TO MY FRIEND MAX SCHOTT
Preface
y purpose is to record and contemplate the origin, growth, maturity, and decline of Greek civilization from the oldest remains of Crete
and Troy to the conquest of Greece by Rome. I wish to see and feel this complex culture not only in the subtle and impersonal rhythm of its rise and fall, but in the rich variety of its vital elements: its ways of drawing a living from the land, and of organizing industry and trade; its experiments with monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, dictatorship, and revolution; its man ners and morals, its religious practices and beliefs; its education of children, and its regulation of the sexes and the family; its homes and temples, markets and theaters and athletic fields; its poetry and drama, its painting, sculpture, architecture, and music; its sciences and inventions, its superstitions and philosophies. I wish to see and feel these elements not in their theoretical and scholastic isolation, but in their living interplay as the simultaneous movements of one great cultural organism, with a hundred organs and a hundred million cells, but with one body and one soul.
Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepti cism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cyni cism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words for cul tural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured for good or evil by the abounding energy of the Greeks. All the problems that disturb us today-the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the eman cipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of politics and the perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural sup ports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of the rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and communism, between the East and the West-all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and
vii
PREFACE
turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own.
We shall try to see the life of Greece both in the mutual interplay of its cultural elements, and in the immense five-act drama of its rise and fall. We shall begin with Crete and its lately resurrected civilization, because appar ently from Crete, as well as from Asia, came that prehistoric culture of Mycenae and Tiryns which slowly transformed the immigrating Achaeans and the invading Dorians into civilized Greeks; and we shall study for a moment the virile world of warriors and lovers, pirates and troubadours, that has come down to us on the rushing river of Homer's verse. We shall watch the rise of Sparta and Athens under Lycurgus and Solon, and shall trace the colonizing spread of the fertile Greeks through all the isles of the Aegean, the coasts of Western Asia and the Black Sea, of Africa and Italy, Sicily, France, and Spain. We shall see democracy fighting for its life at Marathon, stimulated by its victory, organizing itself under Pericles, and flowering into the richest culture in history; we shall linger with pleasure over the spectacle of the human mind liberating itself from superstition, cre ating new sciences, rationalizing medicine, secularizing history, and reach ing unprecedented peaks in poetry and drama, philosophy, oratory, history, and art; and we shall record with melancholy the suicidal end of the Golden Age in the Peloponnesian War. We shall contemplate the gallant effort of disordered Athens to recover from the blow of her defeat; even her decline will be illustrious with the genius of Plato and Aristotle, Apelles and Prax iteles, Philip and Demosthenes, Diogenes and Alexander. Then, in the wake of Alexander's generals, we shall see Greek civilization, too powerful for its little peninsula, bursting its narrow bounds, and overflowing again into Asia, Africa, and Italy; teaching the cult of the body and the intellect to the mystical Orient, reviving the glories of Egypt in Ptolemaic Alexandria, and enriching Rhodes with trade and _art; developing geometry with Euclid at Alexandria and Archimedes at Syracuse; formulating in Zeno and Epicurus the most lasting philosophies in history; carving the Aphrodite of Melos, the Laocoon, the Victory of Sttmotbrace, and the Altar of Pergamum; striving and failing to organize its politics into honesty, unity, and peace; sinking ever deeper into the chaos of civil and class war; exhausted in soil and loins and spirit; s1,U'rendering to the autocracy, quietism, and mysticism of the Orient; and at last almost welcoming those conquering Romans through whom dying Greece would bequeath to Europe her sciences, her philoso phies, her letters, and her arts as the living cultural basis of our modem_ world.
viii
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Mr. Wallace Brock way for his scholarly help at every stage of this work; to Miss Mary Kaufman, Miss Ethel Durant, and Mr. Louis Du rant for aid in classifying the material; to Miss Regina Sands for her expert preparation of the manuscript; and to my wife for her patient encouragement and quiet inspiration.
I am deeply indebted to Sir Gilbert Murray and to his publishers, the Ox ford University Press, for permission to quote from his translations of Greek drama.These translations have enriched English literature.
I am also indebted to the Oxford Uni
versity Press for permission to quote from its excellentOxfordBookofGreek
Versme
Translati01l.
W.D.
ix
Notes
ON THE USE OF THIS BOOK
1. This book, while forming the second part of the author's Story of Civili zation, has been written as an independent unit, complete in itself. The next volume will probably appear in 1943 under the title of Caesar tmd Christ a history of Roman civilization and of early Christianity.
2. To bring the book into smaller compass, reduced type (like this) has been used for technical or recondite material. Indented passages in reduced type are quo tations.
3. The raised numbers in the text refer to the Notes at the end of the vol ume. Hiatuses in the numbering of the notes are due to last Ininute curtail ments.
+ The chronological table given at the beginning of each period is designed to free the text as far as possible from minor dates and royal trivialities. All dates are B.c. unless otherwise stated or evident.


CHAP.XII)	WORK  AND  WEALTH  IN  ATHENS
Greeks "a mean occupation."• Hear blunt Xenophon, who speaks, how ever, as a proud member of the knightly class:
The base mechanic arts, so called ... are held in ill repute by civ ilized communities, and not unreasonably; seeing they are the ruin of the bodies of all concerned in them, workers and overseers alike, who are forced to remain in sitting postures or to hug the gloom, or else to crouch whole days confronting a furnace. Hand in hand with physical enervation follows apace an enfeebling of soul, while the demand which these base mechanic arts make on the time of those employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims of friendship and the state.11
Trade is similarly scorned; to the aristocratic or philosophical Greek it is merely money-making at the expense of others; it aims not to create goods but to buy them cheap and sell them dear; no respectable citizen will engage in it, though he may quietly invest in it and profit from it so long as he lets others do the work. A freeman, says the Greek, must be free from economic tasks; he must get slaves or others to attend to his material con cerns, even, if he can, to take care of his property and his fortune; only by such liberation can he find time for government, war, literature, and philosophy. Without a leisure class there can be, in the Greek view, no standards of taste, no encouragement of the arts, no civilization. No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
Most of the functions associated in history with the middle class are in Athens performed by metics-freemen of foreign birth who, though in eligible to citizenship, have fixed their domicile in Athens. For the most part they are professional men, merchants, contractors, manufacturers, managers, tradesmen, craftsmen, artists, who, in the course of their wan dering, have found in Athens the economic liberty, opportunity, and stim ulus which to them is far more vital than the vote. The most important industrial undertakings, outside of mining, are owned by metics; the ceram ic industry is theirs completely; and wherever middlemen can squeeze themselves in between producer and consumer they are to be found. The law harasses them and protects them. It taxes them like citizens, lays "liturgies" upon them, exacts military service from them, and adds a poll tax for good measure; it forbids them to own land or to marry into the family of a citizen; it excludes them from its religious organization, and
Plutarch, Pericles. Zimmem, The Greek Commonwealth, 171, and Ferguson, Greek
Imperialism, 61, feel that the Athenian disdain for manual labor has been exaggerated; but
c.f. Glotz, Ancient Greece at Work, 16o.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XII
from direct appeal to its courts. But it welcomes them into its economic life, appreciates their industry and skill, enforces their contracts, gives them religious freedom, and guards their wealth against violent revolution. Some of them flaunt their riches vulgarly, but some of them, too, work quietly in science, literature, and the arts, practice l,aw or medicine, and create schools of rhetoric and philosophy. In the fourth century they will pro vide the authors and subject of the comic drama, and in the third they will set the cosmopolitan tone of Hellenistic society. They itch for citi zenship, but they love Athens proudly, and contribute painfully to finance her defense against her enemies. Through them, chiefly, the fleet is main tained, the empire is supported, and the commercial supremacy of Athens is preserved.
Mingled with the metics in political disabilities and economic oppor tunities are the freedmen-those who once were slaves. For though it is inconvenient to liberate a slave, since usually he must be replaced by an other, yet the promise of freedom is an economical stimulus to a young slave; and many Greeks, as death approaches, reward their most loyal slaves with manumission. The slave may be freed through ransoming by relatives or friends, as in the case of Plato; or the state, indemnifying his owner, may free him for service in war; or he himself may save his obols until he can buy his liberty. Like the metic, the freedman engages in in dustry, trade, or finance; at the lowest he may do for pay the work of a slave, at the top he may become a magnate of industry. Mylias manages Demosthenes' armor factory; Pasion and Phormio become the richest bankers in Athens. The freedman is especially valued as an executive, for no one is more severe with slaves than the man who has come up from slavery,"" and has known only oppression all the days of his life.
