Athens
500: Hecataeus of Miletus, geographer 499: Ionia revolts; Aeschylus' first play 497: Ionian Greeks burn Sardis
494: Persians defeat Ionians at Lade 493: Themistocles archon at Athens 490: Marathon; temple of Aphaea at
Aegina
489: Aristides archon; trial of Mil tiades
488-72: Theron dictator at Acragas
487: First selection of archons by lot 485-78: Gelon dictator at Syracuse
485: Epicharmus establishes comedy at
Syracuse
4B2: Ostracism of Aristides
48o: Battles of Artemisium, Thermo pylae, Salamis, and Himera; Ageladas of Argos, sculptor
479: Battles of Plataea and Mycale
CB.APTER IV
Sparta
THE ENVIRONMENT OF GREECE
J ET us take an atlas of the classic world• and find our way among the neigh
hors of ancient Greece. By Greece, or Hellas, we shall mean all lands oc cupied, in antiquity, by peoples speaking Greek.
We begin where many invaders entered-over the hills and through the val· leys of Epirus. Here the ancestors of the Greeks must have tarried many a year, for they set up at Dodona a shrine to their thundering sky-god Zeus; as late as the fifth century the Greeks consulted th oracle there, and read the divine will in the clangor of caldrons or the rustling leaves of the sacred oak.1 Through southern Epirus flowed the river Acheron, amid ravines so dark and deep that Greek poets spoke of it as the portal or very scene of Hell. In Homer's day the Epirots were largely Greek in speech and ways; but then new waves of barbarism came down upon them from the north, and dissuaded them from civilization.
Farther up the Adriatic lay Illyria, sparsely settled with untamed herdsmen who sold cattle and slaves for salt.9 On this coast, at Epidamnus (the Roman Dyrrachium, now Durazzo), Caesar disembarked his troops in pursuit of Pom pey. Across the Adriatic the expanding Greeks snatched the lower coasts from the native tribes, and gave civilization to Italy. (In the end those native tribes would sweep back upon them, and one tribe, almost barbarous till .Alexander's time, would swallow them up, along with their motherland, in an unprecedented empire.) Beyond the Alps ranged the Gauls, who were to prove very friendly to the Greek city of Massalia (Marseilles); and at the western end of the Mediterranean lay Spain, already half civilized and fully exploited by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians when, about 550, the Greeks established their timid colony at Emporium (Ampurias). On the coast of Africa, menacingly opposite Sicily, was imperial Carthage, founded by Dido and the Phoenicians, tradition said, in 813; no mere village, but a city of 700,000 population, monopo lizing the commerce of the western Mediterranean, dominating Utica, Hippo, and three hundred other towns in Africa, and controlling prosperous lands, miQes, and colonies in Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain. This fabulously wealthy metropolis was fated to lead the Oriental thrust against Greece in the west, as Persia would lead it in the east.
Or the maps inside the coven of this book.
67
68	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IV
Fanher east on the African coast lay the prosperous Greek city of Cyrene, against a dark Libyan hinterland. Then Egypt. It was the belief of most Greeks that many elements of their civilization had come to them from Egypt; their legends ascribed the foundation of several Greek cities to men who, like Cadmus and Danaus, had come from Egypt, or had brought Egyptian culture to Greece by way of Phoenicia or Crete." Under the Saite kings (663-525) Egyptian commerce and art revived, and the ports of the Nile were for the first time opened to Greek trade. From the seventh century onward many famous Greeks
-Thales, Pythagoras, Solon, Plato, and Democritus may serve as examples visited Egypt, and were much impressed by the fullness and antiquity of its culture. Here were no barbarians, but men who had had a mature civilization, and highly developed arts, two thousand years before the fall of Troy. "You Greeks," said an Egyptian priest to Solon, "are mere children, talkative and vain, and knowing nothing of the past."' When Hecataeus of Miletus boasted to the Egyptian priests that he could trace his ancestry through fifteen gen erations to a god, they quietly showed him, in their sanctuaries, the statues of 345 high priests, each the son of the preceding, making 345 generations since the gods had reigned on eanh.1 From the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, in the belief of Greek scholars like Herodotus and Plutarch, came the Orphic doctrine of a judgment after death, and the resurrection ritual of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis.8 Probably in Egypt, Thales of Miletus learned geometry, and Rhoecus and Theodorus of Samos picked up the art of hollow casting in bronze; in Egypt the Greeks acquired new skills in pottery, textiles, metalwork ing, and ivory;' there, as well as from the Assyrians, Phoenicians, and Hittites, Greek sculptors took the style of their early statues-flat-faced, slant-eyed, closefisted, straight-limbed, stiff;• in the colonnades of Sakkara and Beni-Hasan, as well as in the remains of Mycenaean Greece, Greek architects found pan of their inspiration for the fluted column and the Doric style.8 And as Greece in its youth learned humbly from Egypt, so, when it was exhausted, it died, one might say, in the arms of Egypt; at Alexandria it merged its philosophies, its rites, and its gods with those of Egypt and Judea, in order that they might find a resurrected life in Rome and Christianity.
Second only to Egypt's was the influence of Phoenicia. The enterprising merchants of Tyre and Sidon acted like a circulating medium in the transmis sion of culture, and stimulated every Mediterranean region with the sciences, techniques, ans, and cults of Egypt and the Near East. They excelled and perhaps instructed the Greeks in the building of ships; they taught them better methods in metalworking, textiles, and dyes;" they played a pan, with Crete and Asia Minor, in passing on to Greece the Semitic form of the alphabet that had been developed in Egypt, Crete, and Syria. Farther east, Babylonia gave


were too timid to rally to him, or that he governed them as willfully as any tyrant, he received so little support that he had to abandon the island after a three years' campaign, making the prophetic remark, "What a battlefield I am leaving to Carthage and Rome!" Arriving with depleted forces in Italy, he was defeated at Beneventum (275), where for the first time the light-armed and mobile cohorts proved their superiority to the unwieldy phalanxes, and thereby wrote a chapter in military history.' Pyrrhus returned to Epirus, says the philo sophical Plutarch,
after he had consumed six years in these wars; and though unsuc cessful in his affairs, yet preserved his courage unconquerable among all these misfortunes, and was held, for military experience and per sonal valor and enterprise, above all the other princes of his time; but what he got by brave actions he lost again by vain hopes, and by new desires of what he had not, kept nothing of what he had.8
Pyrrhus went out now to fresh wars, and was killed with a tile by an old woman in Argos. In that same year (272) Taras yielded to Rome.
Eight years later Rome began her century-long struggle against Carthage for the mastery of the western Mediterranean. After a generation of fighting Carthage ceded to Rome Sardinia, Corsica, and the Carthaginian portions of Sicily. In the Second Punic War Syracuse made the mistake of siding with Carthage, whereupon Marcellus starved it into surrender. The victors plundered the city so thoroughly that it never recovered. Marcellus "removed to Rome," says Livy, "the ornaments of Syracuse-the statues and pictures in which it abounded.... The spoils were almost greater than if Carthage itself had been taken.'"' By 210 all Sicily had fallen forfeit to Rome. The island was trans formed into a granary for Italy, and relapsed into an agricultural economy in which nearly all the work was done by hopeless slaves. Industries were discour aged, trade was limited, wealth was sluiced off to Rome, and the free population withered away. Sicily disappeared from the history of civilization for a thou sand years.
D.  ROME THE LIBERATOR
At every step the expansion of Rome was aided by the mistakes of her enemies. In the year 230 two Romans were sent to Scodra, capital of Illyria (northern Albania) to remonstrate against the attacks of Illyrian pirates upon Roman shipping. Queen Teuta, who had been allowed to share the spoils, answered that "it was contrary to the custom of the Illyrian rulers to hinder their subjects from winning booty from the sea.na When one envoy threatened war Teuta had him killed. Pleased with so inex-
662	THE	LIFE  OF GREECF-	(CHAP. XXX
pensive an excuse for seizing the Dalmatian coast, Rome dispatched an ex pedition which reduced Illyria to a Roman protectorate almost as easily in 229 B.c. asinA.D. 1939. Corcyra (Corfu), Epidamnus (Durazzo), and other Greek settlements became Roman dependencies. Since Greek trade had also suffered from Illyrian piracy, Athens, Corinth, and the two leagues applauded Rome as a deliverer, accepted her ambassadors, and admitted the Romans to participation in the Eleusinian mysteries and the Isthmian games. In 2 1 6 Hannibal annihilated the Roman army at Cannae, and marched up to the gates of Rome. While Rome faced the greatest crisis in the history of the republic, Philip V, King of Macedon, signed an alliance with Han nibal and prepared to invade Italy (214). In the conference at Naupactus ( 2 1 3) the Aetolian delegate. Agelaus appealed for the unity of all Greeks, in
this First Macedonian War, against the rising power in the west:
It would be best of all if the Greeks never made war upon each other, but regarded it as the highest favor in the gift of the gods could they always speak with one heart and voice, and marching arm in arm like men fording a river, repel barbarian invaders and unite in preserving themselves and their cities.  For it is evident
that whether the Carthaginians beat the Romans or the Romans the Carthaginians in this war, it is not in the least likely that the victors will be content with the sovereignty of Italy and Sicily, but they are sure to come here and extend their ambitions beyond the bounds of justice. Therefore I implore you all to secure yourselves against this danger, and I address myself especially to King Philip. For you, Sire, the best security is, instead of exhausting the Greeks and making them an easy prey to the invader, on the contrary to take thought for them as for your own body, and to attend to the safety of every province of Greece as if it were part and parcel of your own do minions.•
Philip heard him politely, and became for a moment the idol of Greece. But his treaty with Hannibal, if we may believe the too patriotic Livy, specified that in return for Philip's attack upon Italy, Carthage, if success ful in the present war, would help Philip to subdue all mainland Greece to Macedonia.10 Perhaps because the terms of such an agreement became known to the Greek states, most of them, including Agelaus' Aetolian League, entered into a pact with Rome against Macedon, and kept Philip so harassed at home that his invasion of Italy was indefinitely postponed. In 10,  Rome signed a treaty with Philip so that she might give all her attention
CHAP. XXX)	THE   COMING  OF  ROME
to Hannibal, and three years later the elder Scipio overwhelmed the Car thaginian at Zama. As the last great century of Greek civilization came to an end Egypt, Rhodes, and Pergamum appealed to Rome for help against Philip. Rome responded by inviting the Second Macedonian War. Op posed by nearly all of Greece as well as by Rome, Philip fought with the ferocity of a beast at bay. He used every treachery, stole whatever he found to his purpose, and treated captives with such cruelty that every man in Abydos, when Philip's siege was proving irresistible, killed his wife and children and then himself.11 In 197 Titus Quinctius Flamininus, a patrician of the type that made Polybius a pro-Roman enthusiast, so overwhelmed Philip at Cynoscephalae that suddenly all Macedonia-indeed, all Greece lay at the mercy of Rome. To the disgust of his Aetolian allies (who claimed that they had won the battle), Flamininus, after exacting severe indemnities and appropriating a shipload of spoils, allowed the safely weakened Philip to keep his throne, on the ground that Macedonia was needed as a bulwark against the barbarians in the north.
