full.
To get rid of him the oligarchy secretly sent word to Rome that Han nibal was plotting to renew the war. Scipio used all his influence to protect his rival, but was overruled; the Senate accommodated the rich Carthagin ians by demanding the surrender of Hannibal. The old warrior fled by night, rode 150 miles to Thapsus, and there took ship to Antioch (195).
CHAP. III)	HANNIBAL  AGAINST  ROME	55
He found Antiochus III hesitating between war and peace with Rome; he advised war and became one of the King's staff. \Vhen the Romans de feated Antioch us at J\.fagnesia ( r 89) they made it a condition of peace that Hannibal should be turned over to them. He escaped first to Crete, then to Bithynia. The Romans hunted him out and surrounded his hiding place with soldiers. Hannibal preferred death to capture. "Let us," he said, "re lieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's.death." 32 He drank the poison that he carried with him, and died, aged sixty-seven, in the year r 84 B.C. A few months later his conqueror and admirer, Scipio, followed him to peace.
CHAPTER  IV
Stoic Rome
508-202  B.C.
HAT kind of human beings were these irresistible Romans? \Vhat institutions had formed them to such ruthless strength in character
and policy?-what homes and schools, what religion and moral code? How did they take from the soil, and by what economic organization and skill did they mold to their uses, the wealth required to equip their growing cities and those ever new armies that never knew rest? \Vhat were they like in their streets and shops, their temples and theaters, their science and philosophy, their old age and death? Unless we visualize, scene by scene, this Rome of the early Republic, we shall never understand that vast evo lution of customs, morals, and ideas which produced in one age the stoic Cato, in a later age the epicurean Nero, and at last transformed the Roman Empire into the Roman Church.
THE FAMILY
Birth itself was an adventure in Rome. If the child was deformed or female, the father was permitted by custom to expose it to death.1 Other wise it was welcomed; for though the Romans even of this period prac ticed some measure of family limitation, they were eager to have sons. Rural life made children assets, public opinion condemned childlessness, and religion promoted fertility by persuading the Roman that if he left no son to tend his grave his spirit would suffer endless misery. After eight days the child was formally accepted into the family and the clan by a solemn ceremony at the domestic hearth. A clan (gens) was a group of freeborn families tracing themselves to a common ancestor, bearing his name, united in a common worship, and bound to mutual aid in peace and war. The male child was designated by an individual first name (praenomen), such as Publius, l\farcus, Caius; by his clan name (nomen), such as Cornelius, Tullius, Julius; and by his family name (cog;nomen), such as Scipio, Cicero, Caesar. \Vomen were most often designated simply by the clan name Cornelia, Tullia, Claudia, Julia. Since in classical days there were only
56
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME	57
some fifteen first names for males, and these tended to be repeated con fusingly in many generations of the same family, they were usually reduced to an initial, and a fourth-or even a fifth-name was added for distinctive ness. So P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Maior, the conqueror of Hannibal, was differentiated from P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Minor, the destroyer of Carthage.
The child found itself absorbed into the most basic and characteristic of Roman institutions-the patriarchal family. The power of the father was nearly absolute, as if the family had been organized as a unit of an anny always at _war. He alone of the family had any rights before the law in the early Republic; he alone could buy, hold, or sell property, or make contracts; even his wife's dowry, in this period, belonged to him. If his wife was accused of a crime she was committed to him for judgment and punishment; he could condemn her to death for infidelity or for stealing the keys to his wine. Over his children he had the power of life, death, and sale into slavery. All that the son acquired became legally his father's prop erty; nor could he marry without his father's consent. A married daughter remained under her father's power, unless he allowed her to marry cum manu-gave her into the hand or power of her husband. Over his slaves he had unlimited authority. These, and his wife and children, were 111ancipia to him-literally, "taken in hand"; and no matter what their age or status, they remained in his power until he chose to emancipate them-to let them "out of hand." These rights of the paterfamilias were checked to some de gree by custom, public opinion, the clan council, and praetorian law; other wise they lasted to his death, and could not be ended by his insanity or even by his own choice. Their effect was to cement the unity of the family as the basis of Roman morals and government and to establish a discipline that hardened the Roman character into stoic strength. They were harsher in the letter than in practice; the most extreme of them were seldom used, the rest seldom abused. They did not bar a deep and natural pietas, or rever ential affection, between parents and children. The tomb stelae of Rome are as tender as those of Greece or our own.
Since the greater urgency of the male supplies woman with charms more potent than any law, her status in Rome must not be judged from her legal disabilities. She was not allowed to appear in court, even as a witness. "\Vid owed, she could not claim any dower right in her husband's estate; he might, if he wished, leave her nothing. At every age of her life she was under the tutelage of a man-her father, her brother, her husband, her son, or a guardian-without whose consent she could not marry or dispose of property. On the other hand, she could inherit, though not beyond 100,000 sesterces ( $15,ooo), and she could own without limit. In many instances,
58	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
as the earlier passed into the later Republic, she became wealthy because her husband put his property in her name to escape bankruptcy obligations, damage suits, inheritance taxes, and other everlasting jeopardies. She played a role in religion as priestess; nearly every priest had to have a wife and lost his office when she died. Within the home ( domus) she was honored mis tress, mea domina, madame. She was not, like the Greek wife, confined to a gynaeceum, or woman's quarters; she took her meals with her mate, though she sat while he reclined. She did a minimum of servile work, for nearly every citizen had a slave. She might spin, as a sign of gentility, but her chief economic function was t·o superintend the servants; she made it a point, however, to nurse her children herself. They rewarded her patient motherhood with profound love and respect; and her husband seldom al lowed his legal mastery to cloud his devotion.
The father and the mother, their house and land and property, their children, their married sons, their grandchildren by these sons, their daugh ters-in-law, their slaves and clients-all these constituted the Roman familia:
not so much a family as a household; not a kinship group but an assembly of owned persons and things subject to the oldest male ascendant. It was within this miniature society, containing in itself the functions of family, church, school, industry, and government, that the Roman child grew up, in piety and obedience, to form the sturdy citizen of an invincible state.
THE RELIGION OF ROME
The Gods
The Roman family was both an association of persons with things and an association of persons and things with gods. It was the center and source of religion, as well as of morals, economy, and the state; every part of its property and every aspect of its existence were bound up in a solemn in timacy with the spiritual world. The child was taught, by the eloquent silence of example, that the undying fire in the hearth was the sign and substance of the goddess Vesta, the sacred flame that symbolized the life and continuity of the family; which therefore must never be extinguished, but must be tended with "religious" care, and fed with a portion of each meal. Over the hearth he saw the little icons, crowned with flowers, that represented the gods or spirits of the family: the Lar that guarded its fields and buildings, its fortune and destiny, and the Penates, or gods of the in terior, who protected the accumulations of the family in its storerooms, cupboards, and barns. Hovering invisible but potent over the threshold
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME	59
was the god Janus, two-faced not as deceitful but as watching all entry and exit at every door. The child's father, he learned, was the ward and embodiment of an inner genius, or generative power, which would not die with the body, but must be nourished forever at the paternal grave. His mother was also the carrier of a deity and had likewise to be treated as divine; she had a Juno in her as the spirit of her capacity to bear, as the father enclosed a genius as the spirit of his power to beget. The child too had his genius or Juno, as both his guardian angel and his soul-a godly kernel in the mortal husk. Everywhere about him, he heard with awe, were the watchful Di Manes, or Kindly Shades, of those male forebears whose grim death masks hung on the household walls, warning him not to stray from the ways of his ancestors, and reminding him that the family was composed not merely of those few individuals that lived in his moment but also of those that had once been, or would someday be, members of


The speeches of Stephen, Peter, Paul, and others in Acts may have been invented by the author, after the general custom of ancient historians.
CHAP. XXVII)	THE  APOSTLES	577
because they still observed the Law, remained in Jerusalem with the Judaic Christians. While Peter carried the Gospel to the towns of Judea, James "the Just," "the brother of the Lord," became the head of the now reduced and impoverished church in Jerusalem. James practiced the I,aw in all its severity, and rivaled the Essenes in asceticism; he ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one garment, and never cut his hair or beard. For eleven years, under his guid ance, the Christians were left undisturbed. About 41 another James, the son of Zebedee, was beheaded; Peter was arrested, but escaped. In 62 James the Just was himself put to death. Four years later the Jews revolted against Rome. The Jerusalem Christians, too convinced of the coming "end of the world" to care about politics, left the city and established themselves in pagan and pro-Roman Pella, on the farther bank of the Jordan. From that hour Judaism and Chris tianity parted. The Jews accused the Christians of treason and cowardice, and the Christians hailed the destruction of the Temple by Titus as a fulfillment of Christ's prophecy. Mutual hatred enflamed the two faiths, and wrote some of their most pious literature.
Thereafter Judaic Christianity waned in number and power, and yielded the new religion to be transformed by the Greek mind. Galilee, where Christ had lived nearly all his life, and where the l\fagdalene and the other women who had been among the first to follow him were now lost in obscurity, turned a deaf ear to the preachers who proclaimed the Nazarene as the Son of God. The Jews, who thirsted for libertv, and reminded themselves daily that "the Lord is One," were repelled by a M ssiah who ignored their struggle for independence, and
,vere scandalized by the announcement that a god had been born in a cave or stable in one of their villages. Judaic Christianity survived for five centuries in a little group of Syriac Christians called Ebionim ("the poor"), who practiced Christian poverty and the full Jewish Law. At the end of the second century the Church condemned them as heretics.
