ruin Athens, makes $170 a day by leasing a thousand slaves to the mine oper ators at a rental of one obol (17 cents) each per day; many an Athenian fortune is made in this way, or by lending money to the enterprise. The slaves in the mine number some twenty thousand, and include the superintendents and engineers. They work in ten-hour shifts, and the operations continue without interruption, night and day. If the slave rests he feels the foreman's lash; if he tries to escape he is attached to his work by iron shackles; if he runs away and is captured his forehead is branded with a hot iron.1" The galleries are but three feet high and two feet wide; the slaves, with pick or chisel and hammer, work on their knees, their stomachs, or their backs.1" The broken ore is carried out in baskets or bags handed from man to man, for the galleries are too narrow to let two men pass each other conveniently. The profits are enor mous: in 483 the share received by the government is a hundred talents ($600,- 000)-awindfall that builds a fleet for Athens and saves Greece at Salamis. Even for others than the slaves there is evil in this as well as good; the Athenian treasury becomes dependent upon the mines, and when, in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans capture Laurium the whole economy of Athens is upset. The exhaustion of the veins in the fourth century co-operates with many other factors in Athenian decay. For Attica has no other precious metal in her soil.
Metallurgy advances with mining. The ore at Laurium is crushed in huge mortars with a heavy iron pestle worked by slave power; then it goes to mills where it is ground between revolving stones of hard trachyte; then it is sized by screening; the material that passes through the screen is sent to an ore washer, where jets of water are discharged from cisterns upon inclined rec tangular tables of stone covered with a smooth thin coat of hard cement; the current is turned at sharp angles, where pockets snare the metal particles. The collected metal is thrown_ into small smelting furnaces equipped with blowers to raise the heat; at the bottom of each furnace are openings through which the molten metal is drawn. Lead is separated from the silver by heating the molten metal on cupels of porous material and exposing it to the air; by this simple process the lead is converted into litharge, and the silver is freed. The processes of smelting and refining are competently performed, for the silver coins of Athens are ninety-eight per cent pure. Laurium pays the price of the wealth it produces, as mining always pays the price for metal industry; plants and men wither and die from the furnace fumes, and the vicinity of the works becomes a scene of dusty desolation.u
Other industries are not so toilsome. Attica has many of them now, small in scale but remarkably specialized. It quarries marble and other stones, it makes a thousand shapes of pottery, it dresses hides in great tanneries like those owned by Cleon, rival of Pericles, and Anytus, accuser of Socrates; it has wagon makers, shipbuilders, saddlers, harness makers, shoe manufacturers; there are saddlers who make only bridles, and shoemakers who make only men's or
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CBAP.m
women's shoes.111 In the building trades are carpenters, molders, stonecutters, metalworkers, painters, veneerers. There are blacksmiths, swordmakers, shield makers, lampmakers, lyre tuners, millers, bakers, sausage men, fishmongers everything necessary to an economic life busy and varied, but not mechanized or monotonous. Common textiles are still for the most part produced in the home; there the women weave and mend the ordinary clothing and bedding of the family, some carding the wool, some at the spinning wheel, some at the loom, some bent over an embroidery frame. Special fabrics come from work shops, or from abroad-fine linens from Egypt, Amorgos, and Tarentum, dyed woolens from Syracuse, blankets from Corinth, carpets from the Near East and Carthage, colorful coverlets from Cyprus; and the women of Cos, late in the fourth century, learn the art of unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm and weaving the filaments into silk.JS In some homes the women become so highly skilled in textile arts that they produce more than their families can use; they sell the surplus at first to consumers, then to middlemen; they employ helpers, freedmen or slaves; and in this way a domestic industry develops as a step to a factory system.
Such a system begins to take form in the age of Pericles. Pericles himself, like Alcibiades, owns a factory." No machinery is available, but slaves can be had in abundance; it is because muscle power is cheap that there is no incentive to develop machinery. The ergasteria of Athens are rather workshops than factories; the largest of them, Cephalus' shield factory, has 120 workmen, Timarchus' shoe factory has ten, Demosthenes' cabinet factory twenty, his armor factory thirty.JS At first these shops produce only to order; later they manufacture for the market, and finally for export; and the spread and abun dance of coinage, replacing barter, facilitates their operations. There are no corporations; each factory is an independent unit, owned by one or two men; and the owner often works beside his slaves. There are no patents; crafts are handed down from father to son, or are learned by apprentices; the Athenians are exempted by law from caring for the old age of parents who have failed to teach them a trade.211 Hours are long but work is leisurely; master and man labor from dawn to twilight, with a siesta at summer noons. There are no vacations, but there are some sixty workless holydays every year.
m. TRADE AND FINANCE
When an individual, a family, or a city creates a surplus, and wishes to exchange it, trade begins. The first difficulty here is that transport is costly, for roads are poor, and the sea is a snare. The finest road is the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis; but this is mere dirt, and is often too narrow to let vehicles pass. The bridges are precarious causeways formed by earthen
CHAP.m)    WORK AND  WEALTH  IN  ATHENS
dikes, which as likely as not have been washed away by floods. The usual draft animal is the ox, who is too philosophical to enrich the trader that de pends upon him for transpon; wagons are fragile, and always break down, or get bogged in the mud; it is better to pack the goods on the back of a mule, for he goes a trifle faster, and does not take up so much of the road. There is no postal service in Greece, even for the governments; they are con tent with runners, and private correspondence must wait the chance of using these. lmponant news can be flashed by fire beacons from hill to hill, or sent by carrier pigeons."" There are inns here and there on the road, but they are favored by robbers and vermin; even the god Dionysus, in Aris tophanes, inquires of Heracles for "the eating-houses and hostels where there are the fewest bugs."'"
Sea transpon is cheaper, especially if voyages are limited, as most of them are, to the calm summer months. Passenger tariffs are low: for two drach mas ($2) a family can secure passage from the Piraeus to Egypt or the Black Sea,S" but ships do not cater to passengers, being made to carry goods or wage war or do either at need. The main motive power is wind upon a sail, but slaves ply the oars when the wind is contrary or dead. The small... est seagoing merchant vessels are triaconters with thirty oars, all on one level; the penteconter has fifty. Back about 700 the Corinthians launched the first trireme, with a crew of two hundred men plying three banks or tiers of oars; by the fifth century such ships, beautiful with their long and lofty prows, have grown to 2 56 tons, carry seven thousand bushels of grain, and become the talk of the Mediterranean by making eight miles an hour.•
The second problem of trade is to find a reliable medium of exchange. Every city has its own system of weights and measures, and its own indi vidual coinage; at every one of a hundred frontiers one must transvalue all values skeptically, for every Greek government except the Athenian cheats by debasing its coins." "In most cities," says an anonymous Greek, "merchants are compelled to ship goods for the return journey, for they cannot get money that is of any use to them elsewhere."• Some cities mint coins of electrum-a compound of silver and gold-and rival one another in getting as little gold as possible into the mixture. The Athenian govern ment, from Solon onward, helps Athenian trade powerfully by establishing a reliable coinage, stamped with the owl of Athena; "taking owls to Athens" is the Greek equivalent of "carrying coals to Newcastle.""" Because Athens, through all her vicissitudes, refuses to depreciate her silver drachmas, these "owls" are accepted gladly throughout the Mediterranean world, and tend
274	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XII
to displace local currencies in the Aegean. Gold at this stage is still an anicle of merchandise, sold by weight, rather than a vehicle of trade; Athens mints it only in rare emergencies, usually in a ration to silver of 14 to 1 .• The smallest Athenian coins are of copper; eight of these make an obol-a coin of iron or bronze, named from its resemblance to nails or spits (obeliskoi). Six obols make a drachma, i.e., a handful; two drachmas make a gold stater; one hundred drachmas make a mina; sixty minas make a tal ent. A drachma in the first half of the fifth century buys a bushel of grain, as a dollar does in twentieth-century America.,.	There is no paper money
in Athens, no government bonds, no joint-stock corporations, no stock exchange.
But there are banks. They have a hard struggle to get a footing, for those who have no need for loans denounce interest as a crime, and the philoso phers agree with them. The average fifth-century Athenian is a hoarder; if he has savings he prefers to hide them rather than entrust them to the banks. Some men lend money on mongages, at 16 to 18 per cent; some lend it, without interest, to their friends; some deposit their money in tem ple treasuries. The temples serve as banks, and lend to individuals and states at a moderate interest; the temple of Apollo at Delphi is in some measure an international bank for all Greece. There are no private loans to governments, but occasionally one state lends to another. Meanwhile the money-changer at his table (trapeza) begins in the fifth century to re ceive money on deposit, and to lend it to merchants at interest rates that vary from I z to 30 per cent according to the risk; in this way he becomes a banker, though to the end of ancient Greece he keeps his early name of trapezite, the man at the table. He takes his methods from the Near East, improves them, and passes them on to Rome, which hands them down to modern Europe. Soon after the Persian War Themistocles deposits sev enty talents ($420,000) with the Corinthian banker Philostephanus, very much as political adventurers feather foreign nests for themselves today; this is the earliest known allusion to secular-nontemple-banking. Towards the end of the century Antisthenes and Archestratus establish what will become, under Pasion, the most famous of all private Greek banks. Through such trapezitai money circulates more freely and rapidly, and so does more work, than before; and the facilities that they offer stimulate creatively the expansion of Athenian trade.