The Roman general had learned Greek at Tarentum (as Rome called Taras), and had known the fascination of Greek literature, philosophy, and art. It was apparently his sincere resolve to liberate the Greek city-states from Macedonian domination, and to give them every opportunity to live in freedom and peace. Having with some difficulty convinced the Roman commissioners that this was a wise policy, he went to the Isthmian games at Corinth (196), where all the important Greek world was gathered (each man telling the next, says Polybius, what the Romans would do now), and announced through a herald: "The Senate of Rome; and Titus Quinctius the proconsul, having overcome King Philip and the Macedonians, leave the following people free, without garrisons, subject to no tribute, and gov erned by their own laws: the Corinthians, Phocians, Locrians, Euboeans, Phthiotic Achaeans, Magnesians, Thessalians, and Perrhaebians"-i.e., all those mainland Greeks who were not already free. The greater part of the assemblage, unable to credit so unprecedented an act of liberality, cried out that the announcement should be repeated. When the herald read it again, "such a mighty burst of cheering arose," says Polybius, "that those who listen to the tale today cannot easily conceive what it was.""' Many doubted the sincerity of the declaration, and looked for a trick behind it; but Fla mininus that day began the removal of Roman troops from Corinth, and by 194 his entire army was back in Italy. Greece hailed him as "Savior and Liberator," and entered happily upon its last days of freedom.
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.XXX
m. ROME THE CONQUEROR
The Aetolians were not satisfied with these arrangements. Some of the cities that Rome had freed had once been under Aetolian domination, and were not now restored to the League. The Second Macedonian War was hardly over when the Aetolians invited Antiochus III to rescue Greece from Rome. Pergamum and Lampsacus, caught between the restless Gauls on the north and the expanding Seleucid power on the south, appealed to Rome for help against Antiochus. The Senate sent its ablest general, Publius Scipio Africanus, victor of Zama. With a few legions and the troops of Eumenes II, the Roman generals defeated Antiochus at Magnesia, and turning north ward, drove back the Gauls. The Romans extended their protection over nearly all the Mediterranean coast of Asia, and then returned to Italy. Eumenes was grateful, but mainland Greece denounced him as a traitor to Hellas for calling in the barbarous Romans against his fellow Greeks.
For fickle Greece already regretted that she had ever accepted the favors of her rude rescuer from the west. It was observed that though Flamininus and his successors had given Greece freedom, they had taken in payment from any city that had supported Philip or Antiochus or the Aetolians-so much booty that the Greeks dreaded another such liberation. For three days, in Flamininus' triumph, the spoils of his Grecian campaign passed in continuous train before the eyes of Rome: on the first day arms, armor, and innumerable statues of marble or bronze; on the second day 18,000 pounds of silver, 3,714 pounds of gold, and 100,000 silver coins; on the third day
114 coronets." Moreover, the Romans had supponed, and now through their representatives continued actively to suppon, the moneyed classes in Greece against the poorer citizens, and had forbidden all manifestations of class war. The Greeks did not want peace at such a price; they wished to
be free to settle their own disputes, and to give play to national territorial ambitions; they could not bear changelessness. Soon the rival leagues were at odds, and faction ran rife everywhere. Each city or group laid conflicting claims before the Roman Senate; the Senate dispatched commissions to in vestigate and adjudicate; the Greeks denounced this interference as vas salage. The chains of foreign control were invisible but real; year after year the Greeks-all but the rich-felt them more sharply, and prayed for an end to this freedom. The Senate began to listen to those of its members who contended that there would never be order or quiet in Greece until Rome took full control.
In 179  Philip V died, and his eldest son Perseus, not without bloodshed,
CHAP. XXX)	THE   COMING  OF  ROME	665
inherited his throne. Seventeen years of peace had restored the economy of Macedon, and had raised up a fresh generation of youths for the jaws of war. Perseus negotiated an alliance with Seleucus IV, and married Seleucus' daughter; Rhodes joined the alliance, and sent a great fleet to escort the bride. All Greece rejoiced, and saw in Perseus a living hope against the power of Rome. Eumenes II, fearful for the independence of Pergamurn, journeyed to Rome and urged the Senate, for its own sake, to de,stroy Macedon. On his way home he was almost killed in a private quarrel. It suited Rome to interpret the brawl as a plot of Perseus to assassinate the king; and a patriotic exchange of diplomatic recriminations announced the Third Macedonian War. Only Epirus and Illyria had the courage to help Perseus; the Greek states sent him secret letters of sympathy, but did noth ing. In 168 Aemilius Paulus annihilated the Macedonian army at Pydna, destroyed seventy Macedonian cities, banished their upper classes to Italy, nd quartered the kingdom into four autonomous but tributary republics, among which all trade and intercourse were forbidden. Perseus was im• prisoned in Italy, and died of maltreatment in two years. Epirus was devas• tated, and 100,000 Epirots were sold into slavery at a dollar a head." Rhodes, which had played no active part in the war, was punished by the liberation of her possessions on the Asiatic coast, and by the establishment of a com petitive and free port at Delos. The private papers of Perseus were cap tured, and all Greeks who had offered him aid or comfort were banished or jailed. A thousand of the Achaean League's most prominent representa• tives, including Polybius, were deported to Italy; they remained in exile there for sixreen years, during which seven hundred of them died. The ad miration of Greece for Rome the liberator had never been so intense as was now the Greek hatred of Rome the conqueror.
The severity of the victors had unwilled results. The weakening of Rhodes ended her policing of the Aegean, and revived a trade-destroying piracy. The removal of so many aristocrats left the field open to radical leadership in the cities of the Achaean League, and the class war enjoyed one of its bitterest periods. The rich clung to the protection of Rome, the poor demanded the expulsion both of the rich and of the Roman power. In 150 the surviving Achaean exiles returned from Italy, and joined in the demand for the repudiation of Roman authority in Greece. To weaken the Achaean power Rome sent to Greece a commission that ordered Corinth, Orchomenos, and Argos to secede from the League. The ladies of Corinth replied by emptying pails of refuse upon the heads of the commissioners.15 In 146 the League voted for a war of liberation, hoping that Rome's cam-


Marriage is by purchase, usually in oxen or their equivalent, paid by the suitor to the father of the girl; the poet speaks of "cattle-bringing maidens.""" The purchase is reciprocal, for the father usually gives the bride a substan tial dowry. The ceremony is familial and religious, with much eating, dancing, and loose-tongued merriment. "Beneath a blaze of torches they led the brides from their chambers through the city, and loud rose the bridal song. The young men whirled in the dance, and high among them did sound the flute and the lyre";"' so changeless are the essentials of our life. Once married, the woman becomes mistress in her home, and is honored in proponion to her children. Love in the truest sense, as a profound mutual tenderness and solicitude, comes to the Greeks, as to the French, after marriage rather than before; it is not the spark thrown off by the contact or nearness of two bodies, but the fruit of long association in the cares and industries of the home. The Homeric wife is as faithful as her husband is not. There are three adulteresses in Homer-Clytaemnestra, Helen, and Aphrodite; but they do injustice to the mortal average, if not to the divine. Formed out of this background, the Homeric family (barring the enor mities of legends that play no part in Homer) is a wholesome and pleasing institution, rich in fine women and loyal children. The wor;nen function not only as mothers but as workers; they grind the grain, card the wool, spin, weave, and embroider; they do little sewing, since garments are mostly without seams; and cooking is normally left to men. Amid these labors they bear and rear children, heal their hurts, pacify their quarrels, and teach them the manners, morals, and traditions of the tribe. There is no formal education, apparently no teaching of letters, no spelling, no gram mar, no books; it is a boy's utopia. The girl is taught the ans of the home, the boy those of the chase and war; he learns to 7sh and swim, to till the fields, set snares, handle animals, aim the arrow and the lance, and take
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.m
care of himself in all the emergencies of a half-lawless life. When the oldest boy grows up to manhood he becomes, in the absence of his father the responsible head of the family. When he marries he brings his bride to his father's home, and the rhythm of the generations is renewed. The individual members of the family change with time, but the family is the lasting unit, surviving perhaps for centuries, and forging in the turbulent
.cru..cible. of the home the order and character without which all government
IS m vain.