Meanwhile the apostles and disciples had spread the Good News, chiefly among the Jews of the Dispersion,14 from Damascus to Rome. Philip made converts in Samaria and Caesarea, John developed a strong church in Ephesus, and Peter preached in the cities of Syria. Like most of the apos tles, Peter took a "sister" with him on his missions to serve as his wife and aide.15 He healed the sick so successfully that at Samaria a magician, Simon Magus, offered him money for a share in his mysterious powers. At Joppa he raised Tabitha from app2rent death; at Caesarea he won a Roman cen turion to Christianity. A vision, says the Book of Acts, convinced him that he should accept pagan as well as Jewish converts; and from this time for ward, with -some amiable vacillations, he contented himself with baptizing, rather than also circumcizing, non-Jewish proselytes. We feel some of the ardor of these early missionaries in the first epistle of Peter:
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVII
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those [ hristian Je":'s] w are scattered as foreigners over Pontus, Galatia, Cappadoc1a, Asia, and Bithynia ...	God bless you and give you perfect peace.... My dearly beloved, I pray you as aliens and exiles, to live pright lives among the gentiles so that ...	they may, from observing the uprightness of your conduct, come to praise God.... Submit to all human authority for the Master's sake...	: Live like free men, but do not make your freedom an excuse for wrong doing.... Servants, be submissive to your masters, and perfectly respectful to them; not only to those who are kind and considerate, but also to those who are unreasonable. You married women, likewise, must be submissive to your husbands, so that any who refuse to believe ... may be won over when they see how chaste and submissive you are. Yo must not adopt the external attractions of arranging your hair or wearing jewelry; you must be a qujet and gentle spirit. You mar ried men also must be considerate to your wives; show deference to women as the weaker sex, sharing the gift of life with you	Re
turn not evil for evil.	Above all keep your love for one another
strong, for love covers a multitude of sins.16
,ve do not know when and by what stages Peter made his way to Rome. Jerome (ca. 390) dates his first arrival there as early as 42. The tradition that he played a leading role in establishing the Christian community in the capital has survived all criticism.11 Lactantius speaks of Peter's coming to Rome in Nero's reign; 18 probably the apostle visited the city on divers occasions. He free and Paul in prison labored as rivals to win converts there, until both of them suffered martyrdom, perhaps in the same year 64.19 Origen reports that Peter "was crucified head downward, for he had asked that he might suffer that way," 20 perhaps hoping that in that position death would come sooner, or (said the opinion of the faithful) holding himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Christ. Ancient texts testify that his wife was killed with him and that he had to see her led to execution.21 A later story named Nero's Circus, on the Vatican field, as the place of his death. Over the site the Cathedral of St. Peter rose, and claimed to enshrine his bones.
His missions in Asia Minor and Rome must have _helped to preserve many Judaic elements in Christianity. Through him and the other apostles it inherited Jewish monotheism, puritanism, and eschatology. Through them and Paul the Old Testament became the only Bible that first-century Chris tianity knew. Till 70 Christianity was preached chiefly in synagogues or among Jews•. The fo: ' ce:emony, and vestments of Hebrew worship passed down mto Chnsnan ntual. The Paschal lamb of sacrifice was subli-
CHAP. xxvn)	THE  APOSTLES	579
mated in the Agnus Dei-the expiatory Lamb of God-of the Catholic Mass. The appointment of elders (presbyteri, priests) to govern the churches was adopted from Jewish methods of administering the synagogue. Many Judaic festivals-e.g., Passover and Pentecost-were accepted into the Christian calendar, however altered in content and date. The Jewish Dispersion aided the rapid dissemination of Christianity; the frequent movement of Jews from city to city, and their connections throughout the Empire, co-operated with commerce, Roman roads, and the Roman peace, to open a path for the Christian faith. In Christ and Peter Christianity was Jewish; in Paul it became half Greek; in Catholicism it became half Roman. In Protestantism the Judaic element and emphasis were restored.
PAUL
The Persecutor
The founder of Christian theology was born at Tarsus, in Cilicia, about the tenth year of our era. His father was a Pharisee, and brought up the youth in the fervent principles of that sect; the Apostle of the Gentiles never ceased to consider himself a Pharisee, even after he had rejected the Judaic Law. The father was also a Roman citizen, and transmitted the precious franchise to his son. Probably the name Paul was the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Saul, so that both names belonged to the apostle from infancy.22 He did not receive a classical education, for no Pharisee would have per mitted such outright Hellenism in his son, and no man with Greek training would have written the bad Greek of the Epistles. Nevertheless, he learned to speak the language with sufficient fluency to address an Athenian au dience, and he occasionally referred to famous passages in Greek literature. We may believe that some Stoic theology and ethics passed from the uni versity environment of Tarsus into the Christianity of Paul. So he uses the
,Stoic term pneuma (breath) for what his English translators call spirit. Like most Greek cities, Tarsus had followers of the Orphic or other mystery religions, who believed that the god they worshiped had died for them, had risen freim the grave, and would, if appealed to by lively faith and proper ritual, save them from Hades, and share with them his gift of eternal and blessed life.23 The mystery religions prepared the Greeks for Paul, and Paul for the Greeks.
After the youth had learned the trade of tentmaking, and had received instruction in the local synagogue, his father sent him to Jerusalem, where, Paul tells us, he was "educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the
580	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXVIl
strict manner of the Law." 24 Gamaliel was reputedly the grandson of Hillel; he succeeded Hillel as president of the Sanhedrin, and carried on the tradi tion of interpreting the Law with a lenient regard for the frailty of man kind. Stricter Pharisees were shocked to find him gazing appreciatively even upon pagan women.25 He was so learned that the Jews, who keenly honor scholarship, called him "the beauty of the Law," and gave to him first, as to only six men after him, the title of rabban, "our master." From him and others Paul learned that shrewd and subtle, sometimes casuistic and sophisti cal, manner of Biblical interpretation which was to disport itself in the Talmud. Despite Paul's initiation into Hellenism he remained to the end a Jew in mind and character, uttered no doubt of the Torah's inspiration, and proudly maintained the divine election of the Jews as the medium of man's salvation.
He describes himself as "insignificant in appearance," 26 and adds: "to keep me from being too much elated, a bitter physical affliction was sent me"; 27 he does not further specify. Tradition pictured him at fifty as a bent and bald and bearded ascetic, with vast forehead, pale face, stern coun tenance, and piercing eyes; Dlirer imagined him so in one of the greatest drawings of all time; but in truth these representations are literature and art, not history.
His mind was of a type frequent among Jews: penetrating and passionate rather than genial and urbane; emotional and imaginative rather than objec tive and impartial; he was powerful in action because he was narrow in thought. Even more than Spinoza he was a "God-intoxicated man," con sumed with religious enthusiasm in the literal sense of this word-holding "a god within." He believed himself divinely inspired, and endowed with the ability to work miracles. He was also a practical soul, capable of laborious organization, impatiently patient in founding and preserving Christian com munities. As in so many men, his faults and virtues were near allied and mutually indispensable. He was impetuous and courageous, dogmatic and decisive, domineering and energetic, fanatical and creative, proud before man and humble before God, violently wrathful and capable of the ten derest love. He advised his follo-wers to "bless them that persecute you," but he could hope that his enemies-"the party of circumcision"-"would get themselves emasculated." 28 He knew his failings, struggled against them, and begged his converts to "put up with a little folly from me." 29 The post script to his first epistle to the Corinthians sums him up: "This farewell I, Paul, add in my own hand. A curse upon anyone who has no love for the Lord! Lord, ome quic y! The blessing of the Lord Jesus be with you! My love be with you all.  He was what he had to be to do what he did.
He began by attacking Christianity in the name of Judaism, and ended
CHAP.:xxvu)	THE   APOSTLES


of Christians rather than of Christ; but unless we assume the latter we are driven to the improbable hypothesis that Jesus was invented in one genera tion; moreover, we must suppose that the Christian community in Rome had been established some years before 52, to merit the attention of an imperial decree. About the middle of this first century a pagan named Thallus, in a fragment preserved by Julius Africanus,11 argued that the abnormal darkness alleged to have accompanied the death of Christ was a purely natural phenomenon and coincidence; the argument took the existence of Christ for granted. The denial of that existence seems never to have occurred even to the bitterest gentile or Jewish opponents of nascent Christianity.
The Christian evidence for Christ begins with the letters ascribed to Saint Paul. Some of these are of uncertain authorship; several, antedating
A.D. 64, are almost universally accounted as substantially genuine. No one has questioned the existence of Paul, or his repeated meetings with Peter, James, and John; and Paul enviously admits that these men had known Christ in the flesh.12 The accepted epistles frequently refer to the Last Sup per 13 and the crucifixion.14
Matters are not so simple as regards the Gospels. The four that have come down to us are survivors from a much larger number that once circulated among the Christians of the first two centuries. Our English term gospel (Old English godspel, good news) is a rendering of the Greek euangelion, which is the opening word of Mark, and means "glad tidings"-that the l\lessiah had come, and the Kingdom of God was at hand. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are "synoptic": their contents and episodes allow of being arranged in parallel columns and "viewed together." They were written in the Greek koine of popular speech, and were no models of gram mar or literary finish; nevertheless, the directness and force of their simple style, the vivid power of their analogies and scenes, the depth of their feeling, and the profound fascination of the story they tell give even the rude originals a unique charm, immensely enhanced for the English world by the highly inaccurate but lordly version made for King James.
The oldest extant copies of the Gospels go back only to the third century. The original compositions were apparently written between A.D. 60 and 1 20, and were therefore exposed to two centuries of errors in transcription, and to possible alterations to suit the theology or aims of the copyist's sect or time. Christian writers before 100 quote the Old, but never the New, Testament. The only reference to a Christian gospel before 150 is in Papias, ,vho, about 1 35, reports an unidentified "John the Elder" as saying that J\fark had composed his gospel from memories conveyed to him by Peter.15 Papias adds: "Matthew
556	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXVI
transcribed in Hebrew the Logia"-apparently an early Aramaic collection of the sayings of Christ. Probably Paul had some such document, for though he men tions no gospels he occasionally quotes the direct words of Jesus.* Criticism gen erally agrees in giving the Gospel of Mark priority, and in dating it between 65 and 7o. Since it sometimes repeats the same matter in different forms,16 it is widely be lieved to have been based upon the Logia, and upon another early narrative which may have been the original composition of Mark himself. Our Gospel of Mark was apparently circulated while some of the apostles, or their immediate disciples, were still alive; it seems unlikely, therefore, that it differed substantially from their recollection and interpretation of Christ.17 We may conclude, with the brilliant but judicious Schweitzer, that the Gospel of Mark is in essentials "genuine history." 18
Orthodox tradition placed Matthew's Gospel first. Irenaeus 19 describes it as originally composed in "Hebrew"-i.e., Aramaic; but it has come down to us only in Greek. Since in this form it apparently copies Mark, and probably also the
Logia, criticism inclines to ascribe it to a disciple of Matthew rather than to the "publican" himself; even the most skeptical students, however, concede to it as
early a date as A.D. 85-90.20 Aiming to convert Jews, Matthew relies more than
the other evangelists on the miracles ascribed to Jesus, and is suspiciously eager to prove that many Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in Christ. Never theless, it is the most moving of the four Gospels, and must be ranked among the unconscious masterpieces of the world's literature.