In this volume an obol is reckoned as equivalent in buying power to 17 cents in United States currency in 1938, a drachma as $1, a talent as $6000. These equivalents are only approximate, for prices rose throughout Greek history; cf. section V of this chapter.
CHAP.XII)	WORK  AND  WEALTH  IN  ATHENS
Trade, not industry or finance, is the soul of Athenian economy. Though many producers still sell directly to the consumer, a growing number of them require the intermediary of the market, whose function it is to buy and store goods until the consumer is ready to purchase them. In this way a class of retailers arises, who peddle their wares through the streets, or in the wake of armies, or at festivals or fairs, or off er them for sale in shops or stalls in the agora or elsewhere in the town. To the shops come freemen or metics or slaves to haggle with tradesmen and buy for the home. One of the severest disabilities suffered by the "free" women of Athens is that custom does not allow them to shop.•
Foreign commerce advances even faster than domestic trade, for the Greek states have learned the advantages of an international division of labor, and each specializes in some product; the shieldmaker, for example, no longer goes from city to city at the call of those who need him, but makes his shields in his shop and sends them out to the markets of the classic world. In one century Athens moves from household economy-wherein each household makes nearly all that it needs-to urban economy-wherein each town makes nearly all that it needs-to international economy-where each state is dependent upon imports, and must make exports to pay for them. The Athenian fleet for two generations keeps the Aegean clear of pirates, and from 480 to 430 commerce thrives as it never will again until Pompey suppresses piracy in 67 B.c. The docks, warehouses, markets, and banks of the Piraeus offer every facility for trade; soon the busy port becomes the chief center of distribution and reshipment for the commerce between the East and the West. "The articles which it is difficult to get, one here, one there, from the rest of the world," says lsocrates, "all these it is easy to buy in Athens."00 "The magnitude of our city," says Thucydides, "draws the produce of the world into our harbor, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury as those of his own."11 From the Piraeus merchants carry the wine, oil, wool, minerals, marble, pottery, arms, luxuries, books, and works of art produced by the fields and shops of Attica; to the Piraeus they bring grain from the Byzantium, Syria, Egypt, Italy, and Sicily, fruit and cheese from Sicily and Phoenicia, meat from Phoenicia and Italy, fish from the Black Sea, nuts from Paphlagonia, copper from Cyprus, tin from England, iron from the Pontic coast, gold from Thasos and Thrace, timber from Thrace and Cyprus, embroideries from the Near East, wools, flax, and dyes from Phoenicia, spices from Cyrene, swords from Chalcis, glass from Egypt, tiles from Corinth, beds from Chios and Miletus, boots and bronzes from
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XII
Etruria, ivory from Ethiopia, perfumes and ointments from Arabia, slaves from Lydia, Syria, and Scythia. The colonies serve not only as markets, but as shipping agents to send Athenian goods into the interior; and though the cities of Ionia decay in the fifth century because the trade that once passed there is diverted to the Propontis and Caria during and after the Persian War, Italy and Sicily replace them as outlets for the surplus prod ucts and population of mainland Greece. We may estimate the amount of Aegean commerce from the return of 1 200  talents from a 5 per cent tax laid in 413 upon the imports and exports of the cities in the Athenian Empire, indicating a trade of $144,000,000 a year.
The danger lurking in this prosperity is the growing dependence of Athens upon imported grain; hence her insistence upon controlling the Hellespont and the Black Sea, her persistent colonizing of the coasts and isles on the way to the straits, and her disastrous expeditions to Egypt in 459 and to Sicily in 415. It is this dependence that persuades Athens to transform the Confederacy of Delos into an empire; and when, in 405, the Spartans destroy the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont, the starvation and surrender of Athens are inevitable results. Nevertheless it is this trade that makes Athens rich, and provides, with the imperial tribute, the sinews of her cultural development. The merchants who accompany their goods to all quarters of the Mediterranean come back with changed perspective, and alert and open minds; they bring new ideas and ways, break down ancient taboos and sloth, and replace the familial conservatism of a rural aristocracy with the individualistic and progressive spirit of a mercantile civilization. Here in Athens East and West meet, and jar each other from their ruts. Old myths lose their grasp on the souls of men, leisure rises, inquiry is supported, science and philosophy grow. Athens becomes the most intensely alive city of her time.
IV. FREEMEN AND SLAVES
Who does all this work? In the countryside it is done by citizens, their families, and free hired men; in Athens it is done partly by citizens, partly by freedmen, more by metics, mostly by slaves. The shopkeepers, artisans, merchants, and bankers come almost entirely from the voteless classes. The burgher looks down upon manual labor, and does as little of it as he may. To work for a livelihood is considered ignoble; even the professional prac tice or. teaching of music, sculpture, or painting is accounted by many


der the rule of dictators, were not a whit more valiant than any of their neighbors, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became decidedly the first of all.""
PREMARITAL RELATIONS
In morality, as in alphabet, measures, weights, coinage, costume, music, as tronomy, and mystic cults, classic Athens seems more Oriental than European. The physical basis of love is accepted frankly by both sexes; the love philters that anxious ladies brew for negligent men have no merely Platonic aim. Pre marital chastity is required of respectable women, but among unmarried men after the ephebic period there are few moral restraints upon desire. The great festivals, though religious in origin, are used as safety valves for the natural promiscuity of humanity; sexual license on such occasions is condoned in the belief that monogamy may be more easily achieved during the balance of the year. No stigma is attached in Athens to the occasional intercourse of young men with courtesans; even married men may patronize them without any greater moral penalty than a scolding at home and a slightly tarnished repu tation in the city."" Athens officially recognizes prostitution, and levies a tax upon its practitioners.""
With a career so open to talent, harlotry becomes in Athens, as in most other cities of Greece, a well-plied profession with many specialties. The lowest order of them, the pornai, live chiefly at the Piraeus, in common brothels marked for the convenience of the public with the phallic symbol of Priapus. An obol secures admission to these houses, where the girls, so lightly clad that they are called gymnai (naked), allow their prospective purchasers to examine them like dogs in a kennel. A man may strike a bargain for any period of time, and may arrange with the madam of the house to take a girl to live with him for a week, a month, or a year; sometimes a girl is hired out in this way to two or more men, distributing her time among them according to their means.11 Higher than these girls in the affection of the Athenians are the auletrides, or flute-players, who, like the geisha of Japan, assist at "stag" entertainments, pro vide music and gaiety, perform dances artistic or lascivious, and then, if prop erly induced, mingle with the guests and spend the night with them... A few old courtesans may stave off destitution by developing training schools for such flute girls, and teaching them the science of cosmetic adornment, personal transfiguration, musical entertainment, and amorous dalliance. Tradition hands down carefully from one generation of courtesans to another, like a precious heritage, the arts of inspiring love by judicious display, holding it by coy re fusal, and making it pay.• Nevertheless some of the auletrides, if we may take Lucian's word for it from a later age, have tender hearts, know real affection,
300	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIII
and ruin themselves, Camille-like, for their lovers' sakes. The honest courtesan is an ancient theme hoary with the dignity of age.
The highest class of Greek courtesans is composed of the hetairai-literally, companions. Unlike the pornai, who are mostly of Oriental birth, the hetairai are usually women of the citizen class, who have fallen from the respectability or fled from the seclusion required of Athenian maids and matrons. They live independently, and entertain at their own homes the lovers whom they lure. Though they are mostly brunettes by nature, they dye their hair yellow in the belief that Athenians prefer blondes; and they distinguish themselves, appar ently under legal compulsion, by wearing flowery robes." By occasional read ing, or attending lectures, some of them acquire a modest education, and amuse their cultured patrons with learned conversation. Thais, Diotima, Thargelia, and Leontium, as well as Aspasia, are celebrated as philosophical disputants, and sometimes for their polished literary style.• Many of them are renowned for their wit, and Athenian literature has an anthology of hetairai epigrams.• Though all courtesans are denied civil rights, and are forbidden to enter any temple but that of their own goddess, Aphrodite Pandemos, a select minority of the hetairai enjoy a high standing in male society at Athens; no man is ashamed to be seen with these; philosophers contend for their favors; and an historian chronicles their history as piously as Plutarch."'
In such ways a number of them achieve a certain scholastic immortality. There is Clepsydra, so named because she accepts and dismisses her lovers by the hourglass; Thargelia, who, as the Mata Hari of her time, serves the Per sians as a spy by sleeping with as many as possible of the statesmen of Athens;"' Theoris, who consoles the old age of Sophocles, and Archippe, who succeeds her about the ninth decade of the dramatist's life;"" Archeanassa, who amuses Plato,"° and Danae and Leontium, who teach Epicurus the philosophy of pleasure; Themistonoe, who practices her .art until she has lost her last tooth and her last lock of hair; and the businesslike Gnathaena, who, having spent much time in the training of her daughter, demands a thousand drachmas ($1000) as the price of the young lady's company for a night.'11 The beauty of Phryne is the talk of fourth-century Athens, since she never appears in public except completely veiled, but, at the Eleusinian festival, and again on the feast of the Poseidonia, disrobes in the sight of all, lets down her hair, and goes to bathe in the sea."' For a time she loves and inspires Praxiteles, and poses for his Aphrodites; from her, too, Apelles takes his Aphrodite Anadyomene."' So rich is Phryne from her loves that she offers to rebuild the walls of Thebes if the Thebans will inscribe her name on the structure, which they stubbornly refuse to do. Perhaps she asks too large an honorarium from Euthias; he re venges himself by indicting her on a charge of impiety. But a member of the court is one of her clients, and Hypereides, the orator, is her devoted lover;
CHAP. XIII)  THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS   301
Hypereides defends her not only with eloquence but by opening her tunic and revealing her bosom to the court. The judges look upon her beauty, and vindicate her piety.''