Beneath these three classes-citizens, metics, and freedmen-are the 1 1 5,- 000 slaves of Attica.* They are recruited from unransomed prisoners of war, victims of slave raids, infants rescued from exposure, wastrels, and criminals. Few of them in Greece are Greeks. The Hellene looks upon foreigners as natural slaves, since they so readily give absolute obediencr, to a king, and he does not account the servitude of such men to Greeks as
The figure is Gomme's, l.c. Possibly the number was much greater: Suidas, on the authority of a speech uncertainly attributed to Hypereides in 338, gives the number of adult male slaves alone as 150,000;.. and according to the unreliable Athenaeus the census of Attica by Demetrius Phalereus about 317 gave 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics and freedmen, and 400,000 slaves. Timaeus about 300 reckoned the slaves of Corinth at 460,000, and Aristotle, about 340, those of Aegina at 470,000.80 Perhaps these high figures are due to including slaves transiently offered for sale in the slave marts of Corinth, Aegina, and Athens.
CHAP.m)    WORK  AND  WEALTH  IN  ATHENS	279
unreasonable. But he balks at the enslavement of a Greek, and seldom stoops to it. Greek traders buy slaves as they would merchandise, and offer them for sale at Chios, Delos, Corinth, Aegina, Athens, and wherever else they can find purchasers. The slave dealers at Athens are among the richest of the inetics. In Delos it is not unusual for a thousand slaves to be sold in a day; Cimon, after the battle of the Eurymedon, puts 20,000 prisoners on the slave market.as At Athens there is a mart where slaves stand ready for naked inspection and bargaining purchase at any time. They cost from half a mina to ten minas ($50 to $1000). They may be bought for direct use, or for investment; men and women in Athens find it profitable to buy slaves and rent them to homes, factories, or mines; the return is as high as 33 per cent."' Even the poorest citizen has a slave or two; Aeschines, to prove his poveny, complains that his family has only seven; rich homes may have fifty.as The Athenian government employs a number of slaves as clerks, attendants, minor officials, or policemen; many of these receive their clothing and a daily "allowance" of half a drachma, and are permitted to live where they please.
In the countryside the slaves are few, and are chiefly women servants in the home; in northern Greece and most of the Peloponnesus serfdom makes slavery superfluous. In Corinth, Megara, and Athens slaves do most of the manual labor, and women slaves most of the domestic toil; but slaves do also a great pan of the clerical, and some of the executive work, in industry, commerce, and finance. Most skilled labor is performed by freemen, freedmen or metics; and there are no learned slaves as there will be in the Hellenistic period and in Rome. The slave is seldom allowed to bring up children of his own, for it is cheaper to buy a slave than to rear one. If the slave misbehaves he is whipped; if he testifies he is tortured; when he is struck by a freeman he must not defend himself. But if he is subjected to great cruelty he may flee to a temple, and then his master must sell him. In no case may his master kill him. So long as he labors he has more security than many who in other civilizations are not called slaves; when he is ill, or old, or there is no work for him to do, his master does not throw him upon public relief, but continues to take care of him. If he is loyal he is treated like a faithful servant, almost like a member of the family. He is often allowed to go into business, provided he will pay his owner a pan of his earnings. He is free from taxation and from mili tary service. Nothing in his costume distinguishes him, in fifth-century Athens, from the freeman; indeed the "Old Oligarch" who about 425 writes a pamphlet on The Polity of the Athenians complains that the slave
i8o	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XII
does not make way for citizens on the street, that he talks freely, and acts in every detail as if he were the equal of the citizen... Athens is known for mildness to her slaves; it is a common judgment that slaves are better off in democratic Athens than poor freemen in oligarchic states.'° Slave revolts, though feared, are rare in Attica.41
Nevertheless the Athenian conscience is disturbed by the existence of slavery, and the philosophers who defend it reveal almost as clearly as those who denounce it that the moral development of the nation has outrun its institutions. Plato condemns the enslavement of Greeks by Greeks, but for the rest accepts slavery on the ground that some people have under privileged minds." Aristotle looks upon the slave as an animate tool, and thinks that slavery will continue in some form until all menial work can be done by self-operating machines..., The average Greek, though kind to his slaves, has no notion of how a cultured society can get along without slavery; to abolish slavery, he feels, it w9uld be necessary to abolish Athens. Others are more radical. The Cynic philosophers condemn slavery out right; their successors, the Stoics, will condemn it more politely; Euripides again and again stirs his audiences by sympathetic pictures of war-captured slaves; and the sophist Alcidamas goes about Greece preaching, unmolested, the doctrine of Rousseau almost in the words of Rousseau: "God has sent all men into the world free, and nature has made no man a slave."" But slavery goes on.
V. THE WAR OF THE CLASSES
The exploitation of man by man is less severe in Athens and Thebes than in Sparta or Rome, but it is adequate to the purpose. There are no castes among the freemen in Athens, and a man may by resolute ability rise to any thing but citizenship; hence, in part, the fever and turbulence of Athenian life. There is no tense class distinction between employer and employee except in the mines; usually the master works beside his men, and personal acquaintance dulls the edge of exploitation. The wage of nearly all arti sans, of whatever class, is a drachma for each actual day of work;"' but un skilled workers may get as low as three obols (50 cents) a day... Piecework tends to replace timework as the factory system develops; and wages begin to vary more widely. A contractor may hire slaves from their owner for a rental of one to four obols a day." We may estimate the buying power of these wages by comparing Greek prices with our own. In 414 a house and estate in Attica cost twelve hundred drachmas; a medinmus, or 1 ½
CHAP.XII)	WORK  AND  WEALTH  IN  ATHENS
bushels, of barley costs a drachma in the sixth century, two at the close of the fifth, three in the fourth, five in the time of Alexander; a sheep costs a drachma in Solon's day, ten to twenty at the end of the fifth century;"' in Athens as elsewhere currency tends to increase faster than goods, and prices rise. At the close of the fourth century prices are five times as high as at the opening of the sixth; they double from 480 to 404, and again from 404 to 330 ...
A single man lives comfortably on 120 drachmas ($120) a month;"° we may judge from this the condition of the worker who earns thirty drachmas per month, and has a family. It is true that the state comes to his relief in times of great stress, and then distributes corn at a nominal price. But he observes that the goddess of liberty is no friend to the goddess of equality, and that under the free laws of Athens the strong grow stronger, the rich richer, while the poor remain poor.*61 Individualism stimulates the able, and degrades the simple; it creates wealth magnificently, and concentrates it dangerously. In Athens, as in other states, cleverness gets all that it can, and mediocrity gets the rest. The landowner profits from the rising value of his land; the merchant does his best, despite a hundred laws, to secure corners and monopolies; the speculator reaps, through the high rate of interest on loans, the lion's share of the proceeds of industry and trade. Demagogues arise who point out to the poor the inequality of human possessions, and conceal from them the inequality of human economic ability; the poor man, face to face with wealth, becomes conscious of his poverty, broods over his unrewarded merits, and dreams of perfect states. Bitterer than the war of Greece with Persia, or of Athens with Sparta, is, in all the Greek states, the war of class with class.
In Attica it begins with the conflict between the new rich and the landed aristocracy. The ancient families still love the soil, and live for the greater part on their estates. Division of the patrimony through many generations


Hippocrates raised the profession to a higher standing by his emphasis
on medical ethics. He was a teacher as well as a practitioner, and the famous oath ascribed to him may have been designed to ensure the loyalty of the student to his instructor.•
The oath is regarded as deriving from the Hippocratic school rather than from the master himself; but Erotian, writing in the first century A.D., attributes it to Hippocrates."
CHAP. xv)	THE	ADVANCEMENT  OF LEARNING	347
The Hippocratic Oath
I swear by Apollo Physician, by Asclepius, by Hygiaea, by Pana cea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture. To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, with out fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other instruction to my own sons, to the sons of my teacher, and to indentured pupils who have taken the physician's oath, but to nobody else. I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein. Into whatsoever houses I enter I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets. Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain forever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I transgress it and for swear myself, may the opposite befall me."'
The physician, Hippocrates adds, should maintain a becoming exterior, keeping his person clean and his clothing neat. He must always remain calm, and must make his behavior inspire the patient with confidence."' He must
keep a careful watch over himself, and ... say only what is abso lutely necessary.... When you enter a sick man's room, bear in mind your manner of sitting, reserve, arrangement of dress, decisive utterance, brevity of speech, composure, bedside manners ... self control, rebuke of disturbance, readiness to do what has to be done.
