CHAP. xm)  THE  MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS   289
the material upon which he writes. Some schools, anticipating much later fash ions, are adorned with statues of Greek heroes and gods; a few are elegantly furnished. The teacher teaches all subjects, and attends to character as well as intellect, using a sandal.•"'
The curriculum has three divisions-writing, music, and gymnastics; eager modernists will add, in Aristotle's day, drawing and painting." Writing includes reading and arithmetic, which uses letters for numbers. Everyone learns to play the lyre, and much of the material of instruction is put into poetical and musical form.u No time is spent in acquiring any foreign language, much less a dead one, but great care is taken in learning the correct usage of the mother tongue. Gymnastics are taught chiefly in the gymnasium and the palaestra, and no one is considered educated who has not learned to wrestle, swim, and use the bow and the sling.
The education of girls is carried on at home, and is largely confined to "domestic science." Outside of Sparta girls take no part in public gymnastics. They are taught by their mothers or nurses to read and write and reckon, to spin and weave and embroider, to dance and sing and play some instrument. A few Greek women are well educated, but these are mostly hetairai; for respect able ladies there is no secondary education, until Aspasia lures a few of them into rhetoric and philosophy. Higher education for men is provided by pro fessional rhetors and sophists, who offer instruction in oratory, science, philoso phy, and history. These independent teachers engage lecture halls near the gymnasium or palaestra, and constitute together a scattered university for pre Platonic Athens. Only the prosperous can study under them, for they charge high fees; but ambitious youths work by night in mill or field in order to be able to attend by day the classes of these nomadic professors.
When boys reach the age of sixteen they are expected to pay special atten tion to physical exercises, as fitting them in some measure for the tasks of war. Even their sports give them indirectly a military preparation: they run, leap, wrestle, hunt, drive chariots, and hurl the javelin. At eighteen they enter upon the second of the four stages of Athenian life (pais, ephebos, aner, geron-child, youth, man, elder), and are enrolled into the ranks of Athens' soldier youth, the epheboi.t Under moderators chosen by the leaders of their tribes they are trained for two years in the duties of citizenship and war. They live and eat together, wear an impressive uniform, and submit to moral supervision night and day. They organize themselves democratically on the model of the city, meet in assembly, pass resolutions, and erect laws for their own governance;
In one of the pictures at Pompeii, probably copied from the Greek, we see a pupil sup poned upon the shoulders of another, and held at his heels by a third, while the teacher Bogs him.ia
t This institution, however, cannot yet be traced back beyond 336 B.c.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIII
they have archon:., strategoi, and judges.11 For the first year they are schooled with strenuous drill, and hear lectures on literature, music, geometry, and rhet oric.11 At nineteen they are assigned to garrison the frontier, and are entrusted for two years with the protection of the city against attack from without and disorder within. Solemnly, in the presence of the Council of Five Hundred, with hands stretched over the altar in the temple of Agraulos, they take the oath of the young men of Athens:
I will not disgrace the sacred arms, nor will I abandon the man next to me, whoever he may be. I will bring aid to the ritual of the state, and to the holy duties, both alone and in company with many. I will transmit my native commonwealth not lessened, but larger and better than I have received it. I will obey those who from time to time are judges; I will obey the established statutes, and what ever other regulations the people shall enact. If anyone shall attempt to destroy the statutes I will not permit it, but will repel him both alone and with all. I will honor the ancestral faith.18
The epheboi are assigned a special place at the theater, and play a prominent role in the religious processions of the city; perhaps it is such young men that we see riding so handsomely on the Parthenon frieze. Periodically they exhibit their accomplishments in public contests, above all in the relay torch race from the Piraeus to Athens. All the city comes out for this picturesque event, and lines the four-and-a-half-mile road; the race is run at night, and the way is not illuminated; all that can be seen of the runners is the leaping light of the torches that they carry forward and pass on. When, at the age of twenty one, the training of the epheboi is completed, they are freed from parental authority, and formally admitted into the full citizenship of the city.
Such is the education-eked out by lessons learned in the home and in the street-that produces the Athenian citizen. It is an excellent combination of physical and mental, moral and esthetic, training, of supervision in youth with freedom in maturity; and in its heyday it turns out young men as fine as any in history. After Pericles theory grows and beclouds practice; philosophers debate the goals and methods of education-whether the teacher should aim chiefly at intellectual development or at moral character, chiefly at practical ability or the promotion of abstract science. But all agree in attaching the highest importance to education. When Aristippus is asked in what way the educated are superior to the untutored he answers, "as broken horses are to the unbroken"; and Aristotle to the same question replies, "as the living are to the dead." At least, adds Aristippus, "If the pupil derives no other good, he will not, when he attends the theater, be one stone upon another.',,.
CHAP. xm) THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS	291
EXTERNALS
The citizens of Athens, in the fifth century, are men of medium height, vigorous, bearded, and not all as handsome as Pheidias' horsemen. The ladies of the vases are graceful, and those of the stelae have a dignified loveliness, and those molded by the sculptors are supremely beautiful; but the actual ladies of Athens, limited in their mental development by an almost Oriental seclusion, are at best as pretty as their Near Eastern sisters, but no more. The Greeks admire beauty even beyond other nations, but they do not always embody it. Greek women, like others, find their figures a little short of perfection. They lengthen them with high cork soles on their shoes, pad out deficiencies with wadding, compress abundances with lacing, and support the breasts with a cloth brassiere.•"'
The hair of the Greeks is usually dark; blondes are exceptional, and much admired; many women, and some men, dye their hair to make it blonde, or to conceal the grayness of age." Both sexes use oils to help the growth of the hair and to protect it against the sun; the women, and again some men, add perfumes to the oil."" Both sexes, in the sixth century, wear the hair long, usually bound in braids around or behind the head. In the fifth century the women vary their coiffure by knotting the hair low on the nape of the neck, or letting it fall over the shoulders, or around the neck and upon the breast. The ladies like to bind their hair with gay ribbons, and to adorn these with a jewel on the forehead." After Marathon the men begin to cut their hair; after Alexander they will shave their mustaches and beards with sickle-shaped razors of iron. No Greek ever wears a mustache without a beard. The beard is neatly trimmed, usually to a point. The barber not only cuts the hair and shaves or trims the beard, but he manicures his customer and otherwise polishes him up for presentation; when he has finished he offers him a mirror in the most modern style.• The barber has his shop, which is a center for the "wineless symposia" (as Theophrastus calls them) of the local gossips and gadflies; but he often works outside it under the sky. He is garrulous by profession; and when one of his kind asks King Archelaus of Macedon how he would like to have his hair cut the king answers, "In silence.""" The women also shave here and there, using razors or depilatories of arsenic and lime.
Perfumes-made from flowers, with a base of oil-are numbered in the
Plutarch tells a pretty story of how an epidemic of suicide among the women of Milerus was suddenly and completely ended by an ordinance decreeing that self-slain women should be carried naked through the marketplace to their burial.11
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIII
hundreds; Socrates complains that men make so much use of them."" Every lady of class has an armory of mirrors, pins, hairpins, safety pins, tweezers, combs, scent bottles, and pots for rouge and creams. Cheeks and lips are painted with sticks of minium or alkanet root; eyebrows are penciled with lampblack or pulverized antimony; eyelids are shaded with antimony or kohl; eyelashes are darkened, and then set with a mixture of egg white and gum ammoniac. Creams and washes are used for removing wrinkles, freckles, and spots; disagreeable applications are kept on the face for hours in the patient lust to seem, if one cannot be, beautiful. Oil of mastic is em ployed to prevent perspiration, and specific perfumed unguents are ap plied to various parts of the body; a proper lady uses palm oil on the face and breast, marjoram on the eyebrows and hair, essence of thyme on the throat and knees, mint on the arms, myrrh on the legs and feet.• Against this seductive armament men protest to as much effect as in other ages. A character in Athenian comedy reproves a lady in cosmetic detail: "If you go out in summer, two streaks of black run from your eyes; perspiration makes a red furrow from your cheeks to your neck; and when your hair touches your face it is blanched by the white lead.',. Women remain the same, because men do.
Water is limited, and cleanliness seeks substitutes. The well to do bathe once or twice daily, using a soap made of olive oil mixed with an alkali into a paste; then they are anointed with fragrant essences. Comfortable homes have a paved bathroom in which stands a large marble basin, usually filled by hand; sometimes water is brought by pipes and channels into the house and through the wall of the bathroom, where it spouts from a metal nozzle in the shape of an animal's head, and falls upon the floor of a small shower-bath enclosure, whence it runs out into the garden.80 Most people, unable to spare water for a bath, rub themselves with oil, and then scrape it off with a crescent-shaped strigil, as in Lysippus' Apoxyomenos. The Greek is not fastidiously clean; his hygiene is not so much a matter of indoor toilette as of abstemious diet and an active outdoor life. He seldom sits in closed homes, theaters, churches, or halls, rarely works in closed factories or shops; his drama, his worship, even his government, proceed under the sun; and his simple clothing, which lets the air reach every pan of his body, can be thrown aside with one swing of the arm for a bout of wrestling or a bath of sunshine.
Greek dress consists essentially of two squares of cloth, loosely draped about the body, and seldom tailored to fit the individual; it varies in minor detail from city to city, but remains constant for generations. The chief
CHAP, XIII)  THE  MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE  ATHENIANS    293
garment at Athens is for men the chiton, or tunic, for women the peplos, or robe, both made of wool. If the weather requires it these may be cov ered with a mantle (himation) or cloak (chlamys), suspended like them from the shoulders, and falling freely in those natural folds that so please us in Greek statuary. In the fifth century clothing is usually white; women, rich men, and gay youths, however, go in for color, even for purple and dark red, and colored stripes and embroidered hems; and the women may bind a colored girdle about the waist. Hats are unpopular on the ground that they keep moisture from the hair and so make it prematurely gray;"' the head is covered only in traveling, in battle, and at work under the hot sun; women may wear colored kerchiefs or bandeaux; workers sometimes wear a cap and nothing else."" Shoes are sandals, high shoes, or boots; usu ally of leather, black for men, colored for women. The ladies of Thebes, says Dicaearchus, "wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare feet."'" Most children and workingmen dispense with shoes altogether; and no one bothers with stockings."