Lais of Corinth, says Athenaeus, "appears to have been superior in beauty to any woman that had ever been seen.,,.. As many cities as claimed Homer dis pute the honor of having witnessed her birth. Sculptors and painters beg her to pose for them, but she is coy. The great Myron, in his old age, persuades her; when she disrobes he forgets his white hair and beard, and offers her all his possessions for one night; whereupon she smiles, shrugs her rounded shoul ders, and leaves him statueless. The next morning, burning with readolescence, he has his hair trimmed, and his beard cut off; he puts on a scarlet robe and a golden girdle, a chain of gold around his neck and rings on all his fingers. Be colors his cheeks with rouge, and perfumes his garments and his flesh. He seeks out Lais, and announces that he loves her. "My poor friend," she re plied, seeing through his metamorphosis, "you are asking me what I refused to your father yesterday."'" She lays up a great fortune, but does not refuse her self-to poor but comely lovers; she restores the ugly Demosthenes to virtue by asking ten thousand drachmas for an evening;"' and from the well-to-do Aris tippus she earns such sums as scandalize his servant;78 but to the penniless Diogenes she gives herself for a pittance, being pleased to have philosophers at her feet. She spends her wealth generously upon temples, public buildings, and friends, and finally returns, after the custom of her kind, to the poverty of her youth. She plies her trade patiently to the end; and when she dies she is honored with a splendid tomb as the greatest conqueror that the Greeks have ever known.78
GREEK FRIENDSHIP
Stranger than this strange entente between prostitution and philosophy is the placid acceptance of sexual inversion. The chief rivals of the hetairai are the boys of Athens; and the courtesans, scandalized to the very depths of their pockets, never tire of denouncing the immorality of homosexual love. Mer chants import handsome lads to be sold to the highest bidder, who will use them first as concubines and later as slaves;.. and only a negligible minority of males think it amiss that the effeminate young aristocrats of the city should arouse and assuage the ardor of aging men. In this matter of genders Sparta is as careless as Athens; when Aleman wishes to compliment some girls he calls them his "female boy-friends."81 Athenian law disfranchises those who receive homosexual attentions,.. but public opinion tolerates the practice humorously; in Sparta and Crete no stigma of any kind is attached to it;88 in Thebes it is accepted as a valuable source of military organization and bravery. The great est heroes in the fond remembrance of Athens are Harmodius and Aristogeiton,
302	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIII
tyrannicides and lovers; the most popular in Athens in his day is Alcibiades, who boasts of the men who love him; as late as Aristotle "Greek lovers" plight their troth at the tomb of Iolaus, comrade of Heracles;" and Aristippus de scribes Xenophon, leader of armies and hardheaded man of the world, as infat uated with young Cleinias."" The attachment of a man to a boy, or of a boy to a boy, shows in Greece all the symptoms of romantic love-passion, piety, ecstasy, jealousy, serenading, brooding, moaning, and sleeplessness... When Plato, in the Phaedrus, talks of human love, he means homosexual love; and the disputants in his Symposium agree on one point-that love between man and man is nobler and more spiritual than love between man and woman..., A simi
.lar inversion appears among the women, occasionally among the finest, as in Sappho, frequently among the courtesans; the auletrides love one another more passionately than they love their patrons, and the pornaia are hothouses of Lesbian romance...
How shall we explain the popularity of this perversion in Greece? Aristotle attributes it to fear of overpopulation,.. and this may account for part of the phenomenon; but there is obviously a connection between the prevalence of both homosexuality and prostitution in Athens, and the seclusion of women. After the age of six the boys of Periclean Athens are taken from the gynaeceum in which respectable women spend their lives, and are brought up chiefly in com panionship with other boys, or men; little opportunity is given them, in their formative and almost neutral period, to know the attractiveness of the tender sex. The life of the common mess hall in Sparta, of the agora, gymnasium, 'and pafaestra in Athens, and the career of the ephebos, show the youth only ,the male form; even art does not announce the physical beauty of woman until Praxiteles. In married life the men seldom find mental companionship at home; the rarity of education among women creates a gulf between the sexes, and men seek elsewhere the charms that they have not permitted their wives to acquire. To the Athenian citizen his home is not a castle but a dormitory; from morning to evening, in a great number of cases, he lives in the city, and rarely has social contacts with respectable women other than his wife and daugh ters. Greek society is unisexual, and misses the disturbance, grace, and stimu lation that the spirit and charm of women will give to Renaissance Italy and Enlightenment France.
vm. LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Romantic love appears among the Greeks, but seldom as the cause of marriage. We find little of it in Homer, where Agamemnon and Achilles frankly think of Chryseis and Briseis, even of the discouraging Cassandra, in terms of physical desire. Nausicaa, however, is a warning against too
CHAP. XIII)  THE  MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS    303
broad a generalization, and legends as old as Homer tell of Heracles and Iola, of Orpheus and Eurydice. The lyric poets, again, talk abundantly of love, commonly in the sense of amorous appetite; stories like that which Stesichorus tells of a maiden dying for love00 are exceptional; but when Theano, wife of Pythagoras, speaks of love as "the sickness of a long ing soul,".. we feel the authentic note of romantic rut. As refinement grows, and superimposes poetry upon heat, the tender sentiment becomes more frequent; and the increasing delay that civilization places between desire and fulfillment gives imagination leisure to embellish the object of hope. Aeschylus is still Homeric in his treatment of sex; but in Sophocles we hear of "Love" who "rules at will the gods,"*"" and in Euripides many a passage proclaims Eros' power. The later dramatists often describe a youth desperately enamored of a girl."' Aristotle suggests the real quality of romantic adoration when he remarks that "lovers look at the eyes of the beloved, in which modesty dwells."°'
Such affairs in classic Greece lead rather to premarital relations than to matrimony. The Greeks consider romantic love to be a form of "posses sion" or madness, and would smile at anyone who should propose it as a fit guide in the choice of a marriage mate.Ill Normally marriage is arranged by the parents as in always classic France, or by professional matchmakers,"' with an eye not to love but to dowries. The father is expected to provide for his daughter a marriage portion of money, clothing, jewelry, and per haps slaves.97 This remains to its end the property of the wife, and reverts to her in case of a separation from her husband-a consideration that dis courages divorce by the male. Without a dowry a girl has little chance of marriage; therefore where the father cannot give it to her the relatives combine to provide it. Marriage by purchase, so frequent in Homeric days, has by this means been inverted in Periclean Greece: in effect, as Euripides' Medea complains,.. the woman has to buy her master. The Greek, then, marries not for love, nor because he enjoys matrimony (for he prates end lessly about its tribulations), but to continue himself and the state through a wife suitably dowered, and children who will ward off the evil fate of an untended soul. Even with these inducements he avoids wedlock as long
•Cf.Antigone, 78rf.:
When Love disputes
He carries his battles!


. onies, where geographical separation had broken some of the bonds of tradition. Perhaps Athens would have remained obscurantist and intolerant to the point of stupidity had it not been for the growth of a cosmopolitan trading class, and the coming of the Sophists to Athens.
The debates in the Assembly, the trials before the heliaea, and the rising need for the ability to think with the appearance of logic and to speak with clarity and persuasion, conspired with the wealth and curiosity of an imperial society to create a demand for something unknown in Athens before Pericles-formal higher education in letters, oratory, science, philos ophy, and statesmanship. The demand was met at first not by the organi zation of universities but by wandering scholars who engaged lecture halls, gave there their courses of instruction, and then passed on to other cities to repeat them. Some of these men, like Protagoras, called themselves sophistai-i.e., teachers of wisdom.81 The word was accepted as equivalent to our "university professor," and bore no derogatory connotation until the conflict between religion and philosophy led to conservative attacks upon the Sophists, and the commercialism of certain of them provoked Plato to darken their name with the imputations of venal sophistry that now cling to it. Perhaps the general public entertained a vague dislike for these teachers from their first appearance, since their costly instruction in logic and rhetoric could be bought only by the well to do, and gave these an advantage in trying their cases before the courts.• It is true that the more famous Sophists, like most skilled practitioners in any field, charged all that their patrons could be persuaded to pay; this is the final law of prices everywhere. Protagoras and Gorgias, we are told, demanded ten thousand drachmas ($10,000) for the education of a single pupil. But lesser Sophists were content with reasonably moderate fees; Prodicus, famous through out Greece, asked from one to fifty drachmas for admission to his courses.• Protagoras, the most renowned of the Sophists, was born in Abdera a
CHAP. XVI)  THE CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION	35
generation before Democritus. In his lifetime he was the better known of the two, and the more influential; we surmise his repute from the furore created by his visits to Athens.•"' Even Plato, who was not often intention ally fair to the Sophists, respected him, and described him as a man of high character. In the Platonic dialogue that is named after him Protagoras makes a much better showing than the argumentative young Socrates; here it is Socrates who talks like a Sophist, and Protagoras who behaves like a gentleman and a philosopher, never losing his temper, never jealous of another's brilli·,nce, never taking the argument too seriously, and never anxious to spea·•c He admits that he undertakes to teach his pupils pru denc;: in priva1 - and public matters, the orderly management of home and fan-'.dy, the ari- .:>f rhetoric or persuasive speaking, and the ability to under strnd and direct affairs of state."' He defends his high fees by saying that it is his custom, when a pupil objects to the sum asked, to agree to receive as ad quate vrhatever amount the pupil may name as just in a solemn statement before some sacred shrine"'-a rash procedure for a teacher who doubted the existence of the gods. Diogenes Laertius accuses him of being the first to "arm disputants with the weapon of sophism," a charge that would have pleased Socrates; but Diogenes adds that Protagoras "was also the first to invent that sort of argument which is called Socratic"""-which might not have pleased Socrates.