. . . I urge you not to be too unkind, but to consider carefully your patient's superabundance or means. Sometimes give your services
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XV
for nothing; and if there be an opportunity of serving a stranger who is in financial straits, give him full assistance. For where there is love of man, there is also love of the art.'18
If, in addition to all this, the physician studies and practices philosophy, he becomes the ideal of his profession; for "a physician who is a lover of wis dom is the equal of a god."79
Greek medicine shows no essential advance upon the medical and surgi cal knowledge of Egypt a thousand years before the various Fathers of Medicine; in the matter of specialization the Greek development seems to have fallen short of the Egyptian. From another point of view we must hold the Greeks in high esteem, for not until the nineteenth century of our era was any substantial improvement made upon their medical practice or theory. In general, Greek science went as far as could be expected with out instruments of observation and precision, and without experimental methods. It would have done better had it not been harassed by religion and discouraged by philosophy. At a time when many young men in Athens were taking up with enthusiasm the study of astronomy and com parative anatomy, the progress of science was halted by obscurantist legis lation, and the persecutions of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Socrates; while the famous "turning around" of Socrates and the Sophists from the exter nal to the internal world, from physics to ethics, drew Greek thought from the problems of nature and evolution to those of metaphysics and morals. Science stood still for a century while Greece succumbed to the charms of philosophy.
CHAPTER XVI
The Conflict of Philosophy and Religion
I.  THE IDEALISTS
HE age of Pericles resembled our own in the variety and disorder of its thought, and in the challenge that it offered to every traditional standard and belief. But no age has ever rivaled that of Pericles in the num ber and grandeur of its philosophical ideas, or in the vigor and exuberance with which they were debated. Every issue that agitates the world today was bruited about in ancient Athens, and with such freedom and eagerness that all Greece except its youth was alarmed. Many cities-above all, Sparta
-forbade the public consideration of philosophical problems, "on account of the jealousy and strife and profitless discussions" (says Athenaeus) "to which they give rise."' But in Periclean Athens the "dear delight" of philosophy captured the imagination of the educated classes; rich men opened their homes and salons in the manner of the French Enlighten ment; philosophers were lionized, and clever arguments were applauded like sturdy blows at the Olympic games.• When, in 432, a war of swords was added to the war of words, the excitement of the Athenian mind be came a fever in which all soberness of thought and judgment was consumed. The fever subsided for a time after the martyrdom of Socrates, or was dissipated from Athens to other centers of Greek life; even Plato, who had known the very height and crisis of it, became exhausted after sixty years of the new game, and envied Egypt the inviolable orthodoxy and quiet stability of its thought. No age until the Renaissance would know such enthusiasm again.
Plato was the culmination of a development that began with Parmenides; he played Hegel to Parmenides' Kant; and though he scattered condemna tion lavishly, he never ceased to reverence his metaphysical father. In the little town of Elea, on the western coast of Italy, 450 years before Christ, there began for Europe that philosophy of idealism which was to wage
349
35°	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVI
through every subsequent century an obstinate war against materialism.• The mysterious problem of knowledge, the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, between the unseen real and the unreal seen, was flung into the caldron of European thought, and was to boil or simmer there through Greek and medieval days until, in Kant, it would explode again in a philosophical revolution.
AB Kant was "awakened" by Hume, so Parmenides was aroused to philosophy by Xenophanes; perhaps his was one of many minds stirred by Xenophanes' declaration that the gods were myths, and that there was only one reality, which was both world and God. Parmenides studied with the Pythagoreans also, and absorbed something of their passion for astronomy. But he did not lose himself in the stars. Like most Greek philosophers he was interested in living affairs and the state; Elea commissioned him to draw up for it a code of laws, which it liked so well that its magistrates were thenceforth required to decide all cases by that code.• Possibly as a recrea tional aside in a busy life he composed a philosophical poem On Nature, of which some 1 60 verses survive, enough to make us regret that Par menides did not write prose. The poet announces, with a twinkle in 'his eye, that a goddess has delivered to him a revelation: that all things are one; that motion, change, and development are unreal-phantasms of superficial, contradictory, untrustworthy sense; that beneath these mere appearances lies an unchanging, homogeneous, indivisible, indissoluble, motionless unity, which is the only Being, the only Truth, and the only God. Heracleitus said, Panta rei, all things change; Parmenides says, Hen ta panta, all things are one, and never change. At times, like Xenophanes, he speaks of this One as the universe, and calls it spheroidal and finite; at times, in an idealis tic vision, he identifies Being with Thought, and sings, "One thing are Thinking and Being,"' as if to say that for us things exist only in so far as we are conscious of them. Beginning and end, birth and death, forma tion and destruction, are of forms only; the One Real never begins and never ends; there is no Becoming, there is only Being. Motion, too, is un real, it assumes the passage of something from where it is to where there is nothing, or empty space; but empty space, Not Being, cannot be; there is no void; the One fills every nook and cranny of the world, and is forever at rest.t
The Hindus had seen the problem long before, and were to remain Parmenideans to the end; perhaps the antisensationism of the Upanishads had penetrated through Ionia or Pvthagoras to Parmenides.
't This strains the imagination; but almost in Parmenidean fashion we speak of a table as at


')bliquity of the ecliptic,• and the succession of solstices, equinoxes, and seasons."" With the collaboration of his fellow Milesian, Hecataeus, he established geography as a science by drawing-apparently upon a tablet
of brass-the first known map of the inhabited world.t
In its earliest form, said Anaximander, the earth was in a fluid state; external heat dried some of it into land, and evaporated some of it into clouds; while the variations of heat in the atmosphere so formed caused the motions of the winds. Living organisms arose by gradual stages from the original moisture; land animals were at first fishes, and only with the drying of the earth did they acquire their present shape. Man too was once a fish; he could not at his earliest appearance have been born as now, for he would have been too helpless to secure his food, and would have been destroyed...
A slighter figure is Anaximander's pupil Anaximenes, whose first prin ciple was air. All other elements are produced from air by rarefaction, which gives fire, or by condensation, which forms progressively wind, cloud, water, earth, and stone. As the soul, which is air, holds us together, so the air, or pneuma, of the world is its pervasive spirit, breath, or God."' Here was an idea that would ride out all the storms of Greek philosophy, and find a haven in Stoicism and Christianity.
This heyday of Miletus produced not only the earliest philosophy, but the earliest prose, and the first historiography, in Greece.t Poetry seems natural to a nation's adolescence, when imagination is greater than knowl edge, and a strong faith gives personality to the forces of nature in field, wood, sea, and sky; it is hard for poetry to avoid animism, or for animism to avoid poetry. Prose is the voice of knowledge freeing itself from imag ination and faith; it is the language of secular, mundane, "prosaic" affairs; it is the emblem of a nation's maturity, and the epitaph of its youth. Up to this time (600) nearly all Greek literature had taken a poetic f rm; edu cation had transmitted in verse the lore and morals of the race; even early philosophers, like Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles, ga1:e their
The ecliptic (so called because eclipses of the sun and moon take place in it) is the great circle made by the apparent annual path of the sun through the heavens. Since the plane of this circle or ecliptic is also the plane of the earth's orbit, the obliquity of the ecliptic is the oblique angle (about 2 3°) between the plane of the earth's equator and the plane of its orbit around the sun.
t The Egyptians had drawn maps, but of limited districts.
:j: The  wise reader will always supply the word kno'W1l after such words as earliest and
first.
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.VI
systems a poetic dress. Just as science was at first a form of philosophy, struggling to free itself from the general, the speculative, the unverifiable, so philosophy was at first a form of poetry, striving to free itself from mythology, animism, and metaphor.
It was therefore an event when Pherecydes and Anaximander expounded their doctrines in prose. Other men of the age, whom the Greeks called logo graphoi-reason writers, prose writers-began to chronicle in the new medium the annals of their states; so Cadmus (550) wrote a chronicle of Miletus, Eu gaeon wrote of Samos, Xanthus wrote of Lydia. Towards the end of the cen tury Hecataeus of Miletus advanced both history and geography in epochal works-the Historiai, or Inquiries, and the Ges periodos, or Circuit of the Earth. The latter divided the known planet into two continents, Europe and Asia, and included Egypt in Asia; if (as many doubt) the existing fragments are genuine, it was especially informative about Egypt, and provided a rich field for unacknowledged poaching by Herodotus. The Histories began with a skeptical blast: "I write what I consider to be the truth; for the traditions of the Greeks seem to me many and ridiculous." Hecataeus accepted Homer as history, and swallowed some tales with his eyes shut; nevertheless he made an honest effort to distinguish fact from myth, to trace real genealogies, and to ar rive at a credible history of the Greeks. Greek historiography was old when the "Father of History" was born.