TheArts
The Achaeans leave to merchants and lowly scribes the art of writing, which has presumably been handed down to them from Mycenaean Greece; they pre fer blood to ink and flesh to clay. In all of Homer there is but one reference to writing,.. and there in a characteristic context; a folded tablet is given to a mes senger, directing the recipient to kill the messenger. If the Achaeans have time for literature it is only when war and marauding allow a peaceful interlude; the king or prince gathers his retainers about him for a feast, and some wandering minstrel, stringing the lyre, recounts in simple . verse the exploits of ancestral heroes; this is, for the Achaeans, both poetry and history. Homer, perhaps wishing like Pheidias to engrave his own portrait upon his work, tells how Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, calls for such song in entertaining Odysseus. "Summon hither the divine minstrel, Demodocus; for to him above all others has the god granted skill in song.... Then the herald drew near, leading the good minstrel, whom the Muse loved above all other men, and gave him both good and evil; of his sight she deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet song."•
The only art except his own that interests Homer is toreutics-'the hammer ing of metals into plastic forms. He says nothing of painting or sculpture, but calls up all his inspiration to describe the scenes inlaid or damascened upon Achilles' shield, or raised in relief upon Odysseus' brooch. He speaks briefly but illuminatingly about architecture. The common dwelling in Homer is apparently of sun-dried brick with a footing of stone; the floor is ordinarily of beaten earth, and is cleaned by scraping; the roof is of reeds overlaid with clay, and slopes only enough to carry off the rain. The doors are single or double, and may have bolts or keys."° In the better dwellings the interior walls are of painted stucco, with ornamental border or frieze, and are hung with weapons, shields, and tapestries. There is no kitchen, no chimney, no windows; an open ing in the roof of the central hall lets out some of the smoke that may rise from the hearth; the rest finds its way through the door, or settles in soot on the walls. Rich establishments have a bathroom; others content themselves with a tub.
CHAP.m)	THE   HEROIC  AGE	S3
The furniture is of heavy wood, often artistically carved and finished; Icmalius fashions for Penelope an armchair set with ivory and precious metals; and Odysseus makes for himself and his wife a massive bedstead designed to last for a century.
It is characteristic of the age that its architecture ignores temples and spends itself upon palaces, just as Periclean architecture will neglect palaces and lavish itself upon temples. We hear of the "sumptuous home of Paris, which that prince had built with the aid of the most cunning architects in Troy";01 of King Alcinous' great mansion, with walls of bronze, frieze of blue-glass paste, doors of silver and gold, and other features that may belong rather to poetry than to architecture; we hear something of Agamemnon's royal residence at Mycenae, and a great deal about Odysseus' palace at Ithaca. This has a front court, paved in part with stone, surrounded by a palisade or plastered wall, and adorned with trees, stalls for horses, and a heap of steaming dung on which Odysseus' dog Argos makes his bed in the sun.• A large pillared porch leads to the house; here the slaves sleep and often the visitors. Within, an anteroom opens upon a central hall supported by pillars, and sometimes lighted not only by the open ing in the roof, but by a narrow clerestory or open space between the archi trave and the eaves. At night braziers burning on tall stands give an unsteady illumination. In the center of the hall is the hearth, 'around whose sacred fire the family gathers in the evening for warmth and good cheer, and debates the ways of neighbors, the willfulness of children, and the vicissitudes of states.
TheState
How are these passionate and vigorous Achaeans ruled? In peace by the family, in crisis by the clan. The clan is a group (genos, literally a genus) of persons acknowledging a common ancestor and a common chief tain. The citadel of the chieftain is the origin and center of the city; there, as his force subsides into usage and law, clan after clan gathers, and makes a political as well as a kinship community. When the chieftain desires some united action from his clan or city, he summons its free males to a public assembly, and submits to them a proposal which they may accept or reject, but which only the most important members of the group may propose to change. In this village assembly-the one democratic element in an essentially feudal and aristocratic society-skilled speakers who can sway the people are valuable to the state; already, in old Nestor, whose voice "flows sweeter than honey from his tongue,""" and in wily Odysseus, whose words fall "like snowflakes upon the people,""" we have the beginnings of
Argos dies of joy on recognizing his master after twenty years' separation.
54	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.III
that stream of eloquence which will reach greater heights in Greece than in any other civilization, and will finally submerge it in ruin.
When all the clans must act at once the chieftains follow the lead of the strongest of their number as king, and repon to him with their armies of freemen and attendant slaves. Those chieftains who are nearest to the king in residence and respect are called the King's Companions; they will be called that again in Philip's Macedonia and in Alexander's camp. In their boule, or council, the nobles exercise full freedom of speech, and address the king as merely and temporarily first among equals. Out of these insti tutions-public assembly, council of nobles, and king-will come, in a hun dred varieties and under a thousand shibboleths and phrases, the constitu tions of the modern Western world.
The powers of the king are mrrowly limited and very wide. They are limited in space, for his kingdom is small. They are limited in time, for he may be deposed by the Council, or by a right which the Achaeans read ily recognize-the right of the stronger. Otherwise his rule is hereditary, and has only the vaguest boundaries. He is above all a military commander, solicitous for his army, without which he might be found in the wroni. He sees to it that it is well equipped, well fed, well trained; that it has poi soned arrows,"' lances, helmets, greaves, spears, breastplates, shields, and chariots. So long as the army defends him he is the government-legisla ture, executive, judiciary. He is the high priest of the state religion, and sacrifices for the people. His decrees are the laws, and his decisions are final; there is as yet no word for law... Below him the Council may sit occa sionally to judge grave disputes; then, as if to set a precedent for all couns, it asks for precedents, and decides accordingly. Precedent dominates law because precedent is custom, and custom is the jealous older brother of law. Trials of any kind, however, are rare in Homeric society; there are hardly any public agencies of justice; each family must defend and revenge itself. Violence abounds.
To support his establishment the king does not levy taxes; he receives, now and then, "gifts" from his subjects. But he would be a poor king if he depended upon such presents. His chief income is derived, presumably, from tolls on the plunder that his soldiers and his ships gather on land or sea. Perhaps that is why, late in the thirteenth century, the Achaeans are found in Egypt and Crete; in Egypt as unsuccessful buccaneers, in Crete as passing conquerors. Then, suddenly, we hear of them inflaming their people with a tale of humiliating rape, collecting all the forces of all the tribes, equipping a hundred thousand men, and sailing in a vast and un-
CHAP.m)	THE   HEROIC  AGE	55
paralleled armada of a thousand ships to try their fortunes against the spear head of Asia on the plains and hill of Troy.
THE SIEGE OF TROY
Was there such a siege? We only know that every Greek historian, and every Greek poet, and almost every temple record or legend in Greece, took it for granted; that archeology has placed the ruined city, generously multiplied, before our eyes; and that today, as until the last century, the story and its heroes are accepted as in essence real.  An Egyptian inscrip
tion of Rameses III reports that "the isles were restless" toward 1196 B.c.;9' and Pliny alludes to a Rameses "in whose time Troy fell."08 The great Alexandrian scholar Eratosthenes, on the basis of traditional genealogies collated late in the sixth century before Christ by the geographer-historian Hecataeus, calculated the date of the siege as 1194 B.c.
The ancient Persians and Phoenicians agreed with the Greeks in tracing the great war to four abductions of beautiful women. The Egyptians, they said, stole Io from Argos, the Greeks stole Europa from Phoenicia, and Medea from Colchis; did not a just balancing of the scales require that Paris should abduct Helen?,.,.. Stesichorus in his penitent years, and after him Herodotus and Euripides, refused to admit that Helen had gone to Troy; she had only gone to Egypt, under constraint, and had merely waited there a dozen years for Menelaus to come and find her; besides, asked Herodotus, who could believe that the Trojans would fight ten years for one woman? Euripides attributed the expedition to excess population in Greece, and the consequent urge to expansion;"° so old are the youngest excuses of the will to power.


"Hall of the Double Ax"; adding near by the conveniences of a theater, a royal villa, and a cemetery. On the lowest floor they plant massive square pillars of stone; on the upper floors they use circular columns of cypress, tapering strangely downward, to support the ceilings upon smooth round capitals, or to form shady porticoes at the side. Safe in the interior against a gracefully decorated wall they set a stone seat, simply but skillfully carved, which eager diggers will call the throne of Minos, and on which every tourist will modestly seat himself and be for a moment some inches a king. This sprawling palace in all likelihood is the famous Labyrinth, or sanctuary of the Double Ax (labrys), attributed by the ancients to Daedalus, and destined to give its name in aftertime to any maze-of rooms, or words, or ears.•38
As if to please the modem spirit, more interested in plumbing than in poetry, the builders of Cnossus install in the palace a system of drainage superior to anything else of its kind in antiquity. They collect in stone con duits the water that flows down from the hills or falls from the sky, direct it through shafts to the bathroomst and latrines, and lead off the waste in terra-cotta pipes of the latest style-each section six inches in diameter and thirty inches long, equipped with a trap to catch the sediment, tapering at one end to fit into the next section, and bound to this firmly with a necking of cement... Possibly they include an apparatus for supplying running hot water to the household of the king.t"9
To the complex interiors the artists of Cnossus add the most delicate decorations. Some of the rooms they adorn with vases and statuettes, some with paintings or reliefs, some with huge stone amphorae or massive urns, some with objects in ivory, faience or bronze. Around one wall they run a limestone frieze with pretty triglyphs and half rosettes; around another a panel of spirals and frets on a surface painted to simulate marble; around another they carve in high relief and living detail the contests of man and bull. Through the halls and chambers the Minoan painter spreads all the glories of his cheerful art: here, caught chattering in a drawing room, are Ladies in Blue, with classic features, shapely arms, and cozy breasts; here
The ascription of rooms is, of course, highly conjectural. It should be added that nearly all the exhwned decorations of the palace have been removed to the musewn at Heraclewn or elsewhere, while much of what remains in site has been tastelessly restored.
t It is no longer agreed that the square depressions found in the floors of some rooms were baths; they have no outlets, and are made of gypswn, which water would gradually dissolve."