It was but one of his many distinctions that he founded European gram
mar and philology. He treated of the right use of words, says Plato,.. and was the first to distinguish the three genders of nouns, and certain tenses and moods of verbs."° But his chief significance lay in this, that with him, rather than with Socrates, began the subjective standpoint in philosophy. Unlike the lonians he was less interested in things than in thought-i.e., in the whole process of sensation, perception, understanding, and expression. Whereas Parmenides rejected sensation as a guide to truth, Protagoras, like Locke, accepted it as the only means of knowledge, and refused to admit any transcendental-suprasensual-reality. No absolute truth can be found, said Protagoras, but only such truths as hold for given men under given conditions; c:ontradictory assertions can be equally true for different per sons or at different times."' All truth, goodness, and beauty are relative and subjective; "man is the measure of all things-of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not."°" To the historical eye a whole world begins to tremble when Protagoras announces this sim ple principle of humanism and relativity; all established truths and sacred
These probably occurred in 451-45, 432, 422, and 415.""
36o	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVI
principles crack; individualism has found a voice and a philosophy; and the supernatural bases of social order threaten to melt away.
The far-reaching skepticism implicit in this famous pronouncement might have remained theoretical and safe had not Protagoras applied it for a mo ment to theology. Among a group of distinguished men in the home of the unpopular freethinker, Euripides, Protagoras read a treatise whose first sentence made a stir in Athens. "With regard to the gods I know not whether they exist or not, or what they are like. Many things prevent our knowing: the subject is obscure, and brief is the span of our mortal life.""" The Athenian Assembly, frightened by that ominous prelude, banished Protagoras, ordered all Athenians to surrender any copies they might have of his writings, and burned the books in the market place. Protagoras fled to Sicily, and, story tells us, was drowned on the way."'
Gorgias of Leontini carried on this skeptical revolution, but had the good sense to spend most of his life outside of Athens. His career was typi cal of the union between philosophy and statesmanship in Greece. Born about 483, he studied philosophy and rhetoric with Empedocles, and be came so famous in Sicily as an orator and a teacher of oratory that in 42 7 he was sent by Leontini as an ambassador to Athens. At the Olympic games of 408 he captivated a great crowd by an address in which he appealed to the warring Greeks to make peace among themselves in order to face with unity and confidence the resurrected power of Persia. Traveling from city to city, he expounded his views in a style of oratory so euphuistically ornate, so symmetrically antithetical in idea and phrase, so delicately poised be tween poetry and prose, that he had no difficulty in attracting students who offered him a hundred minas for a course of instruction. His book On Nature sought to prove three startling propositions: ( r) Nothing exists; (2) if anything existed it would be unknowable; and (3) if anything were knowable the knowledge of it could not be communicated from one person to another.•• Nothing else remains of Gorgias' writings. After enjoying the hospitality and fees of many states he settled down in Thessaly, and had the wisdom to consume most of his great fortune before his death... He lived, as all authorities assure us, to at least one hundred and five; and an ancient writer tells us that "though Gorgias attained to the age of one hun dred and eight, his body was not weakened by old age, but to the end of his life he was in sound condition, and his senses were those of a youth."..
These propositions, aiming to discredit the transcendentalism of Parmenides, meant: (1) Nothing exists beyond the senses; (2) if anything existed beyond the senses it would be un knowable, for all knowledge comes through the senses; (3) if anything suprasensual were knowable, the knowledge of it would be incommunicable, since all communication is through the senses.
CHAP. XVI)	THE  CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION	361
H the Sophists together constituted a scattered university, Hippias of Elis was a university in himself, and typified the polymath in a world where knowledge was not yet so vast as to be clearly beyond the grasp of one mind. He taught astronomy and mathematics, and made original contribu tions to geometry; he was a poet, a musician, and an orator; he lectured on literature, morals, and politics; he was an historian, and laid the foundations of Greek chronology by compiling a list of victors at the Olympic games; he was employed by Elis as an envoy to other states; and he knew so many arts and trades that he made with his own hands all his clothing and oma ments.08 His work in philosophy was slight but important: he protested against the degenerative artificiality of city life, contrasted nature with law, and called law a tyrant over mankind."" Prodicus of Ceos carried on the grammatical work of Protagoras, fixed the parts of speech, and pleased the elders with a fable in which he represented Heracles choosing laborious Virtue instead of easy Vice.100 Other Sophists were not so pious: Antiphon of Athens followed Democritus into materialism and atheism, and defined justice in terms of expediency; Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (if we may take Plato's word for it) identified right with might, and remarked that the success of villains cast doubt upon the existence of the gods.IOl
All in all, the Sophists must be ranked among the most vital factors in the history of Greece. They invented grammar and logic for Europe; they developed dialectic, analyzed the forms of argument, and taught men how to detect and practice fallacies. Through their stimulus and example reasoning became a ruling passion with the Greeks. By applying logic to language they promoted clarity and precision of thought, and facilitated the accurate transmission of knowledge. Through them prose became a form of literature, and poetry became a vehicle of philosophy. They ap plied analysis to everything; they refused to respect traditions that could not be supported by the evidence of the senses or the logic of reason; and they shared decisively in a rationalist movement that finally broke down, among the intellectual classes, the ancient faith of Hellas. "The common opinion" of his time, says Plato, derived "the world and all animals and plants ... and inanimate substances from ... some spontaneous and unin telligent cause.moo Lysias tells of an atheistic society that called itself the kakodaimoniotai, or Devils' Club, and deliberately met and dined on holy days set apart for fasting.1.. Pindar, at the opening of the fifth century, accepted the oracle of Delphi piously; Aeschylus defended it politically; Herodotus, about 450, criticized it timidly; Thucydides, at the end of the century, openly rejected it. Euthyphro complained that when in the As-
362	THE	LI FE	OF	GREECE	(CHAP, XVI
sembly he spoke of oracles, the people laughed at him as an antiquated fool.,a,
The Sophists must not be blamed or credited for all of this; much of it was in the air, and was a natural result of growing wealth, leisure, travel, research, and speculation. Their role in the deterioration of morals was likewise contributory rather than basic; wealth of itself, without the aid of philosophy, puts an end to puritanism artd stoicism. But within these modest limits the Sophists unwittingly quickened disintegration. Most of them, barring a thoroughly human love of money, were men of high char acter and decent life; but they did not transmit to their pupils the tradi tions or the wisdom that had made or kept them reasonably virtuous despite their discovery of the secular origin and geographical mutability of morals. Their colonial derivation may have led them to underestimate the value of custom as a peaceful substitute for force or law in maintaining morality and order. To define morality or human worth in terms of knowledge, as Protagoras did a generation before Socrates,""" was a heady stimulus to thought, but an unsteadying blow to character; the emphasis on knowledge raised the educational level of the Greeks, but it did not develop intelli gence as rapidly as it liberated intellect. The announcement of the relativity of knowleoge did not make men modest, as it should, but disposed every man to consider himself the measure of all things; every clever youth could now feel himself fit to sit in judgment upon the moral code of his people, reject it if he could not understand and approve it, and then be free to rationalize his desires as the virtues of an emancipated soul. The distinc tion between "Nature" and convention, and the willingness of minor Sophists to argue that what "Nature" permitted was good regardless of custom or law, sapped the ancient supports of Greek morality, and en couraged many experiments in living. Old men mourned the passing of domestic simplicity and fidelity, and the pursuit of pleasure or wealth unchecked by religious restraints.""' Plato and Thucydides speak of think ers and public men who rejected morals as superstitions, and acknowledged no right but strength. This unscrupulous individualism turned the logic and rhetoric of the Sophists into an instrument of legal chicanery and political demagogy, and degraded their broad cosmopolitanism into a cau tious reluctance to defend their country, or an unprejudiced readiness to sell it to the highest bidder. The religious peasantry and the conservative aristocrats began to agree with the common citizen of the urban democracy that philosophy had become a danger to the state.