To Hecataeus and the other logographoi who appeared in this age in most of the cities and colonies of Hellas, historia• meant any inquiry into the facts of any matter, and was applied to science and philosophy as well as to historiog raphy in the modem sense. The term had a skeptical connotation in Ionia; it signified that the miracle stories of gods and demigod heroes were to be replaced with secular records of events, and rational interpretations of causes and effects. In Hecataeus the process begins; in Herodotus it advances; in Thucydides it is complete.
The poverty of Greek prose before Herodotus is bound up with the conquest and impoverishment of Miletus in the very generation in which prose literature began. Internal decay followed the custom of history in smoothing the path of the conqueror. The growth of wealth and luxury made epicureanism fashionable, while stoicism and patriotism seemed anti quated and absurd; it became a byword among the Greeks that ''once upon a time the Milesians were brave.".. Competition for the goods of the earth
From bistor or istor, knowing; a euphonism for id-tor, from the root id in eidenai, to know; cf. our wit and wisdom. Story is a shortened form of history.
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	141
became keener as the old faith lost its power to mitigate class strife by giv ing scruples to the strong and consolations to the weak. The rich, support ing an oligarchic dictatorship, became a united party against the poor, who wanted a democracy. The poor secured control of the government, expelled the rich, collected the remaining children of the rich on thresh ing floors, set oxen upon them, and had them trampled to death. The rich returned, recaptured power, coated the leaders of the democracy with
pitch, and then burnt them alive  De nobis fabula narrabitur. When, about
560, Croesus began to subject to Lydian rule the Greek coast of Asia from Cnidus to the Hellespont, Miletus saved its independence by refusing to help her sister states. But in 546 Cyrus conquered Lydia, and without much difficulty absorbed the faction-torn cities of Ionia into the Persian Empire. The great age of Miletus was over. Science and philosophy, in the history of states, reach their height after decadence has set in; wisdom is a harbinger of death.
Polycrates of Samos
Across the bay from Miletus, near the outlets of the Maeander, stood the modest town of Myus, and the more famous city of Priene. There, in the sixth century, lived Bias, one of the Seven Wise Men. As Hermippus said, the Seven Wise Men were seventeen; for different Greeks made different lists of them, most frequently agreeing upon Thales, Solon, Bias, Pittacus of Mytilene, Periander of Corinth, Chilon of Sparta, and Cleobolus of Lin dus in Rhodes. Greece respected wisdom as India respected holiness, as Renaissance Italy respected artistic genius, as young America naturally re spects economic enterprise. The heroes of Greece were not saints, or artists, or millionaires, but sages; and her most honored sages were not theorists but men who had made their wisdom function actively in the world. The sayings of these men became proverbial among the Greeks, and were in some cases inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Peo ple liked to quote, for example, the remarks of Bias-that the most unfor tunate of men is he who has not learned how to bear misfortune; that men ought to order their lives as if they were fated to live both a long and a short ti.me; and that "wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession.""'
West of Priene lay Samos, second largest of Ionia's isles. The capital stood on the southeastern shore; and as one entered the well-protected har-
142	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.VI
bor, passing the famous red ships of the Samian fleet, the city rose as if in tiers on the hill: first the wharves and shops, then the homes, then the fortress-acropolis and the great temple of Hera; and behind these a succes sion of ranges and peaks rising to. a height of five thousand feet. It was a sight to stir the patriotism of every Samian soul.
The zenith of Samos came in the third quarter of the sixth century, under Polycrates. The revenues from the busy port enabled the dictator to end a dangerous period of unemployment by a program of public works that called forth the admiration of Herodotus. The greatest of these under takings was a tunnel that carried the city's water supply 4500 feet through a mountain; we catch some idea of Greek ability in mathematics and engi neering when we learn that the two bores, begun at opposite ends, met in the center with an error of eighteen feet in direction and nine in height.*'1


benefits and kindnesses to other men." Solon took to trade, and became a successful merchant with far-flung interests that gave him wide experi ence and travel. His practice was as good as his preaching, for he ac quired among all classes an exceptional reputation for integrity. He was still relatively young-forty-four or forty-five-when, in 594, representa tives of the middle classes asked him to accept election nominally as archon eponymos, but with dictatorial powers to soothe the social war, establish a new constitution, and restore stability to the state. The upper classes, trusting to the conservatism of a moneyed man, reluctantly consented.
His first measures were simple but drastic economic reforms. He disap pointed the extreme radicals by making no move to redivide the land; such an attempt would have meant civil war, chaos for a generation, and the rapid return of. inequality. But by his famous Seisachtheia, or Removal of Burdens, Solon canceled, says Aristotle, "all existing debts, whether owing to private persons or to the state";*"" and at one blow cleared Attic lands of all mortgages. All persons enslaved or attached for debt were
Probably this did not apply to commercial debts in which personal servitude was not
involved."'
114	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. V
released; those sold into servitude abroad were reclaimed and freed; and such enslavement was forbidden for the future. It was characteristic of humanity that certain of Solon's friends, getting wind of his intention to cancel debts, bought on mortgage large tracts of land, and later retained these without paying the mortgages; this, Aristotle tells us with a rare twinkle in his style, was the origin of many fortunes, that were later "sup posed to be of immemorial antiquity.""' Solon was under suspicion of having connived at this and of having profited by it, until it was discovered that as a heavy creditor he himself had lost by his law.08 The rich protested unanswerably that such legislation was confiscation; but within a decade opinion became almost unanimous that the act had saved Attica from revolution.•
Of another Solonian reform it is difficult to speak with clearness or cer tainty. Solon, says Aristotle, "superseded the Pheidonian measures"-that is, the Aeginetan coinage theretofore used in Attica-"by the Euboic sys tem on a larger scale, and made the mina,• which had contained seventy drachmas, now contain a hundred.".., According to Plutarch's fuller ac count, Solon "made the mina, which before passed for seventy-three drach mas, go for a hundred, so that, though the number of pieces in a payment was equal, the value was less; which proved a considerable benefit to those that were to discharge great debts, and no loss to the creditors."91 Only the genial and generous Plutarch could devise a, form of inflation that would relieve debtors without hurting creditors-except that doubtless in some
cases half a loaf is better than none.t
More lasting than these economic reforms were those historic decrees that created the Solonian constitution. Solon prefaced them with an act of amnesty freeing or restoring all persons who had been jailed or ban ished for political offenses short of trying to usurp the government. He went on to repeal, directly or by implication, most of Draco's legislation; the law concerning murder remained.'"' It was in itself a revolution that the laws of Solon were applied without distinction to all freemen; rich and
For the value of Athenian coins, see below, Chap. XII, sect. 111.
t Grote and many others interpreted Plutarch's statement to mean that Solon had depre ciated the currency by rwenty-seven per cent and had thereby given relief to landlords who, themselves debtors to others, were deprived of the mongage returns upon which they had depended for meeting their obligations.02 Such inflation, however, would have fallen as a second blow upon those landlords who had lent sums to merchants; if it helped any class, it helped these merchants rather than the landlords or the peasants-whose mongages had already been forgiven. Possibly Solon had no thought of debasing the currency, but wished merely to substitute, for a monetary standard that had been found convenient in trading with the Peloponnesus, another that would facilitate trade with the rich and growing markets of lonia, where the Euboic standard was in common use.""
CHAP,V)	ATHENS	IIJ
poor were now subject to the same restraints and the same penalties. Rec ognizing that his reforms had been made possible by the suppon of the mercantile and industrial classes and signified their accession to a substan tial share in the government, Solon divided the free population of Attica into four groups according to their wealth: first, the pentacosiomedimni, or five-hundred-bushel men, whose annual income reached five hundred measures of produce, or the equivalent thereof;• second, the hippes, whose income was between three and five hundred measures; third, the zeugitai, with incomes between two and three hundred measures; and fourth, the tbetes, all other freemen. Honors and taxes were determined by the same rating, and the one could not be enjoyed without paying the other; fur thermore, the first class was taxed on twelve times, the second class on ten times, the third class on only five times, the amount of its annual in come; the property tax was in effect a graduated income tax."" The founh class was exempt from direct taxation. Only the first class was eligible to the archonship or to military commands; the second class was eligible to lower offices and to the cavalry; the third was privileged to join the heavy armed infantry; the fourth was expected to provide the common soldiers of the state. This peculiar classification weakened the kinship organiza tion upon which the oligarchy had rested its power, and established the new principle of "timocracy"-government by honor or prestige as frankly determined by taxable wealth. A similar "plutocracy" prevailed, through out the sixth and part of the fifth century, in most of the Greek colonies.