:j: Mosso found similar drainage pipes in the villa at Hagia Triada. "One day, after a heavy downpour of rain, I was interested to find that all the drains acted perfectly, and I saw the water flow from the sewers, through which a man could walk upright. I doubt if there is any other instance of a drainage system acting after four thousand years.'*
20	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
are fields of lotus, or lilies, or olive spray; here are Ladies at the Opera, and dolphins swimming motionlessly in the sea. Here, above all, is the lordly Cupbearer, erect and strong, carrying some precious ointment in a slim blue vase; his face is chiseled by breeding as well as by art; his hair descends in-a thick braid upon his brown shoulders; his ears, his neck, his arm, and his waist sparkle with jewelry, and his costly robe is embroidered with a grace ful quatrefoil design; obviously he is no slave, but some aristocratic youth proudly privileged to serve the king. Only a civilization long familiar with order and wealth, leisure and taste, could demand or create such luxury and such ornament.
THE FALL OF CNOSSUS
When in retrospect we seek the origin of this brilliant culture, we find ourselves vacillating between Asia and Egypt. On the one hand, the Cretans seem kin in language, race, and religion to the Indo-European peoples of Asia Minor; there, too, clay tablets were used for writing, and the shekel was the standard of measurement; there, in Caria, was the cult of Zeus Labrandeus, i.e., Zeus of the Double Ax (labrys) ; there men worshiped the pillar, the bull, and the dove; there, in Phrygia, was the great Cybele, so much like the mother goddess of Crete that the Greeks called the latter Rhea Cybele, and considered the two divinities one.'"a And yet the signs of Egyptian influence in Crete abound in every age. The two cultures are at first so much alike that some scholars presume a wave of Egyptian emigra tion to Crete in the troubled days of Menes." The stone vases of Mochlos and the copper weapons of Early Minoan I are strikingly like those found in Proto-Dynastic tombs; the double ax appears as an amulet in Egypt, and even a "Priest of the Double Ax"; the weights and measures, though Asiatic in value, are Egyptian in form; the methods used in the glyptic arts, in faience, and in painting are so similar in the two lands that Spengler reduced Cretan civilization to a mere branch of the Egyptian."
We shall not follow him, for it will not do, in our search for the continu
ity of civilization, to surrender the individuality of the parts. The Cretan quality is distinct; no other people in antiquity has quite this flavor of minute refinement, this concentrated elegance in life and art. Let us believe that in its racial origins the Cretan culture was Asiatic, in many of its arts Egyptian; in essence and total it remained unique. Per.haps it belonged to a complex of civilization common to all the Eastern- Mediterranean, in which each nation inherited kindred arts, beliefs, and ways from a wide spread neolithic culture parent to them all. From that common civilization
CHAP. I)	CRETE	21
Crete borrowed in her youth, to it she contributed in her maturity. Her rule forged an order in the isles, and her merchants found entry at every port. Then her wares and her arts pervaded the Cyclades, overran Cyprus, reached to Caria and Palestine,.. moved north through Asia Minor and its islands to Troy, reached west through Italy and Sicily to Spain," penetrated the mainland of Greece even to Thessaly, and passed through Mycenae and Tiryns into the heritage of Greece. In the history of civilization Crete was the first link in the European chain.
We do not know which of the many roads to decay Crete chose; perhaps she took them all. Her once famous forests of cypress and cedar vanished; today two thirds of the island are a stony waste, incapable of holding the winter rains... Perhaps there too, as in most declining cultures, population control went too far, and reproduction was left to the failures. Perhaps, as wealth and luxury increased, the pursuit of physical pleasure sapped the vitality of the race, and weakened its will to live or to defend itself; a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean. Possibly the collapse of Egypt after the death of Ikhnaton disrupted Creto-Egyptian trade, and diminished the riches of the Minoan kings. Crete had no great internal resources; her prosperity required commerce, and markets for her industries; like modem England she had become dangerously dependent upon control of the seas. Perhaps internal wars decimated the island's manhood, and left it disunited against foreign attack. Perhaps an earthquake shook the palaces into ruins, or some angry revolution avenged in a year of terror the accumulated oppressions of centuries.
About 1450 the palace of Phaestus was again destroyed, that of Hagia Triada was burned down, the homes of the rich burghers of Tylissus dis appeared. During the next fifty years Cnossus seems to have enjoyed the zenith of her fortune, and a supremacy unquestioned throughout the Aegean. Then, about 1400, the palace of Cnossus itself went up in :flames. Everywhere in the ruins Evans found signs of uncontrollable fire-charred beams and pillars, blackened walls, and clay tablets hardened against time's tooth by the conflagration's heat. So thorough was the destruction, and so complete the removal of metal even from rooms covered and protected by debris, that many students suspect invasion and conquest rather than earth quake.*"' In any case, the catastrophe was sudden; the workshops of artists
H archeological chronology would permit the deferment of this confia tion to the n :hood of 1250 it would be convenient to interpret the tragedy as an mcident in the A		conquest of the Aegean preliminary to the siege of Troy.
22	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. I
and artisans give every indication of having been in full activity when death arrived. About the same time Gournia, Pseira, Zakro, and Palaikastro were leveled to the ground.
We must not suppose that Cretan civilization vanished overnight. Palaces were built again, but more modestly, and for a generation or two the pro ducts of Crete continued to dominate Aegean art. About the middle of the thirteenth century we come at last upon a specific Cretan personality-that King Minos of whom Greek tradition told so many frightening tales. His brides were annoyed at the abundance of serpents and scorpions in his seed; but by some secret device his wife Pasiphae eluded these,'1 and safely bore him many children, among them Phaedra (wife of Theseus and lover of Hippolytus) and the fair-haired Ariadne. Minos having offended Poseidon, the god afflicted Pasiphae with a mad passion for a divine bull. Daedalus pitied her, and through his contrivance she conceived the terrible Minotaur. Minos imprisoned the animal in the Labyrinth which Daedalus had built at his command, but appeased it periodically with human sacrifice."'
Pleasanter even in its tragedy is the legend of Daedalus, for it opens one of the proudest epics of human history. Greek story represented him as an Athenian Leonardo who, envious of his nephew's skill, slew him in a moment of temperament, and was banished forever from Greece. He found refuge at Minos' court, astonished him with mechanical inventions and novelties, and became chief artist and engineer to the king. He was a great sculptor, and fable used his name to personify the graduation of statuary from stiff, dead figures to vivid portraits of possible men; the creatures made by him, we are informed, were so lifelike that they stood up and walked away unless they were chained w their pedestals... But Minos was peeved when he learned of Daedalus' connivance with Pasiphae's amours, and con fined him and his son Icarus in the maze of the Labyrinth. Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and Icarus, and by their aid they leaped across the walls and soared over the Mediterranean. Disdaining his father's coun sel, proud Icarus flew too closely to the sun; the hot rays melted the wax on his wings, and he was lost in the sea, pointing a moral and adorning a tale. Daedalus, empty-hearted, flew on to Sicily, and stirred that island to civiliza tion by bringing to it the industrial and artistic culture of Crete.•""
Pausanias, father of all Baedekers, credits Daedalus with several statues, mostly of wood, and a marble relief of Ariadne dancing, as all extant in the second century A.D.n The Greeks never doubted the reality of Daedalus, and the experience of Schliemann warns us to be skeptical even of our skepticism. Old traditions have a way of being easily rejected by one generation of scholars, and laboriously confirmed by the next.
CHAP. I)	CRETE
More tragic still is the story of Theseus and Ariadne. Minos, victorious in a war against youthful Athens, exacted from that city, every ninth year, a tribute of seven girls and seven young men, to be devoured by the Minotaur. On the coming of the third occasion for this national humiliation the handsome Theseus-his father King Aegeus reluctantly consenting-had himself chosen as one of the seven youths, for he was resolved to slay the Minotaur and end the recurrent sacrifice. Ariadne pitied the princely Athenian, loved him, gave him a magic sword, and taught him the simple trick of unraveling thread from his arm as he penetrated the Labyrinth. Theseus killed the Minotaur, followed the thread back to Ariadne, and took her with him on his flight from Crete. On the isle of Naxos he married her as he had promised, but while she slept he and his companions sailed treach erously away.*"'
With Ariadne and Minos, Crete disappears from history till the coming of Lycurgus to the island, presumably in the seventh century. There are indications that the Achaeans reached it in their long raid of Greece in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, and Dorian conquerors settled there towards the end of the second millennium before Christ. Here, said many Cretans and some Greeks,"" Lycurgus, arid in less degree Solon, had found the model for their laws. In Crete as in Sparta, after the island had come under Dorian sway, the ruling class led a life of at least outward simplicity and restraint; the boys were brought up in the army, and the adult males ate together in public mess halls; the state was ruled by a senate of elders, and was administered by ten kosmoi or orderers, corresponding to the ephors of Sparta and the archons of Athens."' It is difficult to say whether Crete taught Sparta, or Sparta Crete; perhaps both states were the parallel results of similar conditions-the precarious life of an alien military aristocracy amid a native and hostile population of serfs. The comparatively enlight ened law code of Gortyna, discovered on the walls of that Cretan town in


CRAP.fl)	THE  HEROIC  AGE	43
and found his way to Colchis, at the farther end of the Black Sea; there he sacrificed the ram and hung up its fleece as an offering to Ares, god of war. Aietes, King of Colchis, set a sleepless dragon to watch the fleece, for an oracle had said that he should die if a stranger carried it off; and to better assure himself he decreed that all strangers coming to Colchis should be put to death. His daughter Medea, who loved strange men and ways, pitied the wayfarers who entered Colchis, and helped them to escape. Her father ordered her to be confined; but she fled to a sacred precinct near the sea, and lived there in bitter brooding till Jason found her wandering on the shore.
