in the arena.116
On the eve of their combat they were given a rich banquet. The rougher ones ate and drank heartily; others took sad leave of their \Vives and chil dren; those who were Christians joined in a last agape, or "supper of love." The next morning they entered the arena in festal dress and paraded from one end of it to the other. They were usually armed with swords, or spears, or knives, and armored with bronze helmets, shields, shoulderplates, breast plates, and greaves. They were classified according to their weapons: reticrrii, who entangled their opponents with nets and dispatched them with daggers; secutores, skilled in pursuit with shield and sword; laqueatores, slingshooters; dimachae, with a short sword in each hand; essedarii, who fought in chariots; bestiarii, who contended with beasts. Besides these enter prises the gladiators engaged in duels, in pairs or in groups. If a dueler in a single combat was seriously wounded, the provider of the games asked the spectators for their will; they held thumbs up-or waved handkerchiefs-as signs of mercy, or turned thumbs down (po/lice 'Verso) to signify that the victor was to kill the defeated forthwith.117 Any combatant who betrayed a reluctance to die aroused the resentment of the people and was prodded to
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN  ROME
bravery by hot irons.118 Richer slaughter was furnished by mass battles in which thousands of men fought with desperate ferocity. In the eight spectacles given by Augustus 10,000 men took part in such wholesale con flicts. Attendants in the garb of Charon probed the fallen with sharp rods to see if they were feigning death, and killed such actors with mallet blows on the head. Other attendants, dressed like Mercury, dragged the bodies away with hooks, while Moorish slaves gathered up the bloodied ground in shovels and spread fresh sand for the next death.
Most Romans defended the gladiatorial games on the ground that the victims had been condemned to death for serious crimes, that the sufferings they endured acted as a deterrent to others, that the courage with which the doomed men were trained to face wounds and death inspired the people to Spartan virtues, and that the frequent sight of blood and battle accustomed Romans to the demands and sacrifices of war. Juvenal, who denounced everything else, left the games unscathed; the younger Pliny, a highly civil ized man, praised Trajan for providing spectacles that impel men "to noble wounds and the scorn of death"; 119 and Tacitus reflected th;1t the blood spilled in the arena was in any case vile sanguis-the "cheap gore" of com mon men.120 Cicero was revolted by the slaughter; "what entertainment," he asks, "can possibly arise, to a refined and humanized spirit, from seeing a noble beast struck to the heart by its merciless hunter, or one of our own weak species cruelly mangled by an animal of far greater strength?" But, he added, "when guilty men are compelled to fight, no better discipline against suffering and death can be presented to the eye." 121 Seneca, drop ping in at the games during the noon recess, when most of the assemblage had left for luncheon, was shocked to see hundreds of criminals driven into the arena to amuse the remaining audience with their blood.
I come home more greedy, more cruel and inhuman, because I have been among human beings. By chance I attended a midday exhibi tion, expecting some fun, wit, and relaxation . . . whereby men's eyes may have respite from the slaughter of their fellow men. But it was quite the contrary.    These noon fighters are sent out with
no armor of any kind; they are exposed to blows at all points, and no one ever strikes in vain.    In the morning they throw men to
the lions; at noon they throw them to the spectators. The crowd demands that the victor who has slain his opponent shall face the man who will slay him in turn; and the last conqueror is reserved for another butchering    This sort of thing goes on while the stands
are nearly empty.... Man, a sacred thing to man, is killed for sport and merriment.122
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVII
THE NEW FAITHS
Religion accepted the games as proper forms of religious celebration and inaugurated them with solemn processions. The Vestal Virgins and the priests occupied seats of honor in the theaters, at the circus, and before the arena. The emperor who presided was the high priest of the state religion. Augustus and his successors h:1d done everything they could to revitalize the old faith, except to live moral lives; even the declared atheists among them, like Caligula and Nero, had carried out all the ritual traditionally due the official gods. The Luperci priests still danced through the streets on their festival day; the Arval Brethren still mumbled prayers to Mars in old Latin that no one could understand. Divination and augury were assidu ously practiced and widely trusted; all but a few philosophers believed in astrology, and the emperors who banished astrologers consulted them. Magic and sorcery, witchcraft and superstition, charms and incantations, "portents" and the interpretation of dreams were deeply woven into the tissue of Roman life. Augustus studied his dreams with the diligence of a modern psychologist; Seneca saw women sitting on the steps of the Capitol waiting the pleasure of Jupiter because their dreams had told them they were desired of the god.123 Every consul celebrated his inauguration by sacrificing steers; Juvenal, who could laugh at everything else, piously slit the throats of two lambs and a young ox in gratitude for the safe voyage of a friend. Temples were rich with gold and silver offerings; candles burned before the altars; the lips, hands, and feet of divine images were worn by the kisses of the devout. The old religion seemed still vigorous; it created new gods like Annona (gatherer of the world's corn for Rome), put new life into the worship of Fortuna and Roma, and gave powerful support to law, order, and tyranny. If Augustus had returned a year after his death he might well have claimed that his religious revival had proved a happy
success.
Despite these appearances the ancient faith was diseased at the bottom and at the top. The deification of the emperors revealed not how much the upper classes thought of their rulers, but how little they thought of their gods. Among educated men philosophy was whittling away belief even while patronizing it. Lucretius had not been without effect; men did not mention him, but merely because it was easier to practice epicureanism than to study Epicurus or his passionate expositor. The rich youths who went to Athens, Alexandria, and Rhodes for higher education found no sustenance there for the Roman creed. Greek poets made fun of the Roman pantheon, and Roman poets leaped to imitate them. The poems of Ovid
CHAP. XVII)	EPICUREAN   ROME
assumed that the gods were fables; the epigrams of Martial assumed that they were jokes; and no one seems to have complained. Many of the mimes ridiculed the gods; one whipped Diana off the stage, another showed Jove making his will in expectation of death.124 Juvenal, like Plato five centuries before him and ourselves eighteen centuries after him, noted that the fear of a watchful deity had lost its power to discourage perjury.125 Even on the tombstones of the poor we note increasing skepticism, and some candid sensuality. Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo, reads one-"I was not, I was, I am not, I care not"; and another, Non fueram, non sum, nescio-"I had not been, I am not, I know not"; and another, "\Vhat I have eaten and drunk is my own; I have had my life." 126 "I believe in nothing beyond the grave," says one tombstone; "There is no Hades, no Charon, no Cerberus," assetts another. "Now," a harassed soul wrote, "I need never fear hunger, need never pay rent, and am at least free from gout"; and a somber Lucretian writes of the buried flesh: "The elements out of which he was formed take possession of their own 2gain. Life is only lent to man; he cannot keep it forever. By his death he pays his debt to Nature." 127
But doubt, how ver honest, cannot long take the place of belief. Amid all its pleasures this society had not found happiness. Its refinements wearied it, its debaucheries exhausted it; rich and poor were still subject to pain and grief and death. Philosophy-least of all so coldly superior a doctrine as Stoicism-could never give the common man a faith to grace his poverty, encourage his decency, solace his sorrows, and inspire his hopes. The old religion had fulfilled the first of these functions; it had failed in the rest. Men wanted revelation, and it gave them ritual; they wanted immortality, and it gave them games. Men who had come, enslaved or free, from other states felt excluded from this nationalistic worship; therefore they brought their own gods with them, built their own temples, practiced their own rites; in the very heart of the West they planted the religions of the Eas1s Between the creeds of the conquerors and the faith of the defeated a war took form in which the weapons of the legions were useless; the needs of the heart would determine the victory.
The new deities came with war captives, returning soldiers, and mer
chants. Traders from Asia and Egypt set up temples in Puteoli, Ostia, and
. Rome for the cult of their traditional gods. The Roman government treated these alien faiths for the most part with toleration; since it would not admit foreigners to its own worship it preferred that they should practice their imported rites rather than have no religion at all. In return it required that each new faith should exercise a similar talerance towards other creeds, and should include in its ritual some obeisance to the emperor's "genius" and the goddess Roma, as an expression of loyalty to the state. Encouraged
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XVIl
by this lenience, the Oriental faiths already domiciled in Rome became major religions of the populace. Hoping to civilize the cult, Claudius re moved the restrictions that had harassed the worship of the Great Mother; he allowed Romans to become her ministrants, and established her feast around the vernal equinox, from March 1 5 to 2 7. Her chief rival in this first Christian century was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood, fer tility, and trade. Again and again the government had forbidden the cult in Rome, but it always returned; the piety of the devotees overcame the power of the state, and Caligula marked the surrender by building with public funds an immense shrine to her in the Field of Mars. Otho and Domi tian took part in the lsiac festivals; Commodus, with shaven head, walked humbly behind the priests, holding reverently in his arms a statue of Anubis, the Egyptian monkey god.
The divine invasion swelled from year to year. From southern Italy came the worship of Pythagoras-vegetarianism and reincarnation. From Hierap olis came Atargatis, known to the Romans as dea Syria, "the Syrian goddess," Aziz the "Zeus of Doliche," and other strange gods; their worship was spread by Syrian merchants and slaves; and at last a young priest of a Syrian Baal ascended the throne as Elagabalus-worshiper of the god of the sun. From hostile Parthia came the cult of another sun-god, .Mithras; its devotees were enlisted as soldiers in the great cosmic war of Light against Darkness, of Good against Evil; it was a virile faith that won men rather than women, and pleased the Roman legions stationed on distant frontiers where they could hardly hear the voices of their native gods. From Judea came Yahweh, an uncompromising monotheist who commanded the most difficult life of piety and regulation, but gave his followers a moral code and courage that supported them well in tribulation, and clothed with a certain nobility the life of the humblest poor. Among the Roman Jews who prayed to him were ome, as yet obscurely distinguished from the rest, who worshiped his incarnate and resurrected son.