The Gospel according to St. Luke, generally assigned to the last decade of the first century, announces its desire to co-ordinate and reconcile earlier accounts of Jesus, and aims to convert not Jews but gentiles. Very probably Luke was himself a gentile, the friend of Paul, and the author of the Acts of th Apostles.21 Like Matthew he borrows much from Mark.22 Of the 661 verses in the received
text of Mark over 600 are rep:oduced in Matthew, a?d 350 in Luke, mostly word for word.23 Many passages m Luke that are not m Mark occur in Matthew,
again nearly verbatim; apparently Luke borrowed these from Matthew, or Luke
and Matthew t?ok th m from  common_ source, now lost. Luke works up these
candid borrowmgs with some literary skill; Renan thought this Gospel the most beautiful book ever written.24
The Fourth <?ospel does not pret nd to e a bio raphy of Jesus; it is a pres entation of Chnst from the theological pmnt of _view, as the divine Logos or Word, creator of the wo:ld and_ re_deemer of n_iankmd. It contradicts the synoptic gospels in a hundred details and m Its general picture of Christ.25The half-Gnostic
character of the work, and its e phasis on metaphysical ideas, have led many Christian scholars to doubt that its_ uthor was the apostle John.26 Experience suggests, however, that an old trad1t10n must not be too quickly rejected· our ancestors were not all fools. Recent studies tend to restore the ·Fourth G spel
" In 1s97 and 1903 Grenfell and Hunt discovered in the ruins of Oxvrhynchus in E	t twelve fragments of ogia loosely corresponding to pas_sages in the Gospels. These'papy notolder than the third century, but they may be copies of older manuscripts.
CHAP. XXVI)	JESUS	557
to a date near the end of the first century. Probably tradition was correct in assigning to the same author the "Epistles of John"; they speak the same ideas in the same style.
In summary, it is clear that there are many contradictions between one gospel and another, many dubious statements of history, many suspicious resemblances to the legends told of pagan gods, many incidents apparently designed to prove the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, many pas sages possibly aiming to establish a historical basis for some later doctrine or ritual of the Church. The evangelists shared with Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus the conception of history as a vehicle for moral ideas. And presum ably the conversations and speeches reponed in the Gospels were subject to the frailties of illiterate memories, and the errors or emendations of copyists. All this granted, much remains. The contradictions are of minutiae, not substance; in essentials the synoptic gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent ponrait of Christ. In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient wonhies-e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates-would fade into legend.* Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere in ventors would have concealed-the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably
' clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.
THE  GROWTH OF JESUS
Both Matthew and Luke assign Jesus' binh to "the days when Herod was king of Judea" 27-consequently before 3 B.c. Luke, however, describes


best form of government, and democracy is nonsense. "It is absurd," says Xenophon's Socrates, "to choose magistrates by lot where no one would dream of drawing lots for a pilot, a mason, a flute-player, or any craftsman at all, though the shoncomings of such men are far less harmful than those that disorder our government."''18 He condemns the litigiousness of the Athenians, their noisy envy of one another, the bitterness of their political factions and disputes: "On these accounts," he says, "I am constantly in the greatest fear lest some evil should happen to the state too great for it to bear.",., Nothing could save Athens, he thought, except government by knowledge and ability; and this was no more to be determined by voting than the qualifications of a pilot, a musician, a physician, or a carpenter. Nor should power or wealth choose the officials of the state; tyran y and plutocracy are as bad as democracy; the reasonable compromise is an aristocracy in which office would be restricted to those mentally fit and trained for it.181 Despite these criticisms of Athenian democracy Socrates recognized its advantages, and appreciated the liberties and opportunities that it gave him. He smiled at the tendency of some followers to preach a "return to Nature," and adopted towards Antisthenes and the Cynics the same attitude that Voltaire would take towards Rousseau-that with all its
CHAP. XVI)  THE  CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION	373
faults civilization is a precious thing, not to be abandoned for any primeval simplicity.181
Nevertheless the majority of the Athenians looked upon him with irri tated suspicion. The onhodox in religion considered him to be the most dangerous of the Sophists; for while he observed the amenities of the ancient faith he rejected tradition, wished to subject every rule to the scrutiny of reason, founded morality in the individual conscience rather than in social good or the unchanging decrees of heaven, and ended with a skepticism that left reason itself in a mental confusion unsettling to every custom and belief. To him, as well as to Protagoras and Euripides, praisers of the past like Aristophanes attributed the irreligion of the age, the dis respect of the young for the old, the loosened morals of the educated classes, and the disorderly individualism that was consuming Athenian life. Though Socrates refused to suppon the oligarchic faction, many of its leaders were his pupils or his friends. When one of them, Critias, led the oligarchs in a rich man's revolution and a ruthless terror, democrats like Anytus and Meletus branded Socrates as the intellectual source of the oligarchic reac tion, and determined to remove him from Athenian life.
They succeeded, but they could not destroy his immense influence. The dialectic he had received from Zeno was passed down through Plato to Aristotle, who turned it into a system of logic so complete that it remained unaltered for nineteen hundred years. Upon science his influence was injurious: students were turned away from physical research, and the doc trine of external design offered no encouragement to scientific analysis. The individualist and intellectualist ethic of Socrates had a modest share, perhaps, in undermining Athenian morals; but its emphasis on conscience as above the law became one of the cardinal tenets of Christianity. Through his pupils the many suggestions of his thought became the sub-
Stance of all the major philosophies of the next two centuries. The most powerful element in his influence was the example of his life and charac ter. He became for Greek history a martyr and a saint; and every genera tion that sought an exemplar of simple living and brave thinking turned back to nourish its ideals with his memory. "In contemplating the man's wisdom and nobility of character," said Xenophon, "I find it beyond my power to forget him, or, in remembering him, to refrain from praising him. And if, among those who make virtue their aim, any one has ever been brought into contact with a person more helpful than Socrates, I count that man worthy to be called most blessed."181
0
CHAPTER  XVII
TheLiterature of the Golden Age
I. PINDAR
ORMALl..,Y the philosophy of one age is the literature of the next: the ideas and issues that in one generation are fought out on the field of re
search and speculation provide in the succeeding generation the background of drama, fiction, and poetry. But in Greece the literature did not lag behind the philosophy; the poets were themselves philosophers, did their own thinking, and were in the intellectual vanguard of their time. That same conflict between conservatism and radicalism which agitated GrCrek religion, science, and philoso phy found expression also in poetry and drama, even in the writing of history. Since excellence of artistic form was added, in Greek letters, to depth of specu lative thought, the literature of the Golden Age reached heights never touched again until the days of Shakespeare and Montaigne.
Because of this burden of thought, and the decay of royal or aristocratic patronage, the fifth century was less rich than the sixth in lyric poetry as an independent art. Pindar is the transition between the two periods: he inherits the lyric form, but fills it with dramatic magnificence; after him poetry breaks through its traditional limits, and, in the Dionysian drama, combines with religion, music, and the dance to make a greater vehicle for the splendor and passion of the Golden Age.
Pindar came of a Theban family that. traced its lineage back to primitive times, and claimed to include many of the ancient heroes commemorated in his verse. His uncle, an accomplished flutist, passed down to Pindar much of his love for music, and something of his skill. For advanced musical instruction the parents sent the boy to Athens, where Lasus and Agathocles taught him choral composition. Before he was twenty-i.e., by 502-he returned to Thebes, and studied with the poetess Corinna. Five times he competed against Corinna in public song, and five times was beaten; but Corinna was very pleasing to be hold, and the judges were men.1 Pindar called· her a sow, Simonides a crow, himself an eagle." Despite this myopia his reputation rose so high that his fel low Thebans soon concocted a story that told how once, as the young poet slept in the fields, some bees had settled upon his lips, and had left their honey there.a Soon he was handsomely commissioned to write odes in honor of princes and rich men; he was the guest of noble families in Rhodes, Tenedos,
374
CHAP.XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	37J
Corinth, and Athens, and for a time lived as royal bard at the courts of Alexan der I of Macedon, Theron of Acragas, and Hieron I of Syracuse. Usually his songs were paid for in advance, very much as if a city should in our days en gage a composer to celebrate it with an original composition for chorus and dance, and to conduct the performance himself. When Pindar returned to Thebes, towards his forty-fourth year, he was acclaimed as Boeotia's greatest gift to Greece.
He worked painstakingly, composing the music for each poem, and often training a chorus to sing it. He wrote hymns and paeans for deities, dithyrambs for the festivals of Dionysus, parthenaia for maidens, enkomia for celebrities, skolia for banquets, threnoi, or dirges, for funerals, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for winners at the Panhellenic competitions. Of all these only forty five odes remain, named after the games whose heroes they honored. Of these odes, again, only the words survive, none of the music; in judging them, we are in the position of some future historian who, having the librettos of Wag ner's operas but nothing of the scores, should list him as a poet rather than a composer, and should rank him by the words that once attended upon his harmonies. Or if we picture some Chinese scholar, unfamiliar with Christian story, reading in one evening, in lame translation, ten Bach chorals divorced from their music and ritual, we shall measure our justice to Pindar. When read today, ode after ode, in the silence of the study, he is beyond comparison the dreariest outpost in the classical landscape.