Some twenty years before (Greek chronologists said about 1245), Pelias, son of Poseidon, had usurped the throne of Aeson, King of Iolcus in Thessaly. Aeson's infant son Jason had been hidden by friends, and had grown up in the woods to great strength and courage. One day he ap peared in the market place, dressed in a leopard skin and armed with two spears, and demanded his kingdom. But he was simple as well as strong, and Pelias persuaded him to undertake a heavy task as the price of the throne-to recover the Golden Fleece. So Jason built the great ship Argo (the Swift), and called to the adventure the bravest spirits in Greece. Heracles came, with his beloved companion Hylas; and Peleus, father of Achilles; Theseus, Meleager, Orpheus, and the fleet-footed maiden Atal anta. As the vessel entered the Hellespont it was halted, seemingly by some force from Troy, for Heracles left the expedition to sack the city and kill its King Laomedon, and all his sons but Priam.
When, after many tribulations, the Argonauts reached their goal, they were warned by Medea of the death that awaited all strangers in Colchis. But Jason persisted; and Medea agreed to help him gain the Fleece if he would take her to Thessaly and keep her as his wife until he died. He pledged himself to her, captured the Fleece with her aid, and fled back to his ship with her and his men. Many of them were wounded, but Medea quickly healed them with roots and herbs. When Jason reached Iolcus he again asked for the kingdom, and Pelias again delayed. Then Medea, by the arts of a sorceress, deceived the daughters of Pelias into boiling him to death. Frightened by her magic powers, the people drove her and Jason from lolcus, and debarred him forever from the throne.18 The rest belongs to Euripides.
A myth is often a bit of popular wisdom personified in poetic figures, as the story of Eden suggests the disillusionment of knowledge and the liabili-
44	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.m
ties of love; legend is often a fragment of history swelling with new fictions as it rolls down the years. It is probable that in the gene.ration before the historic siege of Troy the Greeks had tried to force their way through the Hellespont and open the Black Sea to colonization and trade; the story of the Argonauts may be the dramatized memory of that commercial explora tion; and the "golden fleece" may refer to the woolen skins or cloths an ciently used in northern Asia Minor to catch particles of gold carried down by the streams." A Greek settlement was actually made, about this time, on the island of Lemn6s, not far from the Hellespop.t. The Black Sea proved inhospitable despite its propitiating name, and the fortress of Troy rose again after Heracles' visitation to discourage adventures in the strait. But the Greeks did not forget; they would come again, a thousand ships in stead of one; and on the plain of Ilion the Achaeans would destroy them selves to free the Hellespont.
HOMERIC CIVILIZATION
How shall we reconstruct the life of Achaean Greece ( 1300-1100 B.c.) out of the poetry of its legends? Our chief reliance must be upon Homer, who may never have existed, and whose epics are younger by at least three centuries than the Achaean Age. It is true that archeology has surprised the archeologists by making realities of Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, Cnossus, and other cities described in the Iliad, and by exhmning a Mycenaean civilization strangely akin to that which spontaneously takes form between the lines of Homer; so that our inclination today is to accept as real the central characters of his fascinating tales. None the less, it is impossible to say how far the poems reflect the age in which the poet lived, rather than the age of which he writes. We shall merely ask, then, what did Greek tradition, as gathered together in Homer, conceive the Homeric Age to be? In any case we shall have a picture of Hellas in buoyant transit from the Aegean culture to the civilization of historic Greece.
Labor
The Achaeans (i.e., the Greeks of the Heroic Age) impress us as less civ ilized than the Mycenaeans who preceded them, and more civilized than the Dorians who followed them. They are above all physical-the men tall and powerful, the women ravishingly lovely in an unusually literal sense. Like the Romans a thousand years after them, the Achaeans look down upon literary
CHAP.m)	THE   HEROIC  AGE	45
culture as effeminate degeneration; they use writing under protest, and the only literature they know is the martial lay and unwritten song of the trouba dour. If we believe Homer we must suppose that Zeus had realized in Achaean society the aspiration of the American poet who wrote that if he were God he would make all men strong, and all women beautiful, and would then himself become a man. Homeric Greece is kalligynaikti"-it is a dream of fair women. The men too are handsome, with their long hair and their brave beards; the greatest gift that a man can give is to cut off his hair and lay it as an offering upon the funeral pyre of his friend.'" Nakedness is not yet cultivated; both sexes cover the body with a quadrangular garment folded over the shoulders, tied with a clasp pin, and reaching nearly to the knees; the women may add a veil or a gird!e, and the men a loincloth-which, as dignity increases, :will evolve into drawers and trousers. The well to do go in for costly robes, such as that which Priam brings humbly to Achilles in ransom for his son.17 The men are barelegged, the women bare-armed; both wear shoes or sandals outdoors, but are usually barefoot within. Both sexes wear jewelry, and the women and Paris anoint the body with "rose-scented oil."18
How do these men and women live? Homer shows them to us tilling the soil, sniffing with pleasure the freshly turned dark earth, running their eyes with pride along the furrows they have ploughed so straight, winnowing the wheat, irrigating the fields, and banking up the streams against the winter floods;:u, he makes us feel the despair of the peasant whose months of toil are washed out by "the torrent at the full that in swift course shatters the dykes, neither can the long line of mounds hold it in, nor the walls of the fruitful orchards stay its sudden coming.""' The land is hard to farm, for much of it is mountain, or swamp, or deeply wooded hill; the villages are visited by wild beasts, and hunt ing is a necessity before it becomes a sport. The rich are great stockbreeders, raising cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses; one Erichthonius keeps three thou sand brood mares with their foals.st The poor eat fish and grain, occasionally vegetables; warriors and the rich rely upon great portions of roast meat; they breakfast on meat and wine. Odysseus and his swineherd eat, between them, a small roast pig for luncheon, and a third of a five-year-old hog for dinner."" They have honey instead of sugar, meat fat instead of butter; instead of bread they eat cakes of grain, baked large and thin on a plate of iron or a hot stone. The diners do not recline, as the Athenians will do, but sit on chairs; not at a central table but along the walls, with little tables between the seats. There are no forks, spoons, or napkins, and only such knives as the guests may carry; eating is managed with the fingers... The staple drink, even among the poor and among children, is diluted wine.
The land is owned by the family or the clan, not by the individual; the father administers and controls it, but he rmnot sell it."' In the Iliad great tracts are
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
called the King's Commons or Demesne (temenos); in effect it belongs to the community, and in its fields any man may pasture his flocks. In the Odyssey these common lands are being divided, and sold to-or appropriated by-rich or strong individuals; the commons disappears in ancient Greece precisely as in modem England.•
The soil might yield metal as well as food; but the Achaeans neglect to mine the earth, and are content to import copper and tin, silver and gold, and a strange new luxury, iron. A shapeless mass of iron is offered as a precious prize at the games held in honor of Patroclus_,.. it will make, says Achilles, many an agricultural implement. He says nothing of weapons, which are still of bronze."' The Odyssey describes the tempering of iron,• but th t epic probably belongs to a later agt:, than the Iliad.
The smith at his forge and the potter at his wheel work in their shops; other Homeric craftsmen-saddlers, masons, carpenters, cabinetmakers-go to work at the home that has ordered their product. They do not produce for a market, for sale or profit; they work long hours, but leisurely, without the sting and stimulus of visible competition."" The family itself provides most of its needs; everyone in it labors with his hands; even the master of the house, even the local king, like Odysseus, makes bed and chairs for his home, boots and saddles for himself; and unlike the later Greeks he prides himself on his manual skill. Penelope, Helen, and Andromache, as well as their servant women, are busy with spinning, weaving, embroidery, and household cares; Helen seems lovelier when she displays her needlework to Telemachus"° than when she walks in beauty on the battlements of Troy.
The craftsmen are freemen, never slaves as in classic Greece. Peasants may in emergency be conscripted to labor for the king, but we do not hear of serfs bound to the soil. Slaves are not numerous, nor is their position degraded; they are mostly female domestics, and occupy a position in effect as high as that of household servants today, except that they are bought and sold for long terms instead of for precariously brief engagements. On occasion they are brutally treated; normally they are accepted as members of the family, are cared for in illness or depression or old age, and may develop a humane relation of affection with master or mistress. Nausicaa helps her bondwomen tQ wash the family linen in the stream, plays ball with them, and altogether treats them as com panions.11 If a slave woman bears a son to her master, the child is usually free.• Any man, however, may become a slave, through capture in battle or in piratical raids. This is the bitterest aspect of Achaean life.
Homeric society is rural and local; even the "cities" are mere villages nestling against hilltop citadels. Communication is by messenger or herald, or, over
''When a smith tempers in cold water a great ax or an adze, it gives off a hissing; this is
what gives iron its strength."D
CHAP.m)	THE   HEROIC  AGE	47
long distances, by signal fires flashing from peak to peak.• Overland traffic is made difficult and dangerous by roadless mountains and swamps and bridgeless streams. The carpenter makes carts with four wheels boasting of spokes and wooden tires; even so most goods are carried by mules or men. Trade by sea is easier, despite pirates and storms; natural harbors are numerous, and only on the perilous four-day trip from Crete to Egypt does the ship lose sight of land. Usu ally the boat is beached at night, and crew and passengers sleep on trusty land. In this age the Phoenicians are still better merchants and mariners than the Greeks. The Greeks revenge themselves by despising trade, and pref erring piracy.


Only one of these studies survives-the Athenaion Politeia, found in 1891. It is an admir able constitutional history of Athens.