CHAPTER XVIII
14	ll.C.-A.D. 19 2


THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXIV
polyglot empire through one law and one faith. When Jason went about these matters with insufficient haste Antiochus replaced him with Menelaus, who gave him larger promises and a fatter bribe."' Under Menelaus Yahweh was identified with Zeus, Temple vessels were sold to raise funds, and in some Jewish communities sacrifices were offered to Hellenic deities. A gymnasium was opened in Jerusalem, and Jewish youths, even priests, took part, naked, in athletic games; some young Jews, in the ardor of their Hel lenism, underwent operations to remedy the physiological shortcomings that might eveal their race.1"
Shocked by these developments, and feeling their religion challenged in its very existence, the majority of the Jewish people went over to the side and view of the Chasidim. When Antiochus IV was expelled from Egypt by Popilius ( 1 68), the news reached Jerusalem in the form of a report that: he had been killed. The rejoicing Jews deposed his appointees, massacred the leaders of the Hellenizing party, and cleansed the Temple of what they felt to be pagan abominations. Antiochus, not dead but humiliated, money less, and convinced that the Jews had obstructed his campaign against Egypt and were conspiring to return Judea to the Ptolemies,11 marched up to Jerusalem, slaughtered Jews of either sex by the thousand, desecrated and looted the Temple, appropriated for the royal coffers its golden altar, its vessels, and its treasuries, restored Menelaus to supreme power, and gave orders for the compulsory Hellenization of all Jews (167). He commanded that the Temple be rededicated as a shrine to Zeus, that a Greek altar be built over the old one, and that the usual sacrifices be re placed with a sacrifice of swine. He forbade the keeping of the Sabbath or the Jewish festivals, and made circumcision a capital crime. Throughout Judea the old religion and its rites were interdicted, and the Greek ritual was made compulsory on pain of death. Every Jew who refused to eat pork, or who was found possessing the Book of the Law, was to be jailed or killed, and the Book wherever found was to be burned.18 Jerusalem itself was put to the flames, its walls were destroyed, and its Jewish population was sold into slavery. Foreign peoples were brought in to resettle the site, a new fortress was built upon Mt. Zion, and a garrison of troops was left in it to rule the city in the name of the King."" At times, it seems, Antiochus thought of establishing and requiring the worship of himself as a god."°
The orgy of persecution became intensified as its proceeded. There is
always, in any society, a minority whose instincts rejoice in the permission co persecute; it is a release from civilization. The agents of Antiochus, having put an end to all visible expression of Judaism in Jerusalem, passed like a searching fire into the towns and villages. Everywhere they gave
CHAP.XXIV)	HELLENISM  AND THE  ORIENT
the people a choice between death and participation in Hellenic worship, which included the eating of sacrificial swine."'- All synagogues and Jew ish schools were closed. Those who refused to work on the Sabbath were outlawed as rebels. On the day of the Bacchanalia the Jews were com pelled to deck themselves with ivy like the Greeks, to take part in the processions, and to sing wild songs in honor of Dionysus. Many Jews conformed to the demands, waiting for the storm to pass. Many others fled into caves or mountain retreats, lived on clandestine gleanings from the fields, and resolutely carried on the ordinances of Jewish life. The Chasidim circulated among them, preaching courage and resistance. A detachment of royal troops, coming upon some caves in which thousands of Jews-men, women, and children-were hiding, ordered them to come forth. The Jews refused; and because it was the Sabbath, they would not move the stones that might have blocked the entrance to the caves. The soldiers attacked with fire and sword, killing many of the refugees and asphyxiating the remainder with smoke." Women who had circumcized their newborn sons were cast with their infants over the city walls to death." The Greeks were surprised to find the strength of the old faith; not for centuries had they seen such loyalty to an idea. The stories of martyrdom went from mouth to mouth, filled books like the First and Second Maccabees, and gave to Christianity the prototypes of its martyrs and its martyrology. Judaism, which had been near assimilation, became intensified in religious and national consciousness, and withdrew into a protective isolation.
Among the Jews who in those days fled from Jerusalem were Mattathias
-of the family of Hasmonai, of the tribe of Aaron-and his five sons Johannan Caddis, Simon, Judas, Eleazar, and Jonathan. When Apelles, an agent of Antiochus, came to Modin, where these six had sought refuge, he summoned the inhabitants to repudiate the Law and sacrifice to Zeus. The aged Mattathias came forward with his sons and said: "Even should all the people in the kingdom obey the order to depart from the faith of their fathers, I and my sons will abide by the Covenant of our ancestors." As one of the Jews approached the altar to make the required sacrifice Mattathias slew him, and slew also the King's commissioner. Then he said to the people: ''Whoever is zealous for the Law, and wishes to support the Covenant, let him follow me.""' Many of the villagers retired with him and his sons to the mountains of Ephraim; and there they were joined by a small band of young rebels, an·d by such of the Chasidim as were still alive.
Soon afterward Mattathias died, having designated as captain of his band
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIV
his son Judas, called Maccabee.• Judas was a warrior whose courage equaled his piety; before every battle he prayed like a saint, but in the hour of battle "he was like a lion in his rage." The little army "lived in the mountains after the manner of beasts, feeding on herbs." Every now and then it descended upon a neighboring village, killed backsliders, pulled down pagan altars, and "what children soever they found uncircumcized, those they circumcized valiantly."" These things being reported to An tiochus, he sent an army of Syrian Greeks to destroy the Maccabean force. Judas met them in the pass of Emmaus; and though the Greeks were trained mercenaries fully armed, and Judas' band was poorly armed and clad, the Jews won a complete victory (166). Antiochus sent a larger force, whose general was so confident that he brought slave pierchants with him to buy the Jews whom he expected to capture,·and posted in the towns the prices that he would ask."° Judas defeated these troops at Mizpah, and so decisively that Jerusalem fell into his hands without resist ance. He removed all pagan altars and ornaments from the Temple, cleansed and rededicated it, and restored the ancient service amid the ac
claim of the returning orthodox Jews (164).t
As the regent Lysias advanced with a new army to recapture the capi tal, the news came-this time true-that Antiochus was dead (163). De siring to be free for action elsewhere, Lysias offered the Jews full religious freedom on condition that they lay down their arms. The Chasidim con sented, the Maccabeans refused; Judas announced that Judea, to be safe from further persecutions, must achieve political as well as religious lib erty. Intoxicated with power, the Maccabeans now took their turn at persecution, pursuing the Hellenizing faction vengefully not only in Jerusalem but in the -cities that bordered the frontier."' In 161 Judas de feated Nicanor at Adasa, and strengthened himself by making an alliance with Rome; but in the same year, fighting against great odds at Elasa, he was slain. His brother Jonathan carried on the war bravely, but was him self killed at Acco (143). The only surviving brother, Simon, supported by Rome, won from Demetrius II, in 142, an acknowledgment of Judean independence. By popular decree Simon was appointed both high priest and general; and as these offices were made hereditary in his family, he became the founder of the Hasmonean dynasty. The first year of his reign was counted as the beginning of a new era, and an issue of coinage proclaimed the heroic rebirth of the Jewish state.
Usually but uncertainly interpreted as "The Hammer."
t The anniversary of this Rededication (Hanukkah} is still celebrated in nearly every
Jewish home.
CHAPTER  :XXV
Egypt and the West
THE KINGS' REGISTER
HE smallest but richest morsel of Alexander's legacy was allotted to the ablest and wisest of his generals. With characteristic loyalty perhaps as a visible sanction of his authority-Ptolemy, son of Lagos, brought the body of the dead king to Memphis, and had it entombed in a sarcophagus of gold.* He brought with him also Alexander's occasional mistress Thais, married her, and had by her two sons. He was a plain, blunt soldier, capable both of generous feeling and of realistic thinking. While other inheritors of Alexander's realm spent half their lives in war, and dreamed of undivided sovereignty, Ptolemy devoted himself to con solidating his position in an alien country, and to promoting Egyptian agriculture, commerce, and industry. He built a great fleet, and made Egypt as secure against naval attack as nature had made it almost unassail able by land. He helped Rhodes and the Leagues to preserve their inde pendence of Macedon, and so won the title of Soter. Only ·when, after eighteen years of labor, he had firmly organized the political and economic life of his new realm did he call himself king (305). Through him and his successor Greek Egypt established its rule over Cyrene, Crete, the Cy clades, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine, Phoenicia, Samos, Lesbos, Samothrace, and the Hellespont. In his old age he found time to write astonishingly truth ful commentaries on his campaigns, and to establish, about 290, the Mu seum and Library that were to make the fame of Alexandria. In 285, feeling his eighty-two years, he appointed his second son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, to the throne, yielded the government to him, and took his place as a subject
in the young king's court. Two years later he died.
Already the fertile valley and delta had poured great wealth into the royal treasury. Ptolemy I, to give a dinner to his friends, had had to bor row their silver and rugs; Ptolemy II spent $2,500,000 on the feast that climaxed his coronation." The new Pharaoh was a convert to the philoso-
Ptolemy Philadelphus had the sarcophagus removed to Alexandria. Ptolemy Cocces melted down the gold for his use, and exposed the mortal remains of Alexander in a glass coffin.'
586	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, XXV


Comedy prospered as tragedy decayed, and took over something of the subtlety, refinement, and subject matter of the Euripidean stage. This Middle Comedy (400-323) lost its taste or courage for political satire pre cisely when politics most needed a "candid friend"; possibly such satire was forbidden or the audience was weary of politics now that Athens was ruled by second-rate men. The general retirement of the fourth-cen tury Greek from public to private life inclined his interest from affairs of state to those of the home and the heart. The comedy of manners ap peared; love began to dominate the scene, and not always by its virtue; the ladies of the demimonde mingled on the boards with fishwives, cooks, and bewildered philosophers-though the honor of the protagonists and the dramatist was saved by a marriage at the end. These plays were not coars ened by Aristophanes' vulgarity and burlesque, but neither were they
482
CHAP. XX)   LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY	483
vitalized by his exuberance and his imagination. We know the names, and have none of the works, of thirty-nine poets of the Middle Comedy; but we may judge from their fragments that they did not write for the ages. Alexis of Thurii wrote 245 plays, Antiphanes 260. They made hay while the sun shone, and died with its setting.
