he took notes every day, feeling with an artist's sensitivity the dramatic possibilities of this grotesque and lovable Silenus.
Then, when Plato was twenty-three, came the tory revolution of 404, led by his own relatives; the tense days of the oligarchic terror, and the brave defiance of the Thirty by Socrates; the death of Critias and Char mides, the restoration of the democracy, the trial and death of Socrates: all the world seemed to collapse about the once carefree youth, and he fled from Athens as if it were a haunted city. He found some comfort at Megara in the home of Eucleides, and then at Cyrene, perhaps with Aris tippus; thence he appears to have gone to Egypt and studied the mathemati cal and historical lore of the priests.89 About 395 he was back in Athens, and a year later fought for the city at Corinth. About 387 he set forth again, studied the Pythagorean philosophy with Archytas at Taras and with Timaeus at Locri, passed over to Sicily to see Mt. Etna, formed a friend ship with Dion of Syracuse, was introduced to Dionysius I, was sold into slavery, and was back safe in Athens in 386. With the three thousand drachmas raised to reimburse his ransomer, and which Anniceris refused, Plato's friends now bought for him a suburban recreation grove named
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY	511
from its local god Academus;"'• and there Plato founded the university that was destined to be the intellectual center of Greece for nine hundred years.*
The Academy was technically a religious fraternity, or thittsos, dedi cated to the worship of the Muses. The students paid no fees, but as they came for the most part from upper-class families their parents could be expected to make substantial donations to the institution; rich men, says Suidas, "from time to time bequeathed in their wills, to the members of the school, the means of living a life of philosophic leisure.".. Dionysius II was reported to have given Plato eighty talents ($480,000)"'-which might ex plain the philosopher's patience with the King. The comic poets of the time satirized the students as affected in their manners and overnice in their dress-with elegant caps and canes, and a short cloak or academic gown;.. so old are the manners of Eton, and the black robes of scholarship. Women were admitted to the student body, for Plato remained to this extent a radi cal, that he was an ardent feminist. The chief studies were mathematics and philosophy. Over the portal was a warning inscription-medeis ageometre tos eisito-"Let no one without geometry enter here"; perhaps a consider able measure of mathematics formed a requirement for admission. Most of the mathematical advances of the fourth century were made by men who had studied in the Academy. The mathematical course included arith metic (theory of number), advanced geometry, "spheric" (astronomy), "music" (probably including literature and history), law, and philosophy... Moral and political philosophy came last, if Plato followed the advice which
-half justifying Anytus and Meletus-he puts into the mouth of Socrates:
Socr. You know that there are certain principles about justice and good which were taught us in childhood; and under their pa rental authority we have been brought up, obeying and honoring them.
Glaucon. That is tme.
Socr. And there are also opposite maxims and habits of pleasure which flatter and attract our soul, but they do not influence those who have any sense of right, and who continue to honor the maxims of their fathers and obey them.
Gl. Troe.
Socr. Now, when a man is in this state, and the questioning spirit asks what is fair and honorable, and he answers as the law directs, and
It was not the first university: the Pythagorean school of Crotona, as far back as 520, had offered a variety of courses to a united scholastic community; and the school of Isocrates antedated the Academy by eight years.
512	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
then arguments come and refute the word of the legislator, and he is driven into believing that nothing is fair any more than foul, or just and good any more than the opposite, and the same of all his time-honored notions, do you think that he will still honor and obey them?
Gl. That is impossible.
Socr. And when he ceases to think them honorable and natural as heretofore, and he fails to discover the true, can he be expected to pursue any life other than that which flatters his desires?
Gl. He cannot.
Socr. And from being an observer of the law he is converted into a lawless person?
Gl. Unquestionably....
Socr. Therefore every care must be taken in introducing our thirty-year-old citizens to dialectic.... They must not be allowed to taste the dear delight too early; that is one thing specially to be avoided; for young men, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting others in imitation of those who refute them; they are like puppy-dogs, who delight to tear and pull at all who come near them.
Gl. Yes, that is their great delight.
Socr. And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything that they believed before, and hence ... philosophy has a bad name with the rest of the world.
Gl. That is very true.


those of his students."" The History of Animals is a mine of mistakes. We learn there that mice die if they drink in summer; that elephants suffer from only two diseases-catarrh and flatulence; that all animals but man develop rabies when bitten by a mad dog; that eels are generated spon taneously; that only men have palpitation of the heart; that the yolk of several eggs shaken together collects into the middle; that eggs float in strong brine.'n Aristotle knows the internal organs of animals better than those of men, for neither he nor Hippocrates seems to have overridden religious taboos and practiced human dissection.1'111 He thinks that man has only eight ribs, that women have fewer teeth than men,1.., that the heart lies higher than the lungs, that the heart and not the brain is the seat of sensa tion,*180 that the function of the brain is (literally) to cool the blood.m. Finally he (or some ponderous proxy) carries the theory of design to depths that make the· judicious smile. "It is evident that plants are created for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of men." "Nature has made the buttocks for repose, since quadrupeds can stand without fatigue, bQt man needs a seat.msa And yet even this last passage reveals the scientist: the author takes it for granted that man is an animal, and seeks natural causes for the anatomical differences between beasts and men. All in all, the History of Animals is Aristotle's supreme work, and the greatest scientific product of fonrth-century Greece. Biology waited twenty centuries for its equal.
The Philosopher
Whether through a sincere piety, or through a cautious respect for the opinions of mankind, Aristotle becomes less of a scientist and more of a meta physician as he turns to the study of man. He defines the soul (psyche), or vital principle as "the primary entelechy of an organism"-i.e., the organism's inherent and destined form, its urge and directon of growth. The soul is not something added to, or residing in, the body, it is coextensive with the body; it is the body itself in its "powers of self-nourishment, self-growth, and self decay"; it is the sum of the functions of the organism; it is to the body as vision is to the eye.183 Nevertheless, this functional aspect is basic; it is the functions that make the structures, the desires that mold the organs, the soul that forms the body: "All natural bodies are organs of the soul."f8'
The soul has three grades-nutritive, sensitive, and rational. Plants share
He was misled by the insensitivity of cerebral tissue to direct stimulus.