Only the analogy of music can explain the structure of these poems. To Pindar, as to Simonides and Bacchylides, the form to be followed in an epinician ode was as compulsory as sonata form in the sonatas and symphonies of modern Europe. First came the statement of the theme-the name and story of the athlete who had gained the prize, or of the nobleman whose horses had drawn their chariot to victory. In general Pindar celebrates "the wisdom of man, and his beauty, and the splendor of his fame."' In truth he was not much interested in his formal subject; he sang in praise of runners, courtesans, and kings, and was willing to accept any promptly paying tyrant as a patron saint:5 if the occa sion gave scope to his rich imagination and his proudly intricate verse. His topic might be anything from a mule race to the glory of Greek civilization in all its variety and spread. He was loyal to Thebes, and not more inspired than the Delphic oracle when he defended Theban neutrality in the Persian War; but later he was ashamed of his error, and went out of his way to praise the leader of the Greek defense as "renowned Athens, rich, violet-crowned, worthy of song, bulwark of Hellas, god-protected city."1 The Athenians are said to have given him ten thousand drachmas ($10,000) for the dithyrambs, or pro cessional song, in which these lines occurred;" Thebes, we are less reliably informed, fined him for his implied reproof, and Athens paid the fine.'
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVII
The second part of a Pindaric ode was a selection from Greek mythology. Here Pindar was discouragingly lavish; as Corinna complained, he "sowed with the whole sack rather than with the hand."• He had a high conception of the gods, and honored them as among his best clients. He was the favorite poet of the Delphic priesthood; during his life he received many privileges from them, and after his death his spirit was, with Caledonian generosity, invited to share in the first fruits offered at Apollo's shrine.10 He was the last defender of the orthodox faith; even the pious Aeschylus seems wildly heretical beside him; Pindar would have been horrified by the blasphemies of Prometheus Bound. Sometimes he rises to an almost monotheistic conception of Zeus as "the All, governing all things and seeing all things.'m He is a friend of the Mysteries, and shares the Orphic hope of paradise. He preaches the divine origin and destiny of the individual soul,1" and offers one of the earliest descriptions of a Last Judgment, a Heaven, and a Hell. "Immediately after death the lawless spir its suffer punishment, and the sins committed in this realm of Zeus are judged by One who passeth sentence stem and inevitable."
But in sunshine ever fair
Abide the good, and all their nights and days An equal splendor wear.
And never as of old with thankless toil
For their poor empty needs they vex the soil, And plough the watery seas;


After the passing of fhemistocles and Aristides the leadership of the democratic faction at Athens descended to Ephialtes, and that of the oli-
CHAP.XI)  PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT   247
garchic or conservative faction to Cimon, son of Miltiades. Cimon had most of the virtues that Themistocles lacked, but none of the subtlety that abil ity must depend upon for political success. Unhappy amid the intrigues of the city, he secured command of the fleet, and consolidated the liberties of Greece by his victory at the Eurymedon. Returning to Athens in glory, he at once lost his popularity by advising a reconciliation with Sparta. He won the Assembly's reluctant consent to lead an Athenian force to the aid of the Spartans against their revolted Helots at lthome; but the Spartans suspected the Athenians even when bringing gifts, and so clearly distrusted Cimon's soldiers that these returned to Athens in anger, and Cimon was disgraced. In 46 I he was ostracized at the instigation of Pericles, and the oligarchic party was so demoralized by  fall that for two generations the government remained in the hands of the democrats. Four years later Pericles, repentant (or, rumor said, enamored of Cimon's sister Elpinice), secured his recall, and Cimon died with honors in a naval campaign in
Cyprus.
The leader of the democratic party at this time was a man of whom we know strangely little, and yet his activity was a turning point in the his tory of Athens. Ephialtes was poor but incorruptible, and did not long survive the animosities of Athenian politics. The popular faction had been strengthened by the war, for in that crisis all class divisions among freemen had for a moment been forgotten, and the saving victory at Salamis had been won not by the army-which was dominated by the aristocrats-but by the navy, which was manned by the poorer citizens and controlled by the mercantile middle class. The oligarchic party sought to maintain its privileges by making the conservative Areopagus the supreme authority in the state. Ephialtes replied by a bitter attack upon this ancient senate..• He impeached several of its members for malfeasance, had some of them put to death,' and persuaded the Assembly to vote the almost complete abolition of the powers that the Areopagus still retained. The conservative Aristotle later approved this radical policy, on the ground that "the trans fer to the commons of the judicial functions that had belonged to the Senate appears to have been an advantage, for corruption finds an easiez
Grote's statement, written about 1850, of the case aF the Areopagus recalls certain criticisms of the Supreme Court of the United States m 1937. ''The Areopagus, standing alone in the enjoyment of a life-tenure, appears to have exercised an undefined and extensive control which long continuance had gradually consecrated. It was invested with a kind of religious respect. . . . The Areopagus also exercised a supervision over the public assembly, taking care that none of the proceedings ... should be such as to infringe the established laws of the coun . These were powers immense, undefined, not derived from any formal grant of the people. ,.
THli:  LlFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XI
material in a small number than in a large one."" But the conservatives of the time did not see the issue so calmly. Ephialtes, having been found unpurchasable, was assassinated in 461 by an agent of the oligarchy," and the perilous task of leading the democratic party passed down to the aris tocratic Pericles.
PERICLES
...
The man who acted as commander in chief of all the physical and spir itual forces of Athens during her greatest age was born some three years before Marathon. His father, Xanthippus, had fought at Salamis, had led the Athenian fleet in the battle of Mycale, and had recaptured the Helles pont for Greece. Pericles' mother, Agariste, was a granddaughter of the reformer Cleisthenes; on her side, therefore, he belonged to the ancient family of the Alcmaeonids. "His mother being near her time," says Plu tarch, "fancied in a dream that she was brought to bed of a lion, and a few days after was delivered of Pericles-in other respects perfectly formed, only his head was somewhat longish and out of proportion"t his critics were to have much fun with this very dolicocephalic head. The most famous music teacher of his time, Damon, gave him instruction in music, and Pythocleides in music and literature; he heard the lectures of Zeno the Eleatic at Athens, and became the friend and pupil of the philosopher Anaxagoras. In his development he absorbed the rapidly growing culture of his epoch, and united in his mind and policy all the threads of Athenian civilization-economic, military, literary, anistic, and philosophical. He was, so far as we know, the most complete man that Greece produced.
Seeing that the oligarchic party was out of step with the time, he at tached himself early in life to the party of the demos-i.e., the free popu lation of Athens; then, as even in Jefferson's day in America, the word "people" carried cenain proprietary reservations. He approached politics in general, and each situation in it, with careful preparation, neglecting no aspect of education, speaking seldom and briefly, and praying to the gods that he might never utter a word that was not to the point. Even the comic poets, who disliked him, spoke of him as "the Olympian," who wielded the thunder and lightning of such eloquence as Athens had never heard before; and yet by all accounts his speech was unimpassioned, and ap pealed to enlightened minds. His influence was due not only to his intelli gence but to his probity; he was capable of using bribery to secure state ends, but was himself "manifestly free from every kind of corruption, and
CHAP.XI)  PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT   249
superior to all considerations of money";'1 and whereas Themistocles had entered public office poor and left it rich, Pericles, we are told, added noth ing to his patrimony by his political career." It showed the good sense of the Athenians in this generation that for almost thirty years, between 467 and 428, they elected and re-elected him, with brief intermissions, as one of their ten strategoi or commanders; and this relative permanence of office not only gave him supremacy on the military board, but enabled him to raise the position of strategos autokrator to the place of highest influence in the government. Under him Athens, while enjoying all the privileges of democracy, acquired also the advantages of aristocracy and dictatorship. The good government and cultural patronage that had adorned Athens in the age of Peisistratus were continued now with equal unity and decisive ness of direction and intelligence, but also with the full and annually re newed consent of a free citizenship. History through him illustrated again the principle that liberal reforms are most ably executed and most perma nently secured by the cautious and moderate leadership of an aristocrat enjoying popular support. Greek civilization was at its best when democ racy had grown sufficiently to give it variety and vigor, and aristocracy survived sufficiently to give it order and taste.
The reforms of Pericles substan ially extended the authority of the peo ple. Though the power of the heliaea had grown under Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes, the lack of payment for jury service had given the well to do a predominating influence in these courts. Pericles introduced (451) a fee of two obols (34 cents), later raised to three, for a day's duty as juror, an amount equivalent in each case to half a day's earnings of an average Athenian of the time.11 The notion that these modest sums weakened the fiber and corrupted the morale of Athens is hardly to be taken seriously, for by the same token every state that pays its judges or its jurymen would long since have been destroyed. Pericles seems also to have established a small remuneration for military service. He crowned this scandalous generosity by persuading the state to pay every citizen two obols annu ally as the price of admission to the plays and games of the official festivals; he excused himself on the ground that these performances should not be a luxury of the upper and middle classes, but should contribute to elevate the mind of the whole electorate. It must be confessed, however, that Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch-conservatives all-were agreed that these pittances injured the Athenian character."'
Continuing the work of Ephialtes, Pericles transferred to the popular courts the various judicial powers that had been possessed by the archons
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XI
and magistrates, so that from this time the archonship was more of a bureaucratic or administrative office than one that carried the power of forming policies, deciding cases, or issuing commands. In 457 eligibility to the archonship, which had been confined to the wealthier classes, was ex tended to the third class, or zeugitai; soon thereafter, without any legal form, the lowest citizen class, the thetes, made themselves eligible to the office by romancing about their income; and the importance of the thetes in the defense of Athens persuaded the other classes to wink at the fraud.• Moving for a moment in the opposite direction, Pericles (451) carried through the Assembly a restriction of the franchise to the legitimate off spring of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. No legal marriage was to be permitted between a citizen and a noncitizen. It was a measure aimed to discourage intermarriage with foreigners, to reduce illegitimate births, and perhaps to reserve to the jealous burghers of Athens the material rewards of citizenship and empire. Pericles himself would soon have rea son to regret this exclusive legislation.