Some of the philosophers themselves joined in the attack upon the Soph-
CHAP. XVI)  THE  CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION	36
ists. Socrates condemned them (as Aristophanes was to condemn Socrates) for making error specious with logic and persuasive with rhetoric, and scorned them for taking fees.107 He excused his ignorance of grammar on the ground that he could not afford the fifty-drachma course of Prodi cus, but only the one-drachma course, which gave merely the rudiments.108 In an ungenial moment he used a merciless and revealing comparison:
It is believed among us, Antiphon, that it is possible to dispose of beauty or of wisdom alike honorably or dishonorably; for if a per son sells his 6eauty for money to anyone that wishes to purchase it, men call him a male prostitute; but if anyone makes a friend of a person whom he knows to be an honorable and worthy admirer, we regard him as prudent. In like manner those who sell their wis dom for money to any that will buy, men call sophists, or, as it were, prostitutes of wisdom; but whoever makes a friend of a person whom he knows to be deserving, and teaches him all the good that he knows, we consider him to act the part which becomes a good and honorable citizen.1°"
Plato could afford to agree with this view, being a rich man. Isocrates be gan his career with a speech Against the Sophists, became a successful pro fessor of rhetoric, and charged a thousand drachmas ($1 ooo) for a course.110 Aristotle continued the attack; he defined a Sophist as one who "is only eager to get rich off his apparent wisdom,'nn and accused Protagoras of "promising to make the worse appear the better reason."=
The tragedy was deepened by the fact that both sides were right. The complaint about fees was unjust: short of a state subsidy no other way was then open to finance higher education. If the Sophists criticized tra ditions and morals it was, of course, with no evil intent; they thought that they were liberating slaves. They were the intellectual representatives of their time, sharing its passion for the free intellect; like the Encyclopedists of Enlightenment France they swept away the dying past with magnifi cent elan, and did not live long enough, or think far enough; to establish new institutions in place of those that loosened reason would destroy. In every civilization the time comes when old ways must be re-examined if the society is to readjust itself to irresistible economic change; the Sophists were the instrument of this re-examination, but failed to provide the states manship for the readjustment. It remains to their credit that they power fully stimulated the pursuit of knowledge, and made it fashionable to think. From every corner of the Greek world they brought new ideas and chal lenges to Athens, and aroused her to philosophical consciousness and ma-
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVI


Naples Museum

FIG. 63-The "Old Market Woman"
Metropolitan Museum, New York
(See page 626)
Fie. 64-The Prize Fighter
Museo delle Terme, Rome
CHAP. XIV)	THE   ART  OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE	335
temple. The interior was relatively small; much of the space was taken up by two double-storied Doric colonnades that supported the roof, and divided the naos into a nave and two aisles; while in the western end Athene Parthenos blinded her worshipers with the gold of her raiment, or fright ened them with her spear and shield and snakes. Behind her was the Room of the Virgins, adorned with four columns in the Ionic style. The marble tiles of the roof were sufficiently translucent to let some light into the nave, and yet opaque enough to keep out the heat; moreover, piety, like love, deprecates the sun. The cornices were decorated with careful detail, sur mounted with terra-cotta acroteria, and armed with gargoyles to carry off the rain. Many parts of the temple were painted, not in subdued colors but in bright tints of yellow, blue, and red. The marble was washed with a stain of saffron and milk; the triglyphs and parts of the molding were blue; the frieze had a blue background, the metopes a red, and every figure in them was colored."" A people accustomed to a Mediterranean sky can bear and relish brighter hues than those that suit the clouded atmosphere of northern Europe. Today, shorn of its colors, the Parthenon is most beauti ful at night, when through every columned space come changing vistas of sky, or the ever worshipful moon, or the lights of the sleeping city mingling with the stars.*
Greek art was the greatest of Greekproducts; for though its masterpieces
have yielded one by one to the voracity of time, their form and spirit still survive sufficiently to be a guide and stimulus to many arts, many genera tions, and many lands. There were faults here, as in all that men do. The
The Parthenon, like the Erechtheum and the Theseum, was preserved through its use as a Christian church; it needed no great change of name, being in each case dedicated to the Virgin. After the Turkish occupation in 1456 it was transformed into a mosque, and acquired a minaret. In 1687, when the Venetians besieged Athens, the Turks used the temple to store each day's supply of powder for their artillery. The Venetian commander, so informed, ordered his gunners to fire upon the Parthenon. A shell pierced the roof, exploded the powder, and laid half the building in ruins. After capturing the city Morosini tried also to take the pediment statuary, but his workmen dropped and smashed the figures in lowering them. In 1800 Lord Elgin, British ambassador to Turkey, secured permission to remove a part of the sculptures to the British Museum, on the ground that they would be safer there than at Athens against weather and war. His spoils included twelve statues, fifteen metopes, and fifty-six slabs of the frieze. The Museum's expert on sculpture advised against buying this material; it was only after ten years of negotiations that the Museum agreed to pay
$175,000 for them, which was less than half what Lord Elgin had spent in securing and transporting them."" A few years later, during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), the Acropolis was twice bombarded, and much of the Erechtheum was destroyed."' Some metopes of the Parthenon are still in place; a few slabs of the frieze are in the Athens Museum, and a few others in the Louvre. The citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, have built a replica of the Parthenon, in the same dimensions as the original, with like materials, and, so far as our knowledge goes, with the same decorations and coloring; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art contains a small hypothetical reproduction of the interior.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIV
sculpture was too physical, and rarely reached the soul; it moves us more often to admire its perfection than to feel its life. The architecture was narrowly limited in form and style, and clung across a thousand years to the simple rectangle of the Mycenaean megaron. It achieved almost nothing in secular fields; it attempted only the easier problems of construction, and avoided difficult tasks like the arch and the vault, which might have given it greater scope. It held up its roofs with the clumsy expedient of internal and superimposed colonnades. It crowded the interior of its temples with statues whose size was out of proportion to the edifice, and whose ornamentation lacked the simplicity and restraint that we expect of the classic style.•
But no faults can outweigh the fact that Greek art created the classic style. The essence of that style-if the theme of this chapter may be restated in closing-is order and form: moderation in design, expression, and decora tion; proportion in the parts and unity in the whole; the supremacy of rea son without the extinction of feeling; a quiet perfection that is content with simplicity, and a sublimity that owes nothing to size. No other style but the Gothic has had so much influence; indeed, Greek statuary is still the ideal, and until yesterday the Greek column dominated architecture to the discouragement of more congenial forms. It is good that we are freeing ourselves from the Greeks; even perfection becomes oppressive when it will not change. But long after our liberation is complete we shall find in struction and stimulus in that art which was the life of reason in form, and in that classic style which was the most characteristic gift of Greece to mankind.
One might also note the lack of order in the arrangement of the buildings on the Acropolis, or in the sacred enclosure at Olympia; but it is difficult to say whether this dis order was a defect of taste or an accident of history.
CHAPTER XV
The Advancement of Learning
HE cultural activity of Periclean Greece takes chiefly three fonns an, drama, and philosophy. In the first, religion is the inspiration; in
the second it is the battleground; in the third it is the victim. Since the organization of a religious group presumes a common and stable creed, every religion sooner or later comes into opposition with that fluent and changeful current of secular thought that we confidently call the progress of knowledge. In Athens the conflict was not always visible on the surface, and did not directly affect the masses of the people; the scientists and the philosophers carried on their work without explicitly attacking the popular faith, and often mitigated the strife by using the old religious terms as sym bols or allegories for their new beliefs; only now and then, as in the indict ments of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, Diagoras of Melos, Euripides, and Socrates, did the struggle come out into the open, and become a matter of life and death. But it was there. It ran through the Periclean age like a major theme; played in many keys and elaborated in many variations and forms; it was heard most distinctly in the skeptical discourses of the Sophists and in the materialism of Democritus; it sounded obscurely in the piety of Aeschylus, in the heresies of Euripides, even in the irreverent banter of the conservative Aristophanes; and it was violently recapitulated in the trial and death of Socrates. Around this theme the Athens of Pericles lived its mental life.
I.  THE MATHEMATICIANS
Pure science, in fifth-century Greece, was still the handmaiden of philosophy, and was studied and developed by men who were philosophers rather than scientists. To the Greeks higher mathematics was an instrument not of prac tice but of logic, directed less to the conquest of the physical environment than to the mtellectual construction of an abstract world.
Popular arithmetic, before the Periclean period, was almost primitively clumsy.• One upright stroke indicated 1, two strokes 2, three 3, and four 4; 5, 10,  100, 1000, and 10,000 were expressed by the initial letter of the Greek word
On later (possibly Periclean) arithmetical notation cf. Chap. XXVIIl, sect. 1, below.


In 572, at the age of sixty-six, and after serving as archon for twenty-two years, Solon retired from office into private life; and having bound Athens, through the oath of its officials, to obey his laws unchanged for ten years;'9 he set out to observe the civilizations of Egypt and the East. It was now, apparently, that he made his famous remark-"! grow old while always learning.""° At Heliopolis, says Plutarch, he studied Egyptian history and thought under the tutelage of the priests; from them, it is said, he heard of the sunken continent Atlantis, whose tale he told in an unfinished epic which two centuries later would fascinate the imaginative Plato. From Egypt he sailed to Cyprus and made laws for the city that in his honor changed its name to Soli.* Herodotus.. and Plutarch describe with miracu lous memory his chat at Sardis with Croesus, the Lydian king: how this
Diogenes Laertius tells this story rather of Soli in Cilicia-me town whose preservation of old Greek speech into Alexander's day led to the word solecism.