t ''The soul," Aristotle adds in a startling idealistic aside, "is in a certain way all existing things; for all things are either perceptions or thoughts.''1811 Having bowed to Berkeley, Aristotle also bows to Hume: "Mind is one and continuous in the sense in which the process of thinking is so; and thinking is identical with the thoughts which are its parts.,_
532	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
with animals and men the nutritive soul-the capacity for self-nourishment and internal growth; animals and men have in addition the sensitive soul-the capacity for sensation; the higher animals as well as men have the "passive rational" soul-the capacity for the simpler forms of intelligence; man alone has the "active rational" soul-the capacity to generalize and originate. This last is a part or emanation of that creative and rational power of the universe which is God; and as such it cannot die.187 But this immortality is impersonal; what survives is the power, not the personality; the individual is a unique and mortal compound of nutritive, sensitive, and rational faculties; he achieves immortality only relatively, through reproduction, and only impersonally, through death.•
Just as the soul is the "form" of the body, so God is the "form" or "entelechy" of the world-its inherent nature, functions, and purposes.t All causes! at last go back to the First Cause Uncaused, all motions to the Prime Mover Un moved; we must assume some origin or beginning for the motion and power in the world, and this source is God. As God is the sum and source of all motion, so he is the sum and goal of all purposes in nature; he is the Final, as well as the First, Cause. Everywhere we see things moving to specific ends; the front teeth grow sharp to cut food, the molars grow flat to grind it; the eyelid winks to protect the eye, the pupil expands in the dark to let in more light; the tree sends its roots into the earth, its shoots toward the sun.189 As the tree is drawn by its inherent nature, power, and purposes toward the light, so the world is drawn by its inherent nature, power, and purposes, which are God. God is not the creator of the material world, but its energizing form; he moves it not from behind, but as an inner direction or goal, as something be loved moves the lover.111° Finally, says Aristotle, God is pure thought, rational soul, contemplating itself in the eternal forms that constitute at once the essence of the world, and God.
The purpose of art, like that of metaphysics, is to capture the essential form of things. It is an imitation or representation of life,""1 but no mechani cal copy; that which it imitates is the soul of the matter, not the body or matter itself; and through this intuition and mirroring of essence even the representation of an ugly object may be beautiful. Beauty is unity, the
Other interpretations of Aristotle's contradictory pronouncements on this point are possible. The text follows the Cambridge Ancient History, VI, 345; Grote, Aristotle, II, 233; and Rohde, Psyche, 493.
t The essential aspect of anything, in Aristotle as in Plato, is the "form" (eidos), not the
matter which is formed; the matter is not the "real being," but a negative and passive poten tiality which acquires specific existence only when actuated and determined by form.
:j: Every effect, says Aristotle, is produced by four causes: material (the component stuff), efficient (the agent or his act), formal (the nature of the thing), and final (the goal). He gives a peculiar example: "What is the material cause of a man? The menses" (i.e., the pro vision of an ovum). ''What is the efficient cause? The semen" (i.e., the act of insemination). ''What is the formal cause? The nature" (of the agents involved). "What is the final cause? The purpose in view.'"""
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY	533
co-operation and symmetry of the parts in a whole. In drama this unity is primarily a unity of action; the plot must concern itself with one action chiefly, and may admit other actions only to advance or illuminate this cen tral tale. If the work is to be of high excellence the action must be noble or heroic. "Tragedy," says Aristotle's celebrated definition, "is a repre sentation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magni tude, by means of language enriched with all kinds of ornament   it rep•
resents men in action, and does not use narrative; and through pity and fear it brings relief to these and similar emotions.",... By arousing our pro foundest feelings, and then quieting them through a subsiding denouement, the tragic drama offers us a harmless and yet soul-deepening expression of emotions that might otherwise accumulate to neurosis or violence; it shows us pains and sorrows more awful than our own, and sends us home dis charged and cleansed. In general there is a pleasure in contemplating any work of true art; and it is the mark of a civilization to provide the soul with works worthy of such contemplation. For "nature requires not only that we should be properly employed, but that we should be able to enjoy our leisure in an honorable way.",..
What, then, is the good life? Aristotle answers, with frank simplicity, that it is the happy life; and he proposes to consider, in his Ethics,* not (like Plato) how to make men good, but how to make them happy. All other things than happiness, he thinks, are sought with some other end in view; happiness alone is sought for its own sake.'"' Certain things are neces sary to lasting happiness: good birth, good health, good looks, good luck, good reputation, good friends, good money, and goodness.'"" "No man can be happy who is absolutely ugly."'"" "As for those who say that he who is being tortured on the wheel, or falls into great misfortunes, is happy pro vided only he be good, they talk nonsense."11" Aristotle quotes, with a can dor rare in philosophers, the answer of Simonides to Hieron's wife, who had asked whether it was better to be wise or to be rich: "Rich, for we see the wise spending their time at the doors of the rich."'"" But wealth is merely means; it does not of itself satisfy anyone but the miser; and since it is relative, it seldom satisfies a man long. The secret of happiness is action, the exercise of energy in a way suited to a man's nature and circumstances. Virtue is a practical wisdom, an intelligent appraisal of one's own good.,.. Usually it is a golden mean between two extremes; intelligence is needed
The Nicomacbean Ethics (so called because edited by Aristotle's son Nicomachus) and the Politics were originally one book. The plural title forms-ta ethika and ta politika-were used by the Greek editors to suggest the treatment of various moral and political problems; and these forms have been retained in the English adoption of the words.
534	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXI
to find the mean, and self-control (enkrateia, inner strength) to practice it. "He who is angry at what and with who:qi he ought," says a typically Aristotelian sentence, "and further, in right manner and time, and for a proper length of time, is praised."200 Virtue is not an act but a habit of doing the right thing. At first it has to be enforced by discipline, since the young cannot judge wisely in these matters; in time that which was the result of compulsion becomes a habit, "a second nature," and almost as pleasant as desire.
Aristotle concludes, quite contrary to his initial placing of happiness in action, that the best life is the life of thought. For thought is the mark or special excellence of man, and "the proper work of man is a working of the soul in accordance with reason."201 "The most fortunate of men is he who combines a measure of prosperity with scholarship, research, or con templation; such a man comes closest to the life of the gods."... "Those who wish for an independent pleasure should seek it in philosophy, for all other pleasures need the assistance of men."'03
The Statesman
As ethics is the science of individual happiness, so politics is the science of collective happiness. The function of the state is to organize a society for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. "A state is a collective body of citizens sufficient in themselves for all the purposes of life.'"°' It is a natural product, for "man is by nature a political animal"200-i.e., his in stincts lead him to association. "The state is by nature prior to the family and the individual": man as we know him is born into an already organized society, which molds him in its image.
Having collected and studied, with his students, 158 Greek constitu tions,• Aristotle divided them into three types: monarchy, aristocracy, and timocracy-governrnent respectively by power, by birth, and by excel lence. Any one of these forms may be good according to time, place, and circumstance. "Though one form of government may be better than oth ers," reads a sentence which every American should memorize, "yet there is no reason to prevent another from being preferable to it under particular conditions."200 Each form of government is good when the ruling power seeks the good of all rather than its own profit; in the contrary case each is bad. Each type, therefore, has a degenerate analogue when it becomes government for the governors instead of for the governed; then monarchy


The Homeric Greeks have no money, but use, as media for exchange, ingots of iron, bronze, or gold; the ox or cow is taken as a standard of v-tlue. A gold ingot of fifty-seven pounds is called a talent (talanton, weight)."' Much barter remains. Wealth is computed realistically in goods, especially cattle, rather than in pieces of metal or paper that may lose or alter their value at any moment through a change in the economic theology of men. There are rich and poor in Homer as in life; society is a rumbling cart that travels an uneven road; and no matter how carefully the cart is constituted, some of the varied objects in it will sink to the bottom, and others will rise to the top; the potter has not made all the vessels of the same earth, or strength, or fragility. Already in the second book of the Iliad we hear the sound of the class war; and as Thersites flies oratorically at Agamemnon we recognize an early variation on a persistent theme.•
Morals
As we read Homer the impression forms that we are in the presence of a society more lawless and primitive than that of Cnossus or Mycenae. The Achaean culture is a step backward, a transition between the brilliant Aegean civilization and the Dark Age that will follow the Dorian conquest. Homeric life is poor in art, rich in action; it is unmeditativei buoyant, swift; it is too young and strong to bother much about manners or philosophy. Probably we misjudge it by seeing it in the violent crisis or disorderly aftermath of war.