At the head of the new government Solon's code left the old Senate of the Areopagus, a little shorn of its exclusiveness and powers, open now to all members of the first class, but still with supreme authority over the conduct of the people and the officers of the state... Next below it he created a new boule, a Council of Four Hundred, to which each of the four tribes elected a hundred members; this Council selected, censored, and prepared all business that could be brought before the Assembly. Beneath this oligarchic superstructure, ingratiating to the strong, Solon, perhaps with good will aforethought, placed fundamentally democratic institutions. The old ekklesia of Homer's day was brought back to life, and all citizens were invited to join in its deliberations. This Assembly annually elected, from among the five-hundred-bushel men, the archons who heretofore had been appointed by the Areopagus; it could at any time question these offi cers, impeach them, punish them; and when their terms expired it scruti-
A medimnus-about one and a half bushels-was considered equivalent to one drachma in money.
116	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. V
nized their official conduct during the year, and could debar them, if it chose, from their usual graduation into the Senate. More important still, though it did not seem so, was the admission of the lowest class of the citi zens to full parity with the higher classes in being eligible to selection by lot to the heliaea-a body of six thousand jurors that formed the various courts before which all matters except murder and treason were tried, and to which appeal could be made from any action of the magistrates. "Some believe," says Aristotle, "that Solon intentionally introduced obscurity into his laws, to enable the commons to use their judicial power for their own political aggrandizement"; for since, as Plutarch adds, "their differ ences could not be adjusted by the letter, they would have to bring all their causes to the judges, who were in a manner masters of the laws.".., This power of appeal to popular courts was to prove the wedge and citadel of Athenian democracy.
To this basic legislation, the most important in Athenian history, Solon added a miscellany of laws aimed at the less fundamental problems of the time. First he legalized that individualization of property which custom had already decreed. If a man had sons he was to divide his property among them at his death; if he died childless he might bequeath to anyone the property that in such cases had heretofore reverted automatically to the clan.08 With Solon begins, in Athens, the right and law of wills. Himself a businessman, Solon sought to stimulate commerce and industry by open ing citizenship to all aliens who had a skilled trade and came with their families to reside permanently at Athens. He forbade the export of any produce of the soil except olive oil, hoping to turn men from growing sur plus crops to practicing an industry. He enacted a law that no son should be obliged to support a father who had not taught him some specific trade... To Solon-not to the later Athenians-the crafts had their own rich honor and dignity.
Even into the dangerous realm of morals and manners Solon offered laws. Persistent idleness was made a crime, and no man who lived a life of debauchery was permitted to address the Assembly.'° He legalized and taxed prostitution, established public brothels licensed and supervised by the state, and erected a temple to Aphrodite Pandemos from the revenues. "Hail to you, Solon!" sang a contemporary Lecky. "You bought public women for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of the morality of a city that is full of vigorous young men who, in the absence of your wise insti tution, would give themselve over to the disturbing annoyance of the bet ter women."" He enacted the un-Draconian penalty of a hundred drachmas
CHAP, v)	ATHENS	117
for the violation of a free woman, but anyone who caught an adr:lterer in the act was allowed to kill him there and then. He limited the size of dowries, wishing that marriages should be contracted by the affection of mates and for the rearing of children; and with childlike trustfulness he forbade women to extend their wardrobes beyond three suits. He was asked to legislate against bachelors, but refused, saying that, after all, "a wife is a heavy load to carry."'" He made it a crime to speak evil of the dead, or to speak evil of the living in temples, courts, or public offices, or at the games; but even he could not tie the busy tongue of Athens, in which, as with us, gossip and slander seemed essential to democracy. He laid it down that those who remained neutral in seditions should lose their citizenship, for he felt that the indifference of the public is the ruin of the state. He condemned pompous ceremonies, expensive sacrifices, or lengthy lamen tations at funerals, and limited the goods that might be buried with the dead. He established the wholesome law-a source of Athenian bravery for generations-that the sons of those who died in war should be brought up and educated at the expense of the government.
To all of his laws Solon attached penalties, milder than Draco's but still severe; and he empowered any citizen to bring action against any person whom he might consider guilty of crime. That his laws might be the bet ter known and obeyed he wrote them down in the court of the archon basileus upon wooden rollers or prisms that could be turned and read. Unlike Lycurgus, Minos, Hammurabi, and Numa, he made no claim that a god had given him these laws; this circumstance, too, revealed the temper of the age, the city, and the man. Invited to make himself a permanent dictator he refused, saying that dictatorship was "a very fair spot, but there was no way down from it.'"" Radicals criticized him for failing to estab lish equality of possessions and power; conservatives denounced him for admitting the commons to the franchise and the courts; even his friend Anacharsis, the whimsical Scythian sage, laughed at the new constitution, saying that now the wise would plead and the fools would decide. Besides, added Anacharsis, no lasting justice can be established for men, since the strong or clever will twist to their advantage any laws that are made; the law is a spider's web that catches the little flies and lets the big bugs escape. Solon accepted all this criticism genially, acknowledging the imperfections of his code; asked had he given the Athenians the best laws, he answered, "No, but the best that they could receive""-the best that the conflicting groups and interests of Athens could at that time be persuaded conjointly to accept. He followed the mean and preserved the state; he was a good
118	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. V
pupil of Aristotle before the Stagirite was born. Tradition attributed to him the motto that was inscribed upon the temple of Apollo at Delphi medenagan, nothing in excess;"8 and all Greeks agreed in placing him among the Seven Wise Men.
The best proof of his wisdom was the lasting effect of his legislation. Despite a thousand changes and developments, despite intervening dic tatorships and superficial revolutions, Cicero could say, five centuries later, that the laws of Solon were still in force at Athens.'" Legally his work marks the end of government by incalculable and changeable decrees, and the beginning of government by written and permanent law. Asked what made an orderly and well-constituted state, he replied, "When the people obey the rulers, and the rulers obey the laws."'l'J To his legislation Attica owed the liberation of its farmers from serfdom, and the establishment of a peasant proprietor class whose ownership of the soil made the little armies of Athens suffice to preserve her liberties for many generations. When, at the close of the Peloponnesian War, it was proposed to limit the fran chise to freeholders, only five thousand adult freemen in all Attica failed to satisfy this requirement... At the same time trade and industry were freed from political disabilities and financial inconveniences, and began that vigorous development which was to make Athens the commercial leader of the Mediterranean. The new aristocracy of wealth put a premium upon intelligence rather than birth, stimulated science and education, a d pre pared, materially and mentally, for the cultural achievements of the Golden Age.


413: Athenian defeat at Syracuse; Eurip ides' Iphigenia in Tauris
412: Euripides' Helen and Andromeda
411: Revolt of the Four Hundred; Aris tophanes' Lysistrata and Thesmo phoriazusae
410: Restoration of the democrary; vic tory of Alcibiades at Cyzicus
408: Timotheus of Miletus, poet and musician; Euripides' Orestes
406: Athenian victory atArginusae; deaths of Euripides and Sophocles; Eurip ides' Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis
405-367: Dionysius I dictator at Syracuse
405: Spartan victory at Aegospotami; Aristophanes' Frogs
404: End of the Peloponnesian War; rule of the Thirty at Athens
403: Restoration of the democracy
401: Defeat of Cyrus II at Cunaxa: retreat of Xenophon's Ten Thousand; Sophocles Oedipus at Colo1lUS
399: Trial and death of Socrates
CBAPTEB.  XI
Pericles and the Democratic Experiment
THE RISE OF ATHENS
"THE period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle," wrote Shelley,' "is undoubtedly, whether con sidered in itself or with reference to the effect which it has produced upon
the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world." Athens dominated this period because she had won the allegiance-and the contributions-of most Aegean cities by her leadership in saving Greece; and because, when the war was over, Ionia was impov erished and Sparta was disordered by demobilization, earthquake, and in surrection, while the fleet that Themistocles had created now rivaled with the conquests of commerce its victories at Artemisium and Salamis.