Both sexes announce or disguise their incomes with jewelry. Men wear at least one ring; Aristotle wears several."" The walking sticks of the men may have knobs of silver or gold. Women wear bracelets, necklaces, dia dems, earrings, brooches and chains, jeweled clasps and buckles, and some times jeweled bands about the ankles or the upper arms. Here, as in most mercantile cultures, luxury runs into excess among those to whom wealth is a novelty. Sparta regulates the headdress of its ladies, and Athens for bids women to take more than three dresses on a journey  Women smile


180	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VIII
eye, to all whom she visited. The less learned Greeks sacrificed puppies to keep her away.m
Before the classical age the dead were regarded as spirits capable of good and evil to men, and were appeased with offerings and prayer. They were not quite gods, but the primitive Greek family, like the Chinese, honored its dead beyond any deity."" In classical Greece these vague ghosts were more dreaded than loved, and were propitiated with aversion rituals, as in the festival of Anthesteria. The worship of heroes was an extension of the cult of the dead. Great, noble, or beautiful men or women could be raised by the gods to im mortal life and become minor deities. So the people of Olympia offered annual sacrifice to Hippodameia; Cassandra was worshiped at Laconian Leuctra, Helen at Sparta, Oedipus at Colonus. Or a god might descend into the body of a mortal, and transform him with divinity; or the god might cohabit with a mortal and beget a hero-god, as Zeus with Alcmena begot Heracles. Many cities, groups, even professions, traced their origin to some god-born hero; so the physicians of Greece looked back to Asclepius. The god was once a dead man, ancestor, or hero; the temple was originally a tomb; the church is still in most lands a shelter for relics of the sacred dead. In general the Greeks made less distinction between men and gods than we do; many of their gods were as human, except in birth, as our saints, and as close to their worshipers; and though they were called Immortals, some of them, like Dionysus, could die.
The Olympians
All these were the less famous, though not necessarily the less honored, gods of Greece. How is it that we hear so little of them in Homer, and so much of the Olympians? Probably because the gods of Olympus entered with the Achaeans and Dorians, overlaid the Mycenaean and chthonian deities, and conquered them as their worshipers were conquered. We see the change in action at Dodona and Delphi, where the older god of the earth, Gaea, was displaced in the one case by Zeus, in the other by Apollo. The defeated gods were not wiped out; they remained, so to speak, as sub ject deities, hiding bitterly underground, but still revered by the common people, while the victorious Olympians received on their mountaintop the worship of the aristocracy; hence Homer, who composed for the elite, says almost nothing of the nether gods. Homer, Hesiod, and the sculptors helped the political ascendancy of the conquerors to spread the cult of the Olympians. Sometimes the Ininor gods were combined or absorbed into the greater figures, or became their attendants or satellites, very much as minor states were now and then attached or subjected to greater ones; so the satyrs
CHAP.VIII)	THE  GODS OF GREECE
and sileni were given to Dionysus, the sea nymphs to Poseidon, the moun tain and forest sprites to Artemis. The more savage rites and myths faded out; the chaos of a demon-haunted earth yielded to a semiorderly divine government that reflected the growing political stability of the Greek world.
At the head of this new regime was the majestic and patriarchal Zeus. He was not first in time; Uranus and Cronus, as we have seen, preceded him; but they and the Titans, like Lucifer's hosts, were overthrown.• Zeus and his brothers cast lots to divide the world amongst them; Zeus won the sky, Poseidon the sea, Hades the bowels of the earth. There is no creation in this mythology: the world existed before the gods, and the gods do not make man out of the slime but beget him by union among themselves, or with their mortal offspring; God is literally the Father in the theology of the Greeks. Nor are the Olympians omnipotent or omniscient; each limits the other, or even opposes the other; any one of them, especially Zeus, can be deceived. Nevertheless they acknowledge his suzerainty, and crowd his court like the retainers of a feudal lord; and though he consults them on occasion, and now and then yields his preference to theirs,"" he frequently
puts them in their place." He begins as a sky-and-mountain-god, provider of the indispensable rain.t Like Yahweh he is, among his earlier forms, a god of war; he debates with himself whether to end the siege of Troy or
"make the war more bloody," and decides for the latter course."" Gradually he becomes the calm and mighty ruler of gods and men, bestriding Olympus in bearded dignity. He is the head and source of the moral order of the world; he punishes .filial neglect, guards family property, sanctions oaths, pursues perjurers, and protects boundaries, hearths, suppliants, and guests. At last he is the serene dispenser of judgment whom Pheidias carves for Olympia.
His one failing is the youthful readiness with which he falls in love. Not
having created women, he admires them as wonderful beings, bearing even to the gods the inestimable gifts of beauty and tenderness; and he finds it beyond him to resist them. Hesiod draws up a long list of the divine amours and their glorious offspring... His first mate is Dione, but he leaves her in
This struggle between Zeus and his aides against the Titans became for the Greeks a symbol of the conquest of barbarism and brute strength by civilization and reason, and offered a frequent subject for art.
t The name Zeus is probably akin to the Latin dies, our day, and may come from an lndo
European root di, meaning to shine. Jupiter is Zeu-pater, Zeus the father; hence the geni tive Dior. Today the haunts and peaks once sacred to Zeus are named, or dedicated to, St. Elias, the rain-giving saint of the Greek Church.•
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. VIII
Epirus when he moves to Thessalian Olympus. There his first wife is
Metis, goddess of measure, mind, wisdom. Gossip says that her children
	will dethrone him; therefore he swallows her, absorbs her qualities, and be comes himself the god of wisdom. Metis is delivered of Athena within him, and his head has to be cut open that Athena may be born. Lonely for loveli ness, he takes Themis for his mate, and begets by her the twelve Hours; then he takes Eurynome, and begets the three Graces; then Mnemosyne, and engenders the nine Muses; then Leto, and fathers Apollo and Artemis; then his sister Demeter, and has Persephone; finally, having sown his wild oats, he weds his sister Hera, makes her Queen of Olympus, and receives from her Hebe, Ares, Hephaestus, and Eileithyia. But he does not get along well with Hera. She is as old a god as he, and more honored in many states; she is the patron deity of matrimony and motherhood, protectress of the mar riage tie; she is prim and grave arid virtuous, and frowns upon his escapades; moreover, she is an excellent shrew. He thinks of beating her,.. but finds it easier to console himself with new amours. His first mortal mate is Niobe; his last is Alcmena, who is descended from Niobe in the sixteenth genera tion.* He loves also, with Greek impartiality, the handsome Ganymede, and snatches him up to be his cupbearer on Olympus.
It was natural that so fertile a father should have some distinguished chil
dren. When Athena was, born in full development and armament from the head of Zeus she provided the literature of the world with one of its most hackneyed similes. She was an appropriate goddess for Athens, consoling its maids with her proud virginity, inspiring its men with martial ardor, and symbolizing for Pericles the wisdom that belonged to her as the daughter of Metis and Zeus. When Pallas the Titan tried to make love to her she slew him, and added his name to hers as a warning to other suitors. To her Athens dedicated its loveliest temple and its most splendid festival.
More widely worshiped than Athena was her comely brother Apollo, bright deity of the sun, patron of music, poetry, and art, founder of cities, maker of laws, god of healing and father of Asclepius, "far-darting" archer and god of war, successor to Gaea and Phoebet at Delphi as the holiest oracle of Greece. As god of the growing crops he received tithe offerings at harvest time, and in return he radiated his golden warmth and light from Delos and Delphi to enrich the soil. Everywhere he was associated with order, measure, and beauty; and whereas in other cults there were strange
It should be added, in justice to the dead, that these adventures were probably invented by the poets, or by tribes anxious to trace their lineage to the greatest of the gods.
t From Phoebe he took the name Phoebus, "inspired."
CHAP. VIII)	THE  GODS OF GREECE	183


In the spring of 480 the great host reached the Hellespont, where Egyptian and Phoenician engineers had built a bridge that was among the most admired mechanical achievements of antiquity. If again we may fol low Herodotus, 674 ships of trireme or penteconter size were distributed in two rows athwart the strait, each vessel facing the current, and moored
CHAP. X)	THE   STRUGGLE  FOR  FREE DOM	239
with a heavy anchor. Then the builders stretched cables of flax or papyrus over each row of ships from bank to bank, bound the cables to every ship, and made them taut with capstans on the shore. Trees were cut and sawn into planks, and these, laid across the cables, were fastened to them and to one another. The planks were covered with brushwood, and this with earth, and the whole was trodden down to resemble a road. A bulwark was erected on each side of the causeway high enough to keep animals from taking fright at sight of the sea.18 Nevenheless many of the beasts, and some of the soldiers, had to be driven by the lash to trust themselves to the bridge. It stood the burden well, and in seven days an<) nights the entire host had passed over it successfully. A native of the region, seeing the spectacle, concluded that Xerxes was Zeus, and asked why the master of gods and men had taken so much trouble to conquer little Greece when he might have destroyed the presumptuous nation with one thunderbolt.1' The army marched overland through Thrace and down into Macedonia and Thessaly, while the Persian fleet, hugging the coasts, avoided the storms of the Aegean by passing southward through a canal dug by forced
labor across the isthmus at Mt. Athos to the length of a mile and a quarter. Wherever the army ate two meals, we are told, the city tnat fed it was utterly ruined; Thasos spent four hundred silver talents-approximately a
million dollars-in playing host to Xerxes for a day.20 The northern Greeks. even to the Attic frontier, surrendered to fear or bribery, and allowed their troops to be added to Xerxes' millions. Only Plataea and Thespiae, in the nonh, prepared to fight.