There are, it is true, many tender qualities and scenes. Even the warriors are generous and affectionate; between parent and child there is a love as profound as it is silent. Odysseus kisses the heads and shoulders of the members of his family when, after their long separation, they recognize him; and in like manner they kiss him... Helen and Menelaus weep when they learn that this noble lad, Telemachus, is the son of the lost Odysseus who fought so valiantly for them." Agamemnon himself is capable of tears
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.m
so abundant that they remind Homer of a stream pouring over rocks.18 Friendships are firm among the heroes, though possibly a degree of sexual inversion enters into the almost neurotic attachment of Achilles to Patroclus, especially to Patroclus dead. Hospitality is lavish, for "from Zeus are all strangers and beggars.".. Maids bathe the foot or the body of the guest, anoint him with unguents, and may give him fresh garments; he receives food and lodging if he needs them; and perhaps a gift.'° "Lo," says "fair cheeked Helen," as she places a costly robe in Telemachus' hands, "I too give thee this gift, dear child, a remembrance of the hands of Helen, against the day of thy longed-for marriage, for thy bride to wear.'"1 It is a picture that reveals to us the human tenderness and fine feeling that in the Iliad must hide themselves under the panoply of war.
Even war does not thwart the Greek passion for games. Children and adults engage in skillful and difficult contests, apparently with fairness and good humor; Penelope's suitors play draughts, and throw the disk or Jave lin; the Phaeacian hosts of Odysseus play at quoits, and a strange medley of ball and dance.* When the dead Patroctus has been cremated, according to Achaean custom, games are played that set a precedent for Olympia foot races, disk-throwing, javelin-throwing, archery, wrestling, chariot races, and single combat fully armed; all in excellent spirit, except that only the ruling class may enter, and only the gods may cheat.411
The other side of the picture is less pleasing. As a prize for the chariot race Achilles offers "a woman skilled in fair handiwork"; and on the funeral pyre horses, dogs, oxen, sheep, and human beings are sacrificed to keep the dead Patroclus well tended and fed." Achilles treats Priam with fine courtesy, but only after dragging Hector's body in mangled ignominy around the pyre. To the Achaean male, human life is cheap; to take it is no serious matter; a moment's pleasure can replace it. When a town is captured the men are killed or sold into slavery; the women are taken as concubines if they are attractive, as slaves if they are not. Piracy is still a respected occupation; even kings organize marauding expeditions, plu der towns and villages, and enslave their population; "Indeed," says Thucyd ides, "this came to be the main source of livelihood among the early Hel-
"Then Alcinous ordered Halias and Laodamas to dance, by themselves, for never did any one dare join himself with them. They took in their hands the fine ball, purple-dyed ... and played. The first, bendin his body right back, would hurl the ball towards the shadowy crowds, while the other in his turn would spring high into the air and catch it gracefully before his feet touched the ground. Then, after they had made full trial of tossing the ball high, they began oassing it back and forth between them, all the while they danced upon the f,:uitful earth.''"'	'
CHAP.m)	THE   HEROIC  AGE
lenes, no disgrace being yet attached to such an occupation,""' but some glory; very much as, in our times, great nations may conquer and subjugate defenseless peoples without loss of dignity or righteousness. Odysseus is in sulted when he is asked is he a merchant, "mindful of the gains of his greed";'° but he tells with pride how, on his return from Troy, his provisions having run low, he sacked the city of Ismarus and stored his ships with food; or how he ascended the river Aegyptus "to pillage the splendid fields, to carry off the women and little children, and to kill the men."" No city is safe from sudden and unprovoked attack.
To this lighthearted relish for robbery and slaughter the Achaeans add an unabashed mendacity. Odysseus can hardly speak without lying, or act without treachery. Having captured the Trojan scout Dolon, he and Diomed promise him life if he will give them the information they require; he does, and they kill him."' It is true that the other Achaeans do not quite equal Odysseus in dishonesty, but not because they would not; they envy and admire him, and look up to him as a model character; the poet who pictures him considers him a hero in every respect; even the goddess Ath ena praises him for his lying, and counts this among the spe.cial charms for which she loves him. "Cunning must he be and knavish," she tells him, smiling, and stroking him with her hand, "who would go beyond thee in all manner of guile, aye, though it were a god that met thee. Bold man, crafty in counsel, insatiate in deceit, not even in thine own land, it seems, wast thou to cease from guile and deceitful tales, which thou lovest from the bottom of thine heart."•
In truth we ourselves are drawn to this heroic Munchausen of the ancient world. We discover some likable traits in him, and in the hardy and subtle people to which he belongs. He is a gentle father, and in his own kingdom a just ruler, who "wrought no wrong in deed or word to any man in the land." "Never again," says his swineherd, "shall I find a master so kind, how far soever I go, not though I come again to the house of my father and mother!"'0 We envy Odysseus his "form like unto the immortals," his frame so athletic that though nearing fifty he throws the disk farther than any of the Phaeacian youths; we admire his "steadfast heart," his "wis dom like to Jove's";51 and our sympathy goes out to him when, in his despair of ever seeing again "the smoke leaping up from his own land," he yearns to die, or when, in the midst of his perils and sufferings, he steels himself with words that old Socrates loved to quote: "Be patient now, my soul; thou hast endured still worse than this."u He is a man of iron in body and mind, yet every inch human, and therefore forgivable.
50	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.m
The secret of the matter is that the Achaean's standard of judgment is as different from ours as the virtues of war differ from those of peace. He lives in a disordered, harassed, hungry world, where every man must be his own policeman, ready with arrow and spear, and a capacity for look ing calmly at flowing blood. "A ravening belly," as Odysseus explains, "no man can hide   Because of it are the benched ships made ready that
bear evil to foeman over the unresting sea.""' Since the Achaean knows little security at home, he respects none abroad; every weakling is fair play; the supreme virtue, in his view, is a brave and ruthless intelligence. Virtue is literally virtus, manliness, arete, the quality of Ares or Mars. The good man is not one that is gentle and forbearing, faithful and sober, industrious and honest; he is simply one who fights bravely and well. A bad man is not one that drinks too much, lies, murders, and betrays; he is one that is cowardly, stupid, or weak. The.re were Nietzscheans long before Nietzsche, long before Thrasymachus, in the lusty immaturity of the European world.