Noc that the war was quite over: intermittently the struggle between Greece and Persia continued from the conquest of Ionia by Cyrus to the overthrow of Darius III by Alexander. The Persians were expelled from Ionia in 479, from the Black Sea in 478, from Thrace in 475; and in 468 a Greek fleet under Cimon of Athens decisively defeated the Persians on land and sea at the mouth of the Eurymedon.* The Greek cities of Asia and the Aegean, for their protection against Persia, now (477) organized under Athenian leadership the Delian Confederacy, and contributed to a common fund in the temple of Apollo on Delos. Since Athens donated ships instead of money, it soon exercised, through its sea power, an effective control over its allies; and rapidly the Confederacy of equals was trans formed into an Athenian Empire.
In chis policy of imperial aggrandizement all the major statesmen of Athens-even the virtuous Aristides and later the impeccable Pericles
joined with the unscrupulous Themistocles. No other man had deserved so well of Athens as Themistocles, and no one was more resolved than he to be repaid for it. When the Greek leaders met to give first and second
A river in Pamphylia, in southern Asia Minor.
245
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XI
awards to those men who had most ably defended Greece in the war, each of them voted for himself first, and for Themistocles second. It was he who set the course of Greek history by persuading Athens that the road to supremacy lay not on land but on the sea, and not by war so much as by trade. He negotiated with Persia, and sought to end the strife between the old and the young empire in order that unimpeded commerce with Asia might bring prosperity to Athens. Under his prodding the men, even the women and children, of Athens raised a wall around the city, and another around the ports at the Piraeus and Munychia; under his lead, carried for ward by Pericles, great quays, warehouses, and exchanges were erected at the Piraeus, providing every convenience for maritime trade. He knew that these policies would arouse the jealousy of Sparta, and might lead to war between the rival states; but he was stirred on by his vision of Athens' development, and his confidence in the Athenian fleet.
His aims were as magnificent as his means were venal. He used the navy to force tribute from the Cyclades, on the ground that they had yielded too quickly to the Persians, and had lent Xerxes their troops; and he appears to have accepted bribes to let some cities off." For like considerations he arranged the recall of exiles, sometimes keeping the money, says Timocreon, though he had failed to obtain the recall." When Aristides was placed in charge of the public revenue he found that his predecessors had embezzled public funds, and not least lavishly Themistocles.' Toward 471 the Athe nians, fearing his unmoral intellect, passed a vote of ostracism upon him, and he sought a new home in Argos. Shortly thereafter the Spartans found documents apparently implicating Themistocles, in the secret correspond ence of their regent Pausanias, whom they had starved to death for enter ing into traitorous negotiations with Persia. Happy to destroy her ablest enemy, Sparta revealed these papers to Athens, which at once sent out an order for Themistocles' arrest. He fled to Corcyra, was denied refuge there, found brief asylum in Epirus, and thence sailed secretly to Asia, where he claimed from Xerxes' successor some reward for restraining the Greek pursuit of the Persian fleet after Salamis. Lured by Themistocles' promise to help him subjugate Greece," Artaxerxes I received him into his counsels, and assigned the revenues of several cities for his maintenance. Before Themistocles could carry out the schemes that never let him rest he died at Magnesia in 449 B.c., at the age of sixty-five, admired and disliked by all the Mediterranean world.


As the soul is a passing tongue of the endlessly changing flame of life,
so God is the everlasting Fire, the indestructible energy of the wurld. He is the unity binding all opposites, the harmony of all tensions, the sum and meaning of all strife. This Divine Fire, like life (for the two are every where and one), is always altering its form, always passing upward or downward on the ladder of change, always consuming and remaking things; indeed, some distant day, "Fire will judge and convict all things" (26), destroy them, and make way for new forms, in a Last Judgment
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	147
or cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the operations of the Undying Fire are not without sense and order; if we could understand the world as a whole we should see in it a vast impersonal wisdom, a Logos or Reason or Word (65); and we should try to mold our lives into accord with this way of Nature, this law of the universe, this wisdom or orderly energy which is God (91). "It is wise to hearken not to me, but to the Word" (1), to seek and follow the infinite reason of the whole.
When Heracleitus applies to ethics these four basic concepts of his thought-energy, change, the unity of opposites, and the reason of the whole-he illuminates all life and conduct. Energy harnessed to reason, wedded to order, is the greatest good. Change is not an evil but a boon; "in change one finds rest; it is weariness to be always toiling at the same things and always beginning afresh" (72-3). The mutual necessity of con traries makes intelligible and therefore forgivable the strife and suffering of life. "For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest" (104). He rebukes those who desire an end of strife in the world (43); without this tension of opposites there would be no "attunement," no weaving of the living web, no development. Harmony is not an ending of conflict, it is a tension in which neither element definitely wins, but both function in dispensably (like the radicalism of youth and the conservatism of old age). The struggle for existence is necessary in order that the better may be separated from the worse, and may generate the highest. "Strife is the father of all and the king of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men; some he has made slaves, and some free" (44). In the end, "strife is justice" (62); the competition of individuals, groups, species, institutions, and empires constitutes nature's supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.
All in all, the philosophy of Heracleitus, concentrated for us now in 130
fragments, is among the major products of the Greek mind. The theory of the Divine Fire passed down into Stoicism; the notion of a final con flagration was transmitted through Stoicism to Christianity; the Logos, or reason in nature, became in Philo and Christian theology the Divine Word, the personified wisdom with which or through whom God creates and governs all things; in some measure it prepared ,for the early modem view of natural law. Virtue as obedience to nature became a catchword of Stoicism; the unity of opposites revived vigorously in Hegel; the idea of change came back into its own with Bergson. The conception of strife and struggle as determining all things reappears in Darwin, Spencer, an&
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VI
Nieu.sche-who carries on, after twenty-four centuries, the war of Hera cleitus against democracy.
We know almost nothing of Heracleitus' life; and of his death we have only an unsupponed story in Diogenes Laertius, which may illustrate the prosaic ends to which our poetry may return:
And at last becoming a complete misanthrope, he used to spend his time walking about the mountains, feeding on grasses and plants; and in consequence of these habits he was attacked by the dropsy, and so he returned to the city, and asked the physicians, in a riddle, whether they were able to produce a drought after wet weather. And as they did not understand him, he shut himself up in a stable for oxen, and covered himself with cow dung, hoping to cause the wet to evaporate from him by the warmth that this produced. And as he did himself no good in this way, he died, having lived seventy years.•
Anacreon of Teos
Colophon, a few miles nonh of Ephesus, derived its name, presumably, from the hill on whose slope it rose.• Xenophanes the anticlerical, born among them about 576, described the Colophonians as "richly clothed in purple garments, proud of their luxuriously dressed hair wet with costly and sweet-smelling oils"; vanity has a long history."" Here, and perhaps at Smyrna, the poet Mimnermus (610) sang, for a people already infected with the languid pessimism of the East, his melancholy odes of fleeting youth and love. He lost his hean to Nanno, the girl who accompanied his songs with the plaintive obbligato of the flute; and when she rejected his love (perhaps on the ground that a poet married is a poet dead), he im mortalized her with a sheaf of delicate elegiac verse.
We blossom like the leaves that come in Spring, What time the sun begins to flame and glow, And in the brief span of youth's gladdening Nor good nor evil from the gods we know;
But always at the goal dark spirits stand
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death, within her hand."'
Gk. kolopbon, hill; cf. Latin collis, Eng. bill. Because the cavalry of the city was famous for giving the "finishing touch" to a defeated force, the word kolophon became in Greek a synonym for the final stroke, and passed into our language as a publisher's symbol, originally placed at the end of a book.""