IV. SALAMIS
How can we imagine, today, the terror and desperation of the south, em Greeks at the approach of this polyglot avalanche? Resistance seemed insane; the loyal states could not muster one tenth of Xerxes' force. For once Athens and Sparta worked together with single mind and heart. Delegates were sped to every city in the Peloponnesus to beg for troops or supplies; most of the states co-operated; Argos refused, and never lived down her disgrace. Athens fitted out a fleet that sailed nonh to meet the Persian armada, and Sparta dispatched a small force under King Leonidas to halt Xerxes for a while at Thermopylae. The two navies met at Ane misium, off the nonhern coast of Euboea. When the Greek admirals saw the overwhelming number of the enemy's vessels they were of a mind to withdraw. The Euboeans, fearing a descent of the Persians upon their
THE  LIFE OF GREECE	(CHAP.X
shores, sent to Themistocles, commander of the Athenian contingent, a bribe of thirty talents ($180,000) on condition that he persuade the Greek leaders to fight; he succeeded by sharing the bribe.n With characteristic subtlety Themistocles had sailors inscribe upon the rocks messages to the Greeks in the Persian fleet begging them to desert, or in any case not to fight against their motherland; he hoped that if the lonians saw these words they would be moved by them, and that if Xerxes saw and understood them, the King would not dare to use Hellenes in the battle. All day the rival fleets fought, until night put an end to the engagement before either side could win; the Greeks then retired to Artemisium, the Persians to Aphetae. Considering the inequality of numbers, the Greeks justifiably looked upon the battle as a victory. When news came of the disaster at Thermopylae the surviving Greek fleet sailed south to Salamis, to provide a refuge for Athens.
Meanwhile Leonidas, despite the most heroic resistance in history, had been overwhelmed at the "Hot Gates," not so much by the bravery of the Persians as by the treachery of Hellenes. Certain Greeks from Trachis not only betrayed to Xerxes the secret of the indirect route over the moun tains, but led the Persian force by that approach to attack the Spartans in the rear. Leonidas and his three hundred elders (for he had chosen only fathers of sons to go with him, lest any Spartan family should be extin guished) died almost to the last man. Of the two Spartan survivors one fell at Plataea, the other hanged himself for shame/" The Greek historians assure us that the Persians lost 20,000, the Greeks 300."" Over the tomb of the latter heroes was placed the most famous of Greek epitaphs: "Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws.'"'
When the Athenians learned that no barrier now remained between Athens and the Persians, proclamation was made that every Athenian should save his family as best he could. Some fled to Aegina, some to Salamis, some to Troezen; some of the men were enlisted to fill up the crews of the fleet that was returning from Artemisium. Plutarch paints"" a touching picture of how the tame animals of the city followed their masters to the shore, and howled when the overladen vessels drew off without them; one dog, be longing to Pericles' father, Xanthippus, leaped into the sea and swam alongside his ship to Salamis, where it died of exhaustion."" We may judge of the excitement and passion of those days when we learn that an Athenian who in the Assembly, advised surrender, was killed there and then, and
CHAP. x)	THE  STRUGGLE  FOR FREEDOM
that a crowd of women went to his house and stoned his wife and children to death... When Xerxes arrived he found the city almost desened, and gave it over to pillage and fire.
Soon afterward the Persian fleet, twelve hundred strong, entered the Bay of Salamis. Against it were ranged three hundred Greek triremes, still under divided command. The majority of the admirals were op posed to risking an engagement. Resolved to force action upon the Greeks, Themistocles resoned to a stratagem that would have cost him his life had the Persians won. He sent a trusted slave to Xerxes to tell him that the Greeks were intending to sail away during the night, and that the Per sians could prevent this only by surrounding the Greek fleet. Xerxes ac cepted the advice, and on the next morning, with every escape blocked, the Greeks were compelled to give fight. Xerxes, seated in state at the foot of Mt. Aegaleus, on the Attic shore across from Salamis, watched the action, and noted the names of those of his men who fought with especial bravery. The superior tactics and seamanship of the Hellenes, and the confusion of tongues, minds, and superfluous ships among the Orientals, finally decided the issue in favor of Greece. According to Diodorus the invaders lost two hundred vessels, the defenders fony; but we do not have the Persian side of the story. Few of the Greeks, even from the lost ships, died; for being all excellent swimmers, they swam to land when their boats foundered."" The remnant of the Persian fleet fled to the Hellespont, and the subtle Themistocles sent his slave again to Xerxes to say that he had dissuaded the Greeks from pursuit. Xerxes left 300,000 men under command of Mar donius, and with the rest of his troops marched back in humiliation to Sardis, a large pan of his force dying of pestilence and dysentery on the way.
In the same year as Salamis-possibly, as the Greeks would have it, on the same day (September 23, 480 B.c.)-the Greeks of Sicily fought the Car thaginians at Himera. We do not know that the Phoenicians of Africa were acting in concert with those who supponed Xerxes and so largely manned his fleet; perhaps it was only a coincidence that Greece found itself as saulted in east and west at once.• In the traditional account Hamilcar, the Canhaginian admiral, arrived at Panormus with 3000 ships and 300,000 troops; he proceeded thence to lay siege to Himera, where he was met by Gelon of Syracuse with 55,ooo men. After the fashion of Punic generals, Hamilcar stood aside from the battle, and burned sacrificial victims to his gods as the contest raged; when his defeat became evident he threw him-
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(cHAP.X
self into the fire. A tomb was erected to him on the site; and there his grandson Himilcon, seventy years afterwards, slaughtered 3000 Greek cap tives in revenge.80
A year later (August, 479) the liberation of Greece was completed by almost simultaneous engagements on land and sea. Mardonius' army, liv ing leisurely on the country, had pitched its camp near Plataea on the Boeotian plain. There, after two weeks of waiting for propitious omens, a Greek force of 110,000 men, led by the Spartan king Pausanias, joined issue with them in the greatest land battle of the war. The non-Persians in the invading force had no heart for the conflict, and took to flight as soon as the Persian contingent, which bore the point of the attack, began to waver. The Greeks won so overwhelming a victory that (according to their his torians) they lost but 159 men, while of the Persian force 260,000 were slain.* On the same day, the Greeks aver, a Greek squadron met a Persian flotilla off the coast of Mycale, the central meeting place of all Ionia. The Persian fleet was destroyed, the Ionian cities were freed from Persian rule, and control of the Hellespont and the Bosporus was won by the Greeks as they had won it from Troy seven hundred years before.
The Greco-Persian War was the most momentous conflict in European history, for it made Europe possible. It won for Western civilization the opportunity to develop its own economic life-unburdened with alien trib ute or taxation-and its own political institutions, free from the dictation of Oriental kings. It won for Greece a clear road for the first great experi ment in liberty; it preserved the Greek mind for three centuries from the enervating mysticism of the East, and secured for Greek enterprise full freedom of the sea. The Athenian fleet that remained after Salamis now opened every port in the Mediterranean to Greek ttade, and the commer cial expansion that ensued provided the wealth that financed the leisure and culture of Periclean Athens. The victory of little Hellas against such odds stimulated the pride and lifted up the spirit of its people; out of very gratitude they felt called upon to do unprecedented things. After cen turies of preparation and sacrifice Greece entered upon its Golden Age.
These figures from Herodotus"1 are presumably an outburst of patriotic imagination. Plutarch, trying to be impartial, raises the Greek loss to 136o, and Diodorus Siculus, though always generous with numbers, lowers the Persian loss to 100,000;81 but even Plutarch and Diodorus were Greeks.
BOOK ID
THE	GOLDEN  AGE
0-399 B.C.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK III
Nom: Where no city is named for a person, "of Athens" is uodemood.


Or perhaps a generation later; cf. note to p. 16o above.
CRAP. VII)	THE	GREEKS  IN  THE  WEST
If we wish to visualize the difficulties of life in colonies carved out by violent conquest we need only contemplate the curious communism of the Lipari i.e., the Glorious-Islands, which lie to the north of eastern Sicily. Here, about 580, some adventurers from Cnidus organized a pirate's paradise. Preying upon the commerce about the Straits, they brought the booty to their island lairs and shared it with exemplary equality. The land was owned by the com munity, a part of the population was assigned to till it, and the products were distributed in like shares to all the citizens. In time, however, individualism reasserted itself: the land was divided into plots individually owned, and life resumed the uneven tenor of its competitive way.
On the northern coast of Sicily lay Himera, destined to be the Plataea of the West. There Stesichorus, "Maker of Choruses," at a time when the Greeks were tiring of epics, recast into the form of choral lyrics the legends of the race, and gave even to Helen and Achilles the passing novelty of "modern dress." As if to bridge the gap between the dying epic and the future novel, Stesichorus composed love stories in verse; in one of these a pure and timid lass dies of unrequited love, in the style of Provem;al madrigals or Victorian fiction. At the same time he opened a pathway for Theocritus by writing a pastoral poem on the death of the shepherd Daphnis, whose love for Chloe was to be the main business of the Greek novel in the Roman age. Stesichorus had his own romance, and with no less a lady than Helen herself. Having lost his sight, he attributed this calamity to his having handed down the tale of Helen's infidelity; to atone to her (for she was now a goddess) he composed a "pal inode," or second song, assuring the world that Helen had been kidnaped by force, had never yielded to Paris, had never gone to Troy, but had waited intact in Egypt until Menelaus came to rescue her. In his old age the poet warned Himera against giving dictatorial power to Phalaris of Acragas.• Being unheeded, he moved to Catana, where his monumental tomb was one of the sights of Roman Sicily.