It was a century of orators. The rise of industry and trade turned men's minds to realism and practicality, and the schools that once had taught the poems of Homer now trained their pupils in rhetoric. Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hypereides, Demades, Deinarchus, Aeschines, Demosthenes were orator politicians, leaders of political factions, masters of what the Germans have called the Advokatenrepublik. Similar men appeared in the democratic interludes of Syracuse; the oligarchic states did not suffer them. The Athenian orators were clear and vigorous in language, averse to ornate eloquence, capable, now and then, of noble patriotic flights, and given to such dishonesty of argument and abusiveness of speech as would not be tolerated even in a modern campaign. The heterogeneous quality of the Athenian Assembly and the popular courts had a debasing as well as a stimulating effect upon Greek oratory, and through it upon Greek litera ture. The Athenian citizen enjoyed bouts of oratorical invective almost as much as he enjoyed a prize fight; when a duel was expected between such word warriors as Aeschines and Demosthenes, men came from dis tant villages and foreign states to hear them. Often the appeal was to pride and prejudice; Plato, who hated oratory as the poison that was killing democracy, defined rhetoric as the art of governing men by addressing their feelings and passions.
Even Demosthenes, with all his vigor and nervous intensity, his frequent ascent to passages of patriotic fervor, his withering fire of personal attack, his clever and relieving alternation of narrative and argume.nt, the care fully rhythmic quality of his language, and the overwhelming torrent of his speech-even Demosthenes strikes us as a little less than great. He laid the secret of oratory in acting (hypocrisis), and so believed this that he rehearsed his speeches patiently, and recited them before a mirror. He dug himself a cave and lived in it for months, practicing secretly; in these periods he kept one half of his face shaved to deter himself from leaving his retreat.1 On the rostrum he contorted his figure, whirled round and round, laid his hand upon his forehead as in reflection, and often raised his voice to a scream.• All this, says Plutarch, "was wonderfully pleasing to the common people, but by well-educated persons, as, for.example, by Demetrius of Phalerum, it was looked upon as mean, humiliating, and
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XX
unmanly." We are amused by Demosthenes' histrionics, amazed by his self-esteem, confused by his digressions, and appalled by his ungracious scurrility. There is little wit in him, little philosophy. Only his patriotism redeems him, and the apparent sincerity of his despairing cry for freedom. The historic climax of Greek oratory came in 330. Six years before, Ctesiphon had carried through the Council a preliminary proposal to award Demosthenes a crown or wreath in appreciation not only of his states manship but of his many financial gifts to the state. To keep this honor from his rival, Aeschines indicted Ctesiphon on the ground (technically correct) of having introduced an unconstitutional proposal. The case of Ctesiphon, repeatedly postponed, finally came to trial before a jury of five hundred citizens. It was, of course, a cause celebre; all who could came, even from afar, to hear it; for in effect the greatest of Athenian orators was fighting for his good name and his political life. Aeschines spent little time attacking Ctesiphon, but turned his assault upon the character and career of Demosthenes, who replied in kind with his famous speech On the Crown. Every line of the two orations still vibrates with excitement, and is hot with the hatred of enemies brought face to face in war. Demosthenes, knowing that offense is better than defense, charged that Philip had chosen the most corruptible of the orators as his mouthpieces in Athens. Then
he etched in acid a life portrait of Aeschines:
I must let you know who this man really is who embarks upon vituperation so glibly . . . and what is his parentage. Virtue? You renegade!-what have you or your family to do with virtue? ... Where did you get your right to talk about education? . . . Shall I relate how your father was a slave who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck, or how your mother practiced daylight nuptials in an outhouse? . . . You helped your father in the drudgery of a grammar school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, holding the position of a menial. ... After getting yourself enrolled on the register of your parish-no one knows how you managed it, but let that pass-you chose a most gentlemanly occupation, that of clerk and errand-boy to minor officials. After committing all the offenses with which you reproach other people, you were relieved of that employment	You en
tered the service of those famous players, Simylus and Socrates, bet ter known as the Growlers. You played small parts to their lead, picking up figs and grapes and olives, and making a better living out of those missile than by all the battles you fought for dear life.
CHAP, XX)	LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY	485
For there was no truce or armistice in the warfare between you and your audience....
Compare, then, Aeschines, your life and mine. You taught read ing, I attended school. You danced, I was choragus.... You were a public scribe, I a public orator. You were a third-rate actor, I a spectator at the play. You failed in your part, and I hissed you.•
It was a powerful speech; not a model of order and courtesy, but so eloquent with passion that the jury acquitted Ctesiphon by a vote of five to one. In the following year the Assembly voted Demosthenes the dis puted crown. Aeschines, unable to pay the fine that was automatically levied upon so unsuccessful a persecution, fled to Rhodes, where he made a precarious living by teaching rhetoric. An old tradition says that Demos thenes sent him money to alleviate his poverty.'
!SOCRATES
This duel of oratory has been loudly lauded and devoutly studied in every generation. But in truth it represents almost the nadir of Athenian politics; we cannot see nobility in this street-corner contest in vituperation, this mean quarrel for public praise between two secret recipients of foreign gold. Isocrates is a little more attractive, and carries down into the fourth century something of the grandeur of the fifth. Born in 436, he lived till 338, and died with Greek liberty. His father had made a fortune by manufacturing flutes; he gave his son every educational advantage, even sending him to study rhetoric with Gorgias in Thessaly. The Peloponnesian War, and the example of Alcibi ades, ruined the flute business, and destroyed the family fortune; Isocrates had to go forth and earn his living by the sweat of his pen. He began by writing speeches for others, and thought of becoming an orator. But he suffered from shyness and a weak voice, and a strong distaste for the crudities of political strife. He abominated the demagogues who had captured the Assembly, and shrank for a time into a quiet pedagogic life.
In 391 he opened the most successful of Athenian schools of rhetoric. Stu dents came to him from all the Greek world; perhaps their variety of origin and outlook helped to form his Panhellenic philosophy. He thought that all other teachers were on the wrong track. In a pamphlet Against the Sophists he denounced both those who professed to turn any numbskull into a pundit for three or four minac;, and those who, like Plato, hoped to prepare men for government by training them in science and metaphysics. As for him elf, he admitted that he could get results only when the student possessed some natural talent. He would not teach metaphysics or science, for these, he argued, were
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XX
hopeless inquiries into insoluble mysteries. Nevertheless, he gave the name of philosophy to the instruction provided in his school. The curriculum centered upon the arts of writing and speaking, but these were taught in connection with literature and politics;• Isocrates offered, as we should say, a cultural course as opposed to the mathematical course given in Plato's Academy. The art of c,peech was the goal, as being then the chief medium of public advancement; the Athenian state was governed by argument. So Isocrates taught his pupils the use of words: how to arrange them in the clearest order, in rhythmic but not metrical sequence, in polished but not ornate diction, in smooth transitions of sound and thought,• in balanced clauses and cumulative periods; such prose,
:1e believed, would please the refined ear as much as poetry. Out of this school came many leaders of the Demosthenic age: Timotheus the general, Ephorus and Theopompus the historians, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hypereides, and Aeschines the orators, Speusippus the successor of Plato, and, some say, Aris totle himself.'
Isocrates was not content with forming great men; he wished to play some part in the affairs of his time. Unable to be either an orator or a statesman, he became a pamphleteer. He addressed long speeches to the Athenian public, to leaders like Philip, or to the assembled Greeks at the Panhel'enic games; in stead of delivering these he published them, and thereby unconsciously invented the essay as a literary form. Twenty-nine of his discourses remain, and rank among the most interesting survivals of Greek antiquity. His first great pro nouncement, the Panegyricus,t struck the theme of all his thought-the theme of his old master Gorgias-a call to Greece to forget its little sovereignties, and become a state. Isocrates was a proud Athenian-"So far has our city distanced the rest of mankind in thought and speech that her pupils have become the teachers of all the world." But he was a prouder Greek; to him, as to the Hellenistic age, Hellenism meant not membership in a race, but participation in a culture; and that culture, he felt, was the finest that men had yet created '.mywhere.' But all around this culture were "barbarians"-in Italy, Sicily, Africa, Asia, and what we should now call the Balkans. It saddened him to see the barbarians becoming stronger, and Persia consolidating her control of ronia, while the Greek states consumed themselves in civil war.
For many as are the ills that are incident to the nature of man, we have ourselves invented more than those that nature lays upon us, by engendering wars and factions among ourselves   Against
these ills no one has ever protested; and people are not ashamed to weep over the calamities that have been fabricated by the poets,
E.g., Isocrates-and most Greek writers after him-counted it a literary sin to end one word, and begin the next, with a vowel.


36o: Praxiteles of Athens and Scopas of Paros, sculptors; Ephorus of Cyme and Theopompus of Chios, histo rians
359: Philip II regent in Macedonia
357-46: War between Athens and Macedonia 357-46: Exile of Dionysius II
356-46: Second Sacred War
356: Birth of Alexander the Great; burn ing of second temple at Ephesus; Isocrates' On the Peace
355: Isocrates' Areopagiticus
B,C,
354: Assassination of Dion
353-49: The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus 351: Demosthenes' Philippic I
349: Philip attacks Olynthus; Demos thenes' Olynthiacs I and II
348: Heracleides of Pontus, astronomer; Speusippus succeeds Plato as head of the Academy
3¢: Demosthenes' On the Peace; lsoc rates' Letter to Philip
344: Timoleon rescues Syracuse; Demos thenes' Philippic II
343: Trial and acquittal of Aeschines 341-38: Aristotle tutor of Alexander
340: Timoleon defeats the Carthaginians 338: Philip defeats Athenians at Chaero
nea; death·of lsocrates
336: Assassination of Philip; accession of Alexander and Darius III
335: Alexander burns down Thebes, and begins his Persian campaigns
334: Aristotle opens the Lyceum; battle of the Granicus; choragic monu ment of Lysicrates
333: Battle of lssus
331: Siege and capture of Tyre; surrender of Jerusalem; foundation of Alex andria
331: Battle of Gaugamela (Arbela); Alex ander at Babylon and Susa
330: Apelles of Sicyon, painter; Lysip pus of Argos, sculptor; Aeschines' Against Ctesiphon; Demosthenes' On the Crown
319-8: Alexander invades central Asia 317: Deaths of Cleitus and Callisthenes
317-5: Alexander in India 315: Voyage of Nearchus 324: Exile of Demosthenes


roamed the great god Pan.