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	149
A more famous poet lived a century later in the near-by town of Teos. Anacreon wandered much, but in Teos he was born (563) and died (478). Many a court sought him, for among his contemporaries only Simonides rivaled him in fame. We find him joining a band of emigrants to Thracian Abdera, serving as soldier for a campaign or two, abandoning his shield in the poetic fashion of the time, and thereafter content to brandish a pen; spending some years at the court of Polycrates in Samos; brought thence in official state, on a fifty-oared galley, to grace the palace of Hipparchus in Athens; and at last, after the Persian War, returning to T eos to ease his declining years with song and drink. He paid for his excesses by living to a great age, and died at eighty-five, we are told, of a grape pit sticking in his throat.•
Alexandria knew five books of Anacreon, but only disordered couplets remain. His subjects were wine, women, and boys; his manner was one of polished banter in tripping iambics. No topic seemed impure in his impeccable diction, or gross in his delicate verse. Instead of the vulgar virulence of Hipponax, or the trembling intensity of Sappho, Anacreon offered the urbane chatter of a court poet who would play Horace to any Augustus that pleased his fancy and paid for his wine. Athenaeus thinks that his tipsy songs and changeful loves were a pose;"" perhaps Anacreon hid his fidelities that he might be interesting to women, and concealed his sobriety to augment his fame. A choice legend tells how, in his cups, he stumbled against a child and abused it with harsh words, and how, in his age, he fell in love with this lad and did penance with doting praise.  His
Eros was ambidextrous, and reached impartially for either sex; but in his later years he gallantly gave the preference to women. "Lo, now," says a pretty fragment, "golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball, and calls me forth to play with a motley-slippered maid. But she hails from lofty Lesbos, and so finds fault with my white hair, and goes a-searching for other prey.',.. A wit of a later age wrote for Anacreon's grave a reveal ing epitaph:
All-enchanting nurse of the wine, 0 Vine, grow lush and long above the tomb of Anacreon. So shall the tippling friend of neat liquor, who thrummed in night-long revel the lute of a lover of lads, yet sport above his buried he.ad the glorious cluster of some teem ing bough, and be wet evermore with the dew whose delicious scent was the breath of his mild old mouth.""
.ISO	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.VI
Chios, Smyrna, Phocaea
From Teos the mainland staggers westward in vacillating bays and promon tories until, across ten miles of sea, the traveler reaches Chios. Here, amid groves of figs and olives, and Anacreontic vines, Homer may have spent his youth. Wine making was a major industry in Chios, and used many slaves;


Aristogeiton, a man of middle age, had won the love of the young Harmodius, then, says Thucydides,.. "in the flower of youthful beauty." But Hipparchus, equally careless of gender, also solicited the lad's love. When Aristogeiton heard of this he resolved to kill Hipparchus and at the same time, in self-protection, to overthrow the tyranny. Harmodius and others joined him in the conspiracy (514). They murdered Hipparchus as he was arranging the Panathenaic procession, but Hippias eluded them and had them slain. To complicate the tale a counesan Leaena, mistress of Harmodius, died bravely under tonure, having refused to betray the surviving conspirators; if we may believe Greek tradition, she bit off her tongue and spat it in the face of her tonurers to make sure that she would not answer their questions.91
Though the people lent no visible support to this revolt, Hippias was frightened by it into replacing his hitheno mild rule with a regime of sup pression, espionage, and terror. The Athenians, strengthened by a gen eration of prosperity, could afford now to demand the luxury of liberty;
124	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.V
gradually, as the dictatorship grew harsher, the cry for freedom grew louder; and Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who had conspired for love and passion rather than for democracy,• were transformed by popular imagina tion into the martyrs of liberty. Off in Delphi the Alcmaeonids, who had been re-exiled by Peisistratus, saw their opportunity, raised an a_rmy, and marched upon Athens with the announced intention of deposing Hippias. At the same time they bribed the Pythian oracle to tell all Spartans who consulted her that Sparta must overthrow the tyranny at Athens. Hippias successfully resisted the forces of the Alcmaeonids; but when a Lacedae monian army joined them he withdrew to the Areopagus. Seeking the security of his children in the event of his own death, he sent them secretly out of Athens; but they were captured by the invaders, and Hippias, as the price of their safety, consented to abdication and exile ( 510). The
Alcmaeonids, led by the courageous Cleisthenes, t entered Athens in tri.:
umph; and on their heels came the banished aristocrats, prepared to cele brate the return of their property and their power.
In the election that ensued, lsagoras, representing the aristocracy, was chosen to be chief archon. Cleisthenes, one of the defeated candidates, aroused the people to revolt, overthrew Isagoras, and set up a popular dictatorship. The Spartans again invaded Athens, seeking to restore lsa goras; but the Athenians resisted so tenaciously that the Spartans retired, and Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonid aristocrat, proceeded to establish democ racy (507).
His first reform struck at the very framework of Attic aristocracy
those four tribes and 360 clans whose leadership, by centuries of tradi tion, was in the hands of the oldest and richest families. Cleisthenes abol ished this kinship classification, and replaced it with a territorial division into ten tribes, each composed of a (varying) number of demes. To prevent the formation of geographical or occupational blocs, such as the old parties of Mountain, Shore, and Plain, each tribe was to be composed of an equal number of demes, or districts, from the city, from the coast, and from the interior. To offset the sanctity that religion had given to the old division, religious ceremonies were instituted for each new tribe or deme, and a famous ancient hero of the locality was made its deity or patron saint. Freemen of foreign origin, who had rarely been admitted to the franchise under the aristocratic determination of citizenship by descent, now auto
One would not be surprised to learn that they represented a resentful aristocracy, like Brutus and Cassius in Rome. Brutus, too, became the hero of a revolution, after eighteen ceD turies had obscured his history.
t Gmndson of Cleisthenes, dictator of Sicyon.
CHAP. V)	ATHENS
matically became citizens of the demes in which they lived. At one stroke the roll of voters was almost doubled, and democracy secured a new sup port and a broader base.
Each of the new tribes was entitled to name one of the ten strategoi, or generals, who now joined the polemarch in command of the army; and each tribe elected fifty members of the new Council of 50 I which now replaced Solon's Council of Four Hundred and assumed the most vital powers of the Areopagus. These councilors were chosen for a year's term, not by election but by lot, from the list of all citizens who had reached the age of thirty and had not already served two terms. In this strange inauguration of representative government both the aristocratic principle of birth and the plutocratic principle of wealth were overridden by the new device of the lot, which gave every citizen an equal chance not only to vote, but to hold office in the most influential branch of the government. For the Council so elected determined all matters and proposals o be submitted for approval or rejection to the Assembly, reserved to itself various judicial powers, exercised wide administrative functions, and super vised all officials of the state.
The Assembly was enlarged by the access of new citizens, so that a full meeting of its membership would have meant an attendance of approxi mately thirty thousand men. All these were eligible for service in the hel iaea, or courts; but the fourth class, or thetes, were still, as under Solon, ineligible to individual office. The powers of the Assembly were enlarged by the institution of ostracism, which Cleisthenes seems to have added as a protection for the young democracy. At any time, by a majority of votes written secretly upon potsherds (ostraka), the Assembly, in a quorum of six thousand members, might send into exile for ten years any man who in its judgment had become a danger to the state. In this way ambitious leaders would be stimulated to conduct themselves with circumspection and moderation, and men suspected of conspiracy could be disposed of without the law's delay. The procedure required that the Assembly should be asked, "Is there any m n among you whom you think vitally dangerous to the state? If so, whom?" The Assembly might then vote to ostracize any one citizen-not excepting the mover of the motion.* Such exile involved no confiscation of property, and no disgrace; it was merely democracy's way of cutting off the "tallest ears of corn_,,.. Nor did the Assembly abuse its power. In the ninety years between the introduction of ostracism and its disuse at Athens, only ten persons were banished by it from Attica.
A similar institution was used at Argos, Megara, and Syracuse.
126	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
One of these, we are told, was Cleisthenes himself. But in truth we do not know his later history; it was absorbed and lost in the brilliance of his work. Beginning with a thoroughly unconstitutional revolt, he had estab lished, in the face of the most powerful families in Attica, a democratic con stitution that continued in operation, with only minor changes, to the end of Athenian liberty. The democracy was not complete; it applied only to freemen, and still placed a modest property limitation upon eligibility to mdividual office.• But it gave all legislative, executive, and judicial power to an Assembly and a Court composed' of the citizens, to magistrates ap pointed by and responsible to the Assembly, and to a Council for whose members all citizens might vote, and in whose supreme authority, by the operation of the lot, at least one third of them actually shared for at lelaSt a year of their lives. Never before had the world seen so liberal a fran chise, or so wide a spread of political power.
The Athenians themselves were exhilarated by this adventure into sov
ereignty. They realized that they had undertaken a difficult enterprise, but they advanced to it with courage and pride, and, for a time, with unwonted self-restraint. From that moment they knew the zest of freedom in action, speech, and thought; and from that moment they began to lead all Greece in literature and art, even in statesmanship and war. They learned to re spect anew a law that was their own considered will, and to love with unprecedented passion a state that was their unity, their power, and their fulfillment. When the greatest empire of the age decided to destroy these scattered cities called Greece, or to lay them under tribute to the Great King, it forgot that in Attica it would be opposed by men who owned the soil that they tilled, and who ruled the state that governed them. It was for tunate for Greece, and for Europe, that Cleisthenes completed his work, and Solon's, twelve years before Marathon.