Since any form of government seems good that brings prosperity, and even the best seems bad that hinders it, Pericles, having consolidated his political position, turned to economic statesmanship. He sought to reduce the pressure of population upon the narrow resources of Attica by estab lishing colonies of poor Athenian citizens upon foreign soil. To give work to the idle,1" he made the state an employer on a scale unprecedented in Greece: ships were added to the fleet, arsenals were built, and a great com exchange was erected at the Piraeus. To protect Athens effectively from siege by land, and at the same time to provide further work for the unemployed, Pericles persuaded the Assembly to supply funds for con structing eight miles of "Long Walls," as they were to be called, connect ing Athens with the Piraeus and Phalerum; the effect was to make the city and its ports one fortified enclosure, open in wartime only to the sea on which the Athenian fleet was supreme. In the hostility with which un walled Sparta looked upon this program of fortification the oligarchic party saw a chance to recapture political power. Its secret agents invited the Spartans to invade Attica and, with the aid of an oligarchic insurrection, to put down the democracy; in this event the oligarchs pledged themselves to level the Long Walls. The Spartans agreed, and dispatched an army which defeated the Athenians at Tanagra (457); but the oligarchs failed to make their revolution. The Spartans returned to the Peloponnesus emp ty-handed, dourly awaiting a better opportunity to overcome the flourish ing rival that was taking from them their traditional leadership of Greece.
CHAP.XI) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT   251
Pericles rejected the temptation to retaliate upon Sparta, and instead, devoted his energies now to the beautification of Athens. Hoping to make his city the cultural center of Bellas, and to rebuild the ancient shrines which the Persians had destroyed-on a scale and with a splendor that would lift up the soul of every citizen, he devised a plan for using all the genius of Athens' artists, and the labor of her remaining unemployed, in a bold program for the architectural adornment of the Acropolis. "It was his desire and design," says Plutarch, "that the undisciplined mechanic multi tude ... should not go without their share of public funds, and yet should not have these given them for sitting still and doing nothing; and to this end he brought in these vast projects of construction."" To finance the undertaking he proposed that the treasury accumulated by the Delian Confederacy should be removed from Delos, where it lay idle and in secure, and that such part of it as was not needed for common defense should be used to beautify what seemed to Pericles the legitimate capital of a beneficent empire.
The transference of the Delian treasury to Athens was quite acceptable
to the Athenians, even to the oligarchs. But the voters were loath to spend any substantial part of the fund in adorning their city-whether through some qualm of conscience, or through a secret hope that the money might be appropriated more directly to their needs and enjoyment. The oli garchic leaders played upon this feeling so ,cleverly that when the matter neared a vote in the Assembly the defeat of Pericles' plan seemed certain. Plutarch tells a delightful story of how the subtle leader turned the tide. " 'Very well,' said Pericles; 'let the cost of these buildings go not to your account but to mine; and let the inscription upon them stand in my name.' When they heard him say this, whether it were out of a surprise to see the greatness of his spirit, or out of emulation of the glory of the works, they cried aloud, bidding him spend on ..  and spare no cost till all were
:finished."
While the work proceeded, and Pericles' especial protection and sup port were given to Pheidias, lctinus, Mnesicles, and the other artists who labored to realize his dreams, he lent his patronage also to literature and philosophy; and whereas in the other Greek cities of this period the strifc of parties consumed much of the energy of the citizens, and literature languished, in Athens the stimulus of growing wealth and democratic free dom was combined with wise and cultured leadership to produce the Golden Age. When Pericles, Aspasia, Pheidias, Anaxagoras, and Socrates attended a play by Euripides in the Theater of Dionysus, Athens could see visibly


like Sparta's, while democracy, loosening all bonds with freedom, puts the accent on youth, and favors the new against the old. Athenian history offers several instances of children taking over their parents' property without proof of imbecility in the elders;,... but Sophocles rescues himself from such an action simply by reading to the court some passages from his latest play. Athenian law commands that sons shall support their infirm or aged parents;'"' and public opinion, which is always more fearful than the law, enjoins modesty and respect in the behavior of the young towards the old. Plato takes it for granted that a well-bred youth will be silent in the presence of his seniors unless he is asked to speak."" There are in the literature many pictures of modest adolescence, as in the earlier dialogues of Plato or the Symposium of Xenophon; and there are touching stories of filial devotion, like that of Orestes to Agamemnon, and of Antigone to Oedipus.
When death comes, every precaution is taken that the soul of the departed shall be spared all avoidable suffering. The body must be buried or burned; else the soul will wander restlessly about the world, and will revenge itself upon its negligent posterity; it may, for example, reappear as a ghost, and bring disease or disaster to plants and men. Cremation is more popular in the Heroic Age, burial in the classic. Burial was Mycenaean, and will survive into Chris tianity; cremation apparently entered Greece with the Achaeans and the Dorians, whose nomad habits made impossible the proper care of graves. One or the other is so obligatory among Athenians that the victorious generals at Argi nusae are put to death for allowing a severe storm to deter them from recover ing and burying their dead.
Greek burial customs carry on old ways into the future. The corpse is bathed, anointed with perfumes, crowned with flowers, and dressed in the fin est garments that the family can afford. An obol is placed between the teeth to pay Charon, the mythical boatman who ferries the dead across the Styx to Hades.• The body is placed in a coffin of pottery or wood; to "have one foot in the coffin" is already a proverb in Greece."" Mourning is elaborate: black garments are worn, and the hair, or part of it, is shorn as a gift for the dead. On the third day the corpse is carried on a bier in procession through the streets, while the women weep and beat their breasts; professional wailers or dirge singers may be hired for the occasion. Upon the sod of the covered grave wine is poured to slake the dead soul's thirst, and animals may be sacrificed for its food. The mourners lay wreaths of flowers or cypress upon the tomb,m and then return home to the funeral feast. Since the departed soul is believed to be present at this feast, sacred custom requires that "of the dead nothing but good" shall be spoken;"" this is the source of an ancient saw, and perhaps of the unfailing lauds of our epitaphs. Periodically the children visit the graves
It was the custom among the Greeks to carry small change in the mouth.
TIU  LIFE  OF GREECE	(cHAP.XlII
of their ancestors, attd offer them food and drink. After the battle of Plataea, where the Greeks of many cities have fallen, the Plataeans pledge themselves to provide for all the dead an annual repast; and six centuries later, in the days of Plutarch, this promise will still be performed.
After death the soul, separated from the body, dwells as an insubstantial shade in Hades. ln Homer only spirits guilty of exceptional or sacrilegious offense suffe.r punishment there; all the rest, saints and sinners alike, share an equal fate of endless prowling about dark Pluto's realm. In the course of Greek history a belief arises, among the poorer classes, in Hades as a place of expiation for sins; Aeschylus pictures Zeus as judging the dead there and punishing the guilty, though no word is said about rewarding the good.= Only rarely do we find mention of the Blessed Isles, or the Elysian Fields, as heavens of eternal happiness for a few heroic souls. The thought of the gloomy fate awaiting nearly all the dead darkens Greek literature, and makes Greek life less bright and cheerful than is fitting under such a sun.
CHAPTER XIV
The Art of Periclean Greece
THE ORNAMENTATION OF LIFE
"IT is beautiful," says a character in Xenophon's Economics,
to see the footgear ranged in a row according to its kind; beautiful to see garments sorted according to their use, and coverlets; beau tiful to see glass vases and tableware so sorted; and beautiful, too, despite the jeers of the witless and flippant, to see cooking-pots arranged with sense and symmetry. Yes, all things without excep tion, because of symmetry, will appear more beautiful when placed in order. All these utensils will then seem to form a choir; the center which they unite to form will create a beauty that will be enhanced by the distance of the other objects in the group.'
This passage from a general reveals the scope, simplicity, and strength of the esthetic sense in Greece. The feeling for form and rhythm, for precision and clarity, for proportion and order, is the central fact in Greek culture; it enters into the shape and ornament of every bowl and vase, of every statue and painting, of every temple and tomb, of every poem and drama, of all Greek work in science and philosophy. Greek art is rea son made manifest: Greek painting is the logic of line, Greek sculpture is a worship of symmetry, Greek architecture is a marble geometry. There is no extravagance of emotion in Periclean art, no bizarrerie of form, no striving for novelty through the abnormal or unusual;• the purpose is not to represent the indiscriminate irrelevancy of the real, but to catch the il luminating essence of things, and to portray the ideal possibilities of men. The pursuit of wealth, beauty, and knowledge so absorbed the Athenians that they had no time for goodness. "I swear by all the gods," says one of Xenophon's banqueters, "that I would not choose the power of the Persian king in preference to beauty."'
The Greek, whatever the romanticists of less virile ages may have fancied
of him, was no effeminate esthete, no flower of ecstasy murmuring mys-
Pbilokaloumen met' euteleias, says Thucydides' Pericles: ''We love beauty without ex travagance.''"
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIV
teries of art for art's sake; he thought of art as subordinate to life, and of living as the greatest art of all; he had a healthy utilitarian bias against any beauty that could not be used; the useful, the beautiful, and the good were almost as closely bound together in his thought as in the Socratic philoso phy.• In his view art was first of all an adornment of the ways and means of life: he wanted his pots and pans, his lamps and chests and tables and beds and chairs to be at once serviceable and beautiful, and never too ele gant to be strong. Having a vivid "sense of the state," he identified him self with the power and glory of his city, and employed a thousand artists to embellish its public places, ennoble its festivals, and commemorate its history. Above all, he wished to honor or propitiate the gods, to express his gratitude to them for life or victory; he offered votive images, lavished his resources upon his temples, and engaged statuaries to give to his gods or his dead an enduring similitude in stone. Hence Greek art belonged not to a museum, where men might go to contemplate it in a rare moment of esthetic conscience, but to the actual interests and enterprises of the people; its "Apollos" were not dead marbles in a gallery, but the likenesses of beloved deities; its temples no mere curiosities for tourists, but the homes of living gods. The artist, in this society, was not an insolvent recluse in a studio, working in a language alien to the common citizen; he was an artisan toiling with laborers of all degrees in a public and intelligible task. Athens brought together, from all the Greek world, a greater concourse of artists, as well as of philosophers and poets, than any other city except Renaissance Rome; and these men, competing in fervent rivalry and co operating under enlightened statesmanship, realized in fair measure the vision of Pericles.