In southern Arcadia the Eurotas almost meets a yet more famous river. Swiftly the Alpheus wears its way through the Parrhasian range, meanders leisurely into the plains of Elis, and leads the traveler to Olympia. The Elians, Pausanias tells us,.. were of Aeolic or Pelasgic origin, and came from Aetolia across the bay. Their first king, Aethlius, was father of that Endymion whose beauty so allured the moon that she closed his eyes in a perpetual sleep, sinned at leisure, and had by him half a hundred daugh ters. Here, where the Alpheus joins the Cladeus flowing from the north, was the holy city of the Greek world, so sacred that war seldom disturbed it, and the Elians had the boon of a history in which battles were replaced by games. In the angle of the merging streams was the Altis, or hallowed precinct, of Olympian Zeus. Wave after wave of invaders stopped here to worship him; periodically, in later days, their delegates returned to be seech his help and enrich his fane; from generation to generation the tem ples of Zeus and Hera grew in wealth and renown, until the greatest archi tects and sculptors of Greece were brought together, after the triumph over Persia, to restore and adorn them in lavish gratitude. The shrine of Hera went back to 1000 B.c.; its ruins are the oldest temple remains in Greece. Fragments of thirty-six columns and twenty Doric capitals sur vive to show how often and how variously the pillars were replaced. Orig inally, no doubt, they were of wood; and one shaft of oak still stood when Pausanias came there, notebook in hand, in the days of the Antonines.
CHAP.IV)	SPARTA
From Olympia one passes by the site of the ancient capital, Elis, into Achaea. Hither some of the Achaeans fled when the Dorians took Argos and·Mycenae. Like Arcadia it is a land of mountains, along whose slopes patient shepherds drive their flocks up or down as the seasons change. On the western coast is the still-thriving port of Patras, of whose women Pausanias said that they were "twice as numerous as the men, and devoted to Aphrodite if any women are."" Other cities huddled against the hills along the Corinthian Gulf-Aegium, Helice, Aegira, Pellene-now almost forgotten, but once alive with men, women, and children, every one of whom was the center of the world.
CORINTH
A few more mountains, and the traveler re-enters, in Sicyon, the area of Dorian settlement. Here, in 676, one Orthagoras taught the world a trick of politics that aftercenturies would use. He explained to the peasants that they were of Pelasgic or Achaean stock, while the landowning aristocracy that exploited them was descended from Dorian invaders; he appealed to the racial pride of the dispossessed, led them in a successful revolution, made himself dictator, and established the manufacturing and trading classes in power.• Under his able successors, Myron and Cleisthenes, these classes made Sicyon a semi-industrial city, famous for its shoes and its pottery, though still named from the cucumbers that it grew.
Farther east is the city that should have been, by all geographic and economic omens, the richest and most cultured center in Greece. For Corinth, on the isthmus, had an enviable position. It could lock the land door to or upon the Peloponnesus; it could serve and mulct the overland trade between northern and southern Greece; and it had harbors and ship ping on both the Saronic and the Corinthian Gulf. Between these seas it
built a lucrative Diolcos ("a slipping through")-a wooden tramway along which ships were drawn on rollers over four miles of land.t Its fortress was the impregnable Acrocorinthus, a mountain peak two thousand feet
high, watered by its own inexhaustible spring. Strabo has described for us the stirring sight from the citadel, with the city spread out on two bright
So in 1789 Camille Desmoulins, from his cafe rostra, urged the Gauls to ovenhrow their German (Frankish) aristocracy.
t The Diolcos was a grateful alternative to merchants who distrusted the rough waters oft
Cape Malea on the sea route to the western Mediterranean. The tramway was sturdy enough to carry the usual trading vessel of Greek times; indeed, Augustus transported his fleet over the Diolcos in pursuit of Antony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium, and a Greek squadron was similarly carried over as late as A.D. 883.'18 Periander planned in his day to cut die canal that now joins the two gulfs, but bis engineers found it too great a task.18
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.IV
terraces below, the open-air theater, the great public baths, the colonnaded market place, the gleaming temples, and the protective walls that reached to the port of Lechaeum on the northern gulf. At the very summit of the mount, as if to symbolize a major industry of the city, was a temple to Aphrodite.""
Corinth had a history stretching back to Mycenaean times; even in Homer's day it was famous for its wealth.81 After the Dorian conquest kings ruled it, then an aristocracy dominated by the family of the Bacchia dae. But here, too, as in Argos, Sicyon, Megara, Athens, Lesbos, Miletus, Samos, Sicily, and wherever Greek trade flourished, the business class, by revolution or intrigue, captured political power; this is the real meaning of the outbreak of "tyrannies" or dictatorships in seventh-century Greece. About 655 Cypselus seized the government. Having promised Zeus the entire wealth of Corinth if he succeeded, he laid a ten per cent tax on all property each year, and gave the proceeds to the temple, until, after a decade, he has fulfilled his vow, while leaving the city as rich as before."' His popular and intelligent rule, through thirty years, laid the basis of Corinthian prosperity.•
His ruthless son, Periander, in one of the longest dictatorships in Greek history (625-585), established order and discipline, checked exploitation, encouraged business, patronized literature and art, and made Corinth for a time the foremost city in Greece. He stimulated trade by establishing a state coinage,.. and promoted industry by lowering taxes. He solved a crisis of unemployment by undertaking great public works, and establishing colonies abroad. He protected small businessmen from the competition of large firms by limiting the number of slaves that might be employed by one man, and forbidding their further importation."" He relieved the wealthy of their surplus gold by compelling them to contribute to a colos sal golden statue as an ornament for the city; he invited the rich women of Corinth to a festival, stripped them of their costly robes and jewels, and sent them home with half their beauty nationalized. His enemies were numerous and powerful; he dared not go out without a heavy guard, and his fear and seclusion made him morose and cruel. To protect himself against revolt he acted on the cryptic advice of his fellow dictator Thrasy bulus of Miletus, that he should periodically cut down the tallest ears of corn in the field.•• His concubines preyed upon him with accusations of his wife, until in a temper he threw her downstairs; she was pregnant, and died of the shock. He burnt the concubines alive, and banished to Corcyra
Cf. the periodical "purges" in Communist Russia, 1935-38.
CHAP. IV)	SPARTA
his son Lycophron, who so grieved for his mother that he would not speak to his father. When the Corcyreans put Lycophron to death Per iander seized three hundred youths of their noblest families and sent them to King Alyattes of Lydia, that they might be made eunuchs; but the ships that bore them touched at Samos, and the Samians, braving Periander's anger, freed them. The dictator lived to a ripe old age, and after his death was numbered by some among the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece...
A gerteration after him the Spartans overthrew the dictatorship at Cor inth and set up an aristocracy-not because Sparta loved liberty, but be cause she favored landowners against the business classes. Nevertheless it w2s. upon trade that the wealth of Corinth was based, helped now and then by the devotees of Aphrodite, and the Panhellenic Isthmian games. Courtesans were so numerous in the city that the Greeks often used cor inthiazomai as signifying harlotry... It was a common matter in Corinth to dedicate to Aphrodite's temple women who served her as prostitutes, and brought their fees to the priests. One Xenophon (not the leader of the Ten Thousand) promises the goddess .fifty hetairai, or courtesans, if she will help him to victory in the Olympic games; and the pious Pindar, celebrating this triumph, refers to the vow without flinching.88 "The Tem ple of Aphrodite," says Strabo,"' "was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money here." The city was grateful, and looked upon these "hospitable ladies" as public benefactors. "It is an ancient custom at Corinth," says an early author quoted by Athen aeus,01 "whenever the city addresses any supplication to Aphrodite ... to employ as many courtesans as possible to join in the supplication." The courtesans had a religious festival of their own, the Aphrodisia, which they celebrated with piety and pomp... St. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians,"" denounced these women, who still in his time plied there their ancient trade.
In 480 Corinth had a population of .fifty thousand citizens and sixty thou
-;and slaves-an unusually high proportion of freemen to slaves.N The quest for pleasure and gold absorbed all classes, and left little energy for literature and art. We hear of a poet Eumelus in the eighth century, but Corinthian names seldom grace Greek letters. Periander welcomed poets at his court, and brought Arion from Lesbos to organize music in Corinth. In the eighth century the pottery and bronzes of Corinth were famous;
92	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IV
in the sixth her vase painters were at the top of their profession in Greece. Pausanias tells of a great cedar chest, in which Cypselus hid from the Bacchiadae, and upon which artists carved elegant reliefs, with inlays of ivory and gold."" Probably it was in the age of Periander that Corinth raised to Apollo a Doric temple famous for its seven monolithic columns, five of which still stand to suggest that Corinth may have loved beauty in more forms than one. Perhaps tirm and chance were ungrateful to the city, and her annals fell to be written by men of other loyalties. The past would be startled if it could see itself in the pages of historians.
MEGARA


per year; the current estimate is fifty.
We have displaced from his chronological position between Aristarchus and Hipparchus a scholar whose ecumenical erudition won him the nick names of Pentathlos and Beta-because he attained distinction in many fields, and ranked second only to the best in each. Tradition gave Eratosthenes of Cyrene exceptional teachers: Zeno the Stoic, Arcesilaus the skeptic, Cal limachus the poet, Lysanias the grammarian. By the age of forty his repu tation for varied knowledge was so great that Ptolemy III made him head of the Alexandrian Library. He wrote a volume of verse, and a history of comedy. His Chronog;raphia sought to determine the dates of the major events in Mediterranean history. He wrote mathematical monographs, and devised a mechanical method for finding mean proportions in continued proportion between two straight lines. He measured the obliquity of the ecliptic at 23 ° 51', an error of one half of one per cent. His greatest achieve ment was his calculation of the earth's circumference as 24,662 miles;80 we compute it at 24,847. Observing that at noon on the summer solstice the sun at Syene shone directly upon the deep surface of a narrow well, and learning that at the same moment the shadow of an obelisk at Alexandria,
some five hundred miles north, showed the sun to be approximately 7½0
away from the zenith as measured on the meridian of longitude that con-
H it was not taken from his Babylonian predecessor Kidinnu.""
t The equinoxes (lit., equal nights) are those two days of the year when the sun in its annual apparent motion crosses the equator northward (our vernal, Argentina's autumnal, equinox), or southward (our autumnal equinox), making day and night equal for a day. The equinoctial points are those points in the sky where the equator of the celestial sphere inter
sects the ecliptic.