A property qualification was placed upon the franchise in the earlier stages of American and French democracy.
CHAPTER  VI
The Great Migration
I, CAUSES AND WAYS
N carrying the story of Sparta and Athens down to the eve of Mara thon we have sacrificed the unity of time to the unity of place. It is true that the cities of the mainland were older than the Greek settlements in the Aegean and Ionia, and that these cities, in many cases, sent out the colonies whose life we must now describe. But, by a confusing inversion of normal sequences, several of those colonies became greater than their mother cities, and preceded them in the development of wealth and art. The real creators of Greek culture were not the Greeks of what we now call Greece, but those who fled before the conquering Dorians, fought des perately for a foothold on foreign shores, and there, out of their Myce naean memories and their amazing energy, made the art and science, the philosophy and poetry that, long before Marathon, placed them in the forefront of the W estem world. Greek civilization was inherited by the


:ennined to starve himself by easy degrees.• "He was exceedingly old," says Diogenes,a
and appeared to be at the point of death. His sister lamented that he would die during the festival of the Thesmophoria, which would prevent her from discharging her duties to the goddess. So he bade her be of good cheer, and to bring him hot loaves (or a little honey5') every day. And by applying these to his nostrils he kept himself
Lucretius attributes a kind of psychophysical parallelism to "the great Democritus," who laid it down that the atoms of body and the atoms of mind are placed one beside one
,dtemately in pairs, and so link the frame together.....
CHAP. XVI)	THE  CONFLICT OF  PHILOSOPHY  AND  RELIGION	355
alive over the festival. But when the three days of the feast were passed he expired withtmt any pain, as Hipparchus assures us, hav- ing lived one hundred and nine years.
His city gave him a public funeral, and Timon of Athens praised him."" He founded no school; but he formulated for science its most famous hy pothesis, and gave to philosophy a system which, denounced by every other, has survived them all, and reappears in every generation.
m. EMPEDOCLES
Idealism offends the senses, materialism offends the soul; the one explains everything but the world, the other everything but life. To merge these half-truths it was necessary to find some dynamic principle that could medi ate between structure and growth, between things and thought. Anaxagoras sought such a principle in a cosmic Mind; Empedocles sought it in the inherent forces that made for evolution.
This Leonardo of Acragas was born in the year of Marathon, of a wealthy family whose passion for horse racing gave no promise of philosophy. He studied for a while with the Pythagoreans, but in his exuberance he divulged some of their esoteric doctrine, and was expelled." He took very much to heart the notion of transmigration, and announced with poetic sympathy that he had been "in bygone times a youth, a maiden, and a flowering shrub; a bird, yes, and a fish that swims in silence through the deep sea.""" He condemned the eating of animal food as a form of canni balism; for were not these animals the reincarnation of human beings?111 All men, he believed, had once been gods, but had forfeited their heavenly place by some impurity or violence; and b.e was certain that he felt in his own soul intimations of a prenatal divinity. "From what glory, from what immeasurable bliss, have I now sunk to roam with mortals on this earth!""' Convinced of his divine origin, he put golden sandals upon his feet, clothed his body with purple robes, and crowned his head with laurel; he was, as he modestly explained to his countrymen, a favorite of Apollo; only to his friends did he confess that he was a god. He claimed supernatural pow ers, performed magic rites, and sought by incantations to wrest from the other world the secrets of human destiny. He offered to cure dis ases by the enchantment of his words, and cured so many that the populace half believed his claims. Actually he was a learned physician fertile in sug gestions to medical science, and skilled in the psychology of the medical
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, XVI
an. He was a brilliant orator; he "invented," says Aristotle,"" the principles of rhetoric, and taught them to Gorgias, who peddled them in Athens. He was an engineer who freed Selinus from pestilence by draining marshes and changing the courses of streams.• He was a courageous statesman who, though himself an aristocrat, led a popular revolution against a narrow aristocracy, refused the dictatorship, and established a moderate democ racy.00 He was a poet, and wrote On Nature and On Purifications in such excellent verse that Aristotle and Cicero ranked him high among the poets, and Lucretius complimented him with imitation. "When he went to the Olympic games," says Diogenes Laenius, "he was the object of general
attention, so that there was no mention made of anybody else in com parison with him."111 Perhaps, after all, he was a god.
The 470 lines that survive give us only hazardous intimations of his philosophy. He was an eclectic, and saw some wisdom in every system. He deprecated Parmenides' wholesale rejection of the senses, and welcomed each sense as an "avenue to understanding.""" Sensation is due to effiuxes of panicles proceeding from the object and falling upon the "pores" (poroi) of the senses; thereforelight needs time to come from the sun to us."' Night is caused by the eanh intercepting the rays of the sun.• All things are com posed of four elements-air, fire, water, and eanh. Operating upon these are two basic forces, attraction and repulsion, Love and Hate. The end less combinations and separations of the elements by these forces produce the world of things and history. When Love or the tendency to combine is doininant, matter develops into plants, and organisms take higher and higher forms. Just as transmigration weaves all souls into one biography, so in nature there is no sharp distinction between one species or genus and another; e.g., "Hair and leaves and the thick feathers of birds, and the scales that form on tough limbs, are the same thing."'' Nature produces every kind of organ and form; Love unites them, sometimes into monstrosi ties that perish through maladaptation, sometimes into organisms capable of propagating themselves and meeting the conditions of survival.• All higher forms develop from lower forms.'111 At first both sexes are in the same body; then they become separated, and each longs to be reunited with the other.•.. To this process of evolution corresponds a process of dissolution, in which Hate, or the force of division, tears down the com plex structure that Love has built. Slowly organisms and planets reven to more and more primitive forms, until all things are merged again in a
Perhaps Plato poached here for Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium.
CHAP. XVI)  THE  CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY  AND RELIGION	357
primeval and amorphous mass..,. These alternating processes of develop ment and decay go on endlessly, in each part and in the whole; the two forces of combination and separation, Love and Hate, Good and Evil, fight and balance each other in a vast universal rhythm of Life and Death. So old is the philosophy of Herbert Spencer.n
The place of God in this process is not clear, for in Empedocles it is difficult to separate fact from metaphor, philosophy from poetry. Some times he identifies deity with the cosmic sphere itself, sometimes with the life of all life, or the mind of all mind; but he knows that we shall never be able to form a just idea of the basic and original creative power. "We cannot bring God near so as to reach him with our eyes and lay hold of him . with our hands	For he has no human head attached to bodily members,
nor do two branching arms dangle from his shoulders; he has neither feet nor knees nor any hairy parts. No; he is only mind, sacred and ineffable mind, flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts."" And Empedocles concludes with the wise and weary counsel of old age:
Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil. Then are they borne away; like smoke they vanish into air; and what they dream they know is but the little that each hath stumbled upon in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all that they have learned the whole. Vain fools! For what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man...
In his last years he became more distinctly a preacher and prophet, ab sorbed in the theory of reincarnation, and imploring his fellow men to purge away the guilt that had exiled them from heaven. With the assorted wisdom of Buddha, Pythagoras, and Schopenhauer he warned the human race to abstain from marriage, procreation,.,. and beans."" When, in 41 5, the Athenians besieged Syracuse, Empedocles did what he could to help its resistance, and thereby offended Acragas, which hated Syracuse with all the animosity of kinship. Banished from his native city, he went to the mainland of Greece and died, some say, in Megara..,. But Hippobotus, says Diogenes Laertius,.,. tells how Empedocles, after bringing back to full life a woman who had been given up for dead, rose from the feast that cele brated her recovery, disappeared, and was never seen again. Legend said that he had leaped into Etna's fiery mouth so that he might die without leaving a trace behind him, and thereby confirm his divinity. But the
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVI
elemental fire betrayed him; it flung up his brazen slippers and left them, like heavy symbols of mortality, upon the crater's edge.•
THE SOPHISTS
It is a reproof to those who think of Greece as synonymous with Athens, that none of the great Hellenic thinkers before Socrates belonged to that city, and only Plato after him. The fate of Anaxagoras and Socrates indi cates that religious conservatism was stronger in Athens than in the col-