Sexes
Achaean society is a patriarchal despotism tempered with the beauty and anger of woman, and the .fierce tenderness of parental love.• Theoretically the father is supreme: he may take as many concubines as he likes,t he may
offer them to his guests, he may expose his children on the mountaintops to die, or slaughter them on the altars of the thirsty gods. Such paternal omnip
.>tence does not necessarily imply a brutal society, but only one in which the organization of the state has not yet gone far enough to preserve so cial order; and in which the family, to create such order, needs the powers that will later be appropriated by the state in a nationalization of the right to kill. As social organization advances, paternal authority and family unity decrease, freedom and individualism grow. In practice the Achaean male is usually reasonable, listens patiently to domestic eloquence, and is devoted to his children.
Within the patriarchal framework the position of woman is far higher in Homeric than it will be in Periclean Greece. In the legends and the
There are vestiges of an earlier and "matriarchal" condition: before Cecrops, said Athenian tradition, "children did not lmow their own father"-i.e., presumably, descent was reckoned through the mother; and even in Homeric days many of the gods especially wor shiped by Greek cities were goddesses-Hera at Argos, Athena at Athens, Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis-with no visible subordination to any male deity."'
t Theseus had so many wives that an historian drew up a learned catalogue of them.•
CHAP.III)	THE  HEROIC  AGE	SI
epics she plays a leading role, from Pelops' courtship of Hippodameia to Iphigenia's gentleness and Electra's hate. The gynaeceum does not confine her, nor does the home; she moves freely among men and women alike, and occasionally shares in the serious discourse of the men, as Helen does with Menelaus and Telemachus. When the Achaean leaders wish to fire the imagination of their people against Troy they appeal not to political or racial or religious ideas, but to the sentiment for woman's beauty; the loveliness of Helen must put a pretty face upon a war for land and trade. Without woman the Homeric hero would be a clumsy boor, with nothing to live for or die for; she teaches him something of courtesy, idealism, and softer ways.


A.D. 1884, belongs apparently to the early fifth century; in an earlier form it may have influenced the legislators of Greece. In the sixth century Thaletas of Crete taught choral music at Sparta, and the Cretan sculptors Dipoenus and Scyllis instructed the artists of Argos and Sicyon. By a hundred channels the old civilization emptied itself out into the new.
The Athenians counted all this as history. They treasured for centuries, by continually repairing it, the ship in which Theseus had sailed to Crete, and used it as a sacred vessel in sending envoys annually to the feast of Apollo at Delos.
CHAPTER  II
Before Agamemnon
SCHLIEMANN
N the year 1822 a lad was born in Germany who was to turn the spade work of archeology into one of the romances of the century. His father had a passion for ancient history, and brought him up on Homer's stories of the siege of Troy and Odysseus' wanderings. "With great grief I heard from him that Troy had been so completely destroyed that it had disap peared without leaving any trace of its existence."' At the age of eight, having given the matter mature consideration, Heinrich Schliemann an nounced his intention to devote his life to the rediscovery of the lost city. Atthe age of ten he presented to his father a Latin essay on the Trojan War. In 1836 he left school with an education too advanced for his means, and became a grocer's apprentice. In 1841 he shipped from Hamburg as cabin boy on a steamer bound for South America. Twelve days out the vessel foundered; the crew was tossed about in a small boat for nine hours, and was thrown by the tide upon the shores of Holland. Heinrich became a clerk, and earned a hundred and .fifty dollars a year; he spent half of this on books, and lived on the other half and his dreams." His intelligence and application had their natural results; at twenty-five he was an independent merchant with interests on three continents; at thirty-six he felt that he had enough money, retired from commerce, and gave all his time to archeology. "In the midst of the bustle of business I had never forgotten Troy, or the
agreement I had made with my father to excavate it.""
In his travels as a merchant he had made it a practice to learn the language of each country he traded with, and to write in that language the current pages of his diary.' By this method he learned English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, and Arabic. Now he went to Greece, studied the language as a living speech, and was soon
CHAP.II)	BEFORE  AGAMEMNON	25
able to read both ancient and modem Greek as fluently as German.• Henceforth, he declared, "I should .find it impossible to live anywhere but on classical soil."" Since his Russian wife refused to leave Russia, he adver tised for a Greek wife, laid down precise specifications for the position, and at the age of forty-seven chose a bride of nineteen from among the photo graphs he received. He married her almost at sight, and unwittingly in the ancient style of purchase; her parents charged him for her a price com mensurate with their conception of his fortune. When his new wife bore him children he reluctantly consented to baptize them, but solemnized the ceremony by laying a copy of the Iliad upon their heads and reading a hundred hexameters aloud. He named them Andromache and Agamemnon, called his servants Telarnon and Pelops, and christened his Athenian home Bellerophon.1 He was an old man mad about Horner.
In 1870 he went to the Troad-the northwest comer of Asia Minor and made up his mind, against all current scholarly opinion, that Priam's Troy lay buried under the hill called Hissarlik. After a year of negotiations he secured permission from the Turkish Government to explore the site; he engaged eighty laborers, and set to work. His wife, who loved him for his eccentricities, shared his toil in the earth from sunrise to sunset. All winter long an icy gale from the north drove a blinding dust into their eyes, and swept with such violence through the cracks of their frail cottage that no lamp could be kept lit in the evening. Despite the fire in the hearth the water froze nearly every night. "We had nothing to keep us warm except our enthusiasm for the great work of discovering Troy."9
A year passed before they were rewarded. Then, blow by blow, a work man's pick exposed a large copper vessel, and this, opened, revealed an astonishing treasure of some nine thousand objects in silver and gold. The canny Schliemann hid the find in his wife's shawl, dismissed his workmen to an unexpected siesta, hurried to his hut, locked the door, spread out the precious things on -the table, linked each one fondly with some passage in
"In order to acquire quickly the Greek vocabulary," Schliemann writes, "I procured a modem Greek translation of Paul et Virginie, and read it through, comparing every word widt its equivalent in the French original. When I had finished this task I knew at least one half the Greek words the book contained; and after repeating the operation I knew them all, or nearly so, without having lost a single minute by being obliged to use a dictionary   Of
the Greek grammar I learned only the declensions and the verbs, and never lost my precious time in studying its rules; for as I saw that boys, after being troubled and tormented for eight years and more in school with the tedious rules of grammar, can nevenheless none of them write a letter in ancient Greek without making hundreds of atrocious blunders, I thought the method pursued by the schoolmasters must be altogether wrong   Ilearned ancient Greek
as I would have learned a living language."•
26	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CBAP.U
Homer, adorned his wife with an ancient diadem, and sent messages to his friends in Europe that he had unearthed "the Treasury of Priam."" No one would believe him; some critics charged him with having placed the objects where he found them; and at the same time the Sublime Porte sued him for taking gold from Turkish soil. But scholars like Virchow, Dorpfeld, and Bumouf came to the site, verified Schliemann's reports, and carried on the work with him until one buried Troy after another was uncovered, and the problem was no longer whether Troy had existed, but which of the nine Troys exhumed had been the Ilios of the Iliad.