CHAP. XXVIII)  THE  CLIM AX OF GREEK  SC IE NC E
nected the two cities, he concluded that an arc of 7½0 on the earth's cir cumference equaled five hundred miles, and that the entire circumference would equal 360+7.5 X500, or 24,000 miles.
Having measured the earth, Eratosthenes proceeded to describe it. His
Geographica brought together the reports of Alexander's surveyors, of travelers like Megasthenes, voyagers like Nearchus, and explorers like Pytheas of Massalia, who, about 320, had sailed around Scotland to Nor way, and perhaps to the Arctic Circle..,. Eratosthenes did not merely depict the physical features of each region, he sought to explain them through the action of water, fire, earthquake, or volcanic eruption."" He bade the Greeks abandon their provincial division of mankind into Hellenes and barbarians; men should be divided not nationally but individually; many Greeks, he thought, were scoundrels, many Persians and Hindus were refined, and the Romans had shown a greater aptitude than the Greeks for social order and competent government... He knew little of northern Europe or northern Asia, less of India south of the Ganges, nothing of south Africa; but he was, so far as we know, the first geographer to mention the Chinese. "If," said another significant passage, "the extent of the Atlantic Ocean were not an obstacle, we might easily pass by sea from Iberia (Spain) to India, keeping in the same parallel.'"'
IV. THEOPHRASTUS, HEROPHILUS, ERASISTRATUS
Zoology never rose again in antiquity to the level that it had reached in Aris totle's History of Animals. Probably by an agreed division of labor his successor Theophrastus wrote a classic treatise, The History of Plants, and a more theo retical discussion called The Causes of Plants. Theophrastus loved gardening, and knew every aspect of his subject. In many ways he was more scientific than his master, more careful of his facts, and more orderly in his exposition; a book without classification, he said, was as untrustworthy as an unbridled horse.• He divided all plants into trees, bushes, shrubs, and herbs, and distinguished the chief parts of a plant as root, stem, branch, twig, leaf, flower, and fruit-a classifica tion not improved on till A.O. 1561.88 "A plant," he wrote, "has the power of germinaticn in all its parts, for it has life in them all   The methods of genera
tion of plants are these: spontaneous, from a seed, a root, a piece tom off, a branch, a twig, pieces of wood cut up small, or from the trunk itself."aT He had no clear idea of sexual reproduction in plants, except in a few species like the fig tree or the date palm; here he followed the Babylonians in describing fertiliza tion and caprification. He discussed the geographical distribution of plants, their industrial uses, and the climatic conditions most conducive to their health. He
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVIIl
studied the minutiae of half a thousand species with an accuracy of detail aston ishing in an age that had no microscope. Twenty centuries before Goethe he recognized that the flower is a metamorphosed leaf... He was a naturalist in more ways than one, stoutly rejecting the supernatural explanations current in his day for certain curiosities of botany... He had all the inquisitiveness of a scientist, and did not think it beneath his dignity as a philosopher to write monographs on stones, minerals, weather, winds, weariness, geometry, astronomy, and the physi cal theories of the pre-Socratic Greeks... "If there had been no Aristotle," says Sarton, "this period would have been called the time of TheophrastUs.'"1
Theophrastus' ninth "book" summarized all that the Greeks knew about the medicinal properties of plants. One passage hinted at anesthesia in describing "dittany, a plant especially useful for labor in women; people say that either it makes labor easy, or it stops the pains."'" Medicine progressed rapidly in this age, perhaps because it had to keep pace with the novel and multiplying diseases of a complex urban civilization. The Greek study of Egyptian medical lore stimu lated a fresh advance. The Ptolemies were ruthlessly helpful; they not only per mitted the dissection of animals and cadavers, but turned over some condemned criminals for vivisection.'" Under these encouragements human anatomy be came a science, and the absurdities into which Aristotle had fallen were substan tially reduced.
Herophilus of Chalcedon, working at Alexandria about 285, dissected the eye and gave a good account of the retina and the optic nerves. He dissected the brain, described the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the meninges, left his name in the torcular Herophili,• and restored the brain to honor as the seat of thought. He understood the role of the nerves, originated their division into sensory and motor, and separated the cranial from the spinal nerves. He distinguished arteries from veins, discerned the function of the arteries as carrying blood from the heart to various parts of the body, and in effect discovered the circulation of the blood nineteen centuries before Harvey." Following a suggestion of the Coan physician Praxagoras, he included the taking of the pulse in diagnosis, and used a water clock to measure its frequency. He dissected and described the ovaries, the uterus, the seminal vesicles, and the prostate gland; he studied the liver and the pancreas, and gave to the duodenum the name that it still bears."' "Science and art," wrote Herophilus, "have nothing to show, strength is incap able of effort, wealth is useless, and eloquence is powerless, where there is no health."..
Herophilus was, so far as we can now judge, the greatest anatomist of an tiquity, and Erasistratus was the greatest physiologist. Born in Ceos, Erasistratus studied in Athens, and practiced medicine in Alexandria about 258 B.c. He dis-
A confluence of blood sinuses in the dlll'll mater, or outer membrane of the brain,
CHAP.XXVIII)  THE  CLIMAX  OF GREEK  SCIENCE	639
tinguished more carefully than Herophilus between cerebrum and cerebellum, and made experiments on living subjects to study the operation of the brain. He described and explained the working of the epiglottis, the lacteal vessels of the mesentery, and the aortic and pulmonary valves of the heart. He had some no tion of basal metabolism, for he devised a crude respiration calorimeter." Every organ, said Erasistratus, is connected with the rest of the organism in three ways-by artery, vein, and nerve. He sought to account for all physiological phenomena by natural causes, rejecting any reference to mystical entities. He discarded the humoral theory of Hippocrates, which Herophilus had retained. He conceived the art of medicine as prevention through hygiene rather than as cure through therapy; he opposed the frequent use of drugs and bloodletting, and relied upon diet, bathing, and exercise.'"
Such men made Alexandria the Vienna of the ancient medical world. But there were great schools of medicine also at Tralles, Miletus, Ephesus, Per gamum, Taras, and Syracuse. Many cities had a municipal medical service; the physicians so employed received a modest salary, but were honored for making no distinction between rich and poor, free and slave, and for devoting themselves to their work at any time and risk. Apollonius of Miletus fought the plague in near-by islands without reward; when all the doctors of Cos were laid low by an epidemic which they had labored to control, others came to their rescue from neighboring towns. Many public decrees of gratitude were issued to Hellenistic physicians; and though ancient jests railed at mercenary incompetence, the great profession kept high that standard of ethics which had come down to it from Hippocrates as its most precious inheritance.
CHAPTER  XXIX
The Surrender of Philosophy


Lycon,
Delphis when I beheld with Eudanippus advancing:
Blonder of cheek and chin were the youths than yellowing ivy, Yea, and their breasts far brighter of sheen than thou,0 Selene, Showing they just had come from the noble toil of the wrestlers.
Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.
I, when I saw, how I raged, how the flame took hold of my bosom, Burned my love-lost heart! My beauty waned, and no longer Watched I the pomp as it passed; nor how I returned to my home-
stead
Knew I, for some fell bane, some parching disease had undone me. Ten days, stretched on my bed, and ten nights dwelt I in anguish. Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.
Often the bloom of my flesh grew dry and yellow as dye-wood, Yea, and the hairs of my head fell off, and of all that I once was Naught but skin was left, and bones; and to whom did I not tum, Whose road left I unsought where an old crone chanted a love-
charm?
Still no solace I found, and time sped ever a-flying.
Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.
The third idyl introduces us to the nymph Amaryllis, and her unattain able charms; the fourth to the shepherd Corydon, the seventh to the poetic goatherd Lycidas-names destined to be invoked by a thousand poets again from Virgil to Tennyson. These rustics are idealized, and speak the most
611	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, XXVI
exquisite Greek; any one of them can sing hexameters loveli r than Homer's; but we learn to accept their incredible gifts as a tolerable con vention when we surrender to the plaintive lilt of their songs. Theocritus redeems their reality with the smell of their jackets and the occasional obscenity of their thoughts; a lusty vein of humor salts their sentiment, and makes them men. All in all, this is the most perfect Greek poetry writ
ten after Euripides, the only extant Hellenistic verse that has the breath of life.
POLYBIUS
If the Hellenistic age inspired but one great poet, it produced an un precedented quantity and variety of prose. It invented the imaginary con versation, the essay, and the encyclopedia; it continued the tradition of writing brief and vivid biographies; and in the Roman sequel Greek litera ture would add the sermon and the novel. Oratory was a dying mode, for it had depended upon the game of politics, litigation before popular courts, and the democratic right to talk. The letter became a favorite vehicle, for both communication and literature; now were established the epistolary forms and phrases that we find in Cicero, and even the famous exordium dear to our grandfathers: "Hoping that this finds you as well as it leaves me.',.
Historiography flourished. Ptolemy I, Aratus of Achaea, and Pyrrhus of Epirus wrote memoirs of their campaigns, establishing a tradition that cul minated in Caesar. The Egyptian high priest Manetho wrote in Greek an Aigyptiaka, or Annals of Egypt, which bundled the Pharaohs somewhat arbitrarily into those dynasties that classify them to this day. Berosus, high priest of the Chaldeans, dedicated to Antiochus I a history of Babylon based upon the cuneiform records. Megasthenes, ambassador of Seleucus I to Chandragupta Maurya, startled the Greek world, about 300, with a book on India. "There is among the Brahmans," said a suggestive passage, "a sect of philosophers who ... hold that God is the Word, by which they mean not articulate speech but the discourse of reason";""' here again was that doctrine of Logos which was destined to make such an impress upon Christian theology. Timaeus af Tauromenium (Taormina), having been exiled from Sicily by Agathocles ( 3r 7), traveled widely in Spain and Gaul, and then settled down in Athens to write a history of Sicily and the West. He was an industrious student, so anxious to include everything that some of his rivals called him "an old ragpicker.".. He labored to arrive at
CHAP, XXVI)	BOOKS	613
an accurate chronology, and hit upon the scheme of dating events by Olympiads. He criticized his predecessors severely, and was lucky enough to die before seeing the brutal attack made upon his work by Polybius."