CHAP. V)	ATHENS	119
paragon of wealth, having arrayed himself in all his paraphernalia, asked Solon did he not account him, Croesus, a happy man; and how Solon, with Greek audacity, replied:
The gods,0 King, have given the Greeks all other gifts in mod erate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is a cheerful and a homely, not a noble and kingly, wisdom; and this, observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyment, or to admire any man's happiness that may yet, in course of time, suffer change. For the uncertain future has yet to come, with every possible variety of fortune; and him only to whom the divinity has continued happiness unto the end do we call happy; to salute as happy one that is still in the midst of life and hazard we think as little safe and conclusive as to crown and proclaim as victorious the wrestler that is yet in the ring...
This admirable exposition of what the Greek dramatists mean by byhris
-insolent prosperity-has the ring of Plutarch's eclectic wisdom; we can only say that it is better phrased than Herodotus' report, and that both accounts belong, presumably, to the realm of imaginary conversations. Cer tainly both Solon and Croesus, in the manner of their deaths, justified the skepticism of this homily. Croesus was dethroned by Cyrus in 546, and (if we may rephrase Herodotus with Dante) knew the bitterness of re membering, in his misery, the happy time of his splendor, and the stern warning of the Greek. And Solon, returning to Athens to die, saw in his last years the overthrow of his constitution, the establishment of a dictator ship, and the apparent frustration of all his work.
The Dictatorship of Peisistratus
The confficting groups which he had dominated for a generation had resumed, upon his departure from Athens, the natural play of politics and intrigue. As in the passionate days of the French Revolution, three parties struggled for power: the "Shore," led by the merchants of the ports, who favored Solon; the "Plain," led by the rich landowners, who hated Solon; and the "Mountain," a combination of peasants and town laborers who still fought for a redistribution of the land. Like Pericles a century later, Peisistratus, though an aristocrat by birth and fortune, manners and tastes, accepted the leadership of the commons. At a meeting of the Assembly he displayed a wound, claiming that it had been inflicted upon him by
120	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
the enemies of the people, and asked for a bodyguard. Solon protested; knowing the subtlety of his cousin, he suspected that the wound had been self-inflicted, and that the bodyguard would open the way to a dictator ship. "Ye men of Athens," he warned them, "I am wiser than some of you, and braver than others: wiser than those of you who do not perceive the treachery of Peisistratus, and braver than those who are aware of it, but out of fear hold their peace."83 Nevertheless the Assembly voted that Peisistratus should be allowed a force of fifty men. Peisistratus collected four hundred men instead of fifty, seized the Acropolis, and declared a dic tatorship. Solon, having published to the Athenians his opinion that "each man of you, individually, walketh with the tread of a fox, but collectively ye are geese,""' placed his arms and shield outside his door as a symbol of resigning his interest in politics, and devoted his last days to poetry.
The wealthy forces of the Shore and the Plain united for a moment and expelled the dictator (556). But Peisistratus secretly made his peace with the Shore, and, probably with their connivance, re-entered Athens under circumstances that seemed to corroborate Solon's judgment of the collec tive intelligence. A tall and beautiful woman, arrayed in the armor and costume of the city's goddess Athena, and seated proudly in a chariot, led the forces of Peisistratus into the city, while heralds announced that the patron deity of Athens was herself restoring him to power (550). "The people of the city, folly persuaded," says Herodotus, "that the woman was the veritable goddess, prostrated themselves before her, and received Peisistratus back."811 The leaders of the Shore turned against him again and drove him into a second exile (549); but in 546 Peisistratus once more returned, defeated the troops sent out against him, and this time main tained his dictatorship for nineteen years, during which the wisdom of his policies almost redeemed the picturesque unscrupulousness of his means. The character of Peisistratus was a rare union of culture and intellect, administrative vigor and personal charm. He could fight ruthlessly, and readily forgive; he could move in the foremost cqrrents of the thought of his time, and govern without the intellectual's vacillation of purpose and timidity of execution. He was mild of manner, humane in his decisions, and generous to all. "His administration," says Aristotle, "was temperate, and showed the statesman rather than the tyrant.""" He made few reprisals upon regenerate enemies, but he banished irreconcilable opponents, and distributed their estates among the poor. He improved the army and built up the fleet as security against external attack; but he kept Athens out of war, and maintained at home, in a city so recently disturbed by class hos-
CHAP.V)	ATHENS	IU
tility, such order and content that it was common to say that he had brought back the Golden Age of Cronus' reign.
He surprised everyone by making little change of detail in the Solonian constitution. Like Augustus he knew how to adorn and support dictator ship with democratic concessions and forms. Archons were elected as usual, and the Assembly and the popular courts, the Council of Four Hun dred and the Senate of the Areopagus met and functioned as before, except that the suggestions of Peisistratus found a very favorable hearing. When a citizen accused him of murder he appeared before -the Senate and offered to submit to trial, but the complainant decided not to press the charge. Year by year the people, in inverse proportion to their wealth, became reconciled to his rule; soon they were proud of him, at last fond of him. Probably Athens had needed, after Solon, just such a man as Peisistratus: one with sufficient iron in his blood to beat the disorder of Athenian life into a strong and steady form, and to establish by initial compulsion those habits of order and law which are to a society what the bony structure is to an animal-its shape and strength, though not its creative life. When, after a generation, the dictatorship was removed, these habits of order and the framework of Solon's constitution remained as a heritage for democ racy. Peisistratus, perhaps not knowing it, had come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it.
His economic policies carried on that emancipation of the people which Solon had begun. He settled the agrarian question by dividing among the poor the lands that belonged to the state, as well as those of banished aris tocrats; thousands of dangerously idle Athenians were settled upon the soil; and for centuries afterward we hear of no serious agrarian discontent in Attica.er He gave employment to the needy by undertaking extensive public works, building a system of aqueducts and roads, and raising great temples to the gods. He encouraged the mining of silver at Laurium, and issued a new and independent coinage. To finance these undertakings he laid a ten per cent tax upon all agricultural products; later he seems to have reduced this to 5 per cent.• He planted strategic colonies on the Dar danelles, and made commercial treaties with many states. Under his rule trade flourished, and wealth grew not among a few only, but in the com munity as a whole. The poor were made less poor, the rich not less rich. That concentration of wealth which had nearly tom the city into civil war was brought under control, and the spread of comfort and oppor tunity laid the economic bases of Athenian democracy.
Under Peisistratus and hissons Athens was physically and mentally trans-
122	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP,V
formed. Till their time it had been a second-rate city in the Greek world, lagging behind Miletus, Ephesus, Mytilene, and Syracuse in wealth and cul ture, in vitality of life and mind. Now new buildings of stone and marble reflected the radiance of the day; the old temple of Athena on the Acropo lis was beautified with a Doric peristyle; and work was begun on that tem ple of Olympian Zeus whose stately Corinthian columns, even in their ruins, brighten the road from Athens to her port. By establishing the Pana thenaic games and giving them a Panhellenic character, Peisistratus brought to his city not honor only, but the stimulus of foreign faces, competition, and ways; under his rule the Panathenaea became the great national fes tival, whose impressive ceremonial still moves on the frieze of the Par thenon. To his court, by public works and private beneficence, Peisistratus attracted sculptors, architects, and poets; in his palace was collected one of the earliest libraries of Greece. A committee appointed by him gave to the Iliad and the Odyssey the form in which we know them. Under his administration and encouragement Thespis and others lifted drama from a mummers' mimicry to a form of art ready to be filled out by the great triumvirate of the Athenian stage.
The "tyranny" of Peisistratus was part of a general movement in the commercially active cities of sixth-century Greece, to replace the feudal rule of a landowning aristocracy with the political dominance of the mid dle class in temporary alliance with the poor.• Such dictatorships were brought on by the pathological concentration of wealth, and the inabil ity of the wealthy to agree on a compromise. Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes. Hence the road to power in Greek commer cial cities was simple: to attack the aristocracy, defend the poor, and come to an understanding with the middle classes... Arrived at power, the dictator abolished debts, or confiscated large estates, taxed the rich to finance public works, or otherwise redistributed the overconcentrated wealth; and while attaching the masses to himself through such measures, he secured the support of the business community by promoting trade with state coinage and commercial treaties, and by raising the social prestige of the bourgeoisie. Forced to depend upon popularity instead of hereditary
The word tyrmt had come from Lydia, perhaps from the town of Tyrrha, meaning a fortress; probably it is a distant cousin to our word tO'Wer (Gk. tyrris). Apparently it was applied first to Gyges, the Lydian king.
CHAP. V)	ATHENS
power, the dictatorships for the most pan kept out of war, supported reli gion, maintained order, promoted morality, favored the higher status· of women, encouraged the arts, and lavished revenues upon the beautification of their cities. And they did all these things, in many cases, while pre serving the forms and procedures of popular government, so that even under despotism the people learned the ways of libeny. When the dictator ship had served to destroy the aristocracy the people destroyed the dic tatorship; and only a few changes were needed to make the democracy of freemen a reality as well as a form.
The Establishment of Democracy
When Peisistratus died, in 5 2 7, he left his power to his sons; his wisdom had survived every test except that of parental lov . Hippias gave promise of being a wise ruler, and for thirteen years continued the policies of his father. Hipparchus, his younger brother, was harmlessly, though expen sively, devoted to love and poetry; it was at his invitation that Anacreon and Simonides came to Athens. The Athenians were not quite pleased to see the leadership of the state pass down without their consent to the young Peisistratids, and began to realize that the dictatorship had given them everything but the stimulus of freedom. Nevenheless Athens was prosperous, and the quiet reign of Hippias might have gone on to a peace ful close had it not been for the unsmooth course of true Greek love.