In 1876 Schliemann resolved to confirm the epic from another direction to show that Agamemnon too was real. Guided by Pausanias' classic de scription of Greece,• he sank thirty-four shafts at Mycenae in the eastern Peloponnesus. Turkish officials interrupted the work by claiming half of the material that he had found at Troy. Unwilling to let the precious "Treasury of Priam" lie unseen in Turkey, Schliemann clandestinely dis patched the objects to the State Museum at Berlin, paid the Porte five times more damages than were required of him, and resumed his digging at Mycenae. Again he was rewarded; and when he saw his workers carrying up to him skeletons, pottery, jewelry, and golden masks, he telegraphed joyfully to the King of Greece that he had discovered the tombs of Atreus and Agamemnon.1° In 1884 he moved on to Tiryns and, guided again by Pausanias, unearthed the great palace and cyclopean walls that Homer had described.n
Seldom had any man done so. much for archeology. He had the faults of his virtues, for his enthusiasm drove him into a reckless haste that de stroyed or confused many exhumed objects in order to reach at once the goal that he sought; and the epics that had inspired his labors misled him into thinking that he had discovered Priam's hoard at Troy, and the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae. The world of scholarship doubted his reports, and the museums of England, Russia, and France long refused to accept as genuine the relics that he had found. He consoled himself with vigorous self-appreciation, and went on digging courageously until disease struck him down. In his last days he hesitated whether to pray to the God of Christianity or to the Zeus of classic Greece. "To Agamemnon Schliemann, best beloved of sons, greeting!" he writes. "I am very glad that you are going to study Plutarch, and have finished Xenophon ... I pray Zeus the Father and Pallas Athene that they will grant you a hundred returns of the
Pausanias traveled through Greece about A.D, 16o, and described it in his Periegesis, of
Tour.
CHAP.II)	BEFORE  AGAMEMNON
day in health and happiness."'" He died in 1890, worn out by climatic hardships, scholastic hostility, and the incessant fever of his dream.
Like Columbus he had discovered a world stranger than the one he sought. These jewels were older by many centuries than Priam and Hecuba; these graves were not the tombs of the Atridae, but the ruins of an Aegean civilization, on the Greek mainland, as ancient as the Minoan Age in Crete. Unknowingly Schliemann had proved Horace's famous line vixerunt fortes mite Agamemnona-"there lived many brave men before Agamemnon."* Year by year, as Dorpfeld and Muller, Tsountas and Starnatakis, Waldstein and Wace dug more widely into the Peloponnesus, and still others explored Attica and the islands, Euboea and Boeotia, Phocis and Thessaly, the soil of Greece gave up the ghostly relics of a culture before history. Here too men had been lifted from barbarism to civilization by the passage from nomadic hunting to settled agriculture, by the replace ment of stone tools with copper and bronze, by the conveniences of writ ing and the stimulus of trade-. Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.
IN THE PALACES OF THE KINGS


Asleep lie mountain-top and mountain-gully, shoulder also and ravine; the creeping things that come from the dark earth, the beasts that lie upon the hillside, the generation of the bees, the monsters in the depths of the purple sea; all lie asleep, and with them the tribes of the winging birds.t""
Aleman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides.
t How strangely simifar this is-as if one feeling united two poets across twenty-five cen turies-to Goethe's ''Wanderer's Night-Song":
Uber allen Gipfeln 1st Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Seiirest du
Kaum emen Hauch;
Die vogelein schweigen im Walde. Watte our, balde
Ruhest du auch.•
O'er all the hill-tops
Is quiet now, In all the tree-tops
Hearest thou Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees. Wait; soon like these
Thou, too, shalt rest.11
CHAP. IV)	SPARTA	77
We may judge from these poets that the Spanans were not always Spar tans, and that in the century before Lycurgus they relished poetry and the arts as keenly as any of the Greeks. The choral ode became so closely associated with them that when the Athenian dramatists wrote choral lyrics for their plays they used the Doric dialect, though they wr"te the dialogue in the Attic speech. It is hard to say what other arts flourished in Lace daemon in those halcyon days, for even the Spanans neglected to preserve or record them. Laconian pottery and bronze were famous in the seventh century, and the minor arts produced many refinements for the life of the fortunate few. But this little Renaissance was ended by the Messenian Wars. The conquered land was divided among the Spanans, and the number of serfs was almost doubled. How could thirty thousand citizens keep in lasting subjection four times their number of Perioeci, and seven times· their number of Helots? It could be done only by abandoning the pursuit and patronage of the arts, and turning every Spanan into a soldier ready at any moment to suppress rebellion or wage war. The constitution of Lycurgus achieved this end, but at the cost of withdrawing Sparta, in every sense but the political, from the history of civilization.
Lycurgus
Greek historians from Herodotus onward took it for granted that Lycur gus was the author of the Spanan code, just as they accepted as historical the siege of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon. And as modem scholar ship for a century denied the existence of Troy and Agamemnon, so today it hesitates to admit the reality of Lycurgus. The dates assigned to him vary from 900 to 600 B.c.; and how could one man take out of his head the most unpleasant and astonishing body of legislation in all history, and impose it in a few years not only upon a subject population but even upon a self-willed and warlike ruling class?"" Nevenheless it would be pre sumptuous to reject on such theoretical grounds a tradition accepted by all Greek historians. The seventh century was peculiarly an age of per sonal legislators-Zaleucus at Locris (ca. 660), Draco at Athens (620), and Charondas at Sicilian Catana (ca. 610)-not to speak of Josiah's dis covery of the Mosaic code in the Temple at Jerusalem (ca. 621). Prob ably we have in these instances not so much a body of personal legislation as a set of customs harmonized and clarified into specific laws, and named, for convenience's sake, from the man who codified them and in most cases
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IV
gave them a written form.• We shall record the tradition, while remem bering that it has in all likelihood personified and foreshortened a process of change, from custom to law, that required many authors and many years.
According to Herodotus," Lycurgus, uncle and guardian of the Spartan King Charilaus, received from the oracle at Delphi certain rhetra, or edicts, which were described by some as the laws of Lycurgus themselves, or by others as a divine sanction for the laws that he proposed. Apparently the legislators felt that to alter certain customs, or to establish new ones, the safest procedure would be to present their proposals as commands of the god; it was not the first time that a state had laid its foundations in the sky. Tradition further relates that Lycurgus traveled in Crete, admired its insti tutions, and resolved to introduce some of them into Laconia."" The kings and most of the nobles grudgingly accepted his reforms as indispensable to their own security; but a young aristocrat, Alcander, resisted violently, and struck out one of the legislator's eyes. Plutarch tells the story with his usual simplicity and charm:
Lycurgus, so far from being daunted or discouraged by this acci dent, stopped short, and showed his disfigured face, and eye beaten out, to his countrymen. They, dismayed and ashamed at the sight, delivered Alcander into his hands to be punished   Lycurgus, hav
ing thanked them, dismissed them all, excepting only Alcander; and taking him with him into his house, neither did nor said anything severely to him, but ... bade Alcander to wait upon him at table. The young man, who was of an ingenuous temper, without murmur ing did as he was commanded; and being thus admitted to live with Lycurgus, he had an opportunity to observe in him, besides his gen tleness and calmness of temper, an extraordinary sobriety and an indefatigable industry; and so, from being an enemy, became one of his most zealous admirers, and told his friends and relations that he was not that morose and ill-natured man they had taken him for, but the one mild and gentle character of the world...