West of Himera lay Segesta, of which nothing remains but a peristyle of unfinished Doric columns weirdly rising amid surrounding weeds. To find Sicilian architecture at its best we must cross the island southward to the once great cities of Selinus and Acragas. During its tragic tenure of life from its establishment in 651 to its destruction by Carthaginians in 409, Selinus raised to the silent gods seven Doric temples, immense in size but of imperfect work manship, covered with painted plaster and decorated with crude reliefs. The demon of earthquake destroyed these temples at a date unknown, and little survives of them but broken columns and capitals sprawling on the ground.
He cast his warning into the form of a fable. A horse, annoyed by the invasion of a stag into its pasturage, asked a man to help it punish the poacher. The man promised to do this if the horse would allow him to bestride 1t javelin in hand. The horse agreed, the stag was frightened away, and the horse found that he was now a slave to the man.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, VII
Acragas, the Roman Agrigentum, was in the sixth century the largest and richest city in Sicily. We picture it rising from its busy wharves through a noisy market place to the homes on the slope of the hill, and the stately acrop olis whose shrines almost lifted their worshipers to the sky. Here, as in most of the Greek colonies, the landowning aristocracy yielded power to a dictator ship representing chiefly the middle class. In 570 Phalaris seized the government, and secured immortality by roasting his enemies in a brazen bull; he was par ticularly pleased by a contrivance that made the agonized cries of his victims sound through a mechanism of pipes like the bellowing of the animal.• Never theless it was to him and a later dictator, Theron, that the city owed the politi cal order and stability that permitted its economic development. The mer chants of Acragas, like those of Selinus, Crotona, and Sybaris, became the American millionaires of their time, upon whom the lesser plutocrats of older Greece looked with secret envy and compensatory scorn; the new world, said the old, was interested in size and show, but had no taste or artistry. The temple of Zeus at Acragas unquestionably sought size, for Polybius describes it as "second to none in Greece in dimensions and design";.. we cannot directly . judge its beauty, for wars and earthquakes destroyed it. A generation later, in the age of Pericles, Acragas raised more modest structures. One of them, the temple of Concord, survives almost completely, and of the temple of Hera there remains an impressive colonnade; enough in either case to show that Greek taste was not confined to Athens, and that even the commercial west had learned that "size is not development."-In Acragas the great Empedocles would be born; and perhaps it was there, and not in Etna's crater, that he would die.
Syracuse began as it is today-a village huddled on the promontory of Ortygia. As far back as the eighth century Corinth had sent colonists, armed with righteousness and superior weapons, to seize the little peninsula, which was then perhaps an island. They built or widened the connection with the mainland of Sicily, and drove most of the Sicels into the interior. They multiplied with all the rapidity of a vigorous people on a resource-full soil; in time their city became the largest in Greece, with a circumference of fourteen miles and a population of half a million souls. An aristocracy of landholders was overthrown about 495 by a revolt of the unfranchised plebs in alliance with the enslaved Sicels. The new democracy, if we may believe Aristotle,"' proved incapable of establishing an orderly society, and in 485 Gelon of Gela, by a program of enlightened treachery, set up a dictatorship. Like many of his kind he was as able as he was unscrupulous. Scorning all moral codes and political restraints, he transformed Ortygia into an im pregnable fortress for his government, conquered Naxos, Leontini, and
CHAP.VII)	THE  GREEKS  IN  THE  WEST
Messana, and taxed all eastern Sicily to make Syracuse the most beautiful of Greek capitals. "In this way," says Herodotus, sadly, "Gelon became a great king."*""
He redeemed himself, and became the idolized Napoleon of Sicily when, as Xerxes' fleet moved upon Athens, the Carthaginians sent an armada only less numerous than the Persian to wrest the island paradise from the Greeks. The fate of Sicily was joined with that of Greece when in the same month tradition said on the same day-Gelon faced Hamilcar at Himera, and Themistocles confronted Xerxes at Salamis.
VI. THE GREEKS IN AFRICA
The Carthaginians had reason to be disturbed, for even on the north coast of Africa the Greeks had established cities and were capturing trade. As early as 630 the Dorians of Thera had sent a numerous colony to Cyrene, midway between Carthage and Egypt. There, on the desert's edge, they found good soil, with rain so abundant that the natives spoke of the site as the place where there was a hole in the sky. The Greeks used part of the land for pas turage, and exported wool and hides; they grew from the silphium plant a spice that all Greece was eager to buy; they sold Greek products to Africa, and developed tqeir own handicrafts to such a point that Cyrenaic vases ranked among the best. The city used its wealth intelligently, and adorned itself with great gardens, temples, statuary, and gymnasiums. Here the first famous epi curean philosopher, Aristippus, was born, and here, after much wandering, he returned to found the Cyrenaic School.
Within Egypt itself, normally hostile to any foreign settlement, the Greeks gained a foothold, at last an empire. About 650 the Milesians opened a "factory," or trading post, at Naucratis on the Canopic branch of the Nile. Pharaoh Psam tik I tolerated them because they made good mercenaries, while their commerce provided rich prey for his collectors of customs revenues."' Ahmose II gave them a large measure of self-government. Naucratis became almost an indus trial city, with manufactures of pottery, terra cotta, and faience; still more it became an emporium of trade, bringing in Greek oil and wine, and sending out Egyptian wheat, linen, and wool, African ivory, frankincense, and gold. Gradually, amid tliese exchanges, Egyptian lore and techniques in religion,
"Gelon of Syracuse," says Lucian, "had disagreeable breath, but did not find it out him self for a long time, no one venturing to mention such a circumstance to a tyrant. At last a foreign woman who had a connection with him dared to tell him; whereupon he went to his wife and scolded her for never having, with all her opportunities of knowing, warned him of it; she put: in the defense that as she had never been familiar or at close quarters with any other man, she had supposed all men were like that."88 He was disarmed.
174	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. VD
architecture, sculpture, and science flowed into Greece, while in return Greek words and ways entered Egypt, and paved the way for Greek domination in the Alexandrian age.
If in imagination we take a merchant vessel from Naucratis to Athens, our tour of the Greek world will be complete. It was necessary that we should make this long circuit in order that we might see and feel the extent and variety of Hellenic civilization. Aristotle described the constitutional history of 158 Greek city-states, but there were a thousand more. Each con tributed in commerce, industry, and thought to what we mean by Greece. In the colonies, rather than on the mainland, were born Greek poetry and prose, mathematics and metaphysics, oratory and history. Without them, and the thousand absorbing tentacles which they stretched out into the old world, Greek civilization, the most precious product in history, might never have been. Through them the cultures of Egypt and the Orient passed into Greece, and Greek culture spread slowly into Asia, Africa, and Europe.
CHAPTER VIII
TheGods of Greece
I. THE SOURCES OF POLYTHEISM
HEN we look for unifying elements in the civilization of these scat tered cities we find essentially five: a common language, with local dialects; a common intellectual life, in which only major figures in literature, philosophy, and science are known far beyond their political frontiers; a common passion for athletics, .finding outlet in municipal and interstate games; a love of beauty locally expressed in forms of art common to all the
Greek communities; and a partly common religious ritual and belief.
Religion divided the cities as much as it united them. Under the polite and general worship of the remote Olympians lay the intenser cults of local deities and powers who served no vassalage to Zeus. Tribal and po1rtical separatism nourished polytheism, and made monotheism impossible. In the early days every family had its own god; to him the divine .fire burned un extinguished at the hearth, and to him offerings of food and wine were made before every meal. This holy communion, or sharing of food with the god, was the basic and primary act of religion in the home. Birth, marriage, and death were sanctified into sacraments by ancient ritual before the sacred fire; and in this wa.y religion suffused a mystic poetry and a stabilizing solemnity over the elemental events of human life. In like manner the gene, the phratry, the tribe, and the city had each its special god. Athens wor shiped Athena, Eleusis Demeter, Samos Hera, Ephesus Artemis, Poseidonia Poseidon. The center and summit of the city was the shrine of the city god; participation in the worship of the god was the sign, the privilege, and the requisite of citizenship. When the city marched out to war it carried the form and emblem of its god in the forefront of the troops, and no im portant step was taken without consulting him through divination. In re turn he fought for the city, and sometimes seemed to appear at the head or above the spears of the soldiers; victory was the conquest not only of a city by a city but of a god by a god. The city, like the family or the tribe, kept always burning, at a public altar in the prytaneum or town hall, a sacred fire symbolizing the mystically potent and persistent life of the city's founders


The highest repute went to those who, like Terpander, Arion, Aleman, or Stesichorus, were skilled in all forms, and wove choral song, instrumental music, and the dance into a complex and harmonious whole probably more profoundly beautiful and satisfying than the operas and orchestras of today. The most famous of these masters was Arion. About him the Greeks told
:he tale how, on a voyage from Taras to Corinth, the sailors stole his money, and then gave him a choice between being stabbed to death or drowned. Having sung a final song, he dived into the sea, and was carried on the back of a dolphin (perhaps his harp) to the shore. It was he who, chiefly at Corinth and towards the close of the seventh century, transformed the inebriated singers of impromptu Dionysiac dithyrambs into a sober and trained "cycle" chorus of fifty voices, singing in strophe and antis trophe, with arias and recitatives as in our oratorios. The theme was usu ally the suffering and death of Dionysus; and in honor of the god's tradi tional attendants the chorus was dressed in goatlike satyr guise. Out of this, in fact and name, came the tragic theater of the Greeks.
The Beginnings of the Drama
The sixth century, already distinguished in so many fields and lands, crowned its accomplishments by laying the foundations of the drama. It was one of the creative moments in history; never before, so far as we know, had men passed from pantomime or ritual to the spoken and secular play.