Samos had been a cultured center long before Polycrates. Here, about 590, the fabulous Aesop had been the Phrygian slave of the Greek Iadmon. An unconfirmed tradition tells how Iadmon freed him, how Aesop traveled widely, met Solon, lived at the court of Croesus, embezzled the money that Croesus had commissioned him to distribute at Delphi, and met a vio lent death at the hands of the outraged Delphians." His fables, largely taken from Eastern sources, were well known at Athens in the classic age; Socrates, says Plutarch, put them into verse." Though their form was Oriental, their philosophy was characteristically Greek. "Sweet are the beauties of Nature, the earth and sea, the stars, and the orbs of sun and moon. But a,11 the rest is fear and pain,"" especially if one embezzles. We can still meet him in the Vatican, where a cup from the Periclean age rep resents him with half-bald head and Vandyke beard, listening profitably to a merry fox.•
The great Pythagoras was born in Samos, but left it in 5 29 to live at Cro tona in Italy. Anacreon came from Teos to sing Polycrates' charms and to tutor his son. The greatest figure at the court was the artist Theodorus, che Leonardo of Samos, Jack-of-all-trades and master of most. The Greeks ascribed to him, perhaps as a cloture on research, the invention of the level, the square, and the lathe;.. he was a skilled engraver of gems, a metalworker, stoneworker, woodworker, sculptor, and architect. He took part in de signing the second temple of Artemis at Ephesus, built a vast skias, or pavilion, for Sparta's public assemblies, helped to introduce clay modeling
enterprises today make both ends meet with an error of only a few inches, or
none.
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	143
into Greece, and shared with Rhoecus the honor of bringing from Egypt or Assyria to Samos the hollow casting of bronze." Before Theodorus the Greeks had made crude bronze statues by riveting plates of the metal to a "bridge" of wood;'" now they were prepared to produce such masterpieces in bronze as the Charioteer of Delphi and the Discus Thrower of Myron. Samos was famous also for its pottery; Pliny recommends it to us by telling us that the priests of Cybele would use nothing but Samian potsherds in depriving themselves of their manhood.•
Heracleitus of Ephesus
Across the Caystrian Gulf from Samos stood Ionia's most famous city Ephesus. Founded about I ooo by colonists from Athens, it prospered by tapping the trade of both the Cayster and the Maeander. Its population, its religion, and its art contained a strong Eastern element; the Artemis wor shiped there began and ended as an Oriental goddess of motherhood and fertility. Her renowned temple had many deaths, and almost as many resurrections. On the site of an ancient altar twice built and twice de stroyed, the first temple was erected about 600, and was probably' the earliest important edifice in the Ionic style. The second temple was raised about_540, partly through the generosity of Croesus; Paeonius of Ephesus, Theodorus of Samos, and Demetrius, a priest of the shrine, shared in de signing it. It was the largest Greek temple that had yet been built, and was ranked without dispute among the Seven Wonders of the World.•
The city was known not only for its temple but for its poets, its philoso phers, and its expensively gowned women.61 Here, as early as 690 B.c., lived Callinus, the earliest known elegiac poet of Greece. Far greater and uglier was Hipponax, who, towards 550, composed poems so coarse in subject, obscure in language, pointed in wit, and re.fined in metrical style, that all Greece began to talk about him, and all Ephesus to hate him. He was short and thin, lame and deformed, and completely disagreeable. Woman, he tells us, in one of his surviving fragments, brings two days of happiness to a man-"one when he marries her, the other when he buries her.""" He was a ruthless satirist, and lampooned every notable in Ephesus from the
The other six were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pharos at Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Pheidian Zeus at Olympia, the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, and the Pyramids. Pliny describes the second temple as 425 feet long by 225 feet wide, with 127 columns sixty feet m height-several of them adorned or disfigured with reliefs.18 Com• pleted in 420 B.c. after more than a century of labor, it was destroyed by fire in 356.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.VI
lowest criminal to the highest priest of the temple. When two sculptors, Bupalus and Athenis, exhibited an elegant caricature of him he attacked them with such corrosive verse that some of it has proved more durable than their stone, and sharper than the teeth of time. "Hold my coat," says a typically polished morsel; "I shall hit Bupalus in the eye. I am ambidex trous, and I never miss my aim."li8 Tradition said that Hipponax died by suicide; but perhaps this was only a universal h.
The most illustrious son of Ephesus was Heracleitus the Obscure. Bom about 530, he belonged to a noble family, and thought that democracy was a mistake. "There are many bad but few good," he said ( 111•), and "one man to me is as ten thousand if he be the best" ( 11 3). But even aristocrats did not please him, nor women, nor scholars. "Abundant learning," he wrote with genial particularity, "does not form the mind; if it did it would have instructed Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus" (16). "For the only real wisdom is to know that idea which by itself will govern everything on every occasion" (19). So he went off, like a Chinese sage, to live in the mountains and brood over the one idea that would explain all things. Disdaining to expound his conclusions in words intelligible to common men, and seeking in obscurity of life and speech some safety from individuality-destroying parties and mobs, he expressed his views in pithy and enigmatical apophthegms On Nature, which he deposited in the temple of Artemis for the mystification of posterity.
Heracleitus has been represented in modem literature as building his philosophy around the notion of change; but the extant fragments hardly support this interpretation. Like most philosophers he longed to find the One behind the Many, some mind-steadying unity and order amid the chaotic flux and multiplicity of the world. "All things are one," he said, as passionately as Parmenides (1); the problem of philosophy was, what is this one? Heracleitus answered, Fire. Perhaps he was influenced by the Persian worship of fire; probably, as we may judge from his identification of Fire with Soul and God, he used the term symbolically as well as liter ally, to mean energy as well as :fire; the fragments permit no certainty. "This world ... was made neither by a god nor by man, but it ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out" (20). Everything is a form of Fire, either in Fire's "downward path" through progressive condensation into moisture, water,
The parenthetical numbers refer to the fragments of Heracleitus as numbered by
Bywater.
CHAP.VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	145
and earth; or in its "upwar.d path" from earth to water to moisture to Fire.*"'
Though he finds a consoling constancy in the Eternal Fire, Heracleitus is troubled by its endless transformations; and the second nucleus of his thought is the eternity and ubiquity of change. He finds nothing static in the universe, the mind, or the soul. Nothing is, everything becomes; no condition persists unaltered, even for the smallest moment; everything is ceasing to be what it was, and is becoming what it will be. Here is a new emphasis in philosophy: Heracleitus does not merely ask, like Thales, what things are, but, like Anaximander, Lucretius, and Spencer, how they be came what they are; and he suggests, like Aristotle, that a study of the sec ond question is the best approach to the first. The extant apophthegms do not contain the famous formula, panta rei, ouden menei-"all things flow, nothing abides"; but antiquity is unanimous in attributing it to Heracleitus,118 "You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flow ing on to you" (41); "we are and we are not" (81); here, as in Hegel, the universe is a vast Becoming. Multiplicity, variety, change are as real as unity, identity, being; the Many are as real as the One,.., The Many are the One; every change is a passage of things towards or from the condition of Fire. The One is the Many; in the very heart of Fire flickers restless change.
Hence Heracleitus passes to the third element in his philosophy-the unity of opposites, the interdependence of contraries, the harmony of strife. "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and· peace, surfeit and hunger" (36). "Good and bad are the same; goodness and badness are one" (57-8); "life and death are the same; so are waking and sleeping, youth and age" (78). All these contraries are stages in a fluctuating move ment, moments of the ever-changing Fire; each member in an opposing pair is necessary to the meaning and existence of the other; reality is the tension and interplay, the alternation and exchange, the unity and bar-
Possibly Heracleitus had in mind a nebular hypothesis: the world begins as fire (or heat or energy), it becomes gas or moisture, which is precipitated as water, whose chemical residue, after evaporation, forms the solids of the earth."" Water and earth (liquid and solid) are two stages of one process, two forms of one reality (25). "All things are exchanged for Fire, and Fire for all things" (22). All change is a "pathway down or up," a passage from one to another form-now more, now less, condensed-of energy or Fire. "The path upwards and downwards is one and the same" (6c}); rarefaction and condensation are movements in an eternal oscillation of change; all things are formed or. the downward and condensing or on the upward and rarefying pathway of reality from Fire and back to Fire; all forms are modes
:Jf one underlying energy. In Spinoza's langua e: Fire or energy is the eternal and omni present substance, or basic principle; condensanon and rarefaction (the downward and up ward paths) are its attributes; its modes or specific forms are the visible things of the world.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.VI
mony, of opposites. "They understand not hew that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There sits attunement of opposite tensionsf like that of the bow and the harp" (45). As the tension of the string, loosened or drawn taut, creates the harmony of vibrations called music or a note, so the alternation and strife of opposites creates the essence and meaning and harmony of life and change. In the struggle of organism with organism, of man with man, of man with woman, of generation with generation, of class with class, of nation with nation, of idea with idea, of creed with creed, the warring opposites are the warp and woof on the loom of life, working at cross-purposes to produce the unseen unity and hidden concord of the whole. "From things that differ comes the fairest attunement" (46); any lover will understand.