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY	535
lapses into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, timocracy into democracy in the sense of rule by the common man.""' When the single ruler is good and able, monarchy is the best form of government; when he is a selfish autocrat we have tyranny, which is the worst form of government. An aristocratic government may be beneficial for a time, but aristocracies tend to deteriorate. "Noble character is now seldom found among those of noble birth, most of whom are good for nothing   Highly gifted families
often degenerate into maniacs, as, for example, the descendants of Alcibi ades and the elder Dionysius; those that are stable often degenerate into fools and dullards, like the descendants of Cimon, Pericles, and Socrates."200 When aristocracy decays it is usually replaced by a plutocratic oligarchy, which is government by wealth. This is better than the despotism of a king or a mob; but it gives power to men whose souls have been cramped by the petty calculations of trade, or the villainous taking of interest,208 and issues, as like as not, in the conscienceless exploitation of the poor.=
Democracy-which here means government by the demos, by the com mon citizen-is just as dangerous as oligarchy, for it is based upon the pass ing victory of the poor over the rich in the struggle for power, and leads to a suicidal chaos. De_mocracy is at its best when it is dominated by peasant proprietors; it is at its worst when ruled by the urban rabble of mechanics and tradesmen.= It is true that the "multitude judge of many things better than any one person, and that from their numbers they are less liable to corruption, as water is from its quantity.""12 But government requires spe cial ability and knowledge; and "it is impossible for one who lives the life of a mechanic or hired servant to acquire excellence"ma-i.e., good charac ter, training, and judgment. All men are created unequal; "equality is just, but only between equals";2 and the upper classes will as readily make sedi tions if an unnatural equality is enforced, as the lower classes will rebel when inequality is unnaturally extreme.*2111 When a democracy is dom inated by the lower classes the rich are taxed to provide funds for the poor. "The poor receive it and again want the same supply, while the giving it is like pouring water into a sieve.'"11 And yet a wise conservative will not let people starve. "The true patriot in a democracy ought to take care that the majority are not too poor ... he should endeavor that they may enjoy perpetual plenty; and as this is also advantageous to the rich, what can be saved out of the public money should be divided among the poor in such quantity as may enable each of them to buy a little field."2111
Even slavery is legitimate, Aristotle thinks: as it is right that the mind should rule t e body, so it is just that those who excel in intelligence should rule those who excel only m strength."'"
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XX!
Having thus given back almost as much as he took away, Aristotle offers
$Orne modest recommendations, not for a utopia but for a moderately better society.
We proceed to inquire what form of government and manner of life is best for communities in general, not adapting it to that su perior vinue which is above the reach of the common people, or that education which only every advantage of nature and fortune can furnish, JJ.Or to those imaginary plans which may be formed at pleasure; but to that mode of life which the greater part of mankind can attain to, and that government which most cities may establish."'"
. . . Whoever would establish a government upon community of goods ought to consult the experience of many years, which would plainly enough inform him whether such a scheme 1s useful; for al most all things have already been found out.220 •••  What is common to many is taken least care of; for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.sm ... It is necessary to begin by assuming a principle of general application, viz., that the part of the state which desires the con tinuance of the new constitution ought to be strbnger than that winch does not.""" . . . It is plain, then, that those states are best instituted wherein the middle classes are a larger and more formid able part than either the rich or the poor.... Whenever the num ber of those in the middle state has been too small, those who were the more numerous, whether the rich or the poor, always over powered them, and assumed to themselves the administration of public affairs.... When either the rich get the better of the poor, or the poor of the rich, neither of them will establish a free state....
To avoid these illiberal dictatorships from above or below, Aristotle pro poses a "mixed constitution" or "timocracy"-a combination of aristocracy and democracy, in which the suffrage will be restricted to landowners, and a strong middle class will be the balance wheel and pivot of power. "The land ought to be divided into two parts, one of which should belong to the community in general, the other to the individuals separately."'"' All the citizens will own land; they "are to eat at public tables in certain com panies"; and only they shall vote or bear arms. They will constitute a small minority-ten thousand at most-of the population. "None of them should be permitted to exercise any mechanic employment or live by trade, for these are ignoble, and destroy excellence.""" But "neither should they be husbandmen; ...	the husbandmen should be a separate order of people"- presumably slaves. The citizens will elect the public officials, and hold each
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY	537
to account at the end of his term. "Laws, properly enacted, should define the issue of all cases as far as possible, and leave as little as possible to the discretion of the judges... _,,..,. "It is better that law should rule than any individual. ... He who entrusts any man with the supreme power gives it to a wild beast, for such his appetites sometimes make him; passion influ ences those who are in power, even the very best of men; but law is reason without desire."221 The state so constructed shall regulate property, in dustry, marriage, the family, education, morals, music, literature, and art. "It is even more necessary to take care that the increase of the people should not exceed a certain number . . . to neglect this is to bring cer tain poverty upon the citizens."= "Nothing imperfect or maimed shall be brought up.""20 Out of these sound foundations will grow the flowers of civilization and tranquillity. "Since the highest virtue is intelligence, the pre-eminent duty of the state is not to train the citizens to military excel lence, but to educate them for the right use of peace."""°
It is unnecessary to sit in judgment upon Aristotle's work. Never before, so far as we know, had anyone reared so impressive an edifice of thought. When a man covers a vast field many errors may be forgiven him if the result adds to our comprehension of life. Aristotle's faults-or those of the volumes that we perhaps wrongly count as the considered product of his pen-are too obvious to need retailing. He is a logician, but is quite capable of bad reasoning; he lays down the laws of rhetoric and poetry, but his books are a jungle of disorder, and no breath of imagination stirs their dusty leaves. And yet, if we penetrate this verbiage we find a wealth of wisdom, and an intellectual industry that opened many paths in the country of the mind. He did not quite found biology, or constitutional history, or literary criticism-there are no beginnings-but he did more for them than any other ancient whom we know. To him science and philosophy owe a multitude of terms that in their Latin forms have facilitated learned com munication and thought-principle,maxim, faculty, mean, category, energy, motive, habit, end....Hewas, as Pater called him, "the first of the School men";081 and his long ascendancy over philosophical method and speculation suggests the fertility of his ideas and the depth of his insight. His treatises on ethics and politics stand above every rival in fame and influence. When all deductions have been made he still remains "the master of those who know," an encouraging testimony to the elastic range of the human in tellect, and a comforting inspiration to those who labor to bring man's scattered knowledge together into perspective and understanding.
CHAPTER XXII
Alexander
THE SOUL OF A CONQUEROR
HE intellectual career of Aristotle, after he left his royal pupil, par alJeled the military career of Alexander; both lives were expressions
of conquest and synthesis. Perhaps it was the philosopher who instilled into the mind of the youth that ardor for unity which gave some grandeur to Alexander's victories; more probably that resolve descended to him from his father's ambitions, and was fused into a passion by his maternal blood. If we would understand Alexander we must always remember that he bore in his veins the drunken vigor of Philip and the barbaric intensity of Olym pias. Furthermore, Olympias claimed descent from Achilles. Therefore the Iliad had a special fascination for Alexander; when he crossed the Helles pont he was, in his interpretation, retracing the steps of Achilles; when he conquered Hither Asia he was completing the work that his ancestor had begun at Troy. Through all his campaigns he carried with him a copy of the Iliad annotated by Aristotle; often he placed it under his pillow at night beside his dagger, as if to symbolize the instrument and the goal.
Leonidas, an austere Molossian, trained the boy's body, Lysimachus taught him letters, Aristotle tried to form his mind. Philip was anxious that Alexander should study philosophy, "so that," he said, "you may not do a great many things of the sort that I am sorry to have done."' To some extent Aristotle made a Hellene of him; through all his life Alexander ad mired Greek literature, and envied Greek civilization. To two Greeks sitting with him at the wild banquet at which he slew Cleitus he said, ''Do you not feel like demigods among savages when you are sitting in com pany with these Macedonians? ,,a
Physically, Alexander was an ideal youth. He was good in every sport: a swift runner, a dashing horseman, a brilliant fencer, a practiced bowman, a fearless hu ter. His friends wished him to enter the foot races at Olympia; he answered that he would be willing, if his opponents were kings. When
all others had failed to tame the giant horse Bucephalu.s, Alexander suc
ceeded; seeing which, says Plutarch, Philip acclaimed him with prophetic words: "My soh, Macedonia is too small for you; seek out a larger empire,
538


Socr. But when a man begins to get older, he will no longer be guilty of that sort of insanity; he will follow the example of the reasoner who is seeking for truth, and not of the eristic who is contradicting for the sake of amusement; and the greater considera tion of his character will increase and not diminish the honor of the pursuit."'
Plato and his aides taught by lecturing, by dialogue, and by setting prob lems to the students. One problem was to find "the uniform and ordered movements by the assumption of which the apparent motions of the planets can be accounted for";"8 possibly Eudoxus and Heracleides derived some stimulus from these tasks. The lectures were technical, and sometimes dis appointed those who had hoped for practical gain; but pupils like Aristotle,
Demosthenes, Lycurgus, Hypereides, and Xenocrates were deeply influ enced by them, and in many cases published the notes they had taken.
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY
Antiphanes said humorously that just as, in a far northern city, words froze into ice as they were spoken, and were heard in the summer when they thawed, so the words spoken by Plato to his students in their youth were finally understood by them only in their old age.""