Having completed his legislation, Lycurgus (says a probably legendary coda to his story) pledged the citizens not to change the laws till his return. Then he went to Delphi, retired into seclusion, and starved himself to death, "thinking it a statesman's duty to make his very death, if possible, an act of service to the state.'m
Lycurgus, however, was believed to have forbidden the writing of his laws.


it the plaintive mooing to which Schliemann, never at a loss for explanations, traced the name Mycenae (Miikenai)."' The finest of these metal relics from Tiryns and Mycenae are two bronze daggers inlaid with electron and burnished gold, and elegantly engraved with wildcats chasing ducks, and lions pursuing leopards or fighting men... Most peculiar of all the remains are the golden masks,
apparently laid over the faces of dead royalty. One mask.8" looks for all the world like the face of a cat; however, the gallant Schliemann ascribed it not to ay.. taemnestra but to Agamemnon.
The unquestioned masterpieces of Mycenaean art were found neither at Tiryns nor at Mycenae but in a tomb at Vaphio, near Sparta, where a minor prince once emulated the magnificence of the northern kings. Here, amid another treasure of jewelry, were two thin cups of beaten gold, simply formed and yet worked with the loving patience of all great art. The craftsmanship is so like the best Minoan that most students are inclined to attribute these cups to some Cretan Cellini; but it would be a pity to deprive the Mycenaean cul ture of its most perfect memorials. The subject-the snaring and taming of a bull-seems characteristically Cretan; and yet the frequency with which such scenes are engraved upon Mycenaean rings and seals or painted upon the palace walls shows that the bull sport was as popular on the mainland as on the island. On one of the cups the bull is caught in a net of heavy rope; his mouth and nostrils gape with breathless anger and fatigue as he struggles to get free and imprisons himself the more; while on the other side a second bull gallops off in terror, and a third charges at a cowboy who catches it bravely by the horns. On the companion cup the captured bull is being led away; as we tum the vessel around we see him already reconciled to the restraints of civilization, and engaged, as Evans puts it, in "amorous conversation" with a cow.11 Many centuries were to pass before such skillful work would appear again in Greece.
The Mycenaean himself, as well as most of his art, is found in the tombs; for he folded and buried his dead in uncomfortable jars, and seldom cremated them as the Heroic Age would do. Apparently he believed in a future life, for many objects of use and value were placed in the graves. For the rest Mycenaean religion, so far as it reveals itself to us, gives every evidence of Cretan origin or kinship. Here as in Crete are the double ax, the sacred pillar, the holy dove, and the cult of a mother goddess associated with a young male deity, presumably her son; and here again are attendant divinities in the form of snakes. Through all the transformations of religion known to us in Greece the mother goddess has remained. After the Cretan Rhea came Demeter, the Mater Dolorosa of the Greeks; after Demeter the Virgin Mother of God. Today, standing on the ruins of Mycenae, one sees, in the little village below, a modest Christian church. Grandeur is gone; simplicity and consolation remain. Civilizations come and
CHAP.II)	BEFORE  AGAMEMNON	33
go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every
desolation.
After the fall of Cnossus Mycenae prospered as never before; the rising wealth of the "Shaft Grave Dynasty" raised great palaces upon the hills of Mycenae and Tiryns. Mycenaean art took on a character of its own, and captured the markets of the Aegean. Now the commerce of the mainland princes reached eastward into Cyprus and Syria, southward through the Cyclades to Egypt, westward through Italy to Spain, northward through Boeotia and Thessaly to the Danube; and found itself balked only at Troy. Like Rome absorbing and disseminating the civilization of Bellas, so Mycenae, won by the culture of dying Crete, spread the Mycenaean phase of that culture throughout the Mediterranean world.
IV, TROY
Between the Greek mainland and Crete 2 20 islands dot the Aegean, forming a circle around Delos, and therefore called the Cyclades. Most of them are rugged and barren, precarious mountain survivals of a land half drowned in the sea; but some were rich enough in marble or metal to be already busy and civilized, as the world goes, long before Greek history comes into our view. In 1896 the British School of Athens dug into the soil of Melos at Phylakopi and found tools, weapons, and pottery remarkably akin, age by age, to the Minoan; and a like research in other islands has built up a prehistoric picture of the Cyclades conforming in time and character, though never comparable in artistic excellence, with the bioscope of Crete. The Cyclades were cramped for land, totaling less than a thousand square miles among them, and proved, like classic Greece, incapable of uniting under one political power. By the sev enteenth century B.c. the little isles had passed in government and art, even, here and there, in language and writing, under Cretan domination. Then, in the final perJ9d ( 1400-1200), the imports from Crete fell away, and the islands increasingly took their pottery and their styles from Mycenae.
Moving eastward into the Sporades (Scattered) Islands, we find in Rhodes another prehistoric culture of the simpler Aegean type. In Cyprus the rich deposits of copper that gave the island its name brought it a measure of wealth throughout the Bronze Age (3400-1200), but its wares• remained crude and undistinguished before the coming of Cretan influence. Its population, pre dominantly Asiatic, used a syllabic script akin to the Minoan, and worshiped a
Sedulously collected by General di Cesnola, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York.
34	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.U
goddess apparently descended from the Semitic Ishtar, and destined to become the Aphrodite of the Greeks,• After 1600 the metal industry of the island developed rapidly; the mines, owned by the royal government, exported copper to Egypt, Crete, and Greece: the foundry at Enkomi made famous daggers, and the potters sold their globular bowls from Egypt to Troy. The forests were cut into timber, and cypress from Cyprus began to compete with the cedars of Lebanon. In the thirteenth century Mycenaean colonists founded the col onies that were to become the Greek cities of Paphos, sacred to Aphrodite, and Citiurn, birthplace of the Stoic Zeno, and Cyprian Salamis, where Solon paused in his wanderings to replace chaos with law.
From Cyprus Mycenaean trade and influence crossed to Syria and Caria, and thence, as well as by other "rowing-stones," they moved up the coa!its and islands of Asia until they reached Troy. There, on a hill separated by three miles from the sea, Schliemann and Dorpfeld found nine cities, super imposed each upon its predecessor, as if Troy had had nine lives.