All three of these principles-fire, change, and the tension unity of con traries-enter into Heracleitus' conception of soul and God. He smiles at men who "seek in vain to purify themselves from blood-guiltiness by de filing themselves with blood" (130), or who "offer prayers to these statues here-as if one should try to converse with houses; such men know noth ing of the real nature of gods" (126). Nor will he admit personal im mortality; man too, like everything else, is a changeful and fitful flame, "kindled and put out like a light in the night" (77). Even so, man is Fire; the soul or vital principle is part of the eternal energy in all things; and as such it never dies. Death and birth are arbitrary points taken in the current of things by the human analyzing mind; but from the impartial standpoint of the universe they are merely phases in the endless change of forms. At every instant some part of us dies while the whole lives; at every second one of us dies while Life lives. Death is a beginning as well as an ending; birth is an ending as well as a beginning. Our words, our thoughts, even our morals, are prejudices, and represent our interests as parts or groups; philosophy must see things in the light of the whole. "To God all things are beautiful and good and right; men deem some things wrong and some right" (61).


riage: "If my breasts were still capable of giving suck, and my womb were able to bear children, then to another marriage-bed not with trembling feet would I come. But now on my skin age has brought many lines, and Love hastens not to me with his gift of pain"-and she advises her suitor to seek a younger wife.11 In truth we do not know when she died, or how; we know only that she left behind her a vivid memory of passion, poetry, and grace; and that she shone even above Alcaeus as the most melodious singer of her time. Gently, in a final fragment, she reproves those who would not admit that her song was finished:
You dishonor the good gifts of the Muses, my children, when you say, "We will crown you, dear Sappho, best player of the clear, sweet lyre." Know you not that my skin is all wrinkled with age, and my hair is turned from black to white? . . . Surely as starry Night follows rose-armed Dawn and brings darkness to the ends of the earth, so Death tracketh everything living, and catcheth it in the end...
THE NORTHERN EMPIRE
Nonh of Lesbos is little Tenedos, whose women were accounted by some ancient travelers to be the most beautiful in Greece.• Then one follows the adventurous Hellenes into the nonhem Sporades: to lmbros, and Lemnos, and Samothrace. The Milesians, seeking to control the Hellespont, founded, about 560, the still-living town of Abydos on its south shore;• here Leander and Byron swam the straits, and• Xerxes' army crossed to Europe on a bridge of boats. Fanher eastward the Phocaeans settled Lampsacus, birthplace of Epi curus. Within the Propontis lay two groups of islands: the Proconnesus, rich in the marble that gave the Propontis its current name, the Sea of Marmora; and the Arctonnesus, on whose southernmost tip the Milesians established in 7 57 the great pon of Cyzicus. Along the coast rose one Greek city after an other: Panormus, Dascylium, Apameia, Cius, Astacus, Chalcedon. Up through the Bosporus the Greeks advanced, hungry for metals, grain, and trade, found ing Chrysopolis (now Scutari) and Nicopolis-"city of victory." Then they made their way along the southern shore of the Black Sea, depositing towns at Heracleia, Pontica, Tieum, and Sinope-a city splendidly adorned, says Strabo,"' with gymnasium, agora, and shady colonnades; Diogenes the Cynic was not above being born here. Then Amisus, Oenoe, Tripolis, and Trapezus (Trebizond, Trabzon)-where Xenophon's Ten Thousand shouted with joy at the sight of the longed-for sea. The opening up of this region to Greek
Nearly all the cities mentioned in this chapter are mll in existence, though under altered
aames.
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	157
colonization, perhaps by Jason, later by the Ionians, gave the mother cities the same outlet for surplus population and trade, the same resources in food, silver, and gold, that the discovery of America gave to Europe at the beginning of modem times...
Following the eastern shores of the Euxine northward into Medea's Colchis, the Greeks founded Phasis and Dioscorias, and Theodosia and Panticapaeum in the Crimea. Near the mouths of the Bug and the Dnieper they established the city of Olbia (Nikolaev); at the mouth of the Dniester, the town of Tyras; and on the Danube, Troesmis. Then, moving southward along the west shore of the Black Sea, they built the cities of lstrus (Constanta, Kustenje), Tomi (where Ovid died), Odessus (Varna), and Apollonia (Burgas). The histori cally sensitive traveler stands appalled at the antiquity of these living towns; but today's residents, engrossed in the tasks of their own generation, are undis turbed by the depth of the centuries that lie silent beneath them.
Then again at the Bosporus the Megarians, about 660, built Byzantium• yesterday Constantinople, now Istanbul. Even before Pericles this strategic port was becoming what Napoleon would call it at the Peace of Tilsit-the' key to Europe; in the third century B.c. Polybius described its maritime position as "more favorable to security and prosperity than that of any other city in the world known to us.""' Byzantium grew rich by exacting tolls from passing ves sels, and exporting to the Greek world the grain of southern Russia ("Scythia") and the Balkans, and the fish that were netted with shameful ease as they crowded through the narrow straits. It was its curving form, and the wealth derived from this fishing industry, that gave the city its later name, the "Golden Horn." Under Pericles Athens dominated Byzantine polities, levied tolls there to fill her treasury in time of emergency, and regulated the export of grain from the Black Sea as a contraband of war.08
Along the northern or Thracian shore of the Propontis the Greeks built towns at Selymbria, Perinthus (Eregli), Bisanthe, Callipolis (Gallipoli), and Sestus. Later settlements were established on the southwestern coast of Thrace at Aph rodisias, Aenus, and Abdera-where Leucippus and Democritus would pro pound the philosophy of atomistic materialism. Off the coast of Thrace lay the island of Thasos, "bare and ugly as a donkey's back in the sea," Archilochus described it,"" but so rich in gold mines that their proceeds paid all the expenses of the government. On or near the eastern coast of Macedonia Greek gold seekers, chiefly Athenians, founded Neapolis and Amphipolis-whose capture by Philip would lead to the war in which Athens was to lose her liberty. Other Greeks, mostly from Chalcis and Eretria, conquered and named the three-fin gered peninsula of Chalcidice, and by 700 had established thirty towns there,
The name was probably taken from Byzas, a native king.08
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VI
several of them destined to play a role in Greek history: Stageirus (birthplace of Aristotle), Scione, Mende, Potidaea, Acanthus, Cleonae, Torone, and Olyn thus-captured by Philip in 348 and known to us now through the oratory of Demosthenes. Recent excavations at Olynthus have unearthed a town of considerable extent, with many houses of two stories and some of twenty-five rooms. In the time of Philip Olynthus appears to have had 60,000 inhabitants; we may judge from this figure for a minor city the abounding fertility and energetic expansion of the pre-Periclean Greeks.
Finally, between Chalcidice and Euboea, Ionian migrants peopled the Eu boean Isles-Gerontia, Polyaegos, Icos, Peparethos, Scandile, Scyros. The orbit of empire in east and north had come full tum, the circuit was complete; Greek enterprise had transformed the islands of the Aegean and the coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, the Black Sea, Macedonia, and Thrace into a busy net work of Hellenized cities, throbbing with agriculture, industry, trade, politics, literature, religion, philosophy, science, art, eloquence, chicanery, and venery. It only remained to conquer another Greece in the West, and build a bridge between ancient Bellas and the modem world.
CHAPTER  VII
The Greeks in the West
THE SYBARITES
KIRTING Sunium again, our ship of fancy, sailing westward, finds Cythera, island haunt of Aphrodite, and therefore the goal of Wat teau's Embtrrkation.• There, about A.D. 160, Pausanias saw "the most holy and ancient of all the temples that the Greeks have built to Aphrodite";1 and there, in 1887, Schliemann dug its ruins out of the earth." Cythera was the southernmost of the Ionian Islands that bordered the west coast of Greece, and so named because Ionian immigrants settled them; Zacynthos, Cephal lenia, Ithaca, Leucas, Paxos, and Corcyra made the rest. Schliemann thought that Ithaca was the island of Odysseus, and vainly sought under its soil some confirmation of Homer's tale;" but Dorpfeld believed that Odysseus' home was on rocky Leucas. From the cliffs of Leucas, as an annual sacri fice to Apollo, the ancient Leucadians, says Strabo, were in the habit of hurling a human victim; but being men as well as theologians, they merci fully attached to him powerful birds whose wings might break his fall:• probably the story of Sappho's leap is bound up with memories of this rite. Corinthian colonists occupied Corcyra (Corfu) about 734 B.c., and soon became so strong that they defeated Corinth's navy and established their independence. From Corcyra some Greek adventurers sailed up the Adriatic as far as Venice; some made small settlements on the Dalmatian coast and in the valley of the Po;" others crossed at last through fifty miles
of stormy water to the heel of Italy.
They found a magnificent shore line, curved into natural harbors and backed by a fertile hinterland that had been almost neglected by the aborigines.• The Greek invaders took possession of this coastal region by the ruthless law of colonial expansion-that natural resources unex ploited by the native population will draw in, by a kind of chemical attrac tion, some other people to exploit them and pour them into the commerce and usage of the world. From Brentesium (Brindisi) the newcomers, chiefly Dorian, traversed the heel of the peninsula to establish a major city
Watteau's painting, Embarkation for Cythera, symbolized the spirit of the upper classes
in eighteenth-century France, which had shed just enough theology to be epicurean.
159
160	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VII