Comedy, says Aristotle,91 developed "out of those who led the phallic
procession." A company of people carrying sacred phalli, and singing dithyrambs to Dionysus, or hymns to some other vegetation god, consti tuted, in Greek terminology, a komos, or revel. Sex was essential, for the culmination of the ritual was a symbolic marriage aimed at the magic stim ulation of the soil;"" hence in early Greek comedy, as in most modem com-
CHAP. IX)  THE  COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE	23I
edies and novels, marriage and presumptive procreation form the proper ending of the tale. The comic drama of Greece remained till Menander obscene because its origin was frankly phallic; it was in its beginnings a joyous celebration of reproductive powers, and sexual restraints were in some measure removed. It was a day's moratorium on morals; free speech (parrhasia) was then particularly free;°"' and many of the paraders, dressed in Dionysian sat :r style, wore a goat's tail and a large artificial phallus of red leather as rart of their costume. This garb became traditional on the comic stage; i1 was a matter of sacred custom, religiously observed in Arist(lphanes; fr,deed, the phallus continued to be the inseparable emblem of the clown 1 :nt] the fifth century of our era in the West, and the last cer:ury of th'. Byzantine Empire in the East."' Along with the phallus, ir1 the Old Comedy, went the iicentious kordax dance.06
Smmge to say, it was in Sicily that the rustic vegetation revel was first transformed into the comic drama. About 560 one Susarion of Megara Hyblaea, near Syracuse, developed the processional mirth into brief plays of rough satire and comedy... From Sicily the new art passed into the Peloponnesus and then into Attica; comedies were performed in the vil lages by traveling players or local amateurs. A century passed before the authorities-to quote Aristotle's phrase"'-treated the comic drama seriously enough to give it (465 B.c.) a chorus for representation at an official fies tival.
Tragedy-trago dia, or the goat song-arose in like manner from the mimic representations, in dancing and singing, of satyrlike Dionysian rev elers dressed in the costume of goats.08 These satyr plays remained till Euripides an essential part of the Dionysian drama; each composer of a tragic trilogy was expected to make a concession to ancient custom by offering, as the fourth part of his presentation, a satyr play in honor of Dionysus. "Being a development of the satyr play," says Aristotle,09 "it was quite late before tragedy rose from short plots and comic diction to its full dignity." Doubtless other seeds matured in the birth of tragedy; perhaps it took something from the ritual worship and appeasement of the dead."'° But essentially its source lay in mimetic religious ceremonies like the representation, in Crete, of the birth of Zeus, or, in Argos and Samos, his symbolic marriage with Hera, or, in Eleusis and elsewhere, the sacred mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, or, above all, in the Peloponnesus and Attica, the mourning and rejoicing over the death and resurrection of Dionysus. Such representations were called dromena-things performed; drttma is a kindred word, and means, as it should, an action. At Sicyon tragic choruses, till the days of the dictator Cleisthenes, commemorated,
232	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.IX
we are told, the "sufferings of Adrastus," the ancient king. At lcaria, where Thespis grew up,. a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus; perhaps the "goat song" from which tragedy derived its name was a chant sung over the dismembered symbol or embodiment of the drunken god.• The Greek drama, like ours, grew out of religious ritual.
Hence the Athenian drama, tragic and comic, was performed as part of the festival of Dionysus, under the presidency of his priests, in a theater named after him, by players called "the Dionysian artists." The statue of Dionysus was brought to the theater and so placed before the stage that he might enjoy the spectacle. The performance was preceded by the sac rifice of an animal to the god. The theater was endowed with the sanctity
of a temple, and offenses committed there were punished severely as sac rileges rather than as merely crimes. Just as tragedy held the place of honor on the stage at the City Dionysia, so comedy held the foreground at the festival of the Lenaea; but this festival too was Dionysian. Perhaps originally the theme, as in the drama of the Mass, was the passion and death of the god; gradually the poets were allowed to substitute the suffer ings and death of a hero in Greek myth. It may even be that in its early forms the drama was a magic ritual, designed to avert the tragedies it por trayed, and to purge the audience of evils, in a more than Aristotelian sense, by representing these as borne and finished with by proxy.102 In part it was this religious basis that kept Greek tragedy on a higher plane than that of the Elizabethan stage.
The chorus as developed for mimetic action by Arion and others became the foundation of dramatic structure, and remained an essential part of Greek tragedy until the later plays of Euripides. The earlier dramatists were called dancers because they made their plays chiefly a matter of choral dancing, and were actually teachers of dancing.:ioa Only one thing was needed to turn these choral representations into dramas, and that was the opposition of an actor, in dialogue and action, to the chorus. This inspira tion came to one of these dancing instructors and chorus trainers, Thespis of Icaria-a town close to the Peloponnesian Megara, where the rites of Dionysus were popular, and not far from Eleusis, where the ritual drama of Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus Zagreus was annually performed. Helped no doubt by the egoism that propels the world, Thespis separated himself from the chorus, gave himself individual recitative lines, developed the notion of opposition and conflict, and offered the drama in its stricter sense to history. He played various roles with such verisimilitude that when his troupe performed at Athens, Solon was shocked at what seemed to him a kind of public deceit, and denounced this newfangled art as immoral1H-a
CHAP. IX)  THE  COM  MON  CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE	233
charge that it has heard in every century. Peisistratus was more imagina tive, and encouraged the competitive performance of dramas at the Diony sian festival. In 534 Thespis won the victory in such a contest. The new form developed so rapidly that Choerilus, only a generation later, produced
160 plays. When, fifty years after Thespis, Aeschylus and Athens returned victorious from the battle of Salamis, the stage was set for the great age in the history of the Greek drama.
RETROSPECT
Looking back upon the multifarious civilization whose peaks have been sketched in the foregoing pages, we begin to understand what the Greeks were fighting for at Marathon. We picture the Aegean as a beehive of busy, quarrelsome, alert, inventive Greeks, establishing themselves obstinately in every port, developing their economy from tillage to industry and trade, and already creating great literature, philosophy, and art. It is amazing how quickly and widely this new culture matured, laying in the sixth cen tury all the foundations for the achievements of the fifth. It was a civiliza tion in certain respects finer than that of the Periclean period-superior in epic and lyric poetry, enlivened and adorned by the greater freedom and mental activity of women, and in some ways better governed than in the later and more democratic age. But even of democracy the bases had been prepared; by the end of the century the dictatorships had taught Greece enough order to make possible Greek liberty.
The realization of self-government was something new in the world; life without kings had not yet been dared by any great society. Out of this proud sense of independence, individual and collective, came a power ful stimulus to every enterprise of the Greeks; it was their liberty that inspired them to incredible accomplishments in arts and letters, in science and philosophy It is true that a large part of the people, then as always, harbored and loved superstitions, mysteries, and myths; men must be con soled. Despite this, Greek life had become unprecedentedly secular; poli tics, law, literature, and speculation had one by one been separated and liberated from ecclesiastical power. Philosophy had begun to build a nat uralistic interpretation of the world and man, of body and soul. Science, almost unknown before, had made its first bold formulations; the elements of Euclid were established; clarity and order and honesty of thought had become the ideal of a saving minority of men. A heroic effort of flesh and spirit rescued these achievements, and the promise they held, from the dead hand of alien despotism and the darkness of the Mysteries, and won for European civilization the trying privilege of freedom.
CHAPTER   X
The Struggle for Freedom
MARATHON
f'I N the reigns of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes," says Herodotus, "Greece suffered more sorrows than in twenty generations before.m


parent cities from their children.
There is nothing more vital in the history of the Greeks than their rapid spread throughout the Mediterranean.• They had been nomadic before Homer, and all the Balkan peninsula had seemed fluid with this movement, but the successive Greek waves that broke upon the Aegean isles and the western coasts of Asia were stirred up above all by the Dorian invasion. From every part of Hellas men went out in search of homes and liberty beyond the grasp of the enslaving conquerors. Political faction and family feud in the older states contributed to the migration; the defeated some times chose exile, and the victors gave every encouragement to their exodus. Some of the Greek survivors of the Trojan War stayed in Asia; others, through shipwreck or adventure, settled in the islands of the Aegean; some, reaching home after a perilous journey, found their thrones or their wives occupied, and returned to their ships to build new homes and fortunes abroad." In mainland Greece, as in modem Europe, colonization proved a blessing in varied ways: it provided outlets for surplus population and
Cf. Pater: "Perhaps the most brilliant and animating episode in the entire history cif
Greece-its early colonization.'"
127
128	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. VI
adventurous spirits, and safety valves against agrarian discontent; it estab lished foreign markets for domestic products, and strategic depots for the import of food and minerals. In the end it created a commercial empire whose thriving interchange of goods, arts, ways, and thoughts made pos sible the complex culture of Greece.
The migration followed five main lines-Aeolian, Ionian, Dorian, Euxine, Italian. The earliest began in the northern states of the mainland, which were the first to feel the brunt of the invasions from the north and the west. From Thessaly, Phthiotis, Boeotia, and Aetolia, throughout the twelfth and eleventh centuries, a stream of immigrants moved slowly across the Aegean to the region about Troy, and founded there the twelve cities of the Aeolian League. The second line took its start in the Peloponnesus, whence thousands of Mycenaeans and Achaeans fled on the "Return of the Heraclids." Some of theu settled in Attica, some in Euboea; many of them moved out into the Cyclades, ventured across the Aegean, and established in western Asia Minor the twelve cities of the Ionian Dodecapolis. The third line was followed by Dorians who overflowed the Peloponnesus into the Cyclades, conquered Crete and Cyrene, and set up a Dorian Hexapolis around the island of Rhodes. The fourth line, starting anywhere in Greece, settled the coast of Thrace, and built a hundred cities on the shores of the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Euxine Sea. The fifth line moved west ward to what the Greeks called the Ionian Isles, thence across to Italy and Sicily, and finally to Gaul and Spain.