Art begins at home, and with the person; men p&int themselves before they paint pictures, and adorn their bodies before building homes. Jewelry, like cosmetics, is as old as history. The Greek was an expert cutter and engraver of gems. He 1;1sed simple tools of bronze-plain and tubular drills, a wheel, and a polishing mixture of emery powder and oil;1 yet his work was so delicate and minute that a microscope was probably required in executing the details, and is certainly needed in following them.8 Coins were not especially pretty at Athens, where the grim owl ruled the mint. Elis led all the mainland in this field, and towards the close of the fifth century Syracuse issued a dekadrachma that has never been surpassed in numismatic art. In metalwork the masters of Chalcis maintained their leadership; every Mediterranean city sought their iron, copper, and silver wares. Greek mirrors were more pleasing than mirrors by
"Among the ancients," said Stendhal, ''the beautiful is only the high relief of the useful.,,.
CHAP.XIV)	THE  ART  OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE	315
their nature can frequently be; for though one might not see the clearest of reflections in the polished bronze, the mirrors themselves were of varied and attractive shapes, often elaborately engraved, and upheld by figures of heroes, fair women, or gods.
The potters carried on the forms and methods of the sixth century, with their traditional banter and rivalry. Sometimes they burnt into the vase a word of love for a boy; even Pheidias followed this custom when he carved upon the finger of his Zeus the words, "Pantarkes is fair.'" In the first half of the fifth century the red-figure style reached its apex in the Achilles and Penthesilea vase, the Aesop and the Fox cup in the Vatican, and the Berlin Museum Orpheus trmong the Thracians. More beautiful still were the white lekythoi of the mid century; these slender flasks were dedicated to the dead, and were usually buried with them, or thrown upon the pyre to let their fragrant oils mingle with the flames. The vase painters ventured into individuality, and sometimes fired the clay with subjects that would have startled the staid masters of the Archaic age; one vase allows Athenian youths to embrace courtesans shamelessly; an other shows men vomiting as they come from a banquet; other vases do what they can for sex education.• The heroes of Periclean vase painting-Brygus, Sotades, and Meidias-abandoned the old myths, and chose scenes from the life of their times, delighting above all in the graceful movement of woman and the natural play of the child. They drew more faithfully than their prede cessors: they showed the body in three-quarters view as well as in profile; they produced light and shade by using thin or thick solutions of the glaze; they modeled the figures to show contours and depth, and the folds of feminine drapery. Corinth and Sicilian Gela were also centers of fine vase painting in this age, but no one questioned the superiority of the Athenians. It was not the competition of other potters that overcame the artists of the Cerarnicus; it was the rise of a rival art of decoration. The vase painters tried to meet the attack by imitating the themes and styles of the muralists; but the taste of the age went against them, and slowly, as the fourth century advanced, pottery resigned itself to being more and more an industry, less and less an art.
THERISE OF PAINTING
Four stages vaguely divide the history of Greek painting. In the sixth cen tury it is chiefly ceramic, devoted to the adornment of vases; in the fifth it is chiefly architectural, giving color to public buildings and statues; in the fourth it hovers between the domestic and the individual, decorating dwellings and making portraits; in the Hellenistic Age it is chiefly individual, producing easel pictures for private purchasers. Greek painting begins as an offshoot of draw ing, and remains to the end a matter essentially of drawing and design. In its


106	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.V
Between Acarnania and Aetolia runs the greatest r,iver of Hellas-the Ache lous, which the imaginative Greeks worshiped as a god, and appeased with prayer and sacrifice. Near its sources in Epirus rises the Spercheus, along whose banks in the little state of Aeniania once lived the pre-Homeric Achaeans, and a small tribe called Hellenes, whose name, by the whims of usage, was adopted by all the Greeks. Towards the east lay Thermopylae, called "Hot Gates" because of its warm sulphur springs and its narrow strategic pass, from north to south, between mountains and the Malic Gulf. Then over Mt. Othrys and through Achaea Phthiotis one descends into the great plains of Thessaly.
Here at Pharsalus Caesar's weary troops wiped out the forces of Pompey. Nowhere else in Greece were the crops so rich as in Thessaly, or the horses so spirited, or the arts so poor. Rivers ran from all directions into the Peneus, making a fertile alluvial soil from the southern boundary of the state to the foot of the northern ranges. Through these mountains the Peneus slashes its way across Thessaly to the Thracian Sea. Between the peaks of Ossa and Olym pus it carves the Vale of Tempe (i.e., a cutting), where for four miles the angry river is hemmed in by precipitous cliffs rising a thousand feet above the stream. Along the great rivers were many cities-Pherae, Crannon, Tricca, Larisa, Gyrton, Elatea-ruled by feudal barons living on the toil of serfs. Here, in the extreme north, is Mt. Olympus, tallest of Greek peaks, and home of the Olympian gods. On its northern and eastern slopes lay Pieria, where the Muses had dwelt before they moved to Helicon.• Southward, and along the gulf, ran Magnesia, piling up mountains from Ossa to Pelion.
Beginning a few miles across the strait from Magnesia, the great island of Euboea stretches its length along the shores of the mainland between inner gulfs and outer Aegean, and pivots itself on a peninsula at Chalcis that. almost binds it to Boeotia. The island's backbone is a range that continues Olympus, Ossa, Pelion, and Othrys, and ends in the Cyclades. Its coastal plains were rich enough to lure Ionians from Attica in the days of the Dorian invasion, and to lead to its conquest by Athens in 506 on the plea that Athens, if blockaded at the Piraeus, would starve without Euboean grain. Neighboring deposits of copper and iron and banks of murex shells gave Chalcis its wealth and its name; for a time it was the chief center of the metallurgical industry in Greece, mak ing unrivaled swords and excellent vases of bronze. The trade of the island, helped by one of the first Greek coinages, passed out from Chalcis, enriched its citizens, and led them to found commercial colonies in Thrace, Italy, and Sicily. The Euboean system of weights and measures became almost universal in Greece; and the alphabet of Chalcis, given to Rome by the Euboean colony
Hence the wise counsel of Alexander Pope's philosophical doggerel: A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink de p CIT taste not the Pierian spring."'
CHAP. v)	ATHENS	IO'J
of Italian Cumae, became through Latin the alphabet of modem Europe. A few miles to the south of Chalcis was its ancient rival, Eretria. There Menede mus, a pupil of Plato, established a school of philosophy, but for_the rest neithe; Eretria nor Chalcis wrote its name very distinctly into the record of Greek thought or art.
From Chalcis a bridge, lineal descendant of the wooden span built in 41 I B.c., leads the traveler across the Euripus strait back into Boeotia. A few miles south on the Boeotian coast lay the little town of Aulis, where Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to the gods. In this region once lived an insignificant tribe, the Graii, who joined the Euboeans in sending a colony to Cumae, near Naples; from them the Romans gave to all the Hellenes whom they encountered the name Graici, Greeks; and from that circumstance all the world came to know Bellas by a term which its own inhabitants never applied to themselves."" Far ther south is T anagra, whose poetess Corinna won the prize from Pindar about
500 B.c., and whose potters, in the fifth and fourth centuries, would make the most famous statuettes in history. Five miles south again and we are in Attica. From the peaks of the Parnes range we can make out the hills of Athens.
ATTICA
The Background of Athens
The very atmosphere seems different-clean, sharp, and bright; each year here has three hundred sunny days. We are at once reminded of Cicero's comment on "Athens' clear air, which is said to have contributed to the keenness of the Attic mind.'"'" Rain falls in Attica in autumn and winter, but seldom in summer. Fog and mist are rare. Snow falls about once a year in Athens, four or five times a year on the surrounding moun taintops... The summers are hot, though dry and tolerable; and in the low lands, in ancient days, malarial swamps detracted from the healthiness of the air.08 The soil of Attica is poor; nearly everywhere the basic rock lies close to the surface, and makes agriculture a heartbreaking struggle for the simplest goods of life.• Only adventurous trade, and the patient culture of the olive and the grape, made civilization possible in Attica.
It is all the more surprising that on this arid peninsula so many towns should have appeared. They are everywhere: at every harbor along the coast, in every valley among the hills. An active and enterprising people
"Attica," says Thucydides (i, I), "because of the poverty of its soil, enjoyed from a very remote period freedom from faction [?] and invasion."
108	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.V
had settled Attica in or before neolithic days, and had hospitably received and intermarried with Ionians-a mixture of Pelasgo-Mycenaeans and Achaeans...-fleeing from Boeotia and the Peloponnesus-in the face of the northern migrations and invasions. Here was no conquering alien race exploiting a native population, but a complex Mediterranean stock, of medium statur and dark features, directly inheriting the blood and cul ture of the old Helladic- civilization, proudly conscious of its indigenous quality,"" and excluding from its national sanctuary, the Acropolis, those half-barbarian upstarts, the Dorians.•
Relationships of blood gave them their social organization. Each family belonged to a tribe, whose members claimed the same divine heroic ances tor, worshiped the same deity, joined in the same religious ceremony, had a common archon (governor) and treasurer, owned together certain communal lands, enjoyed among themselves the rights of intermarriage and bequest, accepted obligations of mutual aid, vengeance, and defense, and slept at last in the tribal burial place. Each of the four tribes of Attica was composed of three phratries or brotherhoods, each phratry of thirty clans or gentes (gene), and each clan, as nearly as possible, of thirty heads of families.81 This kinship classification of Attic society lent itself not only to Inilitary organization and mobilization, but to so clannish an aristocracy of old families that Cleisthenes had to redistribute the tribes before he could establish democracy.