The greatest of the Hellenistic historians, and the only Greek fit to make a triad with Herodotus and Thucydides, was born at Megalopolis, in Arcadia (208). His father, Lycortas, was one of the leading men of the Achaean League, being ambassador to Rome in 189 and strategos in 184. The boy was brought up in the odor of politics, was trained as a soldier under Philopoemen, fought in the Roman campaign against the Gauls in Asia Minor, was associated with his father on an embassy to Egypt (181), and was made the League's hipp«rchos, or commander of the cavalry, in
169.12 He paid for his prominence: when the Romans punished the League for supporting Perseus against them they took a thousand leading Achaeans to Rome as hostages, and Polybius was among them (167). For sixteen years he suffered exile, and at times, he tells us, "utter loss of spirit and paralysis of mind.".. But the younger Scipio befriended him, introduced him to the Scipionic circle of educated Romans, and persuaded the Sen ate, when it was scattering the other exiles throughout Italy, to let Polybius live with him in Rome. He accompanied Scipio on many campaigns, gave him valuable military advice, explored for him the coasts of Spain and Africa, and stood beside him at the burning of Carthage (146). He had received his freedom in 1 51, and m 149 he was employed as the represen tative of Rome in arranging a modus vivendi between the cities of Greece and their distant master, the Roman Senate. He must hav performed this ungrateful task well, for several cities honored him with monuments though one can never tell in what tense man's gratitude is felt. Having lived through sixty full years of action, he retired to write a Treatise on Tactics, a Life of Philopoemen, and his immense Histories. He died like a gentleman by falling from his horse as he was returning from a hunt, at the age of eighty-two.
No man ever wrote history from a wider background of education, travel, and experience. His work was conceived on a grand scale, and pro posed to tell the story, not only of Greece but of "the whole world" (i.e., the Mediterranean nations) from 221 to 146 B.c. "Such is the plan I propose; but all depends upon Fortune's granting me a life long enough to execute it.""' He rightly felt that the center of political history, in the pe riod which he covered, lay in Rome; he gave his book unity by making Rome the focus of its events, and studying with a diplomat's curiosity the methods by which Rome, with British casualness, had mastered the Medi-
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVI
terranean world... He admired the Romans intensely, for he had seen them in their greatest epoch, and had known chiefly the best of them in Scipio's group; they had, he felt, just those qualities that were fatally lacking in Greek character and government. Himself an aristocrat, and befriended by aristocrats, he had no sympathy with what seemed to him mere mob rule in the later stages of Greek democracy. Political history appeared to him to be a repetitious cycle of monarchy (or dictatorship), aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and monarchy. The best escape from this cycle, he thought, was through a "mixed constitution" like that of Lycurgus or Rome-an enfranchised but limited citizenry choosing its own magistrates, but checked by the power of a continuous and aristocratic senate... It was from this viewpoint that he wrote down the record of his times.


1283: ? Coming of Pelops into Elis
1261-1209: ? Heracles
1250: Theseus at Athens; Oedipus at Thebes; Minos and Daedalus at Cnossus
1250-1183: "Sixth city" of Troy; age of the Homeric heroes
1225: ? Voyage of the Argonauts
1213: ? War of the Seven against Thebes
1200: ? Accession of Agamemnon
1192-1183: ? Siege of Troy
1176: ? Accession of Orestes
1104: ? Dorian invasion of Greece
CHAPTER I
Crete
THE MEDITERRANEAN
J\ S we enter the fairest of all waters, leaving behind us the Atlantic and Gibraltar, we pass at once into the arena of Greek history. "Like
frogs around a pond," said Plato, "we have settled down upon the shores of this sea."' Even on these distant coast3 the Greeks founded precarious, barbarian-bound colonies many centuries before Christ: at Hemeroscopium and Ampurias in Spain, at Marseilles and Nice in France, and almost every where in southern Italy and Sicily. Greek colonists established prosperous towns at Cyrene in northern Africa, and at Naucratis in the delta of the Nile; their restless enterprise stirred the islands of the Aegean and the coasts of Asia Minor then as in our century; all along the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea they built towns and cities for their far venturing trade. Mainland Greece was but a small part of the ancient Greek world.
Why was it that the second group of historic civilizations took form on the Mediterranean, as the first had grown up along the rivers of Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and India,·as the third would flourish on the Atlantic, and as the fourth may appear on the shores of the Pacific? Was it the better climate of the lands washed by the Mediterranean? There, then as now: winter rains nourished the earth, and moderate frosts stimulated men; there, almost all the year round, one might live an open-air life under a warm but not enervating sun. And yet the surface of the Mediterranean coasts and islands is nowhere so rich as the alluvial valleys of the Ganges, the Indus, the Tigris, the Euphrates, or the Nile; the summer's drought may begin too soon or last too long; and everywhere a rocky basis lurks under the thin crust of the dusty earth. The temperate north and the tropic south are both more fertile than these historic lands where patient peasants, weary of coaxing the soil, more and more abandoned tillage to grow olives and the vine. And at any moment, along one or another of a hundred faults, earthquakes might split the ground beneath men's feet, and frighten them into a fitful piety. Climate did not draw civilization to Greece; probably it has never made a civiliza tion anywhere.
3
4	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. I
What drew men mto the Aegean was its islands. The islands were beauti ful; even a worried mariner must have been moved by the changing colors of those shadowed hills that rose like temples out of the reflecting sea. To day there are few sights lovelier on the globe; and sailing the Aegean, one begins to understand why the men who peopled those coasts and isles came to love them almost more than life, and, like Socrates, thought exile bitterer than death. But funher, the mariner was pleased to find that these island jewels were strewn in all directions, and at such short intervals that his ship, whether going between east and west or between north and south, would never be more than forty miles from land. And since the islands, like the mainland ranges, were the mountaintops of a once continuous territory that had been gradually submerged by a pertinacious sea,8 some welcome peak always greeted the outlook's eye, and served as a beacon to ships that had as yet no compass to guide them. Again, the movements of wind and water conspired to help the sailor reach his goal. A strong central current flowed from the Black Sea into the Aegean, and countercurrents flowed nonhward along the coasts; while the nonheasterly etesian winds blew regularly in the summer to help back to their southern ports the ships that had gone to fetch grain, fish; and furs from the Euxine Sea.• Fog was rare in the Mediter ranean, and the unfailing sunshine so varied the coastal winds that at almost any harbor, from spring to autumn, one might be carried out by a morning, and brought back by an evening, breeze.
In these propitious waters the acquisitive Phoenicians and the amphibious Greeks developed the an and science of navigation. Here they built ships for the most pan larger or faster, and yet more easily handled, than any that had yet sailed the Mediterranean. Slowly, despite pirates and harassing uncertainties, the water routes from Europe and Africa into Asia-through Cyprus, Sidon, and Tyre, or through the Aegean and the Black Sea-became cheaper than the long land routes, arduous and perilous, that had carried so much of the commerce of Egypt and the Near East. Trade took new lines, multiplied new populations, and created new wealth. Egypt, then Meso potamia, then Persia withered; Phoenicia deposited an empire of cities along the African coast, in Sicily, and in Spain; and Greece blossomed like a watered rose.
The Greeks called the Mediterranean Ho Pontos, the Passage or Road, and euphemisti cally termed the Black Sea Ho Pontos Euxeinos-the Sea Kindly to Guests-perhaps because it welcomed ships from the south with adverse currents and winds. The broad rivers that fed it, and the frequent mists that reduced its rate of evaporation, kept the Black Sea at a higher level than the Mediterranean, and caused a powerful current to rush through the narrow Bosporus (Ox-ford) and the Hellespont into the Aegean. The Sea of Marmora was the Propomis, Before the Sea.
CHAP, I)	CRETE	5
D. THE REDISCOVERY OF CRETE
''There is a land called Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich land, begirt with water; and therein are many men past counting, and ninety cities."' When Homer sang these lines, perhaps in the ninth century before our era,• Greece had almost forgotten, though the poet had not, that the island whose wealth seemed to him even then so great had once been wealthier still; that it had held sway with a powerful fleet over most of the Aegean and part of mainland Greece; and that it had developed, a thousand years before the siege of Troy, one of the most artistic civilizations in his tory. Probably it was this Aegean culture-as ancient to him as he is to us that Homer recalled when he spoke of a Golden Age in which men had been more civilized, and life more refined, than in his own disordered time.


58	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.m
'Twixt the black ships and the river of Xanthus glittered the watch- fires
Built by the horse-taming Trojans by Ilium.
Meanwhile the war-wearied horses, champing spelt and white barley, Oose by their chariots, waited the coming of fair-throned Dawn...
Nestor, King of Elian Pylus, advises Agamemnon to restore Briseis to Achilles; he agrees, and promises Achilles half of Greece if he will rejoin the siege; but Achilles continues to pout. (x) Odysseus and Diomed make a two man sally upon the Trojan camp at night, and slay a_dozen chieftains. (xx) Agamemnon leads his army valiantly, is wounded, and retires. Odysseus, sur rounded, fights like a lion; Ajax and Menelaus cleave a path to him, and save him for a bitter life. (xn-xm) When the Trojans advance to the walls that the Greeks have built about their camp (xxv) Hera is so disturbed that she resolves to rescue the Greeks. Oiled, perfumed, ravishingly gowned, and bound with Aphrodite's aphrodisiac girdle, she seduces Zeus to a divine slu.mber while Poseidon helps the Greeks to drive the Trojans back. (xv) Advantage fluc tuates; the Trojans reach the Greek ships, and the poet rises to a height of fervid narrative as the Greeks fight desperately in a retreat that must mean death.