Only a sympathetic imagination or a keen recollection of our own colonial history can visualize the difficulties that were surmounted in this century-long migration. It was an adventure of high moment to leave the land consecrated by the graves of one's ancestors and guarded by one's hereditary deities, and go forth into strange regions unprotected, pre sumably, by the gods of Greece. Therefore the colonists took with them a handful of earth from their native state to strew upon the alien soil, and solemnly carried fire from the public altar of their mother city to light the civic fire at the hea.rth of their new settlement. The chosen site was on or near a shore, where ships-the second home of half the Greeks-might serve as a refuge from attack by land; better still if it were a coastal plain pro tected by mountains that provided a barrier in the rear, an acropolis for defense in the town, and a promontory-sheltered harbor in the sea; best nf all if such a haven could be found on some commercial route, or by a river mouth that received the products of the interior for export or ex change; then prosperity was only a matter of time. Good sites were nearly
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	129
always occupied, and had to be conquered by stratagem or force; the Greeks, in such matters, recognized no morals loftier than our own. In some cases the conquerors reduced the prior inhabitants to slavery, with all the irony of pilgrims seeking freedom; more often they made friends of the natives by bringing them Greek gifts, charming them with a su perior culture, courting their women, and adopting their gods; the colonial Greeks did not bother about purity of race," and could always find in their teeming pantheon some deity sufficiently like the local divinity to facilitate a religious entente. Above all, the colonists offered the products of the Greek handicrafts to the natives, secured grain, cattle, or minerals in return, and exported these throughout the Mediterranean-preferably to the me• tropolis, or mother city, from which the' settlers had come, and to which they retained for centuries a certain filial piety.
One by one these colonies took form, until Greece was no longer the narrow peninsula of Homeric days, but a strangely loose association of independent cities scattered from Africa to Thrace and from Gibraltar to the eastern end of the Black Sea. It was an epochal performance for the women of Greece; we shall not always find them so ready to have children. Through these busy centers of vitality and intelligence the Greeks spread into all of southern Europe the seeds of that subtle and precarious luxury called civilization, without which life would have no beauty, and history no mearung.
II,  THE IONIAN CYCLADES
Sailing south from the Piraeus along the Attic coast, and beating east around Sunium's templed promontory, the traveler reaches the little isle of Ceos, where, if we may believe the incredible on the authority of Strabo and Plutarch, "there was once a law that appears to have commanded those who were sixty years of age to drink hemlock, in order that the food might be sufficient for the rest," and "there was no memory of a case of adultery or seduction over a period of seven hundred years."'
Perhaps that is why her greatest poet exiled himself from Ceos after reaching middle age; he might have found it difficult to attain, at home, the eighty-seven years that Greek tradition gives him. All the Hellenic world knew Simonides at thirty, and when he died, in 469, he was by common consent the most brilliant writer of his time. His fame as poet and singer won him an invitation from Hipparchus, codictator of Athens,
130	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. VI
at whose court he found it possible to live in amity with another poet, Anacreon. He survived the war with Persia, and was chosen again and again to write epitaphs for memorials of the honored dead. In his old age he lived at the court of Hieron I, dictator of Syracuse; and his repute was then so high that in 475 he made peace in the field between Hieron and Theron, dictator of Acragas, as hostilities were about to begin." Plutarch, in his perennially pertinent essay on "Should Old Men Govern?" tells us that Simonides continued to win the prize for lyric poetry and choral song into very old age. When finally he consented to die he was buried at Acragas with the honors of a king.
He was a personality as well as a poet, and the Greeks denounced and loved him for hfs vices and eccentricities. He had a passion for money, and his muse was dumb in the absence of gold. He was the first to write poetry for pay, on the ground that poets had as much right to eat as anyone else; but the practice was new to Greece, and Aristophanes echoed the resentment of the public when he said that Simonides "would go to sea on a hurdle to earn a groat."" He prided himself on having invented a system of mnemonics, which Cicero adopted gratefully;' its essential principle lay in arranging the things to be remembered into some logical classification and sequence, so that each item would naturally lead to the next. He was a wit, and his sharp repartees passed like a mental currency among the cities of Greece; but in his old age he remarked that he had often repented of speaking, but never of holding his tongue."
We are surprised to find, in the extant fragments of a poet so widely acclaimed and so liberally rewarded, that indispersible gloom which broods over so much of Greek literature after Homer-in whose days men were too active to be pessimists, and too violent to be bored.
Few and evil are the days of-our life; but everlasting will be our sleep beneath the earth. . . . Small is the strength of man, and in vincible are his errors; grief treads upon the heels of grief through his short life; and death, whom no man escapes, hangs over him at last; to this come good and bad alike.... Nothing human is ever lasting. Well said the bard of Chios that the life of man is even as that of a green leaf; yet few who hear this bear it in mind, for hope is strong in the breast of the young. When youth is in flower, and the heart of man is light, he nurses idle thought, hoping he will never grow old or die; nor does he think of sickness in good health. Fools are they who dream thus, nor know how short are the days of our youth and our life.•
CHAP.VI)	THE  GREAT MIGRATION	131
No hope of Blessed Isles comforts Simonides, and the divinities of Olympus, like those of Christianity in some modern verse, have become instruments of poetry rather than consolations of the soul. When Hieron challenged him to define the nature and attributes of God he asked for a day's time to prepare his answer, and the next day begged for two days more, and on each occasion doubled the period that he required for thought. When at last Hieron demanded an explanation, Simonides replied that the longer he pondered the matter the more obscure it became.'°
Out of Ceos came not only Simonides, but his nephew and lyric succes sor Bacchylides, and, in Alexandrian days, the great anatomist Erasistratus. We cannot say so much for Seriphos, or Andros, or Tenos, or Myconos, or Sicinos, or los. On Syros lived Pherecydes (ca. 550), who was reputed to have taught Pythagoras, and to have been the first philosopher to write in prose. On Delos, said Greek story, Apollo himself had been born. So sacred was the island as his sanctuary that both death and birth were for bidden within its borders; those about to give birth or to die were hurriedly conveyed from its shores; and all known graves were emptied that the island might be purified.11 There, after the repulse of the Persians, Athens and her Ionian allies would keep the treasure of the Delian Confederacy; there, every fourth year, the lonians met in pious but convivial assemblage to celebrate the festival of the handsome god. A seventh-century hymn describes the "women with fine girdles,"10 the eager merchants busy at their booths, the crowds lining the road to watch the sacred procession; the tense ritual and solemn sacrifice in the temple; the joyous dances and choral hymns of Delian and Athenian maidens chosen for their comeliness as well as their song; the athletic and musical contests, and the plays in the thea ter under the open sky. Annually the Athenians sent an embassy to Delos to celebrate Apollo's birthday; and no criminal might be executed in Ath ens until this embassy's return. Hence the long interval, so fortunate for literature and philosophy, between the conviction of Socrates and his exe cution.
Naxos is the largest, as Delos is almost the smallest, of the Cyclades. It was famous for its wine and its marble, and became rich enough, in the sixth century, to have its own navy and its own school of sculpture. South east of Naxos lies Amorgos, home of the unamiable Semonides, whose ungallant satire on women has been carefully preserved by man-written history.• To the west lies Faros, almost composed of marble; its citizens
Semonides compares women now to foxes, asses, pigs, and the changeful sea, and swears that no husband has ever passed through a day without some word of censure from his wife...


Meanwhile a modest degree of progress was made in terrestrial science. Anaxagoras correctly explained the annual overflow of the Nile as due to the spring thaws and rains of Ethiopia... Greek geologists attributed the Straits of Gibraltar to a cleaving earthquake, and the Aegean isles to a subsiding sea."" Xanthus of Lydia, about 496, surmised that the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were formerly connected at Suez; and Aeschylus noted the b.elief of his time that Sicily had been torn asunder from Italy by a convulsion of the earth."' Scylax of Caria ( 52 1-485) explored the whole coast of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. No Greek seems to have dared so adventurous a voyage of dis covery as that which the Carthaginian Hanno, with a fleet of sixty ships, led through Gibraltar some 2600 miles down the west coast of Africa (ca. 490). Maps of the Mediterranean world were common in Athens at the end of the fifth century. Physics, so far as we know, remained undeveloped, though the curvatures of the Parthenon show considerable knowledge of optics. The
Ca. 434.80 Another account places the trial in 450.81
t According to a rival story he was imprisoned at Athens, and was awaiting the fatal cup when Pericles arranged his escape.82
:j: Herodotus remarks on the superior calendar of the Egyptians.,., From Egypt the Greeks took the gnomon, or sundial, and from Asia the clepsydra, or water clock, as their instru ments for measuring time.
342	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XV
Pythagoreans, towards 450, announced the most lasting of Greek scientific hypotheses-the atomic constitution of matter. Empedocles and others ex pounded a theory of the evolution of man from lower forms of life, and de scribed the slow advance of man from savagery to civilization...
In.  HIPPOCRATES
The epochal event in the history of Greek science during the Periclean age was the rise of rational medicine. Even in the fifth century Greek medicine was in large measure bound up with religion, and the treatment of disease was still practiced by the temple priests of Asclepius. This tem ple therapy used a combination of empirical medicine with impressive ritual and charms that touched and released the imagination of the patient; pos sibly hypnosis and some form of anesthesia were also employed  Secular
medicine competed with this ecclesiastical medicine. Though both groups ascribed their origin to Asclepius, the profane Asclepiads rejected religious aids, made no claim to miraculous cures, and gradually placed medicine upon a rational basis.