Each town or village was probably in origin the home of a clan, and some times took its name from the clan, or from the god or hero whom it wor shiped, as in the case of Athens. The traveler entering Attica from eastern Boeotia would come first to Oropus, and receive no very favorable impres sion; for Oropus was a frontier town, as terrifying to the tourist as any such today. "Oropus," says Dicaearchus (?) about 300 B.c., "is a nest of hucksters. The greed of the customhouse officials here is unsurpassed, their roguery inveterate and bred in the bone. Most of the people are coarse and truculent in their manners, for they have knocked the decent members of the community on the head."1111 From Oropus southward one moved through a close succession of towns: Rhamnus, Aphidna, Deceleia (a strate gic point in the Peloponnesian War), Acharnae (home of Aristophanes' pugnacious pacifist Dicaeopolis), Marathon, and Brauron-in whose great temple stood that statue of Artemis which Orestes and Iphigenia had brought from the Tauric Chersonese, and where, every four years, as much of Attica as could come joined in the piety and debauchery of the Brauronia, or feast of Artemis.88 Then Prasiae and Thoricus; then the silver-Inining region of Laurium, so vital in the econoinic and military history of Athens:
CHAP. V)	ATHENS
then, at the very point of the peninsula, Sunium, on whose cliffs a lovely temple rose as a guide to mariners and their hopeful offering to the incal culable Poseidon. Then up the western coast (for Attica is half coast, and its very name is from aktike, coastland) past Anaphlystus to the isle of Salamis,• home of Ajax and Euripides; then to Eleusis, sacred to Demeter and her mysteries; and then back to the Piraeus. Into this sheltered port, neglected before Themistocles revealed its possibilities, ships were to bring the goods of all the Mediterranean world for the use and pleasure of Athens. The barrenness of the soil, the nearness of the coast, the abundance of har bors lured the people of Attica into trade; their courage and inventiveness won for them the markets of the Aegean; and out of that commercial em pire came the wealth, the power, and the culture of Athens in the Periclean age.
Athens under the Oligarchs
These towns of Attica were not only the background but the mem bers of Athens. We have seen how, according to Greek belief, Theseus with a benevolent "synoecism" had brought the people of Attica into one
political organization, with one capital.t Five miles from the Piraeus, and
in a nest of hills-Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes-Athens grew around the old Mycenaean acropolis; and all the landowners of Attica were its citizens. The oldest families, and those with the largest holdings, wielded the balance of power; they had tolerated the kingship when disorder threat ened, but when quiet and stability returned they reasserted their feudal domination of the central government. After King Codrus had died in heroic self-sacrifice against the invading Dorians,t they announced (so the story went) that no one was good enough to succeed him, and replaced the king with an archon chosen for life. In 75 2 they limited the tenure of the archonship to ten years, and in 683 to one. On the latter occasion they divided the powers of the office among nine archons: an archon eponymos, who gave his name to the year as a means of dating events;an archon basileus, who bore the name of king but was merely head of the state religion; a polemarcbos, or military commander; and six thesmothetai, or lawmakers. As in Sparta and Rome, so in Athens the overthrow of the monarchy repre sented not a victory for the commons, or any intentional advance towards


at Taras-the Roman Tarentum (Taranto).• There they grew olives, raised horses, manufactured pottery, built ships, netted fish, and gathered mus sels to make a purple dye more highly valued than the Phoenician.8 As in most of the Greek colonies, the government began as an oligarchy of land owners, passed under dictators .financed by the middle class, and enjoyed vigorous and turbulent intervals of democracy. Here the romantic Pyrrhus would land, in 281  B.c., and undertake to play Alexander to the West.
Across the Tarentine Gulf a new wave of immigrants, mostly Achaeans, founded the cities of Sybaris and Crotona. The murderous jealousy of these kindred states illustrates the creative energy and destructive passions of the Greeks. Trade between eastern Greece and western Italy had a choice of two routes, one by water, the other in part by land. Ships fol lowing the water route touched at Crotona, and exchanged many goods there; thence they passed to Rhegium, paid tolls, and moved cautiously through pirate-ridden seas and the swirling currents of the Messina Straits to Elea and Cumae-the northernmost Greek settlement in Italy. To avoid these tolls and perils, and a hundred extra miles of rowing and sailing, mer chants who chose the other route unloaded their cargoes at Sybaris, car ried them overland some thirty miles to the western coast at Laus, and reshipped them to Poseidonia, whence they were marketed into the in terior of Italy.
Strategically situated on this line of trade, Sybaris prospered until it had
(if we may believe Diodorus Siculus") 300,000 population and such wealth as few Greek cities could match. Sybtrrite became a synonym for epicurean. All physical labor was performed by slaves or serfs while the citizens, dressed in costly robes, took their ease in luxurious homes and consumed
exotic delicacies.t Men whose work was noisy, such as carpenters and
smiths, were forbidden to practice their crafts within the con.fines of the city. Some of the roads in the richer districts were covered with awnings as a protection against heat and rain.11 Alcisthenes of Sybaris, says Aris totle, had a robe of such precious stuffs that Dionysius I of Syracuse later sold it for 120 talents ($720,000) ." Smyndyrides of Sybaris, visiting Sicyon to sue for the hand of Cleisthenes' daughter, brought with him a thousand servants.28
The traditional dates for the founding of the Greek cities in the West are given in the Chronological Table. These dates were taken by Thucydides from the old logograeher Antiochus of Syracuse; they are _highly uncertain? an Mahaffy believed that the_ Sicilian foundations came later thnn those m Italy. Thucydides chronology, however, has still many supporters.1
t Cooks or confectioners who invented new dishes or sweets-Athenaeus reports-were
allowed to patent them for a year.10 Perhaps Athenaeus mistook caricature for history.
CHAP.VII)	THE	GREEKS  IN  THE  WEST
All went well with Sybaris until it slipped into war with its neighbor Crotona (510). We are unreliably informed that the Sybarites marched out to battle with an army of 300,000 men.11 The Crotoniates, we are fur ther assured, threw this force into confusion by playing the tunes to which the Sybarites had taught their horses to dance.18 The horses danced, the Sybarites were slaughtered, and their city was so conscientiously sacked and burned that it disappeared from history in a day. When, sixty-five years later, Herodotus and other Athenians established near the site the new colony of Thurii, they found hardly a trace of what had been the proudest community in Greece.
PYTHAGORAS OF CROTONA
Crotona lasted longer; founded about 710 B.c., it is, as Crotone, still noisy with industry and trade. It had the only natural harbor between Taras and Sicily, and could not forgive those ships that discharged their cargoes at Sybaris. Enough trade remained to give the citizens a comfortable pros perity, while a wholesome defeat in war, a long economic depression, a brisk climate, and a certain Dorico-Puritan mood in the population con spired to keep them vigorous despite their wealth. Here grew famous ath letes like Milo, and the greatest school of medicine in Magna Grecia.•
Perhaps it was its reputation as a health resort that drew Pythagoras to Crotona. The name means "mouthpiece of the Pythian" oracle at Delphi; many of his followers considered him to be Apollo himself, and some laid claim to having caught a flash of his golden thigh.17 Tradition assigned his birth to Samos about 580, spoke of his studious youth, and gave him thirty years of travel. "Of all men," says Heracleitus, who praised parsimoni ously, "Pythagoras was the most assiduous inquirer."18 He visited, we are told, Arabia, Syria, Phoenicia, Chaldea, India, and Gaul, and came back with an admirable motto for tourists: "When you are traveling abroad look not back at your own borders";18 prejudices should be checked at every port of entry. More surely he visited Egypt, where he studied with the priests and learned much astronomy and geometry, and perhaps a lit tle nonsense."' Returning to Samos and finding that the dictatorship of Polycrates interfered with his own, he migrated to Crotona, being now over .fifty years of age.•
There he set up as a teacher; and his imposing presence, his varied learn. ing, and his willingness to receive women as well as men into his school,
•The name given by the Romans to the Greek cities in southern Italy.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, VII
soon brought him several hundred students. Two centuries before Plato he laid down the principle of equal opportunity for both sexes, and did not merely preach it but practiced it. Nevertheless he recognized natural dif ferences of function; he gave his women pupils considerable training in philosophy and literature, but he had them instructed as well in maternal and domestic arts, so that the "Pythagorean women" were honored by antiquity as the highest feminine type that Greece ever produced.""
For the students in general Pythagoras established rules that almost turned the school into a monastery. The members bound themselves by a vow of loyalty, both to the Master and to one another. Ancient tradi tion is unanimous that they practiced a communistic sharing of goods while they lived in the Pythagorean community.• They were not to eat flesh, or eggs, or beans. Wine was not forbidden, but water·was recommended a dangerous prescription in lower Italy today. Possibly the prohibition of flesh food was a religious taboo bound up with the belief in the trans migration of souls: men must beware of eating their ancestors. Probably there were dispensations, now and then, from the letter of these rules; English historians in particular find it incredible that the wrestler Milo, who was a Pythagorean, had become the strongest man in Greece without the help of beef"'-though the calf that became a bull in his arms"" managed well enough on grass. The members were forbidden to kill any animal that does not injure man, or to destroy a cultivated tree. They were to dress simply and behave modestly, "never yielding to laughter, and yet not looking stern." They were not to swear by the gods, for "every man ought so to live as to be worthy of belief without an oath." They were not to offer victims in sacrifice, but they might worship at altars that were unstained with blood. At the close of each day they were to ask them selves what wrongs they had committed, what duties they had neglected, what good they had done.•
Pythagoras himself, unless he was an excellent actor, followed these rules
more rigorously than any student. Certainly his mode of life won for him such respect and authority among his pupils that no one grumbled at his pedagogical dictatorship, and .autos epha-ipse dixit-"he himself has said it" -became their formula for alfinal decision in almost any field of con duct or theory. We are told, wlth touching reverence, that the Master never drank wine by day, and liy,'ed for the most part on bread and honey, with vegetables as dessert; that his robe was always white and spotless;
Cf. Chap. IX,sect. IV, below.