(1) In the lowest strata were the remains of a neolithic village coming down to 3000 B.c. Here were walls of rough stones, mortared with mud; clay whorls, bits of worked ivory, tools of obsidian, and pieces of hand
polished black pottery. (2) Above this lay the ruins of the Second City, which Schliemann believed to have been Homer's Troy. Its enclosing walls, like those of Tiryns and Mycenae, were of cyclopean stones; at in tervals there were fortresses, and at the corners great double gates, of which two are well preserved. Some houses survive to a height of four feet, their walls built of brick and wood upon a stone foundation. The red-painted pottery, wheel-turned but crude, indicates a life span for this city from approximately 2400 to 1900. Bronze has replaced stone for tools and weapons, and jewelry abounds; but the statuettes are unprepossessingly primitive. The Second City was apparently destroyed by fire; signs of con flagration are numerous, and persuaded Schliemann that this was the work of Agamemnon's Greeks.
( 3-5) Above the "Burnt City" are the relics of three successive hamlets, small and poor, and negligible in archeological content. (6) About 1600 another city rose on the historic hill. Through the passionate haste of his work, Schliemann mixed the objects of this stratum with those of the second, and dismissed the Sixth City as an unimportant "Lydian settle ment."• But Dorpfeld, continuing the excavations after Schliemann's death, and for a time with Schliemann's money,"' revealed a town consider ably larger than the Second, ornate with substantial buildings in dressed stone, and enclosed by a thirty-foot wall of whose four gates three remain.
CHAP.ll)	BEFORE  AGAMEMNON	3S
In the ruins were monochrome vases of finer workmanship than before, vessels like the "Minyan" ware of Orchomenos, and potsherds so like those found at Mycenae that Dorpfeld considered them to be imponations from that city, and therefore contemporary with the Shaft Grave Dynasty (1400-1200). On these and other shifting grounds current opinion iden tifies the Sixth City with Homer's Troy,•• and assigns to it the "Treasury of Priam" that Schliemann thought he had found in the Second City-six bracelets, two goblets, two diadems, a fillet, sixty earrings, and 8700 other pieces, all in gold.88 The Sixth City too, we are assured, perished by fire, shortly after 1200. Greek historians traditionally assigned the siege of Troy
to 1194-II 84 B.C.t
Who were the Trojans?  An Egyptian papyrus mentions certain "Dar
denui" as among the allies of the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh ( 1287); it is likely that these were the ancestors of the "Dardenoi" who in Homer's terminology are one with the Trojans... Probably these Dardani were of Balkan origin, crossed the Hellespont in the sixteenth century with the kindred Phrygians, and settled in the lower valley of the Scamander.• Herodotus, however, identified the Trojans with the Teucrians, and the Teucrians, according to Strabo, were Cretans who settled in the Troad,t perhaps after the fall of Cnossus.'° Both Crete and the Troad had a sacred Mt. Ida, the "many-fountained Ida" of Homer and Tennyson. Presumably the region was subject at various times to political and ethnic influences from the Hittite hinterland. All in all, the excavations indicate a civilization panly Minoan, panly Mycenaean, panly Asiatic, partly Danubian. Homer represents the Trojans as speaking the same language and worshiping the same gods as the Greeks; but later Hellenic imagination preferred to think of Troy as an Asiatic city, and-0f the famous siege as the first known episode in an endless contest between Semite and Aryan, East and West.a.
More significant than the racial complexion of its people was the strategic


468	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
bling and profligacy; and the whole people spent more on public banquets and entertainments than on the provision necessary for the well-being of the state."91
The voluntary limitation of the family was the order of the day, whether by contraception, by abortion, or by infanticide. Aristotle notes that some women prevent conception "by anointing that part of the womb upon which the seed falls with oil of cedar, or ointment of lead, or frankincense commingled with olive oil."*"" The old families were dying out; they existed, said Isocrates, only in their tombs; the lower classes were multiply ing, but the citizen class in Attica had fallen from 43,000 in 431  to 22,000 in 400 and 2 r,ooo in 3 r 3 ... The supply of citizens for military service suf fered a corresponding decrease, partly from the dysgenic carnage of war, partly from the reduced number of those who had a property stake in the state, partly from unwillingness to serve; the life of comfort and domes ticity, of business and scholarship, had replaced the Periclean life of exer cise, martial discipline, and public office."' Athletics were professionalized; the citizens who in the sixth century had crowded the palaestra and the gymnasium were now content to exert themselves vicariously by witness ing professional exhibitions. Young men received some grounding, as epheboi, in the art of war; but adults found a hundred ways of escaping mili tary service. War itself had become professionalized by technical compli cations, and required the full time of specially trained men; citizen soldiers had to be replaced with mercenaries-an omen that the leadership of Greece must soon pass from statesmen to warriors. While Plato talked of philoso pher kings, soldier kings were growing up under his nose. Greek mer cenaries sold themselves impartially to Greek or "barbarian" generals, and fought as often against Greece as for her; the Persian armies that Alexan der faced were full of Greeks. Soldiers shed their blood now not for a fatherland, but for the best paymaster that they could find.
Making honorable exceptions for the archonship of Eucleides (403) and the financial administration of Lyeurgus (338-26), the political corruption and turbulence that had followed the death of Pericles continued during the fourth century. According to the law, bribery was punished with death; according to Isocrates,'" it was rewarded with military and political preferment. Persia had no difficulty in bribing the Greek politicians to make war upon other Greek states or upon Macedon; at last even Demos-
On a similar use of olive oil in our own time, cf. Himes, Medical History of Contracep
rion,So,
CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP
thenes illustrated the morals of his time. He was one of the noblest of one of the lowest groups in Athens-the rhetors or hired orators who in this century became professional lawyers and politicians. Some of these men, like Lycurgus, were reasonably honest; some of them, like Hypereides, were gallant; most of them were no better than they had to be. If we may take Aristotle's word for it, many of them specialized in invalidating wills."' Several of them laid up great fortunes through political opportunism and reckless demagogy. The rhetors divided into parties, and tore the air with their campaigns. Each party organized committees, invented catchwords, appointed agents, and raised funds; those who paid the expenses of all this frankly confessed that they expected to "reimburse themselves doubly.""' As politics grew more intense, patriotism waned; the bitterness of faction absorbed public energy and devotion, and left little for the city. The con stitution of Cleisthenes and the individualism of commerce and philosophy had weakened the family and liberated the individual; now the free indi vidual, as if to avenge the family, turned around and destroyed the state.