(xvx) Patroclus, beloved of Achilles, wins his permission to lead Achilles' troops against Troy; Hector slays him, and (xvn) fights Ajax fiercely over the body of the youth. (xvm) Hearing of Patroclus' death, Achilles at last resolves to fight. His goddess-mother Thetis persuades the divine smithy, Hephaestus, to forge for him new arms and a mighty shield. (xix) Achilles is reconciled with Agamemnon, (xx) engages Aeneas, and is about to kill him when Poseidon rescues him for Virgil's purposes. (xx1) Achilles slaughters a host of Trojans, and sends them to Hades with long genealogical speeches. The gods take up the fight: Athena lays Ares low with a stone, and when Aphrodite, going for a soldier, tries to save him, Athena knocks her down with a blow upon her fair breast. Hera cuffs the ears of Artemis; Poseidon and Apollo content them selves with words. (xxn) All Trojans but Hector fly from Achilles; Priam and Hecuba counsel Hector to stay behind the walls, but he refuses. Then sud denly, as Achilles advances upon him, Hector takes to his heels. Achilles pur sues him three times around the walls of Troy; Hector· makes a stand, and is killed.
(xxm) In the subsiding finale of the drama Patroclus is cremated with ornate ritual. Achilles sacrifices to him many cattle, twelve captured Trojans, and his own long hair. The Greeks honor Patroclus with games, and (xxxv) Achilles drags the corpse of Hector behind his chariot three times around the pyre. Priam comes in state and sorrow to beg for the remains of his son. Achilles
CHAP.m)	THE  HEROIC  AGE	59
relents, grants a truce of twelve days, and allows the aged king to take the
cleansed and anointed body back to Troy.
THE HOME-COMING
Here the great poem suddenly ends, as if the poet had used up his share of a common-story, and must leave the rest to another minstrel's lay. We are told by the later literature how Paris, standing beside the battle, slew Achilles with an arrow that pierced his vulnerable heel, and how Troy fell at last through the stratagem of the wooden horse.
The victors themselves were vanquished by their victory, and returned in weary sadness to their longed-for homes. Many of them were ship wrecked, and some of these, stranded on alien shores, founded Greek col onies in Asia, the Aegean, and Italy... Menelaus, who had vowed that he would kill Helen, fell in love with her anew when the "goddess among women" came to him in the calm majesty of her loveliness; gladly he took her back to be his queen again in Sparta. When Agamemnon reached Mycenae he "clasped his land and kissed it, and many were the hot tears that streamed from his eyes."" But during his long absence Clytaemnestra had taken his cousin Aegisthus for husband and king; and when Agamem non entered the palace they slew him.
Sadder still was the home-coming of Odysseus; and here probably an other Homer has tgld the tale in a poem less powerful and heroic, gentler and pleasanter, than the Iliad.• Odysseus, says the Odyssey, is shipwrecked on the island of Ogygia, a fairyland Tahiti, whose goddess-queen Calypso holds him as her lover for eight years while secretly he pines for his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus, who pine for him at Ithaca.
Athena persuades Zeus to bid Calypso let Odysseus depart. The goddess flies to Telemachus, and hears with sympathy the youth's simple tale: how the princes of Ithaca and its vassal isles are paying court to Penelope, seeking through her the throne, and how meanwhile they live gaily in Odysseus' palace, and consume his substance. (n) Telemachus bids the suitors disperse, but they laugh at his youth. Secretly he embarks upon the sea in search of his father, while Penelope, mourning now for both husband and son, holds off the suitors
Very probably the narrative in this instance has less basis in history than the Iliad. The legend of the long-wandering mariner or warrior, whose wife cannot recognize him on his return, is apparently older than the story of Troy, and appears in almost every literature." Odvsseus is the Sinuhe, the Sinbad, the Robinson Crusoe, the Enoch Arden of the Greeks. The geography of the poem is a mystery that still exercises leisurely minds.
6o	THE  LIFE  OF GREECE
by promising to wed one of them when she has completed her web-of which she unweaves at night as much as she has woven by day. (m) Telemachus visits Nestor at Pylus and (iv) Menelaus at Sparta, but neither can tell him where to find his father. The poet paints an attractive picture of Helen settled and subdued, but still divinely beautiful; she has long since been forgiven her sins, and remarks that when Troy fell she had grown tired of the city anyway.•
(v) Now for the first time Odysseus enters the tale. "Sitting on the shore" of Calypso's isle, "his eyes were dry of tears, and his sweet life ebbed away, as he longed moumfully for his return. By night indeed he would sleep by Calypso's side perforce in the hollow caves, unwilling beside the willing nymph, but by day he would sit on the rocks and the sands, rocking his soul with tears and groans, and looking over the unresting sea."'18 Calypso, having detained him one night more, bids him make a raft and set out alone.
{VI) After many straggles with the ocean, Odysseus lands in the mythical country of Phaeacia (possibly Corcyra-Corfu), and is found by the maiden Nausicaa, who leads him to the palace of her father, King Alcinous. The lass falls in love with the strong-limbed, strong-hearted hero, and confides to her companions: "Listen, my white-armed maidens  Erewhile this man seemed
to me uncomely, but now he is like the gods that keep wide heaven. Would that such a one might be called my husband, dwelling here, and that it might please him here to abide.""' (vu-VIII) Odysseus makes so good an impression that Alcinous offers him Nausicaa's hand. Odysseus excuses himself, but is glad to tell the story of his return from Troy.
(ix) His ships (he tells the King) were home off their course to the land of the Lotus-Eaters, who gave his men such honey-sweet lotus fruit that many forgot their homes and their longing, and Odysseus had to force them back to their ships. There they sailed to the land of the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants who lived without law or labor on an island abounding in wild grain and fruit. Caught in a cave by the Cyclop Polyphemus, who ate several of his men, Odysseus saved the remnant by lulling the monster to sleep with wine, and then burning out his single eye. (x) The wanderers took again to the sea, and came to the land of the Laestrygonians; but these, too, were cannibals, and only Odysseus' ship escaped them. He and his mates reached next the isle of Aenea, where the lovely and treacherous goddess Circe lured most of them into her cave with song, drugged them, and turned them into ine. Odysseus was about to slay her when he changed his mind and accepted her love. He and his comrades, now restored to human formt remained with Circe a full year.
After her death, said Greek tradition, she was worshiped as a goddess. It was a common belief in Greece that those who spoke ill of her were punished by the gods; even Homer's blindness, it was hinted, came upon him because he had lent his song to the calmnnious notion that Helen had eloped to Troy, instead of being snatched off to Egypt against her will."
CHAP.fl)	THE  HEROIC  AGE
Setting sail again, they came to a land perpetually dark, which proved to be the entrance to Hades; there Odysseus talked with the shades of Agamem non, Achilles, and his mother. (xu) Resuming their voyage, they passed the island of the Sirens, against whose seductive strains Odysseus protected his men by putting wax into their ears. In the straits (Messina?) of Scylla and Charyb dis his ship was wrecked, and he alone survived, to live for eight long years on Calypso's isle.


Zephyrinus, Roman Pope (ca. 198-ca. 218),
617
Zerubbabel, Hebrew prince (fl. 520 B.c.), 533 Zeugma, 511
Zeus, 61, 63, 353, 390, 487, 495-496; Zeus Pan
hellenicos, 418; Zeus the Olympian, 418
Zeus, 461
Zeus (Pheidias), 486
Zeuxis, Greek painter (fl. 430 a.c.), 351
Zion, 535
zodiac, 298
Zola, Emile, French novelist (1840-1902), 412
zoological gardens, 384
Zoro.1scrianism, 524-515, 529-530, 537,540, 558,
595, 596, 600 , 606,639,654; see also ,\lithras Zosimus, Greek h.istonan (fl. 5th cenrury),
663
A	NOTE	ABOUT	THE	AUTHOR
1-Vill Dura11t's childhood rwas spe-ut at North Adams, Mass., and Kearny,
N. J. He was educated i11 the Catholic parochial schools of tbese cities, and thereafter at St. Peter's (Jesuit) College, Jersey City, and Columbia Uni versity, New York. For a summer be served as cuh reporter 011 tbe New York Journal, i111907; but finding the work too exciting for bis temperament he contented bimself rwitb teacbi11g Latin, Frencb, English, and otber sub jects at Seton Hall College, South Orange, N. J. ( 1907-11 ). He entered tbe semiuary tbere i11 1909, but rwitbdrew in 1911, for reasous wbicb he bas described in bis book, Transition. He passed from a seminary to tbe radical circles i11 New	York,aud became the teacher of the Ferrer School ( 1911-13), an experiment i11 libertarian education. Ju 1912 be toured Europe at tbe expense of Alden Freeman,'z:.:bo bad befrieuded bim and bad undertaken to broaden bis borders. In 1913 be gave himself over to graduate studies at Columbia University, specializing in biology under Morgan and Calkins, and in p/Jilosopby under lVoodbridge and Deru:ey. He received tbe Pb.D.. degree tbere in 1917, and taugbt pbilosopby at Columbia U11iversity for one year. In 1914 be began, in a Presbyterian clntrcb at Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, New York, tbose lectures on tbe_ bistory of pbilosopby and literature wbicb prepared bim for The Story of Philosophy and The Story of Civilization; for his audiences there were mostly working;men and wome11, wbo demanded complete clarity, and some co11te111porary signifi cance to all historical material considered v.:ortby of study. In 1921 be organ ized tbe Labor Temple Scbool, wbicb became one of tbe most successful of recent experiments in adult education. He retired in 1s::7 to de,vote him self to The Story of Civilization. He toured Europe again in 1927; v.Jent
.rrouud tbe world for a study of Egypt, tbe Near East, India, China, and
Japa11 i11 1930; a11d circled tbe globe again in 1932 to visit Japan, :Hancburia, Siberia, and Russia. These trar,;els r..:;e11t to •ards making Our Oriental Heritage, the first '.JOlume of The Story of Civilization, tbe magisterial ".;.:ork it is. Before embarking 011 tbe writing of the second 'i..'olzmze, The Life of Greece, Dr. Durant speut a long szmrmer in Greece, i·isiting tbe famous sites and examining tbe remains of H elle11ic ci'".lili::;,.1tio11. His Mediterranean travels bai·e enriched tbe backgro1t11d of Caesar and Christ, tbe tbird part of The Story of CiYilization.