The Artist
Plato himself professed never to have written any technical treatises,70 and Aristotle refers to the teaching in the Academy as Plato's "unwritten doctrine."" How far this differed from the teaching of the Dialogues we do not know.* Probably these were undertaken originally as a recreation, and in a half-humorous vein." It is one of the playful ironies of history that the philosophical works most reverenced and studied in European and American universities today were composed in an attempt to make philoso phy intelligible to the layman by binding it up with a human personality. It was not the first time that philosophical dialogues had been written; Zeno of Elea and several others had used this method,'" and Simon of Ath ens, a leather cutter, had published, in dialogue, a report of the Socratic conversations held in his shop." It was in Plato a literary, not an historical, form; he did not pretend to give accurate accounts of conversations held thirty or .fifty years before, nor even to keep his references consistent. Gorgias, as well as Socrates, was astounded to hear the words that the young dramatist-philosopher had put into his mouth.'" The Dialogues were writ ten independently of one another, and perhaps at long intervals; we must not be shocked by slips of memory, much less by changes of view. There is no design unifying the whole, except as the continuing search of a visibly
developing mind for a truth which it never finds.t
The Dialogues are cleverly and yet poorly constructed. They vivify the drama of ideas, and build up a coherent and affectionate portrait of Socrates; but they seldom achieve unity or continuity, they often wander from subject to subject, and they are frequently cast into a clumsily indirect mood by being presented as narrative reports, by one man, of other men's
Certain passages in Aristotle suggest a different understanding of Plato-especially of the theory of Ideas-than that which we get from the Dialogues.
t The thirty-six Dialogues cannot be dated or authoritatively classified. We may arbi
trarily divide them into (1) an early group-chiefly the Apology, Crito, Ly sis, Ion, Charmides, Cratylus, Euthyphro, and Euthydemus; (z) a middle group-chiefly Gorgias, Protagoras, Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic; and (3) a later group-chiefly Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, and Laws. The first group was probably composed before the age of thirty-four, the second before forty, the third after sixty, the interval being devoted to the Academy.'"
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XX!
conversations. Socrates tells us that he has "a wretched memory,"" and then recites to a friend, verbatim, fifty-four pages of a discussion which he had carried on in his youth with Protagoras. Most of the Dialogues are weakened by the absence of vigorous interlocutors capable of saying to Socrates something .other than "yes" or its equivalent. But these faults are lost in the clear brilliance of the language, the humor of situation, expres sion, and idea, the living world of varied characters humanly realized, and the frequent opening of windows into a profound and noble mind. We may judge the value that the anci nts unconsciously put upon these Dia logues when we consider that they are the most complete product that has come down to us from any Greek author. Their form entitles them to as high a place in the annals of literature as their content has given them in the history of thought.
The earlier Dialogues are excellent examples of the youthful "eristic" condemned in the passage quoted a while back, but they are redeemed by the charming pictures they give of Athenian youth. The Symposium is the masterpiece of its genre, and the best introduction to Plato; its dramatic mise en scene ("Imagine," says Agathon to his servants, "that you are our hosts, and that I and the company are your guests".,.), its living picture of Aristophanes, "hiccoughing because he had eaten too much," its lively epi sode of the drunken and scandalous Alcibiades, above all, its subtle com bination of merciless realism in the portrayal of Socrates with the loftiest idealism in his conception of love-these qualities make the Symposium one of the peaks in the history of prose. The Phttedo is more subdued, and more beautiful; here the main argument, however weak, is honest, and gives its opponents a fair chance; the style flows more smoothly over a scene whose noble calm overcomes its tragedy, making the death of Socrates come as quietly as the turn of a river out of sight around a bend. Part of the dia logue of the Phttedrus takes place on the banks of the Ilissus, while Socrates and his pupil are cooling their feet in the stream. Greatest of all dialogues, of course, is the Re-public, being the fullest exposition of Plato's philosophy, and in its earlier parts a dramatic conflict of personalities and ideas. The Pttrmenides is the worst specimen of empty logic-chopping in all literature, and the bravest example in the history of philosophy of a thinker irrefutably refuting his own mos,t beloved doctrine-the theory of Ideas. Then, in the later Dialogues, the artistry of Plato wanes, Socrates fades from the pic ture, metaphysics loses its poetry, politics its youthful ideals; until, in the Laws, the weary inheritor of all the culture of many-sided Athens surren-
CHAP.XX!)	THE	ZENITH  OF  PHILOSOPHY
ders to the lure of Spana, and gives up freedom, and poetry, and art, snd philosophy itself.
The Metaphysician
There is no system in Plato, and if here, for order's sake, his ideas are summarized under the classic heads of logic, metaphysics, ethics, esthetics, and politics, it should be remembered that Plato himself was too intense a poet to shackle his thought in a frame. Because he is a poet he has most difficulty with logic; he wanders about seeking definitions, and loses his way in perilous analogies; "then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end, came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever."19 He concludes: "I am not certain whether there is such a science of science" as logic "at all."80 Nevertheless he makes a beginning. He examines the nature of language, and derives it from iini tative sound.81 He discusses analysis and synthesis, analogies and fallacies: he accepts induction, but prefers deduction;"" he creates, even in these pop ular dialogues, technical terms-essence, power, action, passion, generation
-which will be useful to later philosophy; he names five of the ten "cate gories" that will make up part of Aristotle's fame. He rejects the Sophist view that the senses are the best test of truth, that the individual "man is the measure of all things"; if that were so, he argues, any man's, any sleeper's, any madman's, any baboon's report of the world would be as good as any other.•
All that the "rabble of the senses" gives us is a Heracleitean flux of change; if we had only sensations, we should never have any knowledge or truth at all. Knowledge is possible through Ideas, through generalized iinages and forms that mold the chaos of sensation into the order of thought."' ff we could be conscious only of individual things thought would be impossible. We learn to think by grouping things into classes according to their likenesses, and expressing the class as a whole by a common noun; man enables us to think of all men, table of all tables, light of every light that ever shone on land or sea. These Ideas (ideai, eida) are not objective to the senses but they are real to thought, for they remain, and are un changed, even when all the sense objects to which they correspond are destroyed. Men are born and die, but man survives. Every individual triangle is only imperfectly a triangle, sooner or later passes away, and therefore is relatively unreal; but triangle-the form and law of all triangles
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
-is perfect and everlasting... All mathematical forms are Ideas, eternal and complete;* everything that geometry says of triangles, circles, squares, cubes, spheres would remain true, and therefore "real," even if there had never been, and never would be, any such figures in the physical world. Abstractions also are real in this sense; individual acts of virtue have a brief existence, but virtue remains as a permanent reality for thought, and an instrument of thought; so with beauty, largeness, likeness, and so forth; these are as real to the mind as beautiful, large, or like things are real to the sense.87 Individual acts or things are what they are by partaking of, and more or less realizing, these perfect forms·or Ideas. The world of science and philosophy is composed not of individual things, but of ldeas;t.. his tory, as distinct from biography, is the story of man; biology is the science not of specific organisms, but of life; mathematics is the study not of con crete things but of number, relation, and form independently of things and yet as valid for all things. Philosophy is the science of Ideas.
Everything in Plato's metaphysics turns upon the theonyof Ideas. God, the Prime Mover Unmoved, or Soul of the World," moves and orders all things according to the eternal laws and forms, the perfect and changeless Ideas which constitute, as the Neo-Platonists would say, the Logos, or Divine Wisdom or Mind of God. The highest of the Ideas is the Good. Sometimes Plato identifies this with God himself;"' more often it is the guid ing instrument of creation, the supreme form towards which all things are drawn. To perceive this Good, to vision the molding ideal of the creative process, is the loftiest goal of knowledge."" Motion and creation are not mechanical; they require in the world, as in ourselves, a soul or principle of life as their originative power."'
Only that which has power is real;"" therefore matter is not basically real


When an artisan undertook to do a certain task for several families, and set up his shop at some center within reach of them all, village economy supplemented, but did not supersede, domestic industry. So the miller took and ground the grain of many fields; later he baked the bread, and finally he delivered it. Forty bakeries were unearthed at Pompeii, and at Rome the pastrymakers were a sepa rate guild. There were like,..-ise contractors who bought an olive crop on the trees and gathered the fruit;11 most estates, however, continued to process their own oil and bake their own bread. The clothing of peasants and philosophers was homespun, but the well-to-do wore garments that, though woven at home, were carded, cleaned, bleached, and cut in a fullery. Some delicate woolen fabrics were woren in factories; and such flax as was not made into sails or nets was
322	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XV
turned by factories into linen garments for women and handkerchiefs for men.12 In its next stage the cloth might be sent to a dyer, who not only colored it but impressed upon it such delicate designs as we find on the costumes in Pompeian murals. Tanning of leather had also reached the factory stage, but shoemakers were usually individual craftsmen, making shoes to order; some were specialists who made only fancy slippers for feminine feet.
The extractive industries were manned almost wholly by slaves or criminals. The gold and silver mines of Dacia, Gaul, and Spain, the lead and tin of Spain and Britain, the copper of Cyprus and Portugal, the sulphur of Sicily, the salt beds of Italy, the iron of Elba, the marble of Luna, Hymettus, and Paros, the porphyry of Egypt, and in general all subsoil natural resources, were owned by the state, were operated by it or on lease from it, and provided a main source of the national revenue; the gold of Spain alone yielded Vespasian $44,000,000 a year.13 The quest for minerals was a chief source of imperialist conquest; the mineral wealth of Britain, says Tacitus, was "the prize of victory" in Claudius' campaign.14 Wood and charcoal were the chief fuels. Petroleum was known in Commagene, Babylonia, and Parthia,15 and the defenders of Samosata threw it in flaming torches upon Lucullus' troops; but there is no sign of its commercial use as a fuel.• Coal was found in the Peloponnesus and northern Italy, but was used chiefly by smiths.16 The art of carburizing iron into steel had now spread from Egypt throughout the Empire. Most ironworkers, coppersmiths; gold smiths, and silversmiths had a single forge and worked with one or two appren tices. At Capua, Minturnae, Puteoli, Aquileia, Como, and elsewhere several forges and smelters were united in factories; those at Capua were apparently large-scale capitalist enterprises externally financed.