In or near 400 the triumphant democrats, to insure the presence of the poorer citizens at the ekklesia and thereby to prevent its domination by the propertied classes, extended state payment to attendance at the Assem bly. At first each citizen received an obol ( 17 cents); as the cost of living rose this was increased to two obols, then to three, until in Aristotle's time it stood at a drachma ($1) per day... It was a reasonable arrangement, for the ordinary citizen towards the end of the fourth century, earned a drachma and a half for a day's work; he could not be expected to leave his employ ment without some recompense. The plan soon gave the poor a majority in the Assembly; more and more the well to do, despairing of victory, stayed home. It was of no use that a revision of the constitution in 403 con fined the power of legislation to a body of five nomothetai, or lawmakers, selected from the citizens chosen by lot for jury service; this new group also inclined to the side of the commons, and its interposition lowered the prestige and authority of the more conservative Council. Perhaps in con sequence of the payment for attendance, the level of intelligence in the Assembly seems to have fallen in the fourth century-though our authori ties for this are prejudiced reactionaries like Aristophanes and Plato."" Isocrates thought that the Assembly should be paid by Athens' enemies to meet frequently, since it made so many mistakes.'°
These mistakes cost Athens both her empire and her freedom. The same lust for wealth and power that had undermined the first Confederacy now wrecked the second. After the fall of Sparta at Leuctra Athens felt that
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
it might again expand. In organizing the new empire she had pledged her self not to·permit the appropriation of land outside of Attica by Athenian subjects." No'\;\' she conquered Samos, the Thracian Chersonese, and the cities of Pydna, Potidaea, and Methone on the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, and colonized them with Athenian citizens. The allied states pro tested, and many of them withdrew from the Confederation. Methods of coercion and punishment that had been used and had failed in the fifth century were used, and failed, again. In 357 Chios, Cos, Rhodes, and By zantium declared a "Social War" of rebellion. When two of Athens' ablest generals, Timotheus and Iphicrates, judged it unwise to give battle in a storm to the rebel fleet in the Hellespont, the Assembly indicted them for cowardice. Timotheus was fined the impossible sum of one hundred talents ($600,000), and fled; Iphicrates was acquitted, but never served Athens again. The rebels fought off all attempts to subdue them, and in 355 Athens signed a peace acknowledging their independence. The great city was left without allies, without leaders, without funds, and without friends.
Possibly subtler factors entered into the weakening of Athens. The life of thought endangers every civilization that it adorns. In the earlier stages of a nation's history there is little thought; action flourishes; men are direct, uninhibited, frankly pugnacious and sexual. As civilization develops, as customs, institutions, laws, and morals more and more restrict the opera tion of natural impulses, action gives way to thought, achievement to imagination, directness to subtlety, expression to concealment, cruelty to sympathy, belief to doubt; the unity of character common to animals and primitive men passes away; behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating; the willingness to fight subsides into a disposi tion to infinite argument. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistible temptation to impecuni ous barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.
THE RISE OF SYRACUSE
Despite a full measure of political turbulence, Syracuse, throughout the fourth century, was one of the richest and most powerful cities in Greece. Dionysius I, unscrupulous, treacherous, and vain, was the most capable administrator of his time. By turning the island of Ortygia into a fortress-
CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP	471
residence for himself, and walling in the causeway that bound it with the mainland, he had rendered his position almost immune to attack; and by doubling the pay of his soldiers, and leading them to easy victories, he se.cured from them a personal loyalty that kept him on the throne for thirty-eight years. Having established his government, he changed his early policy of severity to one of conciliatory mildness, and a kind of egalitarian despotism.• He gave choice tracts of land to his officers and his friends, and (as a military measure) assigned nearly all the residences on Ortygia and the causeway to his soldiers; all the remaining soil of Syra cuse and its environs he distributed equally among the population, free and slave. Under his guidance Syracuse flourished, though he taxed the peo ple almost as severely as the Assembly taxed the Athenians. When the women became too ornate Dionysius announced that Demeter had ap peared to him in a dream and bidden him order all feminine jewelry to be deposited in her temple. He obeyed the goddess, and the women for the most part obeyed him. Soon afterward he "borrowed" the jewelry from Demeter to finance his campaigns."
For at the bottom of all his plans lay the resolve to expel the Carthaginians from Sicily. Envious of Hannibal's resort to battering machines in the siege of Selinus, Dionysius gathered into his service the best mechanics and engi neers of western Greece, and set them to improve the tools of war. These men invented, among many new engines of offense and defense, the katapeltes, or catapult, for throwing heavy stones and similar projectiles; this and other military innovations passed from Sicily to Greece, and were taken up by Philip of Macedon. A call was sent out for mercenaries, and the armorers of Syracuse manufactured in unheard-of quantities weapons and shields to fit the habits and skills of each group of soldiers engaged. Land battles among the Greeks had heretofore been fought by infantry. Dionysius organized a large body of cavalry, and here, too, gave hints to Philip and Alexander. At the same time he poured funds into the building of two hundred ships, mostly quadriremes or quinqueremes; in speed and power this was such an armada as
Greece had never seen.t
When he condemned the Pythagorean Phintias (less correctly Pythias) to death for con spiracy, Phintias asked leave to go home for a day to settle his affairs. His friend Damon (not the music master of Pericles and Socrates) offered himself as hostage, and volunteered to suffer death in case Phintias should not return. Phintias returned; and Dionysius, as sur prised as Napoleon at any sincere friendship, pardoned Phintias, and begged to be admitted mto so steadfast a comradeship."
t A bireme was a galley with two banks or decks of oars; a trireme, quadrireme, or quin quereme probably had not three, four, or five banks of oars, but so many men on each bench. wmdling so many oars through one oarlock or port.
472	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CRAP.XIX
By 397 all was ready, and Dionysius sent an embassy to Carthage to demand the liberation of all Greek cities in Sicily from Carthaginian rule. Anticipating a refusal, he invited these cities to expel their foreign governments. They did; and still enraged by the memory of Hannibal's massacres, they put to death, with tortures seldom used by Greeks, all Carthaginians who fell into their hands. Dionysius did his best to stop the carnage, hoping to sell the captives as slaves. Carthage ferried over a vast army under Himilcon, and war went on at inter vals in 397,392,383, and 368. In the end Carthage recovered all that Dionysius had won from her, and after the bloodshed matters stood as before.
Whether through lust for power, or feeling that only a united Sicily could end Carthaginian rule, Dionysius had meanwhile turned his arms against the Greek cities in the island. Having subjugated them, he crossed over into Italy, conquered Rhegium, and mastered all southwest Italy. He attacked Etruria and took a thousand talents from its temple at Agylla; he planned to plunder the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, but time did not permit. Greece mourned that in the same year (387) liberty had fallen in the west, and in the east had been sold to Persia by the King's Peace. Three years before, Brennus and the Gauls had stood in triumph at the gates of Rome. Everywhere the barbarians on the fringe of the Greek world were growing stronger; and the ravages of Dionys ius in southern Italy paved the way for the conquest of its Greek settlements first by the surrounding natives, and then by the half-barbarous Romans. At the next Olympic games the orator Lysias called upon Greece to denounce the new tyrant. The multitude attacked the tents of Dionysius' embassy, and refused to hear his poetry.
The same despot who, after capturing Rhegium, offered freedom to its inhabitants if they would bring him nearly all their hoarded wealth as ransom, and then, when the wealth had been surrendered, sold them as slaves, was a man of wide culture, not prouder of his sword than of his pen. When the poet Philoxenus, asked by the dictator for his opinion of the royal verses, pronounced them worthless, Dionysius sentenced him to the quarries. The next day the King repented, had Philoxenus released,