CHAP. VII)	THE  GREEKS  IN  THE  WEST
that he was never known to eat too much, or to make love; that he never indulged in laughter, or jests, or stories; that he never chastised.any one, not even a slave.• Timon of Athens thought him "a juggler of solemn speech, engaged in fishing for men";"' but among his most devoted followers were his wife Theano and his daughter Damo, who had facilities for com paring his philosophy with his life. To Damo, says Diogenes Laertius, "he entrusted his Commentaries, and charged her to divulge them to no person out of the house. And she, though she might have sold his discourses for much money, would not abandon them, for she thought obedience to her father's injunctions more valuable than gold; and that, too, though she was a woman."111
Initiation into the Pythagorean society required, in addition to purifica tion of the body by abstinence and self-control, a purification of the mind by scientific study. The new pupil was expected to preserve for five years the "Pythagorean silence"-i.e., presumably, to accept instruction without questions or argument-before being accounted a full member, or being permitted to "see" (study under?) Pythagoras.• The scholars were ac cordingly divided into exoterici, or outer students, and esoterici, or inner members, who were entitled to the secret wisdom of the Master himself. Four subjects composed the curriculum: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Mathematics came first;* not as the practical science that the Egyptians had made it, but as an abstract theory of quantities, and an ideal logical training in which thinking would be compelled to order and clarity by the test of rigorous deduction and visible proof. Geometry now defi nitely received the form of axiom, theorem, and demonstration; each step in the sequence of propositions raised the student to a new platform, as the Pythagoreans put it, from which he might view more widely the secret structure of the world."' Pythagoras himself, according to Greek tradition, discovered many theorems: above all, that the sum of the angles within any triangle equals two right angles, and that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Apollodorus tells us that when the Master discovered this theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb-a hundred animals-in thanksgiving;112 but this would have been scandalously un-Pythagorean.


AST of Megara the road divides-south to Athens, north to Thebes.
Northward the route is mountainous, and draws the traveler up to the heights of Mt. Cithaeron. Far to the west Parnassus is visible. Ahead, across lesser heights and far below, is the fertile Boeotian plain. At the foot of the hill lies Plataea, where 100,000 Greeks annihilated 300,000 Persians. A little to the west is Leuctra, where Epaminondas won his first great vic tory over the Spartans. Again a little west rises Mt. Helicon, home of the Muses and Keats's "blushful Hippocrene"-that famous fountain, the Horse's Spring, which, we are assured, gushed forth when the hoof of the winged steed Pegasus struck the earth as he leaped toward heaven.1 Directly north is Thespiae, always at odds with Thebes; and close by is the fountain in whose waters Narcissus contemplated his shadow-or, another story said, that of the dead sister whom he loved,9
In the little town of Ascra, near Thespiae, lived and toiled the poet Hesiod, second only to Homer in the affection of the classic Greeks. Tra dition gave 846 and 777 as the dates of his birth and death; some m?dem scholars bring him down to 650;8 probably he lived a century earlier than that.' He was born at Aeolian Cyme in Asia Minor; but his father, tired of poverty there, migrated to Ascra, which Hesiod describes as "miserable in winter, insufferable in summer, and never good"1-like most of the places in which men live. As Hesiod, farm hand and shepherd boy, followed his flocks up and down the slopes of Helicon he dreamed that the Muses breathed into his body the soul of poetry. So he wrote and sang, and won prizes in musical contests,8 even, some said, from Homer himself.'
Loving like any young Greek the marvels of mythology, he composed• a Tbeogony, or Genealogy of the Gods, of which we have a thousand halt ing lines, giving those dynasties and families of deities which are as vital to religion as the pedigrees of kings are to history. First he sang of the
So all classical antiquity believed except some Boeotian literati of the second century
A.D., who questioned Hesiod's authorship.•
98
CHAP. V)	ATHENS	99
Muses themselves, because they were, so to speak, his neighbors on Heli con, and in his youthful imagination he could almost see them "dancing with delicate feet" on the mountainside, and "bathing their soft skins" in the Hippocrene." Then he described not so much the creation as the pro creation of the world-how god begot god until Olympus overflowed. In the beginning was Chaos; "and next broad-bosomed Earth, ever secure seat of all the immortals"; in Greek religion the gods live on the earth or within it, and are always close to men. Next came Tartarus, god of the nether world; and after him Eros, or Love, "fairest of the gods."'° Chaos begot Darkness and Night, which begot Ether and Day; Earth begot Mountains and Heaven, and Heaven and Earth, mating, begot Oceanus, the Sea. We capitalize these names, but in Hesiod's Greek there were no capitals, and for all we know he meant merely that in the beginning was chaos, and then the earth, and the inners of the earth, and night and day and the sea, and desire begetting all things; perhaps Hesiod was a philosopher touched by the Muses and personifying abstractions into poetry; Empedocles would use the same tricks a century or two later in Sicily." From such a theology it would be but a step to the natural philosophy of the Ionians.
Hesiod's mythology revels in monsters and blood, and is not averse to
theological pornography. Out of the mating of Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Ge or Gaea) came a race of Titans, some with fifty heads and a hundred hands. Uranus liked them not, and condemned them to gloomy Tartarus. But Earth resenting this, proposed to them that they should kill their father. One of the Titans, Cronus, undertook the task. Then "huge Ge rejoiced, and hid him in ambush; in his hand she placed a sickle with jagged teeth, and suggested to him all the stratagem. Then came vast Heaven, bringing Night [Erebus] with him, and, eager for love, brooded around Earth, and lay stretched on all sides." Thereupon Cronus mutilated his father, and threw the flesh int0 the sea. From the drops of blood that fell upon the earth came the Furies; from the foam that formed around the flesh as it floated on the waters rose Aphrodite.•"' The Titans captured Olympus, deposed Heaven-Uranus, and raised Cronus to the throne. Cronus married his sister Rhea, but Earth and Heaven, his parents, having predicted that he would be deposed by one of his sons, Cronus swallowed them all except Zeus, whom Rhea bore secretly in Crete. When Zeus grew up he deposed Cronus in turn, forced him to disgorge his children, and plunged the Titans back into the bowels of the earth.a
Such, according to Hesiod, were the births and ways of the gods. Here,
From aphros, foam. The final syllable is of uncertain derivation.
100	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.V
too, is the tale of Prometheus, Far-Seer and Fire-Bringer; here, in tedious abundance, are some of the divine adulteries that enabled so many Greeks, like Mayflower Americans, to trace their pedigrees to the gods-one would never have guessed that adultery could be so dull. We do not know how far these myths were the popular outgrowth of a primitive and almost sav age culture, and how far they are due to Hesiod; few of them are men tioned in the healthy pages of Homer. It is possible that some measure of the disrepute into which these tales brought the Olympians in days of philosophical criticism and moral development is to be ascribed to the gloomy fancy of Ascra's bard.
In the only poem universally conceded to Hesiod he descends from Olympus to the plains, and writes a vigorous georgic of the farmer's life. The Works t:md Days takes the form of a long reproof and counsel to the poet's brother Perseus, who is so strangely pictured that he may be only a literary device. "Now will I speak to thee with good intent, thou exceed ing foolish Perseus."1' This Perseus, we are told, has cheated Hesiod of Hesiod's inheritance; and now the poet, in the first of known sermons on the dignity of labor, tells him how much wiser honesty and toil are than vice and luxurious ease. "Behold, thou mayest choose vice easily, even in heaps; for the path is plain, and she dwells very near. But before excellence the immortal gods have placed the sweat of toil; long and steep is the road that leads to her, and rough it is at first; but when you reach the height then truly is it easy, though so hard before."11 So the poet lays down rules for diligent husbandry, and the proper days for plowing, planting, and reaping, in rough saws that Virgil would polish into perfect verse. He warns Perseus against drinking heavily in summer, or dressing lightly in winter. He draws a chilly picture of winter in Boeotia-the "keenly pierc ing air that flays the steers," the seas and rivers tossed about by the north ern wind, the moaning forests and crashing pines, the beasts "shunning the white snow" and huddling fearfully in their folds and stalls.1" How cozy then is a well-built cottage, the lasting reward of courageous and prudent toil! There the domestic tasks go on despite the ston_n; then a wife is a helpmate indeed, and repays a man for the many tribulations she has caused him.
Hesiod cannot quite make up his mind about helpmates. He must have been a bachelor or a widower, for no man with a living wife would have spoken so acridly of woman. It is true that at the end of our fragment of
the Theogony the poet begins a chivalrous Catalogue of Women, recount ing the legends of those days when heroines were as numerous as men, and
CHAP. V)	ATHENS	IOl
most of the gods were goddesses. But in both of his major works he tells with bitter relish how all human ills were brought to man by the beautiful Pandora. Angered by Prometheus' theft of fire from Heaven, Zeus bids the gods mold woman as a Greek gift for man. He
bade Hephaestus with all speed mix earth with water, and endue it with man's voice and strength, and to liken in countenance to im mortal goddesses the fair, lovely beauty of a maiden. Then he bade Athena teach her how to weave the highly wrought web, and golden Aphrodite to shed around her head grace, and painful desire, and cares that waste the limbs; but to endue her with a dog-like mind and tricky manners he charged the messenger Hermes.   They
obeyed Zeus . . . and the herald of the gods placed within her a winning voice; and this woman he called Pandora, because all who dwelt in Olympian mansions bestowed on her a gift, a mischief to inventive men.1'
Zeus presents Pandora to Epimetheus, who, though he has been warned by his brother Prometheus not to accept gifts from the gods, feels that he may,yield to beauty this once. Now Prometheus has left with Epimetheus a mysterious box, with instructions that it should under no circumstances be opened. Pandora, overcome with curiosity, opens the box, whereupon ten thousand evils fly out of it and begin to plague the life of man, while Hope alone remains. From Pandora, says Hesiod, "is the race of tender women; from her is a pernicious race; and tribes of women, a great hurt, dwell with men, helpmates not of consuming poverty but of surfeit. . . . So to mortal men Zeus gave women as an evil.'na
But alas, says our vacillating poet, celibacy is as bad as marriage; a lonely old age is a miserable thing, and the property of a childless man reverts at his death to the clan. So, after all, a man had better marry-though not before thirty; and he had better have children-though not more than one, lest the property be divided.
When full matureness crowns thy manhood's pride, Lead to thy mansion the consenting bride;