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The story was based upon a letter purporting to have been written by one Aristeas in the first century A.D. The letter was proved spurious by Hody of Oxford in 168+•
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXV
REVOLT
The lesson of Ptolemaic socialism is that even a government may ex ploit. Under the first two Ptolemies the system worked reasonably well: great engineering enterprises were completed, agriculture was improved, marketing was brought into order, the overseers behaved with a modest measure of injustice and partiality, and though the exploitation of mate rials and men was thorough, its profits went in large degree to develop and adorn the country, and to finance its cultural life. Three factors ruined the experiment. The Ptolemies went to war, and spent more and more of the people's earnings upon armies, navies, and campaigns. After Philadel phus there was a rapid deterioration in the quality of the kings; they ate and drank and mated, and allowed the administration of the system to fall into the hands of rascals who ground every possible penny out of the poor. The fact that the exploiters were foreigners was never forgotten by the Egyptians, nor by the priests who dreamed of the fleshpots of Egypt that their class had enjoyed before the Persian and Greek domination.
The Ptolemaic conception of socialism was essentially one of intensified production rather than of wide distribution. The fellah received enough of his product to keep him alive, but-not enough to encourage him in his work or in the business of rearing a family. Generation after generation the government's exactions grew. The system of detailed national control became intolerable, like the relentlessly watchrul eye of a despotic parent. The state lent seed-corn to the peasant to plant his crop, and then bound him to the farm until the harvest was in. No peasant might use any of his own product until all his debts had been paid to the state. The fellah was patient, but even he began to grumble. By the second century a substantial part of the soil had been abandoned for lack of peasants to work it; the cleruchs or lessees of royal land could get no tenants to till it for them; they tried to do it themselves, but were not up to the task; gradually the desert crept back upon civilization. In the gold mines of Nubia the slaves worked naked in dark and narrow galleries, in cramping positions, loaded with chains, and encouraged by the whip of the overseer; their food was poor, not even enough to keep them alive; thousands of them succumbed from malnutrition and fatigue; and the only welcome event in their lives was death." The common laborer in the factories received one obol (nine cents) a day, the skilled worker two or three. Every tenth day was a day of rest.
Complaints multiplied, and strikes grew more frequent: strikes among
CHAP. XXV)	EGYPT  AND  THE  WEST	597
the miners, the quarrymen, the boatmen, the peasants, the artisans, the tradesmen, even the overseers and the police; strikes seldom for better pay, since the toilers had ceased to hope for this, but of simple exhaustion and despair. "We are worn out," says a papyrus record of one strike; "we will run away"-i.e., seek sanctuary in a temple.'" Nearly all the exploiters were Greeks, nearly all the exploited were Egyptians or Jews. The priests clandestinely appealed to the religious feelings of the natives, while the Greeks resented any colleession made to Jews or Egyptians by the gov ernment. In the capital the populace was bribed by state bounties and spectacles, but it was excluded from the royal quarter, was watched by a large military force, and was allowed no voice in national affairs; in the end it became an irresponsible and violent mob.'" In 216 the Egyptians revolted, but were put down; in 189 they revolted again, and the mutiny continued for five years. The Ptolemies won for a time by the force of their army, and by raising their contributions to the priests; but the situation had be come impossible. The country had been milked to depletion, and even the exploiters felt that nothing remained.
Disintegration set in on every side. The Ptolemies passed from natural to unnatural vice, from intelligence to stupidity; they married with a free dom and haste that for£eited the esteem of their people; luxury unfitted them for war or government, at last even for thought. Lawlessness and dishonesty, incompetence and hopelessness, the absence of competition and of the stimulus that comes from ownership, lowered year by year the productivity of the land. Literature waned, creative art died; after the third century Alexandria added little to either. The Egyptians lost respect for the Greeks; the Greeks, if such a thing can be believed, lost respect for themselves. Year by year they forgot their own language, and spoke a corrupt mixture of Greek and Egyptian; more and more of them married their sisters, after native custom, or married into Egyptian families and were absorbed; thousands of them worshiped Egyptian gods. By the second century the Greeks had ceased to be the dominant rade even politi cally; the Ptolemies, to preserve their authority, had adopted the Egyptian faith and ritual, and had increased the power of the priests. As the kings sank into epicurean ease the clergy reasserted its leadership, and won back year by year the lands and privileges which the earlier Ptolemies had taken away."° The Rosetta Stone, dated 196 B.c., describes the coronation cere monies of Ptolemy V as following almost completely the Egyptian forms. Under Ptolemy V (203-181) and Ptolemy VI (181-145) dynastic feuds absorbed the energies of the royal house, while Egyptian agriculture and
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXV
industry decayed. Order and peace were not restored until Caesar, as a mere incident in his career, took Egypt with hardly a blow, and Augustus made it a province of Rome (30 B.c.);
SUNSET IN SICILY
The Hellenistic age faced east and south, and almost ignored the west. Cy rene prospered as usual, having learned that it is better to trade than to war; out of it, in this period, came Callimachus the poet, Eratosthenes the philosopher, and Cameades the philosopher. Greek Italy was worried and weakened by the double challenge of multiplying natives and rising Rome, while Sicily lived in daily fear of the Carthaginian power. Twenty-three years after the coming of Timoleon a rich man's revolution suppressed the Syracusan democracy, and put the government into the hands of six hundred oligarchic families ( 320). These divided into factions, and were in tum overthrown by a radical revolution in which four thousand persons were killed and six thousand of the well to do were sent into banishment. Agathocles won dictatorship by promising a can cellation of debts and a redistribution of the land.1n So, periodically, the concen tration of wealth becomes extreme, and gets righted by taxation or by revolu tion.
After forty-seven years of chaos, during which the Carthaginians repeatedly invaded the island, and Pyrrhus came, won, lost, and went, Syracuse by un merited good fortune fell into the power of Hieron II, the most beneficent of the many dictators thrown up by the passions and turbulence of the Sicilian Greeks. Hieron ruled for fifty-four years, says the astonished Polybius, "with out killing, exiling, or injuring a single citizen, which indeed is the most remark able of all things.".. Surrounded by all the means of luxury, he led a modest and temperate life, and lived to the age of ninety. On several occasions he wished co resign his authority, but the people begged him to retain it."" He had the good judgment to make an alliance with Rome, and thereby kept the Carthaginians at bay for half a century. He gave the city order and peace, and considerable free dom; he executed great public works, and without oppressive taxation left a full treasury at his death. Under his protection or patronage Archimedes brought ancient science to its culmination, and Theocritus sang, in the last perfect Greek, the loveliness of Sicily and the expected bounty of its king. Syracuse became now the most populous and prosperous city in Hellas."'
Hieron amused his leisure by watching his artisans, under the supervision of Archimedes, construct for him a pleasure boat that embodied all the shipbuilding art and science of antiquity. It was half a stadium (407 feet) in length; it had a sport deck with a gymnasium and a large marble bath, and a shaded garden deck
CHAP.XXV)	EGYPT  AND  THE  WEST	599
with a great variety of plants; it was manned by six hundred seamen in twenty groups of oars, and could carry in addition three hundred passengers or marines; it had sixty cabins, some with mosaic floors, and doors of ivory and precious woods; it was elegantly furnished in every part, and was adorned with paintings and statuary. It was protected against attack by armor and turrets; from each of the eight turrets great beams extended, with a hole at the end through which large stones could be dropped upon enemy vessels; throughout its length Archi medes constructed a great catapult capable of hurling stones of three talents' weight (174 pounds), or arrows twelve cubits (eighteen feet) long. It could carry 3900 tons of cargo, and itself weighed a thousand tons. Hieron had hoped to use it in regular service between Syracuse and Alexandria; but finding it too large for his own docks, and extravagantly expensive to maintain, he filled it with com and fish from Sicily's abounding fields and seas, and sent it, vessels and con tents, as a gift to Egypt, which was suffering an unusual dearth of com.""
Hieron died in 2 1 6. He had wished to establish a democratic constitution be fore his death, but his daughters prevailed upon his dotage to bequeath his power to his grandson.  Hieronymus turned out to be a weakling and a scoun
drel; he abandoned the Roman alliance, received envoys from Carthage, and permitted them to become in effect the rulers of Syracuse. Rome, not abounding in corn, prepared to fight Carthage for the wealth of_ an island that had never learned to govern itself. All the Mediterranean world, like a decaying fruit, pre pared to fall into the hands of a greater and more ruthless conqueror than Greek history had ever known.
CHAPTER  :X:XVI
Books
LIBRARIES AND SCHOLARS
N every .field of Hellenistic life except the drama we find the same phenomenon-Greek civilization not destroyed but dispersed. Athens was dying, and the Greek settlements of the west, barring Syracuse, were in decay; but the Greek cities of Egypt and the East were at their material and cultural zenith. Polybius, a man of wide experience, historical knowl edge, and careful judgment, spoke, about 148 B.c., of "the present day, when the progress of the arts and sciences has been so rapid";' the words have a familiar ring. Through the dissemination of Greek as a common tongue a cultural unity was now established which would last in the east ern Mediterranean for nearly a thousand years. All men of education in the new empires learned Greek as the medium of diplomacy, literature, and science; a book written in Greek could be understood by almost any edu
cated non-Greek in Egypt or the Near East. Men spoke of the oikoumene, or inhabited world, as one civilization, and developed a cosmopolitan out look less stimulating but perhaps more sensible than the proud and narrow nationalism of the city-state.
For this enlarged audience thousands of writers wrote hundreds of thou sands of books. We know the names of eleven hundred Hellenistic au thors; the unknown are an incalculable multitude. A cursive script had developed to facilitate writing; indeed, as early as the fourth century B.c. we hear of systems of shorthand whereby "certain vowels and consonants can be expressed by strokes placed i various positions."" Books were writ ten on Egyptian papyrus until Ptolemy VI, hoping to check the growth of the library at Pergamum, forbade the export of the material from Egypt. Eumenes II countered by encouraging the mass production of the treated skins of sheep and calves, which had long been used for writing purposes in the East; and soon "parchment," from the city and the name of Perga mum, rivaled paper as a vehicle of communication and literature.