The building trades were well organized and specialized. Dendrophoroi ("tree bearers") cut and delivered the wood, fabri lignarii ("woodworkers") made houses and furniture, caementarii mixed the cement, structores laid the founda tions, arcuarii built the arches, parietarii raised the walls, tectores applied plaster, albarii whitewashed it, artifices plzcmbarii inserted the plumbing-usually with pipes of lead (plumbum), and marmorii paved marble floors; we may imagine the jurisdictional disputes. Bricks and tiles were provided by potteries, many of which had reached the factory stage. Trajan, Hadrian, and l\farcus Aurelius owned such factories and made fortunes from them.17 The kilns of Arretium, Mutina, Puteoli, Surrentum, and Pollentia supplied the ordi ary tableware of all the European and African provinces as well as Italy. This wholesale production laid no claim to artistic excellence; the emphasis was now frankly on quantity; and the terra sigillata ("signed earthenware") that now crowded the Italia,,n market was distinctly inferior to the earlier product of Arretium. Outstanding work, as ,ve shall see, was done in glass.
In the fourth century a fire dart filled with flaming naphtha, and shot from a bow or a ca apult, was ai:iong,;11e weapons of war. "It urns persistently wherever it falls," says Am nuanus Marcellmus; and water poured upon 1t rouses the fire to greater heat; and there is no way of extinguishing it except by sprinkling it with dust." Ilia
CHAP. XV)	ROME  AT WORK
The factory production of glass, brick, tiles, pottery, and metalware does not warrant us in ascribing an industrial capitalism to ancient Italy. Rome itself had only two large factories-a paper mill and a dyeing establishment;18 probably neither metals nor fuels were at hand in quantity, and the profits of politics seemed more honorable than the proceeds of industry. In the fac tories of central Italy almost all the workers, and some of the managers, were slaves; in those of north Italy there was a greater proportion of freemen. Slaves were still sufficiently available to discourage the development of machinery; listless slave labor, with small stake in the product, was not likely to make inventions; some labor-saving devices were rejected because they might have caused technological unemployment; and the purchasing power of the people was too low to stimulate or support mechanized production.19 There were of course many simple machines, common to Italy, Egypt, and the Greek world: screw presses, screw pumps, water wheels, animal-driven gr:iin mills, spinning wheels, looms, the crane and pulley, the revolving mold for pottery.... But Italian life was now (A.D. 96) as highly industrialized as life was ever to be until the nineteenth century. It would hardly go further on the basis of slavery and a high concentration of wealth. Roman law con tracepted large organizations by requiring every sharer in an industrial under taking to be a legally responsible partner; it forbade "limited liability" companies and allowed joint-stock corporations only for the performance of governmental contracts. Since similar restrictions affected banks, these could seldom provide capital for large-scale enterprise. At no time would the industrial development of Rome or Italy equal that of Alexandria or the Hellenistic East.
Ill. THECARRIERS
From Caesar to Commodus wheeled vehicles were forbidden in Rome by day; people then walked, or were carried in slave-borne chairs or litters. For longer distances they traveled on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages or chariots. Travel by public stagecoach averaged some sixty miles a day. Caesar once rode by carriage 800 miles in eight days; messengers bearing the news of Nero's death to Galba in Spain covered 33z miles in thirty-six hours; Tiberius, hurrying day and night, rode in three days 600 miles to stand beside his dying brother. The public post, by carriage or horse at all hours, averaged one hundred miles a day. Au-
	gustus had modeled it on the Persian system, as indispensable to imperial adminis tration. It was called cursus publicus as serving the res -publica, or commonwealth, by carrying official correspondence. Private individuals could use it only by rare and special permission through a government diploma ("double-folded") or passport entitling the bearer to certain privileges and introducing him en route to persons of diplomatic importance. A more rapid means of communication was
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XV
sometimes arranged by semaphores flashing signals from point to point; by this primitive telegraph the arrival of the grain ships at Puteoli was quickly made known to worried Rome. Nonofficial correspondence went by special courier or merchants or traveling friends; some traces suggest the existence, under the Empire, of private companies arranging to transmit private mail. Fewer letters were written than now, and better. Nevertheless, the movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar's day as at any time before the railway. In 54 B.c. Caesar's letter from Britain reached Cicero at Rome in twenty-nine days; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, required thirty days.20
Communication and transport were immensely aided by the consular roads.
	These were the tentacles of Roman law, the members by which the mind of Rome became the will of the realm. They achieved in the ancient world a com mercial revolution comparable in kind with that which the railroads effected in the nineteenth century. Until steam transportation came, the roads of medieval and modem Europe were inferior to those of the Empire under the Antonines. Italy alone had then 372 main routes, and 12,000 miles of paved thoroughfares; the Empire had 51 ,ooo miles of paved highways and a pervasive network of sec ondary roads. Highways ran over the Alps to Lyons, Bordeaux, Paris, Rheims, Rauen, and Boulogne; others to Vienna, Mainz, Augsburg, Cologne, Utrecht, and Leiden; and from Aquileia a road skirted the Adriatic to connect with the Via Egnatia to Thessalonica. i\1agnificent bridges replaced the ferries that had crept across a thousand impeding streams. At every mile on the consular roads stone markers gave the distance to the next town; 4000 of these survive. At in tervals seats were placed for tired travelers. At every tenth mile a statio offered a stopping place, where fresh horses could be hired; at every thirty miles was a marzsio-an inn that was also a store, a saloon, and a brothel.21 The main halting points were the civitates, cities, usually equipped with fair hotels, which were in some cases owned and managed by the municipal govemment.22 Most innkeepers robbed their guests whenever convenient, and other thieves made the highways unsafe at night despite a garrison of soldiers at each statio. "Itineraries" could be bought, showing routes, stations, and intermediate distances.23 Rich men, disdain ing the inns, brought their equipage and slaves with them, and slept in their guarded carriages or in the homes of friends or officials on the way.
Despite all difficulties, there was probably more traveling in Nero's day than at any time before our birth. "i\1any people," says Seneca, "make long voyages to see some remote sight";24 and Plutarch speaks of "globe-trotters who spend the best part of their lives in inns and on boats." 25 Educated Romans flocked to Greece and Egypt and Greek Asia, scratched their names on historic monuments; sought healing waters or climates, ambled by art collections in the temples, studied under famous philosophers, rhetors, or physicians, and doubtless used Pausanias as their Baedeker.26
These "grand tours" usually involved a voyage on one or more of the merchant vessels that cut the Mediterranean with a hundred routes of trade. "Look at the
CHAP. XV)	ROME  AT WORK
harbors and seas," exclaimed Juvenal, "filled with great keels, more peopled than the land." 27 Rome's rival ports, Puteoli, Ponus, and Ostia, were alive with fabri navales building ships, stuppatores calking them, saburarii loading sand into them as ballast, sacrarii unloading grain in sacks, mensores weighing it, lenuncularii operating tenders between large ships and the shore, and urinatores diving for goods fallen into the sea. Of corn barges alone twenty-five were drawn up the Tiber every working day; if we add the transport of building stone, metals, oil, wine, and a thousand other articles, we picture a river teeming with commerce and noisy with loading and carrying machines, with dockmen, porters, steve dores, traders, brokers, and clerks.
Ships were driven with sails, aided by one or more banks of oars. They were larger, on the average, than before; Athenaeus describes a grain cargo vessel as
420 feet long with a fifty-seven-foot beam;29 but this was highly exceptional. Some vessels had three decks; many took 250, several took a thousand, tons of freight. Josephus tells of one that carried 6oo persons-passengers and crew;30 another carried an Egyptian obelisk as large as that in Central Park, New York, together with 200	sailors, 1 300	passengers, 93,000 bushels of wheat, and a load of linen, pepper, paper, and glass.31 Nevertheless, voyages except along the coasts were still dangerous, as Saint Paul found; between November and .March only a few vessels ventured across the open Mediterranean, and in midsummer east ward voyages were made almost impossible by the etesian winds. Night sailing was now frequent, and every harbor of any pretense had a good lighthouse. Danger of piracy had almost disappeared from the Mediterranean. To discourage it, and starve rebellion, Augustus had stationed two main war fleets at Ravenna on the Adriatic and at Misenum on the Bay of Naples, besides minor squadrons at ten other points in the Empire. We may judge what Pliny called "the im mense majesty of the Roman peace" by the fact that for two centuries we hardly hear of these fleets.
Passenger schedules were largely indefinite, as sailings were determined by Weather and commercial convenience. Rates were low-e.g., two drachmas ($1.20) from Athens to Alexandria; but passengers brought their own food, and probably most of them slept on deck. Speed was as moderate as the fares, and varied with the winds, averaging six knots per hour; one might cross the Adriatic in a day, or, like Cicero, take three weeks from Patrae to Brundisium. A swift cruiser might make 2 30  knots in twenty-four hours.32 \Vith favorable winds, six days carried one from Sicily to Alexandria or from Gades to Ostia, and four from Utica to Rome.33 The longest and most dangerous voyage was the six-month sail from Aden, in Arabia, to India, for monsoons forced vessels to hug the pirate breeding coast all the way. At some time before A.D. 50 an Alexandrian Greek skipper, Hippalus, charted the periodicity of the monsoon winds and found that in certain seasons he could sail directly and safely across the Indian Ocean. The discovery was almost as important for that sea as the voyage of Columbus was for the Atlantic. From Egyptian ports on the Red Sea ships thereafter sailed to India in forty days. About A.D. Bo another Alexandrian captain, of unknown
•
326	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XV
name, wrote a Periplus of the Erythrean Sea as a handbook for merchants trading along the east African coast and with India. Meanwhile other mariners had developed routes through the Atlantic to Gaul, Britain, Germany, even to Scandinavia and Russia.34 Never before in human memory had the seas home so many vessels, products, and men.