Secular medicine, in fifth-century Greece, took form in four great schools: at Cos and Cnidus in Asia Minor, at Crotona in Italy, and in Sicily. At Acragas Empedocles, half philosopher and half miracle man, shared medical honors with the rational practitioner Acron.'" As far back as 520 we read of the physician Democedes, who, born at Crotona, practiced medicine in Aegina, Athens, Samos, and Susa, cured Darius and Queen Atossa, and returned to spend his last days in the city of his birth." At Crotona, too, the Pythagorean· school produced the most famous of Greek physicians before Hippocrates. Alcmaeon has been called the real father of Greek medicine,• but he is clearly a late name in a long line of secular medicos whose origin is lost beyond the horizons of history. Early in the fifth centurv he published a work On Nature (peri physeos)-the usual title, in Gre ce, for a general discussion of natural science. He, first of the Greeks, so far as we know, located the optic nerve and the Eustachian tubes, dissected animals, explained the physiology of sleep, recognized the brain as the central organ of thought, and defined health Pythagoreanly as a harmony of the parts of the body." At Cnidus the dominating figure was Euryphron, who composed a medical summary known as the Cnidian Sen tences, explained pleurisy as a disease of the lungs, ascribed many illnesses to constipation, and became famous for his success as an obstetrician." An unmerry war .raged between the· schools of Cos and Cnidus; for the
CHAP.XV)	THE   ADVANCEMENT  OF LEARNING	343
Cnidians, disliking Hippocrates' penchant for basing "prognosis" upon general pathology, insisted upon a careful classification of each ailment, and a treatment of it on specific lines. In the end, by a kind of philosophical justice, many of the Cnidian writings found their way into the Hippo cratic Collection.
As we see Hippocrates in Suidas' thumbnail biography, he appears as the outstanding physician of his time. He was born in Cos in the same year as Democritus; despite their far-separated homes the two became great friends, and perhaps the "laughing philosopher" had some share in the secularization of medicine. Hippocrates was the son of a physician, and grew up and practiced among the thousands of invalids and tourists who came to "take the waters" in the hot springs of Cos. His teacher, Herodicus of Selymbria, formed his art by accustoming him to rely upon diet and exercise rather than upon drugs. Hippocrates won such repute that rulers like Perdiccas of Macedon and Artaxerxes I of Persia were among his patients; and in 430 Athens sent for him to try his hand at staying the great plague. His friend Democritus shamed him by completing a century, while the great physician died at the age of eighty-three.
Nothing in medical literature could be more heterogeneous than the collection of treatises anciently ascribed to Hippocrates. Here are text books for physicians, counsels for laymen, lectures for students, reports of researches and observations, clinical records of interesting cases, and essays by Sophists interested in the scientific or philosophical aspects of medicine. The forty-two clinical records are the only examples of their kind for the next seventeen hundred years; and they set a high standard of honesty by confessing that in sixty per cent of the cases the disease, or the treatment, proved fatal." Of all these compositions only four are by general consent from the pen of Hippocrates-the "Aphorisms," the "Prognostic," the "Regimen in Acute Diseases," and the monograph "On Wounds in the Head"; the remainder of the CorfYUs Hippocraticwm is by a variety of authors ranging from the fifth to the second century B.c.'" There is a fair amount of nonsense in the assortment, but probably not more than the future will find in the treatises and histories of the present day. Much of the material is fragmentary, and takes a loose aphoristic form verging now and then upon Heracleitean obscurity. Among the "Aphorisms" is the famous remark that "Art is long, but time is fleeting."'"
The historical role of Hippocrates and his successors was the liberation of medicine from both religion and philosophy. Occasionally, as in the treatise on "Regimen," prayer is advised as an aid; but the page-by-page
344	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XV
tone of the Collection is a resolute reliance upon rational therapy. The essay on "The Sacred Disease" directly attacks the theory that ailments are caused by the gods; all diseases, says the author, have natural causes. Epilepsy, which the people explained as possession by a demon, is not excepted: "Men continue to believe in its divine origin because they are at a loss to understand it.... Charlatans and quacks, having no treatment that would help, concealed and sheltered themselves behind superstition, and called this illness sacred in order that their complete ignorance might not be revealed."151 The mind of Hippocrates was typical of the Periclean time spirit-imaginative but realistic, averse to mystery and weary of myth, recognizing the value of religion, but struggling to understand the world in rational terms. The influence of the Sophists can be felt in this move for the emancipation of medicine; and.indeed, philosophy so powerfully affected Greek therapy that the science had to fight against philosophical as well as theological impediments. Hippocrates insists that philosophical theories have no place in medicine, and that treatment must proceed by careful observation and accurate recording of specific cases and facts. He does not quite realize the value of experiment; but he is resolved to be guided by experience.11
The natal infection of Hippocratic medicine with philosophy appears in the once famous doctrine of "humors." The body, says Hippocrates, is com pounded of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile; that man enjoys the most perfect health in whom these elements are duly proportioned and min gled; pain is the defect or excess of one "humor," or its isolation from the rest.• This theory outlived all the other medical hypotheses of antiquity; it was abandoned only in the last century, and perhaps survives by transmigra tion in the doctrine of hormones or glandular secretions today. Since the behavior of the "humors" was considered subject to climate and diet, and the most prevalent ailments in Greece were colds, pneumonia, and malaria, Hippocrates (?) wrote a brief treatise on "Airs, Waters, Places" in relation to health. "One may expose oneself confidently to cold," we are told, "except after eating or exercise. . . . It is not good for the body not to be exposed to the cold of winter.""' The scientific physician, wherever he settles, will study the effects, upon the local population, of the winds and the seasons, the water supply and the nature of the soil.
The weakest point in Hippocratic medicine was diagnosis. There was, apparently, no taking of the pulse; fever was judged by simple touch, and auscultation was direct. Infection was understood in the case of scabies, ophthalmia, and phthisis.• The Cor,pus contains excellent clinical pictures
CRAP.XV)	THE	ADVANCEMENT  OF LEARNING	345
of epilepsy, epidemic parotitis, puerperal septicemia, and quotidian, tertian, and quartan fevers. There is no mention in the Collection of smallpox, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, or syphilis; and no clear mention of ty phoid fever.• The treatises on "Regimen" move towards preventive medi cine by advocating "prodiagnosis"-an attempt to catch the first symptoms of a disease, and nip it in the bud."' Hippocrates was particularly fond of "prognosis": the good physician, he believed, will learn by experience to foresee the effects of various bodily conditions, and be able to predict from the first stages of a disease the course that it will follow. Most diseases reach a crisis in which either the illness or the patient comes to an end; the almost Pythagorean calculation of the day on which the crisis should appear was a characteristic element of Hippocratic theory. If in these crises the natural heat of the body can overcome the morbid matter and discharge it, the patient is cured. In any cure nature-i.e., the powers and constitution of the body-is the principal healer; all that the physician can do is to remove or reduce the impediments to this natural defense and recuperation. Hence Hippocratic treatment makes little use of drugs, but depends chiefly upon fresh air, emetics, suppositories, enemas, cupping, bloodletting, fomentations, ointments, massage, and hydrotherapy. The Greek pharmacopoeia was reassuringly small, and consisted largely of pur gatives. Skin troubles were treated with sulphur baths, and by adminis tering the oil of dolphin livers.• "Live a healthy life," Hippocrates advises, "and you are not likely to fall ill, except through epidemic or acci dent. If you do fall ill, proper regimen will give you the best chance of recovery."119 Fasting was often prescribed, if the strength of the patient allowed; for "the more we nourish unhealthy bodies the more we injure them."119 In general "a man should have only one meal a day, unless he have a very dry belly.'m
Anatomy and physiology made slow progress in Greece, and owed much of this to the examination of animal entrails in the practice of augury. A little brochure "On the Heart," in the Hippocratic Collection, describes the ventricles, the great vessels, and their valves. Syennesis of Cyprus and Diogenes of Crete wrote descriptions of the vascular system, and Diogenes knew the significance of the pulse.• Empedocles recognized that the heart is the center of the vascular system, and described it as the organ by which the pneuma, or vital breath (oxygen?), is carried through the blood vessels to every part of the body.ea The Corpus, following Alcmaeon, makes the brain the seat of consciousness and thought; "Through it we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good.'"'
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XV
Surgery was still for the most part an unspecialized activity of advanced general practitioners, though the armies had surgeons on their staffs."" The Hippocratic literature describes trephining operations, and its treatment for dislocations of shoulder or jaw are "modem" in everything except anes thesia.00 A votive tablet from the temple of Asclepius at Athens shows a folding case containing scalpels of various forms.07 The little museum at Epidaurus has preserved for us ancient forceps, probes, scalpels, catheters, and specula essentially like those that are used today; and certain statues there are apparently models illustrating methods for reducing dislocations of the hip... The Hippocratic treatise "On the Physician" gives detailed directions for the preparation of the operating room, the arrangement of natural and artificial light, the cleanliness of the hands, the care and use of instruments, the position of the patient, the bandaging of wounds,. etc...
It is clear from these and other passages that Greek medicine in Hippoc rates' days had made great advances, technically and socially. Heretofore Greek physicians had migrated from city to city as need called them, like the Sophists of their time or the preachers of our own. Now they settled down, opened iatreia-"healing places," or offices-and treated patients there or at the patients' homes.'!1) Women physicians were numerous, and were usually employed for diseases of their sex; some of them wrote authoritative treatises on the care of the skin and the hair." The state exacted .no public examination of prospective practitioners, but required satisfactory evidence of an apprenticeship or tutelage to a recognized physician." City govern ments reconciled socialized with private medicine by engaging doctors to attend to public health, and to give medical treatment to the poor; the best of'such state physicians, like Democedes, received two talents ($12,- 000) a year.18 There were, of course, many quacks and, as always. an in.;. exhaustible supply of omniscient amateurs. The profession, as in all gen erations, suffered from its dishonest or incompetent minority;" and like other peoples the Greeks revenged themselves upon the uncertainties of medicine by jokes almost as endless as those that wreak their vengeance upon marriage.


After his death he achieved popularity even in Athens. The ideas for which he had fought became the dominant conceptions of the following centuries, and the Hellenistic age looked back to him and to Socrates as the greatest intellectual stimuli that Greece had ever known. He had dealt with living problems rather than "dead tales of minstrelsy," and it took the ancient world a long time to forget him. The plays of his prede cessors slipped into oblivion while s own were repeated in every year, and wherever the Greek world had a stage. When, in the collapse of that expedition to Syracuse (415) whose failure had been forecast in The Trojan Women, the captive Athenians faced a living death as chained slaves in the quarries of Sicily, those were given their freedom (Plutarch tells us) who could recite passages from the plays of Euripides:= The New Comedy molded itself upon his dramas, and grew out of them; one of its leaders, Philemon, said, "If I were sure that the dead have consciousness, I would hang myself to see Euripides.'"2' The revival of skepticism, liberalism, and humanitarianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made Euripides almost a contemporary figure, more modern than Shakespeare. All in all, only Shakespeare has equaled him; and Goethe did not think so. "Have all the nations of the world since Euripides," asked Goethe of Eckermann, "produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?"= Not more than one.
420	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVII
ARISTOPHANES
Aristophanes and the War
Greek tragedy is more somber than the Elizabethan, because it seldom employs that principle of comic relief by which, through a humorous interruption of the tragical, the auditor's tolerance for tragedy is increased. The Greek playwright preferred to keep his tragic drama on a persistently high plane, and relegated comedy to a "satyr" play which carried no seri ous import, but allowed the excited emotions of the audience to subside into humor and ease. In the course of time the comic drama declared its inde pendence of tragedy, and a day was allotted to it, at the Dionysian festivals, when the entire program consisted of three or four comedies, written by different authors, played in succession, and competing for a separate prize. Comedy, like oratory, had its first Greek bloom in Sicily. About 484 there came to Syracuse from Cos a philosopher, physician, poet, and drama tist, Epicharmus, who expounded Pythagoras, Heracleitus, and rationalism
in thirty-five comedies,of which only occasional quotations remain. Twelve
years after Epicharmus' arrival in Sicily the Athenian archon allowed its
:first chorus to comedy. The new art developed rapidly under the stimulus of democracy and freedom, and became the principal medium, in Athens, of moral and political satire. The wide license of speech permitted to comedy was a tradition of the Dionysian phallic procession. The abuse of this freedom led in 440 to a law against personal attacks in comedy; but this prohibition was repealed three years later, and full freedom of criticism and abuse continued even during the Peloponnesian War. The Greek comedy took the place, as political critic, of a free press in modern democ racies.
We hear of many comic dramatists before Aristophanes, and the great Rabelais of antiquity even condescended to praise some of them when the smoke of his battles with them had cleared away. Cratinus was the mouthpiece of Cimon, and made rabid war against Pericles, whom he called "the squill-headed God Almighty";ua merciful time has spared us the necessity of reading him. Another forerunner was Pherecrates, who, about 420, satirized, in The Wild Men, those Athenians who professed to dislike civilization and to long for a "return to nature": so old are the brave innovations of our youth. The ablest competitor of Aristophanes was Eupolis; they at :first co-operated, then quarreled and parted, after which they satirized each other vigorously, but still agreed in attacking the demo-
CHAP.XVII) THE  LITERATURE OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	421
cratic party. If comedy throughout the fifth century was hostile to democ racy, it was partly because poets like money and the aristocracy was rich, but chiefly because the function of Greek comedy was to amuse with criticism, and the democratic party was in power. Since the leader of the democracy, Pericles, was sympathetic to new ideas like the emancipation of woman and the development of a rationalist philosophy, the comic dramatists ranged themselves, with suspicious unanimity, against all forms of radicalism, and called for a return to the ways and reputed morals of the "Men of Marathon." Aristophanes became the voice of this reaction, as Socrates and Euripides were the protagonists of the new ideas. The con flict between religion and philosophy captured the comic stage.
Aristophanes had some excuse for liking aristocracy, since he came of a cultured and prosperous family, and appears to have owned land in Aegina. His very name was a patent of nobility, meaning "the best made manifest." Born about 450, he was in the springtime of life when Athens and Sparta began that war which was to be a bitter theme of his plays. The Spartan invasion of Attica compelled him to abandon his country estate and come to live in Athens. He disliked city life, and resented the sudden demand upon him to hate Megarians, C rinthians, and Spar tans; he denounced this conflict of Greek killing Greek, and called, in play after play, for peace.
After the death of Pericles in 429 supreme power in Athens passed into the hands of the rich tanner, Cleon, who represented those commercial interests that wanted a "knock-out blow"-i.e., the utter destruction of Sparta as a competitor for the mastery of Greece. In a lost play, The Babylonians (426), Aristophanes subjected Cleon and his policies to such stinging ridicule that the burly strategos prosecuted him for treason, and had him fined. Two years later Aristophanes revenged himself by pre senting The Knights. Its leading character was Demos (i.e., the People), whose major-domo was called the Tanner; everyone understood the trans parent allegory, including Cleon, who saw the play. The satire was so sharp that no actor would play the part of the Tanner for fear of political misfortune, whereupon Aristophanes took the role himself. Nicias (the name of the superstitious leader of the oligarchic faction) announces that an oracle has told him that the next ruler of Demos' house will be a sausa.ge seller. Such a huckster comes along, and the slaves hail him as "Chief that shall be of our glorious Athens!" "Prithee," says the Sausage-Seller, "let me go wash my tripes ... you make a fool of me." But one Demosthenes assures him that he has just the qualifications for ruling the people-is he
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVII
not a rascal, and free from all education? The Tanner, fearing that he is to be deposed, protests his services and his loyalty to Demos; no one ex cept the harlots, he urges, has done so much for Demos as he. There is the usual Aristophanic burlesque: the Sausage-Seller belabors the Tanner with tripe, and primes himself for an oratorical contest in the Assembly by eating garlic. A contest in adulation ensues, to see which of the can didates can praise Demos the more lavishly, and "deserve better of Demos and his belly." The rivals bring a feast of good things and lay them before Demos like a platter of pre-election promises. The Sausage-Seller proposes that as a test of their honesty each candidate's locker shall be searched. In the Tanner's locker a heap of succulent dainties is found, in particular a massive cake, from which he has cut only a tiny slice for Demos (a refer ence to a current charge that Cleon had embezzled state funds). The Tan ner is dismissed, and the Sausage-Seller becomes the ruler of Demos' house. The Wasps (422) continues the satire on democracy in a milder and weaker vein; the chorus is composed of idle citizens-dressed as wasps who seek to make an obol or two every day by serving as jurymen, in order that they may, by listening t:o "sycophants" and levying confiscatory fines, vote the money of the rich into the coffers of the state and the pockets of the poor. But Aristophanes' ruling interest in these early plays is to ridicule war and promote peace. The hero of The Acharnians (425) is Diceopolis ("Honest Citizen"), a farmer who complains that his land has been devastated by armies, so that he can no longer live by squeezing wine from his vineyards. He sees no reason for war, and is clear that he him self has no quarrel with the Spartans. Tired of waiting for the generals or the politicians to make peace, he signs a personal treaty with the Lace daemonians; and when a chorus of war-patriotic neighbors denounces him
he replies:
Well, the very Spartans even, I've my doubts and scrQples whether They've been totally to blame, in every instance, altogether.
Chorus. Not to blame in every instance? Villain, vagabond, how dare ye,
Talking treason to our faces, to suppose that we will spare ye?
He agrees to let them kill him if he cannot prove that Athens is as much to blame for the war as Sparta. His head is laid upon a chopping block, and he begins his argument. Presently an Athenian general enters, defeated, blustering, and profane; the Chorus is disgusted with him, and releases Diceopolis, who pleases all by selling a wine called Peace. It was a play
CHAP. XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLD EN  AGE	423
of considerable audacity, possible only among a people trained to hear the other side. Taking advantage of the parabasis or digression in which the custom of comedy allowed the author to address the audience through the chorus or one of the characters, Aristophanes explained his function as a comic gadfly among the Athenians:·
Never since our poet presented comedies has he praised himself upon the stage   But he maintains that he has done you much that
is good. If you no longer allow yourselves to be too much hood winked by strangers or seduced by flattery, if in politics you are no longer the ninnies you once were, it is thanks to him. Formerly, when delegates from other cities wanted to deceive you, they had but to style you "the people crowned with violets"; at the word "violets" you at once sat erect on the tips of your bums. Or if, to tickle your vanity, some one spoke of "rich and sleek Athens," he would get all, because he spoke of you as he would have of anchovies in oil. In cautioning you against sucl,. wiles, the poet has done you great service.=
In The Peace (421) the poet was triumphant: Cleon was dead, and Nicias was about to sign for Athens a treaty pledging peace and friendship with Sparta for fifty years. But a few years later hostilities were resumed; and in 411 Aristophanes, abandoning hope in his fellow citizens, invited the women of Greece to end the bloodshed. As the Lysistrata opens, the ladies of Athens, while their men are still asleep, gather at dawn in council near the Acropolis. They agree to withhold the comforts of love from their spouses until these come to terms with the enemy; and they send an em bassy to the women of Sparta to invite their co-operation in this novel campaign for peace. The men, awake at last, call to the women to come home; when these refuse, the men besiege them, but the attackers are repulsed with pails of hot water and torrents of speech. Lysistrata ("Dis solver of Armies") reads the men a lesson: