0 Peace, thou givest plenty as from a deep spring; there is no beauty like unto thine; no, not even among the blessed gods. My heart yearneth within me, for thou tarriest; I grow old and thou re turnest not. Shall weariness overcome mine eyes before they see thy bloom and thy comeliness? When the lovely songs df the dancers are heard again, and the thronging feet of them that wear garlands, shall grey hairs and sorrow have destroyed me utterly? Return, thou holy one, to our city; abide not far from us, thou that quencheth wrath. Strife and bitterness shall depart if thou art with us; madness and the edge of the sword shall flee from our doors,109•
Almost alone among the great writers of his time he dares to attack slavery; during the Peloponnesian War it became obvious that most slaves were such not by nature but by the accidents of life. He does not recog nize any natural aristocracy; environment rather than heredity makes tht" man. The slaves in his dramas play important parts, and often speak his
.finest lines. With the imaginative sympathy of a poet he considers women. He knows the faults of the sex, and exposes them so realistically that Aristophanes was able to make him out a misogynist; but he did more than any other playwright of antiquity to present the case for women, and to support the dawning movement for their emancipation Some of his plays are almost modern, post-Ibsen studies in the problems of sex, even of sexual perversion.= He describes men with realism, but women with gallantry; the terrible Medea gets more compassion from him than he accords to the heroic but unfaithful Jason. He is the first dramatist to make a play
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, XVII
tum upon love; his famous ode to Eros in the lost Andromeda was mouthed by thousands of young Greeks:
0 Love, our Lord, of gods and men the king, Either teach not how beauteous beauty is,
Or help poor lovers, whom like clay thou moldest, Through toil and labor to a happy end.111
Euripides is naturally a pessimist, for every romantic becomes a pessimist when reality impinges upon romance. "Life," said Horace Walpole, "is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."112 "Long ago," says our poet,
I looked upon man's days, and found a grey Shadow. And this thing more I surely say That those of all men who are counted wise, Strong wits, devisers of great policies,
Do pay the bitterest toll. Since life began
Hath there in God's eye stood one happy man?ua
He wonders at the greed and cruelty of men, the resourcefulness of evil, and the obscene indiscriminateness of death. At the beginning of the Alcestis Death says, "Is it not my function to take the doomed?"-to which Apollo answers, "No; only to dispatch those who have ripened into full old age." When death comes after life has been fully lived it is natural, and does not offend us. "We should not lament our fate if, like the harvests that follow each other in the passage of the years, one generation of men after another flowers, fades, and is carried off. So it is ordered in the course of Nature; and we must not be dismayed by anything that is rendered inevitable by her laws.'"1' His conclusion is stoicism: "Do thou endure as men must, chafing not."na Now and then, following Anaximenes and anticipating the Stoics, he consoles himself with the thought that the spirit of man is part of the divine Air or pneuma, and will, after death, be preserved in the Soul of the W orld.ua
Who knows if that be life which we call death, And life be dying?-save alone that men
Living bear grief, but when they yield their breath They have no sorrow then, and grieve no more.m
CHAP. XVII) THE	LITERATURE  OF THE  GOLD EN  AGE	417
The Exile
The man whom we picture from these plays resembles sufficiently the sitting statue in the Louvre, and the busts at Naples, to let us believe that these are faithful copies of authentic Greek originals. The bearded face is handsome, but overwrought with meditation, and softened with a ten der melancholy. His friends agreed with his enemies that he was gloomy, almost morose, not given to conviviality or laughter, and spending his later years in the seclusion of his island home. He had three sons, and derived some happiness from their childhood.118 He found solace in books, and was the first private citizen in Greece, so far as we know, to collect a sub stantial library.*119 He had excellent friends, including Protagoras and Socrates; the latter, who ignored other dramas, said that to see a play by Euripides he would walk to the Piraeus-a serious matter for a stout philosopher. The younger generation of emancipated souls looked up to him as their leader. But he had more enemies than anv other writer in Greek history. The judges, who felt themselves bound, presumably. to protect religion and morals from his skeptical arrows, crowned only five of his efforts with victory; even so it was liberal of the archon basileus to admit so many Euripidean plays to a religious stage. Conservatives in all fields looked upon the dramatist as responsible with Socrates for the growth of unbelief among Athenian youth. Aristophanes declared war upon him at the outset in The Ach(l'Tnians, satirized him with hilarious cari cature in The Thesmophoriazusae, and, in the year after the poet's death, continued the attack in The Frogs; nevertheless, we are told, the tragic and the comic dramatist were on friendly terms to the end.120 As for the audi ence, it denounced his heresies and crowded to his plays. When, at line 612 of the Hippolytus, the young hunter said, "My tongue hath sworn, but my mind remains unbound," the crowd protested so loudly against what seemed to be an outrageously immoral proposition that Euripides had to rise in his seat and comfort them with the assurance that Hippolytus would suffer edifyingly before the story closed-a safe promise for almost any character in Greek tragedy.
There had already been royal or state libraries in Greece, as we have seen; and such collections in Egypt can be traced back to the Fourth Dynasty. A Greek library consisted of scrolls arranged in pigeonholes in a chest. Publication meant that an author had allowed his manuscript to be copied, and the copies to be circulated; thereafter further copies could be made without permission or "copyright." Copies of popular works were numerous, and not costly; Plato tells us in the Apology that Anaxagoras' treatise On Nature could be bought for a drachma ($1). Athens, in the age of Euripides, became the chief center of the book trade in Greece.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	lCHAP. XVII
About 410 he was indicted on a charge of impiety; and soon afterward Hygiaonon brought against him another suit, involving much of the poet's fortune, and adduced Hippolytus' line as proof of Euripides' dishonesty. Both accusations failed; but the wave of public resentment that met The Trojan Women led Euripides to feel that he had hardly a friend left in Athens. Even his wife, it is said, turned against him because he could not join in the martial enthusiasm of the city. In 408, at the age of seventy two, he accepted the invitation of King Archelaus to be his guest in the Macedonian capital. At Pella, under the protection of this Frederick-who had no fears for the orthodoxy of his people-Euripides found peace and comfort; there he wrqte the almost idyllic Iphigenia in Aulis, and the pro found religious play, The Bacchae. Eighteen months after his arrival he died, attacked and dismembered, said pious Greeks, by the royal hounds.111 A year later his son produced the two dramas at ·the city Dionysia, and the judges gave them the first prize. Even modern scholars have thought that The Bacchae was Euripides' apology to Greek religion;= and yet the play may have been intended as a bitter allegory of Euripides' treatment by the pub1ic of Athens. It is the story of how Pentheus, King of Thebes, was torn to pieces by a mob of female Dionysian orgiasts, led by his own mother Agave because he had denounced their wild superstition and in truded upon their revelry. It was no invention; the tale belonged to the religious tradition; the dismemberment and sacrifice of an animal, or of any man who dared to attend the ceremonies, was part of the Dionysian rite; and this powerful drama, by returning for its plot to the legend of Dionysus, bound Greek tragedy at its culmination with Greek tragedy at its birth. The play was composed among the Macedonian mountains which it describes in lyrics of unfailing power; and perhaps it was intended for performance in Pella, where the Bacchic cult was especially strong. Euripides enters with surprising insight into the mood of religious ecstasy, and puts into the mouths of the Bacchantes psalms of passionate devotion; it may indeed be that the old poet had gone to the limits of rationalism and beyond it, and recognized now the frailty of reason, and the persistency
.af the emotional needs of women and men. But the story does dubious nonor to the Dionysian religion; its theme is once more the evils that may come of superstitious creeds.
The .god Dionysus visits Thebes in disguise as a Bacchus, or incarnation
.:>f himself, and preaches the worship of Dionysus. The daughters of Cad mus reject the message; he hypnotizes them into pious ecstasy, and they
CHAP.XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	419
go up into the hills to worship him with wild dances. They clothe them selves with the skins of animals, girdle themselves with snakes, crown them selves with ivy, and suckle the young of wolves and deer. The Theban king Pentheus opposes the cult as hostile to reason, morals, and order, and imprisons its preacher, who bears his punish ent with Christian gentle ness. But the god in the preacher asserts himself, opens the prison walls, and uses his miraculous power to hypnotize the young ruler. Under this influence Pentheus dresses himself as a woman, climbs the hills, and joins the revelers. The women discover that he is a man, and tear him limb from limb; his own mother, drunk with "possession," carries Pentheus' severed head in her hands, thinking it the head of a·lion, and sings a song of triumph over it. When she comes to her senses and sees that it is the head of her son, she is revolted with the cult that intoxicated her; and when Dionysus says, "Ye mocked me, being God; this is your wage," she answers, "Should God be like a proud man in his rage?" The last lesson is the same as the first; even in his dying play the poet remained Euripides.


337
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XV
for the number-pente, deka, hekaton, chilioi, myrioi. Greek mathematics never achieved a symbol for zero. Like our own it betrayed its Oriental origin by taking from the Egyptians the decimal system of counting by tens, and from the Babylonians, in astronomy and geography, the duodecimal or sexagesimal system of counting by twelves or sixties, as still on our clocks, globes, and charts. Probably an abacus helped the people -with the simpler calculations. Fractions were painful for them: to work with a complex fraction they reduced it to an accumulation of fractions having I as their common numerator; so
H was broken down into½ +i + -h + -:h:-1
Of Greek algebra we have no record before the Christian era. Geometry, however, was a favorite study of the philosophers, again less for its practical value than for its theoretical interest, the fascination of its deductive logic, its union of subtlety and clarity, its imposing architecture of thought. Three problems particularly attracted these mathematical metaphysicians: the squar ing of the circle, the trisection of the angle, and the doubling of the cube. How popular the first puzzle became appears in Aristophanes' Birds, in which a character representing the astronomer Meton enters upon the stage armed with ruler and compasses, and undertakes to show "how your circle may be made a square"-i.e., how to find a square whose area will equal that of a given circle. Perhaps it was such problems as these that led the later Pythagoreans to formulate a doctrine of irrational numbers and incommensurable quantities.• It was the Pythagoreans, too, whose studies of the parabola, the hyperbola, and the ellipse prepared for the epochal work of Apollonius of Perga on conic sections.• About 440 Hippocrates of Chios (not the physician) published the
first known book on geometry, and solved the problem of squaring the lune.t
About 420 Hippias of Elia accomplished the trisection of an angle through the quadratri:x curve.• About 410 Democritus of Abdera announced that "in con structing lines according to given conditions no one has ever surpassed me, not even the Egyptians;"' he almost made the boast forgivable by writing four books on geometry, and finding formulas for the areas of cones and pyramids." All in all, the Greeks were as excellent in geometry as they were poor in arith metic. Even into their art geometry entered actively, making many forms of ceramic and architectural ornament, and determining the proportions and cur vatures of the Parthenon.
Irrational numbers are those that cannot be expressed by either a whole number or a fraction, like the square root of 2. Incommensurable quantities are those for which no third quantity can be found which bears to each of them a relation expressible by a rational nwn ber," like the side and diagonal of a square, or the radius and circumference of a circle.
t A moonlike figure made by the arcs of two intersecting circles.
CRAP.XV)'    THE  ADVANCEMENT  OF LEARNING	339
n. ANAXAGORAS
It was part of the struggle between religion and science that the study of astronomy was forbidden by Athenian law at the height of the Periclean age.• At Acragas Empedocles suggested that light takes time to pass from one point to another.7 At Elea Parmenides announced the sphericity of the earth, divided the planet into five zones, and observed that the moon always has its bright portion turned toward the sun.8  At Thebes Philolaus the Pythagorean deposed the earth from the center of the universe, and reduced it to the status of one among many planets revolving about a "central fire."0 Leucippus, pupil of Philolaus, attributed the origin of the stars to the in candescent combustion and concentration of material "drawn onward in the universal movement of the circular vortex.,,,,, At Abdera Democritus, pupil of Leucippus and student of Babylonian lore, described the Milky Way as a multitude of small stars, and summarized astronomic history as the periodical collision and destruction of an infinite number of worlds.21 At Chios Oenopides discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic.11•  Nearly everywhere among the Greek colonies the fifth century saw scientific de velopments remarkable in a period almost devoid of scientific instruments. But when Anaxagoras tried to do similar work at Athens he found the mood of the people and the Assembly as hostile to free inquiry as the friend ship of Pericles was encouraging. He had come from Clazomenae about 480 B.c., at twenty years of age. Anaximenes so interested him in the stars tliat when someone asked him the object of life he answered, "The investi gation of sun, moon, and heaven.""' He neglected his patrimony to chart the earth and the sky, and fell into poverty while his book On Nature was acclaimed by the intelligentsia of Athens as the greatest scientific work of
the century.
It carried on the traditions and speculations of the Ionian school. The universe, said Anaxagoras, was originally a chaos of diverse seeds (sper mata), pervaded by a nous, or Mind, tenuously physical, and akin to the source of life and motion in ourselves. And as mind gives order to the chaos of our actions, so the World Mind gave order to the primeval seeds, setting them into a rotatory vortex,"" and guiding them toward the development of organic forms.18 This rotation sorted the seeds into the four elements-fire, air, water, and earth-and separated the world into two revolving layers, an outer one of "ether," and an inner one of air. "In consequence of this violent
This is the Vortex that Aristophanes, in The Clouds, so effectively satirized as Socrates'
substitute for Zeus.
34°	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XV
whirling motion, the surrounding fiery ether tore away stones from the earth, and kindled them into stars."" The sun and the stars are glowing masses of rock: "The sun is a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnesus. "JJl When their revolving motion wanes, the stones of the outer layer fall upon the earth as meteors.18 The moon is an incandescent solid, having on its surface plains, mountains, and ravines;" it receives its light from the sun, and is of all heavenly bodies the nearest to the earth.1,8 "The moon is eclipsed through the interposition of the earth . . . the sun through the interposition of the moon."18 Probably other celestial bodies are inhabited like the earth; upon them "men are formed, and other animals that have life; the men dwell in cities, and cultivate fields as we do.".. Out of the inner or gaseous layer of our planet successive condensations pro duced clouds, water, earth, and stones. Winds are due to rarefactions of the atmosphere produced by the heat of the sun; "thunder is caused by the collision of clouds, and lightning by their friction.""' The quantity of matter never changes, but all forms begin and pass away; in time the moun tains will become the sea... The various forms and objects of the world are brought into being by increasingly definite aggregations of homo geneous parts (homoiomeria)."" All organisms were originally generated out of earth, moisture, and heat, and thereafter from one another."' Man has developed beyond other animals because his erect posture freed his hands for grasping things.""
These achievements-the foundation of meteorology, the correct ex
planation of eclipses, a rational hypothesis of planetary formation, the dis covery of the borrowed light of the moon, and an evolutionary conception of animal and human life-made Anaxagoras at once the Copernicus and Darwin of his age. The Athenians might have forgiven him these aperfus had. he not neglected his nous in explaining the events of nature and history; perhaps they suspected that this nous, like Euripides' deus ex machina, was a device for saving the author's skin. Aristotle notes that Anaxagoras sought natural explanations everywhere."" When a ram with a single horn in the center of its forehead was brought to Pericles, and a soothsayer interpreted it as a supernatural omen, Anaxagoras had the animal's skull cleft, and showed that the brain, instead of filling both sides of the cranium, had grown upward towards the center, and so had produced the solitary horn."' He aroused the simple by giving a natural explanation of meteors, and re duced many mythical figures to personified abstractions.""
The Athenians took him good-humoredly for a time, merely nicknaming
him nous.• But when no other way could be found of weakening Pericles,
CHAP. XV)    THE   ADVANCEMENT  OF LEARNING	341
Cleon, his demagogic rival, brought a formal indictment of impiety against Anaxagoras on the charge that he had described the sun (still to the people a god) as a mass of stone on fire; and pursued the case so relentlessly that the philosopher, despite Pericles' brave defense of Wm, was convicted.• Having no taste for hemlock, Anaxagoras fled to Lampsacus on the Helles pont, where he kept himself alive by teaching philosophy.t When news was brought to him that the Athenians had condemned him to death, he said, "Nature has long since condemned both them and me.""" He died a few years later, aged seventy-three.
The backwardness of the Athenians in astronomy was reflected in their cal endar. There was no general Greek calendar: every state had its own; and each of the four possible points for beginning a new year was adopted some where in Greece; even the months changed their names across frontiers. The Attic calendar reckoned months by the moon, and years by the sun."' As twelve lunar months made only 360 days, a thirteenth month was added every second year to bring the calendar into harmony with the sun and the seasons.II& Since this made the year ten days too long, Solon introduced the custom of having alternate months of twenty-nine and thirty days, arranged into three weeks (dekades) of ten (occasionally nine) days each;88 and as an excess of four days still remained, the Greeks omitted one month every eighth year. In this incred ibly devious way they at last arrived at a year of 365 ¼ days,!


132	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VI
made their homes of it, and Praxiteles found there the translucent stone which he would carve and polish into the warmth and texture of human flesh. On this island, about the end of the eighth century, Archilochus was born, son of a slave woman, but one of the greatest lyric singers of Greece. A soldier's fortune led him north to Thasos where, in a battle with the natives, he found his heels more valuable than his shield; he took to the one and abandoned the other, and lived to turn many a merry quip about his flight. Back in Paros he fell in love with Neobule, daughter of the rich Lycambes. He describes her as a modest lass with tresses falling over her shoulders, and sighs, as so many centuries have sighed, "only to touch her hand."" But Lycambes, admiring the poet's verses more than his income, put an end to the affair; whereupon Archilochus aimed at him and Neobule and her sister such barbs of satiric verse that all three of them, legend as sures us, hanged themselves. Archilochus turned his back sourly upon the "figs and fishes" of Paros, and became again a soldier of fortune. Finally, his heels having failed him, he was killed in battle against the Naxians.
We learn from his poems that he was a man of rough speech to both friends and foes, with a disappointed lover's penchant for adultery.111 We picture him as an inspired pirate, a melodious buccaneer coarse in prose and polished in verse; taking the iambic meter already popular in folk songs and fashioning it into short and stinging lines of six feet; this was the "iambic trimeter" that would become the classic medium of Greek tragedy. He experimented gaily with dactylic hexameters, trochaic tetrameters, and a dozen other meters,* and gave to Greek poetry the metrical forms that it would keep to the end. Only a few broken lines survive, and we must accept the word of the ancients that he was the most popular of all Greek poets after Homer. Horace loved to imitate his technical diversities; and the great Hellenistic critic, Aristophanes of Byzantium, when asked which of Archilochus' poems he liked best, voiced in two words the feeling of Greece when he answered, "The longest."'"
A morning's sail west of Paros is Siphnos, famous for its mines of silver and gold. These were owned by the people through their government. The yield was so rich that the island could set up at Delphi the Siphnian Treasury with its placid caryatides, erect many another monument, and yet distribute a substantial balance among the citizens at the end of every
Longfellow's Evangeline, his Hifl'Watha, and the final line of each stanza in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, by Byron, may serve as examples respectively of dactylic hexameter, trochaic tetrameter, and iambic trimeter.
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	133
year." In 524 a band of freebooters from Samos landed on the island and exacted a tribute of a hundred talents-the equivalent of $600,000 today. The rest of Greece accepted this heroic robbery with the equanimity and fortitude with which men are accustomed to bear the misfortunes of their friends.
THE DORIAN OVERFLOW
The Dorians, too, colonized the Cyclades, and tamed their warlike spirits to terrace the mountain slopes patiently, that the parsimonious rain might be held and coaxed to nourish their crops and vines. In Melos they took over from their Bronze Age predecessors the quarrying of obsidian, and made the island so prosperous that the Athenians, as we shall see, spared no pains to Melos to win its support in the struggle with Sparta. Here, in 1820, was found that Aphrodite of Melos• which is now the most famous statue in the Western world.
.Moving east and then south, the Dorians conquered Thera and Crete, and from Thera sent a further colony to Cyrene. A few of them settled in Cyprus, where, from the eleventh century, a small colony of Arcadian Greeks had struggled for mastery against the old Phoenician dynasties. It was one of these Phoenician kinglets, Pygmalion, of whom legend told how he so admired an ivory Aphrodite carved by his hands that he fell in love with it, begged the goddess to give it life, and married his creation when the goddess complied."' The coming of iron probably lessened the demand for Cyprian copper, and left the island off the main line of Greek economic advance. The cutting of the timber by the natives to burn the copper ore, by the Phoenicians for ships and by the Greeks for agricultural clearings, slowly transformed Cyprus into the hot and half-barren derelict that it is today. The art of the island, like its population, was in the Greek period a medley of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Hellenic influences, and never attained a homogeneous character of its own:r
The Dorians were but a minority of the Greek population in Cyprus; but in Rhodes and the southern Sporades and on the adjoining mainland they became the ruling class. Rhodes prospered in the centuries between Homer and Marathon, though its zenith would not come till the Hellenistic age. On a promontory jutting out from Asia, Dorian settlers developed the city of Cnidus,
Or, as we know it, from the Roman name of the goddess and the Italian name of the island, the Venus de Milo.
t Cf. Case XIJI of the Ccsnola Collection of Cyprian Antiquities in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. A bilingual tablet uneanhed by British scholars in 1868 enabled
:hem to decipher Cypriote writing as a dialect of Greek expressed by syllabic signs; but the
!'esults have not added anything of interest to universal history.
134	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
well situated to be a port of the coastal trade. Here the astronomer Eudoxus would be born, and the l\istorian (or fabulist) Ctesias, and that Sostratus who was to build the Pharos at Alexandria. Here, among the ruins of ancient tem ples, would be found the sad and matronly Demeter of the British Muse»m.
Opposite Cnidus lay the island of Cos, home of Hippocrates and rival of Cnidus as a center of Greek medical science. Apelles the painter would be born here, and Theocritus the poet. A little to the north, on the coast, was Hali camassus, birthplace of Herodotus and royal seat, in Hellenistic days, of the Carian King Mausolus and his fond Artemisia. This city, with Cos and Cnidus and the chief towns of Rhodes (Lindus, Camirus, and Ialysus) formed the Dorian Hexapolis, or Six Cities, of Asia Minor-weak rivals, for a time, of the Twelve Cities of Ionia.
THE IONIAN DODECAPOLIS
Miletus and the Birth of Greek Philosophy
Running northwest of Caria for some ninety miles was the strip of moun tainous coastland, twenty to thirty miles wide, anciently known as Ionia. Here, said Herodotus, "the air and climate are the most beautiful in the whole world."'" Its cities lay for the most part at the mouths of rivers, or at the ends of roads, that carried the goods of the hinterland down to the Mediterranean for shipment everywhere.
Miletus, southernmost of the Ionian Twelve, was in the sixth century the richest city of the Greek world. The site had been inhabited by Carians from Minoan days; and when, about 1000 B.c., the Ionians came there from Attica, they found the old Aegean culture, though in a decadent form, waiting to serve as the advanced starting point of their civilization. They brought no women with them to Miletus, but merely killed the native males and married the widows;"° the fusion of cultures began with a fusion of blood. Like most of the Ionian cities, Miletus submitted at first to kings who led them in war, then to aristocrats who owned the land, then to "tyrants" representing the middle class. Under the dictator Thrasybulus, at the beginning of the sixth century, industry and trade reached their peak,
and the growing-wealth of Miletus flowered forth in literature, philosophy, and arr. Wool was brought down from the rich pasture lands of the interior, and turned into clothing in the textile mills of the city. Taking a lesson from the Phoenicians and gradually bettering their instruction,
Ionian merchants established colonies as trading posts in Egypt, Italy, the


The Greek nation had to pay the penalty of its development; spreading everywhere, it was bound sooner or later to come into conflict with a major power. Using water as their highway, the Hellenes had opened up a trade route that extended from the eastern coast of Spain to the farthest ports of the Black Sea. This European water route-Greco-Italian-Sicilian-com peted more and more with the Oriental land and water route-Indo-Perso Phoenician; and thereby arose a lasting and bitter rivalry in which war, by all human precedents, was inevitable, and in which the batt)es of Lade, Marathon, Plataea, Himera, Mycale, the Eurymedon, the Granicus, Issus, Arbela, Cannae, and Zama were merely incidents. The European system won against the Oriental partly because transport by water is cheaper than transport by land, and partly because it is almost a law of history that the rugged, warlike north conquers the easygoing, art-creating south.
In the year 51 2 Darius I of Persia crossed the Bosporus, invaded Scythia, and, marching westward, conquered Thrace and Macedon. When he re turned to his capitals he_ had enlarged his realm to embrace Persia, Afghanis tan, northern India, Turkestan, Mesopotamia, ·northern Arabia, Egypt, Cyprus, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, the eastern Aegean, Thrace, and Macedonia; the greatest empire that the world has yet seen had overex tended itself to include and awaken its future conqueror. Only one im portant nation remained outside this vast system of government and trade, and that was Greece. By 5 IO Darius had hardly heard of it outside Ionia. "The Athenians," he asked-"who are they?"' About 506 the dictator Hippias, deposed by revolution at Athens, fled to the Persian satrap at Sardis, begged for help in regaining his power, and offered, in that event, to hold Attica under the Persian dominion.
To this temptation there was added in 500 a timely provocation. The Greek cities of Asia Minor, under Persian rule for half a century, suddenly dismissed their satraps and declared their independence. Aristagoras of
234
CHAP.X)	THE  STRUGGLE  FOR FREEDOM	235
Miletus went to Sparta to enlist its aid, without success; he passed on to Athens, mother city of many Ionian towns, and pleaded so well that the Athenians sent a fleet of twenty ships to support the revolt. Meanwhile the lonians were acting with a chaotic vigor characteristic of the Greeks; each rebel city raised its own troops, but kept them under separate com mand; and the Milesian army, led with more bravery than wisdom, marched upon Sardis and burned the great city to the ground. The Ionian Confed eracy organized a united fleet, but the Samian contingent secretly made terms with the Persian satrap, and when, in 494, the Persian navy met the Ionian at Lade, in one of the major sea battles of history, the half hundred ships of the Samians sailed away without fighting, and many other con tingents followed their example." The defeat of the lonians was com plete, and Ionian civilization never quite recovered from this physical and spiritual disaster. The Persians laid siege to Miletus, captured it, killed the males, enslaved the women and children, and so completely plundered the city that Miletus became from that day a minor town. Persian rule was re-established throughout Ionia, and Darius, resentful of Athenian inter ference, resolved to conquer Greece. Little Athens, as the result of her generous assistance to her daughter cities, found herself face to face with an empire literally a hundred times greater than Attica.
In the year 491 a Persian fleet of six hundred ships under Daris struck across the Aegean from Samos, stopped on the way to subdue the Cyclades, and reached the coast of Euboea with 200,000 men. Euboea submitted after a brief struggle, and the Persians crossed the bay to Attica. They pitched their camp near Marathon, because Hippias had advised them that in that plain they could use their cavalry, in which they were overwhelmingly superior to the Greeks.'
All Greece was in turmoil at the news. The Persian arms had never yet been defeated, the advance of the Empire had never yet been stopped; how could a nation so weak, so scattered, so unused to unity, hold back this wave of Oriental conquest? The northern Greek states were loath to resist so monstrous a power; Sparta hesitatingly prepared, but allowed superstition to delay its mobilization; little Plataea acted quickly, and sent a large proportion of its citizens by forced marches to Marathon. At Athens Miltiades freed and enlisted slaves as well as freemen, and led them over the mountains to the battlefield. When the rival armies met, the Greeks had some twenty thousand men, the Persians probably one hundred thousand." The Persians were brave, but they were accustomed to indi vtdual fighting, and were not trained for the mass defense and attack of
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.X
the Greeks. The Greeks united discipline with c6urage, and though they committed the folly of dividing the command among ten generals, each supreme for a day, they were saved by the example of Aristides, who yielded his leadership to Miltiades.• Under this blunt soldier's vigorous strategy the small Greek force routed the Persian horde in what was not only one of the decisive battles, but also one of the most incredible vic tories, of history. If we may accept Greek testimony on such a matter, 6,400 Persians, but only 192 Greeks, fell at Marathon. After the battle was over the Spartans arrived, mourned their tardiness, and praised the victors.
ARISTIDES AND THEMISTOCLES
The strange mixture of nobility and cruelty, idealism and cynicism, in Greek character and history was illustrated by the subsequent careers of Miltiades and Aristides. Inflated by the praise of all Greece, Miltiades asked the Athenians to equip a fleet of seventy ships, to be under his un checked command. When the ships were ready Miltiades led them to Paros, and demanded of its citizens one hundred talents ($600,000) on pain of wholesale death. The Athenians recalled him and fined him fifty talents; but Miltiades died soon after, and the fine was paid by his son Cimon, the future rival of Pericles.8
The man who had yielded place to him at Marathon survived the pit falls of success. Aristides was in life and manners a Spartan at Athens. His quiet, staid character, his modest simplicity and undiscourageable hon esty won him the title of the Just; and when, in a drama of Aeschylus', the passage occurred-
For not at seeming just, but being so,
He aims; and from his depth of soil below Harvests of wise and prudent counsels grow-
all the audience turned to look at Aristides, as the living embodiment of the poet's lines.9 When the Greeks captured the camp of the Persians at Mara thon, and found great wealth in their tents, Aristides was left in charge of it, and "neither took anything for himself, nor suffered others to do it";,,, and when, after the war, the allies of Athens were induced to con tribute annually to the treasury of Delos as a fund for common defense, Aristides was chosen by them to fu: their payments, and none protested his decisions. Nevertheless, he was more admired than popular. Though
CHAP.X)	THE  STRUGGLE  FOR FREEDOM	237
a close friend of Cleisthenes, who had so extended democracy, he was of the opinion that democracy had gone far enough, and that any further empowerment of the Assembly would lead to administrative corruption and public disorder. He exposed malfeasance wherever he found it, and made many enemies. The democratic party, led by Themistocles, used Cleisthenes' recently established device of ostracism to get rid of him, and in 482 the only man in Athenian history that was at once famous and hon est was exiled at the height of his career. All the world knows-though again it may be only a fable-how Aristides inscribed his own name on the ostracon for a letterless citizen who did not know him, but who, with the resentment of mediocrity for excellence, was tired- of hearing him called the Just. When Aristides learned of the decision he expressed the hope that Athens would never have occasion to remember him.11
The historian is constrained to admit that the public men of Athens were properly equipped with the unscrupulousness that sometimes enters into statesmanship. As much as Alcibiades at a later age, Themistocles was a very flame of ability; "he has a claim on our admiration quite extraordinary and unparalleled," says the always moderate Thucydides.211 Like Miltiades, he saved Athens, but could not save himself; he could defeat a great em pire, but not his own lust for power. "He received reluctantly and care lessly," says Plutarch, "instructions given him to improve his manners and behavior, or to teach him any pleasing or graceful accomplishment; but whatever was said to improve him in sagacity, or in the management of affairs, he would give attention to beyond his years, confident in his nat ural capacity for such things."18 It was Athens' misfortune that both Themistocles and Aristides fell in love with the same girl, Stesilaus of Ceos, and that their animosity outlived the beauty that had aroused it." Nevenhe less it was Themistocles whose foresight and energy prepared for, and carried through, the vk-tory of Salamis-the most crucial battle in Greek history. As far back as 493 he had planned and begun a new harbor for Athens at the Piraeus; now, in 482, he persuaded the Athenians to forego a distribution of money due them from the proceeds of the silver mines at Laurium, and to devote the sum to the building of a hundred triremes. Without this fleet there could have been no resistance to Xerxes.
Ill.  XERXES
Darius I died in 485, and was succeeded by Xerxes I. Both father and son were men of ability and culture, and it would be an error to think of
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.X
the Greco-Persian War as a contest between civilization and barbarism. When Darius, before invading Greece, sent heralds to Athens and Sparta to demand earth and water as symbols of submission, both cities had put the heralds to death. Troubled by portents, Sparta now repented of this violation of international custom, and asked for two citizens to go to Persia and surrender themselves to any punishment that the Great King might exact in retribution. Sperthias and Bulis, both of old and wealthy families, volunteered, made their way to Xerxes, and offered to die in atonement for the killing of Darius' messengers. Xerxes, says Herodotus,"'' "answered with true greatness of soul that he would not act like the Lacedaemonians, who, by killing the heralds, had broken the laws which all men held in common. As he had blamed such conduct in them, he would never be guilty of it himself."
Xerxes prepared leisurely but thoroughly for the second Persian attack upon Greece. For four years he collected troops and materials from all the provinces of his realm; and when, in 48 1, he at last set forth, his army was probably the largest ever assembled in history before our own cen tury. Herodotus reckoned it, without moderation, at 2,641,000 fighting men, and an equal number of engineers, slaves, merchants, provisioners, and prostitutes; he tells us, with perhaps a twinkle in his eye, that when Xerxes' army drank water whole rivers ran dry.'" It was, naturally and fatally, a highly heterogeneous force. There were Persians, Medes, Baby lonians, Afghans, Indians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Sacae, Assyrians, Armenians, Colchians, Scyths, Paeonians, Mysians, Paphlagonians, Phrygians, Thra cians, Thessalians, Locrians, Boeotians, Aeolians, lonians, Lydians, Carians, Cilicians, Cypriotes, Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Libyans, and many more. There were footmen, cavalrymen, chariots, ele phants, and a fleet of transports and fighting triremes numbering, accord ing to Herodotus, 1 207 ships in all. When Greek spies were caught in the camp, and a general ordered their execution, Xerxes countermanded the order, spared the men, had them conducted through his forces, and then set them free, trusting that when they had reported to Athens and Sparta the extent of his preparations, the remainder of Greece would hasten to
-surrender."


175
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VIII
and heroes; and periodically the citizens partook of a common meal before this fire. Just as in the family the father was also the priest, so in the Greek city the chief magistrate or archon was the high priest of the state religion, and all his powers and actions were sanctified by the god. By this conscription of the supernatural, man was tamed from a hunter into a citizen.
Liberated by local independence, the religious imagination of Greece produced a luxµriant mythology and a populous pantheon. Every object or force of earth or sky, every blessing and every terror, every quality even the vices-of mankind was personified as a deity, usually in human form; no other religion has ever been so anthropomorphic as the Greek. Every, craft, profession, and art had its divinity, or, as we should say, its patron saint; and in addition there were demons, harpies, furies, fairies, gorgons, sirens, nymphs, almost as numerous as the mortals of the earth. The old question-is religion created by priests?-is here settled; it is in credible that any conspiracy of primitive g_ieologians should have begotten such a plethora of gods. It must have been a boon to have so many deities, so many fascinating legends, sacred shrines, and solemn or joyous festivals. Polytheism is as natural as polygamy, and survives as long, suiting well all the contradictory currents of the world. Even today, in Mediterranean Christianity, it is not God who is worshiped, so much as the saints; it is polytheism that sheds over the simple life the inspiring poetry of consola tory myth, and gives to the humble soul the aid and comfort that it would not venture to expect from a Supreme Being unapproachably awful and remote.
Each of the gods had a mythos, or story, attached to him, which ac
counted for his place in the city's life, or for the ritual that honored him. These myths, rising spontaneously out of the lore of the place and the people, or out of the inventions and embellishments of rhapsodists, became at once the faith and the philosophy, the literature and the history of the early Greek; from them came the subjects that adorned Greek vases, and suggested to artists countless paintings, statues, and reliefs. Despite the achievements of philosophy and the attempts of a few to preach a mono theistic creed, the people continued to the end of Hellenic civilization to create myths, and even gods. Men like Heracleitus might allegorize the myths, or like Plato adapt them, or like Xenophanes denounce them; but when Pausanias toured Greece five centuries after Plato he found still alive among the people the legends that had warmed the heart of the Homeric age. The mythopoetic, theopoetic process is natural, and goes on today as
CHAP. VIII)	THE  GODS  OF GREECE	177
always; there is a birth rate as well as a death rate of the gods; deity is like energy, and its quantity remains, through all vicissitudes of form, approxi mately unchanged from generation to generation.
AN INVENTORY OF THE GODS
The Lesser Deities
We shall force some order and clarity upon this swarm of gods if we arti ficially divide them into seven groups: sky-gods, earth-gods, fertility-gods, ani mal gods, subterranean gods, ancestor or hero gods, and Olympians. "The names of all of them," as Hesiod said, "it were troublesome for a mortal man to tell."'
Originally, so far as we can make out, the great god of the invading Greeks, as of the Vedic Hindus, was the noble and various sky itself; it was probably this sky-god who with progressing anthropomorphism became Uranus, or Heaven, and then the "cloud-compelling," rain-making, thunder-herding Zeus.• In a land surfeited with sunshine and hungry for rain, the sun, Helios, was only a minor deity. Agamemnon prayed to him," and the Spartans sacrified horses to him to draw his flaming chariot through the skies;• the Rhodians, in Hellenistic days, honored Helios as their chief divinity, flung annually into the sea four horses and a chariot for his use, and dedicated to him the famous Colossus;' and Anaxagoras almost lost his life, even in Periclean Athens, for say ing that the sun was not a god, but only a ball of fire. Generally, however, there was little worship of the sun in classic Greece; still less of the moon (Selene); least of all, of the planets or the stars.
The earth, not the heavens, was the home of most Greek gods. And first the earth itself was the goddess Ge or Gaea, patient and bountiful mother, preg nant through the embrace of raining Uranus, the sky. A thousand lesser deities dwelt on the earth, in its waters, or in its surrounding air: spirits of sacred trees, especially the oak; Nereids, Naiads, Oceanids, in rivers, lakes, or the sea; gods gushing forth as wells or springs, or flowing as stately streams like the Maeander or the Spercheus; gods of the wind, like Boreas, Zephyr, Notus, and Eurus, with their master Aeolus; or the great god Pan, the horned, cloven-footed, sensual, smiling Nourisher, god of shepherds and flocks, of woods and the wild life lurk ing in them, he whose magic flute could be heard in every brook and dell, whose startling cry brought panic to any careless herd, and whose attendants were
Phaethon (the Brilliant), son of Helios, begged for the thrill of driving the sun's chariot across the heavens. He drove it recklessly, nearly set the world on fire, was struck by light ning, and fell into the sea. Perhaps the Greeks meant this tale, like that of Icarus, to serve a'i a sermon to youth.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VIII
merry fauns and satyrs, and those old satyrs called sileni, half goat and half Socrates. Everywhere in nature there were gods; the air was so crowded with spirits of good or evil that, said an unknown poet, "There is not one empty chink into which you could push the spike of a blade of corn."'
The most mysterious and potent force in nature being reproduction, it was natural that the Greeks, like other ancient peoples, should worship the prin ciple and emblems of fertility in man and woman along with their worship of fertility in the soil. The phallus, as symbol of reproduction, appears in the rites of Demeter, Dionysus, Hermes, even of the chaste Artemis." In classical sculp ture and painting this emblem recurs with scandalous frequency. Even the Great Dionysia, the religious festival at which the Greek drama was played, was introduced by phallic processions, to which Athenian colonies piously sent phalli.T Doubtless such festivals lent themselves to much lusty humor, as one may judge from Aristophanes; but all in all the humor was healthy, and perhaps served the purpose of stimulating Eros and promoting the birth rate."
The more vulgar side of this fertility cult was expressed in the Hellenistic and Roman periods by the worship of Priapus, born of an amour between Dionysus and Aphrodite, and popular with vase painters and the mural artists o{ Pompeii. A lovelier variation of the reproductive theme was the veneration of goddesses representing motherhood. Arcadia, Argos,.Eleusis, Athens, Ephesus, and other localities gave their greatest devotion to feminine deities, often husbandless; such goddesses presumably reflect a primitive matrilinear age before the coming of marriage;" the enthronement of Zeus as Father.God over all gods represents the victory of the patriarchal principle.• The probable priority of women in agri culture may have helped to give form to the greatest of these mother deities, Demeter, goddess of the corn or the tilled earth. One of the most beautiful of Greek myths, skillfully narrated in the Hymn to Demeter once attributed to Homer, tells how Demeter's daughter Persephone, while gathering flowers, was kidnaped by Pluto, god of the underworld, and snatched down to Hades. The sorrowing mother searched for her everywhere, found her, and persuaded Pluto to let Persephone live on the earth nine months in every year-a pretty symbol for the annual death and rebirth of the soil. Because the people of Eleusis be friended the disguised Demeter as she "sat by the way, grieved in her inmost heart," she taught them and Attica the secret of agriculture, and sent Triptole mus, son of Eleusis' king, to spread the art among mankind. Essentially it- was the same myth as that of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Tammuz and Ishtar in Baby lonia, Astarte and Adonis in Syria, Cybele and Attis in Phrygia. The cult of motherhood survived through classical times to take new life in the worship of Mary the Mother of God.
Note the absence of mother goddesses in such strongly patriarchal societies as Judea,
Islam, and Protestant Christendom.
CHAP. vm)	THE  GODS  OF GREECE	179
Certain animals, in early Greece, were honored as semideities. Greek religion was too anthropomorphic, in its sculptural age, to admit the divine menageries that we find in Egypt and India; but a vestige of a less classical past appears in the frequent association of an animal with a god. Tke bull was sacred because of its strength and potency; it was often an associate, disguise, or symbol of Zeus and Dionysus, and perhaps preceded them as a god.10 In like manner the "cow-eyed Hera" may once have been a sacred cow.11 The pig too was holy because of its fertility; it was associated with the gentle Demeter; at one of her festivals, the Thesmophoria, the sacrifice was ostensibly of a pig, possibly to it.u At the feast of the Diasia the sacrifice was nominally to Zeus, really to a sub terranean snake that was now dignified with his name.  Whether the snake was
holy as supposedly deathless, or as a symbol of reproductive power, we find it passing down as a deity from the snake-goddess of Crete into fifth-century Athens; in the temple of Athena, on the Acropolis, a sacred serpent dwelt to whom, each month, a honey cake was offered in appeasing sacrifice. In Greek art a snake is often seen about the figures of Hermes, Apollo, and Asclepius;111 under the shield of Pheidias' Athene Parthenos was wreathed a mighty serpent; the Ftrrnese Athena is half covered with snakes.10 The snake was often used as a symbol or form of the guardian deity of temple or home;'1 perhaps because it prowled about tombs it was believed to be the soul of the dead.18 The Pythian games are thought to have been celebrated, at first, in honor of the dead python of Delphi.
The most terrible of the gods were under the earth. In caves and clefts and like nether chambers dwelt those chthonian or earthly deities whom the Greeks worshiped not by day with loving adoration, but at night with apotro paic rites of riddance and fear. These vague nonhuman powers were the real autochthonoi of Greece, older than the Hellenes, older perhaps than the Myce naeans, who probably transmitte!i them to Greece; if we could trace them to their origin we might find that they were the vengeful spirits of the animals that had been driven into the forests or under the soil by the advance and multi plication of men. The greatest of these subterranean deities was called Zeus Chthonios; but Zeus here meant merely god.,,, Or he was called Zeus Meilichios, the Benevolent God; but here again the words were deceptive and propitiatory, for this god was a fearful snake.-Brother to Zeus was Hades, lord of the under world that took his name. To placate him the Greeks called him Pluto, the giver of abundance, for he had it in his power to bless or blight the roots of all things that grew in the soil.• Still more ghostly and terrible was Hecate, an evil spirit that came up from the lower world and brought misfortune, through her evil
Plutus, god of wealth, was a form of Pluto. In early Greece wealth took chiefly the fonn of com eitlier growing in the earth or stored in the earth in iars, in either case under Pluto's protection.•


HE fifth century saw the zenith of Greek literature, the fourth the flowering of philosophy, the third the culmination of science. The
kings proved more tolerant and helpful to research than the democracies. Alexander sent to the Greek cities of the Asiatic coast camel loads of Bab ylonian astronomical tablets,most of which were soon translated into Greek; the Ptolemies built the Museum for advanced studies, and gathered the sci ence as well as the literature of the Mediterranean cultures into the great Library; Apollonius dedicated his Conics to Attalus I, and under the pro tection of Hieron II Archimedes drew his circles and reckoned the sand. The fading of frontiers and the establishment of a common language, the fluid interchange of books and ideas, the exhaustion of metaphysics and the weakening of the old theology, the rise of a secularly minded commercial class in Alexandria, Rhodes, Antioch, Pergamum, and Syracuse, the mul tiplication of schools, universities, observatories, and libraries, combined with wealth, industry, and royal patronage to free science from philosophy, and to encourage it in its work of enlightening, enriching, and endangering the world.
About the opening of the third century-perhaps long before it-the tools of the Greek mathematician were sharpened by the_development of a simpler no tation. The first nine letters of the alphabet were used for the digits, the next letter for 10, the next nine for 20, 30, etc., the next for 100, the next for 200, 300, and so forth. Fractions and ordinals were expressed by an acute accent after the letter; so, according to the context, i' stood for one tenth or tenth; and a small t under a letter indicated the corresponding thousand. This arithmetical short hand provided a convenient system of computation; some extant Greek papyri crowd complicated calculations, ranging from fractions to millions, into les5 space than similar reckonings would require in our own numerical notation.•
Nevertheless the greate t victories of Hellenistic science were in geometry. To this period belongs Euclid, whose name would for two thousand years pro-
These papyri are not older than Alexandria; but since they use the primitive digamma to represent 6, it is probable that the alphabetical notation antedated the Hellenistic age.
627
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVIII
vide geometry with a synonym. All that we know of his life is that he opened a school at Alexandria, and that his students excelled all others in their field; that he cared nothing about money, and when a pupil asked, "What shall I profit from learning geometry?" bade a slave give him an obol, "since he must make a gain out of what he learns";1 that he was a man of great modesty and kindliness; and that when, about 300, he wrote his famous Elements, it never occurred to him to credit the various propositions to their discoverers, because he made no pretense at doing more than to bring together in logical order the geometrical knowledge of the Greeks.• He began, without preface or apology, with simple definitions, then postulates or necessary assumptions, then "common notions" or axioms. Following Plato's injunctions, he confined himself to such figures and proofs as needed no other instruments than ruler and compasses. He adopted and perfected a method of progressive exposition and demonstration already familiar to his predecessors: proposition, diagrammatic illustration, proof, and conclu sion. Despite minor flaws the total result was a mathematical architecture that rivaled the Parthenon as a symbol of the Greek mind. Actually it outlived the Parthenon as an integral form; for until our own century the Elements of Euclid constituted the accepted textbook of geometry in nearly every European uni versity. One must go to the Bible to find a rival for it in enduring influence.
A lost work of Euclid, the Conics, summarized the studies of Menaechmus, Aristaeus, and others on the geometry of the cone. Apollonius of Perga, after years of study in Euclid1s school, took this treatise as the starting point of his own Conics, and explored in eight "books" and 387 propositions the properties of the curves generated by the intersection of a cone by a plane. To three of these curves (the fourth being the circle) he gave their lasting names-parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola. His discoveries made possible the theory of projectiles, and substantially advanced mechanics, navigation, and astronomy. His exposi tion was laborious and verbose, but his method was completely scientific; his work was as definitive as Euclid's, and its seven extant books are to this day the most original classic in the literature of geometry.
ARCHIMEDES
The greatest of ancient scientists was born at Syracuse about 287 B.c., son of the astronomer Pheidias, and apparently cousin to Hieron II, the most enlightened ruler of his time. Like many other Hellenistic Greeks who were interested in science and could afford the expense, Archimedes went to Alexandria; there he studied under the successors of Euclid, and derived
Books I and TI summarize the geometrical work of Pythagoras; Book III, Hippocrates. of Chios; Book V, Eudoxus; Books IV, VI, XI, and XII, the later Pythagorean and Atheman geometricians. Books VII-X deal with higher mathematics.
CHAP.XXVIII)  THE  CLIMAX OF GREEK  SCIENCE
an inspiration for mathematics that gave him two boons-an absorbed life and a sudden death. Returning to Syracuse, he devoted himself monas tically to every branch of mathematical science. Often, like Newton, he neglected food and drink, or the care of his body, in order to pursue the consequences of a new theorem, or to draw figures in the oil on his body, the ashes on the hearth, or the sand with which Greek geometers were wont to strew their floors." He was not without humor: in what he considered his best book, The Sphere tmd the Cylinder, he deliberately inserted false propositions (so we are assured), partly to play a joke upon the friends to whom he sent the manuscript, partly to ensnare poachers who liked to ap propriate other men's thoughts.• Sometimes he amused himself with puzzles that brought him to the verge of inventing algebra, like the famous Cattle Problem that so beguiled Lessing;' sometimes he made strange mechanisms to study the principles on which they operated. But his perennial interest and delight lay in pure science conceived as a key to the understanding of the universe rather than as a tool of practical construction or expanding wealth. He wrote not for pupils but for professional scholars, communi cating to them in pithy monographs the abstruse conclusions of his research. All later antiquity was fascinated by the originality, depth, and clarity of these treatises. "It is not possible," said Plutarch, three centuries later, "to find in all geometry more difficult and intricate questions, or more simple and lucid explanations. Some ascribe this to his natural genius; others think that these easy and unlabored pages were the result of incredible effort and toil.""
Ten of Archimedes' works survive, after many adventures in Europe and Arabia. (1) The Method explains to Eratosthenes, with whom he had formed a friendship in Alexandria, how mechanical experiments can extend geometrical knowledge. This essay ended the ruler-and-compass reign of Plato and opened the door to experimental methods; even so it reveals the different mood of ancient and modem science: the one tolerated practice for the sake of theoretical understanding, the other tolerates theory for the sake of possible practical re sults. (2) A Collection of Lemmas discusses fifteen "choices," or alternative hypotheses, in plane geometry. (3) The Measurement of a Circle arrives at a value between 3½ and 31%1 for 'It-the ratio of the circumference to the diame ter of a circle-and "squares the circle" by showing, through the method of ex haustion, that the area of a circle equals that of a right-angled triangle whose perpendicular equals the radius, and whose base equals the c cumference, of the circle. (4) The Quadrature of the Parabola studies, by a form of integral cal culus, the area cut off from _a parabola by a chord, and the problem of finding
630	THE  L IF E G-F GREECE	( CHAP. XXVIII
the area of an ellipse. (5) On Spirals defines a spiral as the figure made by a point moving from a fixed point at a uniform rate along a straight line which is revolving in a plane at a uniform rate about the same fixed point; and finds the area enclosed by a spiral curve and two radii vectores by methods approximating differential calculus. (6) The Sphere and the Cylinder seeks formulas for the volume and surface area of a pyramid, a cone, a cylinder, and a sphere. (7) On Conoids and Spheroids studies the solids generated by the revolution of conic sections about their axes. (8) The Sand-Reckoner passes from geometry to arithmetic, almost to logarithms, _by suggesting that large numbers may be repre sented by multiples, or "orders," of 10,000; by this method Archimedes expresses the number of grains of sand which would be needed to fill the universe-assum ing, he genially adds, that the universe has a reasonable size. His conclusion, which anyone may verify for himself, is that the world contains not more than sixty-three "ten-million units of the eighth order of numbers"-or, as we should put it, 1088• References to lost works of Archimedes indicate that he had also discovered a way of finding the square root of nonsquare numbers. (9) On Plane Equilibriums applies geometry to mechanics, studies the center of gravity of various bodily configurations, and achieves the oldest extant formulation of scientific statics. (IO) On Floating Bodies founds hydrostatics by arriving at mathematical formulas for the position of equilibrium of a floating body. The work begins with the then startling thesis that the surface of any liquid body at rest and in equilibrium is spherical, and that the sphere has the same center as the earth.
Perhaps Archimedes was led to the study of hydrostatics by an incident almost as famous as Newton's apple. King Hieron had given to a Syracusan Cellini some gold to be formed into a crown. When the crown was de livered it weighed as much as the gold; but some doubt arose whether the artist had made up part of the weight by using silver, keeping the saved gold for himself. Hieron turned over to Archimedes his suspicion and the crown, presumably stipulating that the one should be resolved without injuring the other. For weeks Archimedes puzzled over the problem. One day, as he stepped into a tub at the public baths, he noticed that the water overflowed according to the depth of his immersion, and that his body appeared to weigh-or press downward-less, the more it was submerged. His curious mind, exploring and utilizing every experience, suddenly for mulated ! e "principle of Archimedes"-that a floating body loses in weight an amount equal to the weight of the water which it displaces. Surmising that a submerged body would displace water according to its volume, and perceiving that this principle offered a test for the crown, Archimedes (if we may believe the staid Vitruvius) dashed out naked into the street and
CHAP. XXVIII)  THE  CL I MAX  OF  GREEK  SCIENCE	631
rushed to his dwelling, crying out "Eureka! eureka!"-I have found it! I have found it! Home, he soon dis overed that a given weight of silver, since it had more volume per weight than gold, displaced more water, when immersed, than an equal weight of gold. He observed also that the sub merged crown displaced more water than a quantity of gold equaling the crown in weight. He concluded that the crown had been alloyed with some metal less dense than gold. By replacing gold with silver in the gold weight which he was using for comparison, until the compound displaced as much water as the crown, Archimedes was able to say just how much silver had been used in the crown, and how much gold had been stolen.
That he had satisfied the curiosity of the King did not mean so much to him as that he had discovered the law of floating bodies, and a method for measuring specific gravity. He made a planetarium representing the sun, the earth, the moon, and the five planets then known (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury), and so arranging them that by turning a crank one could set all these bodies in motions differing in direction and speed;8 but he probably agreed with Plato that the laws that govern the movements of the heavens are more beautiful than the stars.* In a lost treatise partly preserved in summaries, Archimedes so accurately formulated the laws of the lever and the balance that no adva.nce was made upon his work until
A.D. 1586. "Commensurable magnitudes," said Proposition VI, "will balance at distances inversely proportional to their gravities"8-a useful truth whose brilliant simplification of complex relationships moves the soul of a scientist as the Hermes of Praxiteles moves the artist. Almost intoxicated with the vision of power which he saw in the lever and the pulley, Archimedes an nounced that if he had a fixed fulcrum to work with he could move any thing: "Pa ho, kai tcm gan kino," he is reported to have said, in the Doric dialect of Syracuse: "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth."" Hieron challenged him to do as well as say, and pointed to the difficulty which his men were experiencing in beaching a large ship in the royal fleet. Archimedes arranged a series of cogs and pulleys in such wise that he alone, sitting at one end of the mechanism, was· able to draw the fully loaded vessel out of the water onto the land.""
Delighted with this demonstration, the King asked Archimedes to design some engines of war. It was characteristic of the two men that Archimedes,
Cicero saw the apparatus two centuries later, and marveled at its complex synchronism. ''When Gallus moved the globe," he writes, "it was actually true that the moon was always as many revolutions behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the num ber of days it was behind it in the sky. Thus the same eclipse of the sun happened on the globP. as would happen in actuality.'"
632	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXVIH


All in all, the extant Jewish writings of this period may be described as a mystic or imaginative literature of instruction, edification, and consola tion. To the Jews of earlier ages life itself had been enough, and religion was not a flight from the world but a dramatization of morals by the poetry of faith; a powerful God, ruling and seeing all things, would reward vir tue and punish vice in this existence on earth. The Captivity had shaken this belief, the restoration of the Temple had renewed it; it broke down under the bludgeoning of Antiochus. Pessimism now had a clear field; and in the writings of the Greeks the Jews found the most eloquent ex posures of the injustices and tragedies of life. Meanwhile Jewish contact with Persian ideas of heaven and hell, of a struggle between good and evil,
606	T H E  L I F E  O F  G R E EC E	(CHAP. XXVI
and the final triumph of good, offered an escape from the philosophy of despair, and perhaps the ideas of immortality that had come down from Egypt to Alexandria, and those that had animated the mysteries of Greece, co-operated to inspire in the Jews of the Greek and Roman periods that consoling hope which bore them up through all the vicissitudes of their Temple and their state. From these Jews, and from the Egyptians, Per sians, and Greeks, the idea of eternal reward and punishment would flow down into a new and stronger faith, and help it to win a disintegrating world.
MENANDER
Like the other arts, the drama enjoyed in this age its greatest quantitative pros per.ity. Every city, almost every third-rate town, had its theater. The actors, better organized than ever, were in great demand, enjoyed high fees, and lived with characteristic superiority to the morals of their time. Dramatists continued to turn out tragedies, but, whether by accident or good taste, tradition has covered them with oblivion's balm. The mood of Hellenistic Athens, like ours today, preferred the lighthearted, lightheaded, sentimental, happy-ending stories of the New Comedy. Of this, too, only fragments remain; but we have some discouraging samples of it in the pilferings of Plautus and Terence, who com posed their plays by translating and adapting Hellenistic comedies. The high concerns of state and soul that aroused Aristophanes are in the New Comedy put aside as too perilous for the literary neck; usually the theme is domestic or private, and traces the devious roads by which women are led to generosity, and men nevertheless to matrimony. Love enters upon its triumphant career as master of the boards; a thousand damsels in distress cross the stage, but achieve honor and wedlock in the end. The old phallic dress is abandoned, and the old phallic bawdiness; but the story circles narrowly about the virginity of the leading lady, and virtue plays as small a role in it as in our daily press. Since the actors wore masks, and the number of masks was limited, the comic dramatist wove his plots of intrigue and mistaken identity around a few stock characters whom the audience was always delighted to recognize-the cruel father, the benevolent old man, the prodigal son, the heiress mistaken for a poor girl, the bragging soldier, the clever slave, the flatterer, the parasite, the physician, the priest, the philosopher, the cook, the courtesan, the procuress, and the pimp.
The masters of this comedy of manners in third-century Athens were Phi lemon and Menander. Of Philemon hardly anything survives except the echo of his renown. The Athenians liked him better than Menander, and gave him more prizes; but Philemon had raised to high excellence the art of organizing a claque. Posterity, being ignored in the subsidy, reversed the judgment, and gave
CHAP. XXVI)	BOOKS	6o7
the crown to Menander's bones. This Congreve of Athens was a nephew of the fertile dramatist Alexis of Thurii, the pupil of Theophrastus, and the friend of Epicurus; from them he learned the secrets of drama, philosophy, and tran quillity. He almost realized Aristotle's ideal: he was handsome and rich, con templated life with serenity and understanding, and took his pleasures like a gentleman. He was an inconstant lover, content to repay Glycera's devotion by touching her name with immortality. When Ptolemy I invited him to Alex andria he sent Philemon in his stead, saying, "Philemon has no Glycera"; Gly cera, who had suffered much, rejoiced at having triumphed over a king.10 There after, we are assured, he lived faithfully with her until, at the age of fifty-two, he died of a cramp while swimming at the Piraeus (292).1"
His first play, as if announcing a new epoch, appeared in the year that fol lowed Alexander's death. Thereafter he wrote one hundred and four comedies, eight of which won the first prize. Some four thousand lines remain, all in brief fragments except for a papyrus discovered in Egypt in 1905; this contains half of the Epitrepontes, or The Arbitrants, and has lowered Menander's reputation. We shall waste our reproaches if we complain that the themes of these plays are as monotonous as those of Greek sculpture, architec'.:ure, and pottery; we must remind ourselves that the Greeks judged a work not by the story it told-which is a child's criterion-but by the manner of its telling. What the Greek mind relished in Menander was the neat polish of his style, the philosophy concen trated in his wit, and so realistic a portrayal of common scenes that Aristophanes of Byzantium asked, "O Menander,0  Life, which of you imitated the other?""
In a world that had fallen forfeit to soldiers nothing remained, in Menander's
view, but to contemplate human affairs as a spectator indulgent but uninvolved. He notes the vanities and vacillations of woman, but concedes that the average wife is a blessing. The action of The Arbitrants turns in part upon a rejection of the double standard;18 and of course one play is about the virtuous prostitute who, like Dumas' Lady of the Camellias, refuses the man whom she loves in order to get him respectably married to a profitable wife.10 Lines that are now proverbs appear in the fragments, like "Evil communications corrupt good manners" (quoted by St. Paul'"'), and "Conscience makes cowards of the bravest men";m some credit Menander with the original of Terence's famous line-Homo sum, bumani nil a me alienum puto-"1 am a man, and consider nothing human to be alien to me." Occasionally we come upon jewels of insight, as in "Everything that dies dies by its own corruption; all that injures is within";111or in these typical verses, prophetic of Menander's early death:
Whom the gods love, die young; that man is blest Who, having viewed at ease this solemn show
Of sun, stars, ocean, fire, doth quickly go Back to his home with calm uninjured breast.
608	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
Be life or short or long, 'tis manifest
Thou ne'er wilt see things goodlier, Parmeno, Than these; then take thy sojourn here as though Thou wert some playgoer or wedding guest,
The sooner sped, the safelier to thy rest.
Well-furnished, foe to none, with strength at need, Shalt thou return; while he who tarries late
Faints on the road out-worn, with age oppressed, Harassed by foes whom life's dull tumults breed; Thus ill dies he for whom death long doth wait.•
(CHAP. XXVI
THEOCRITUS
When Philemon died (262) Greek comedy, and in large measure Athenian literature, died with him. The theater flourished, but it produced no master pieces that time or scholarship thought fit to preserve; and the repetition of old comedies-chiefly those of Menander and Philemon-more and more crowded out original productions. As the third century ended, the spirit of the gay so ciety that had generated the New Comedy died away, and was replaced in Athens by the serious mood of the philosophical schools. Other cities, Alex andria in particular, tried to transplant the dramatic art, but failed.
The great Library and the scholars whom it had attracted set the tone of Alex andrian literature. Books had to meet the tastes of a learned and critical audi ence, sophisticated by science and history. Even poetry became erudite, and tried to cover up the poverty of its fancy with recondite allusions and subtle turns of phrase. Callimachus wrote dead hymns to dead gods, pretty epigrams that sparkled for a day, judicious eulogies like Tbe Lock of Berenice, and a didactic poem on Causes ( Aitia) which contained much learned lore from ge ography, mythology, and history, and one of the earliest love stories in literature. Acontius, hero of this tale, is incredibly handsome, and Cydippe is painfully beautiful; they fall in love at first sight, are opposed by their money-minded parents, threaten suicide, half die of broken hearts, and finally end the romance with marriage; this is the story that a million poets and novelists have told since then, and which a million more will tell. It must be added, however, that in one of his epigrams Callimachus returned to more orthodox Greek tastes:
Drink now, and love, Democrates; for we Shall not have wine and boys eternally."'
His only rival in his century was his pupil Apollonius of Rhodes. When the student poached upon the master's verses and competed for the favor of the Ptolemies, the two men quarreled in life and print, and Apollonius returned to


In the Oeconomicus, however, Xenophon speaks in his own right, and with such frank conservatism that we are charmed despite ourselves. Asked for instruction in agriculture, Socrates modestly confesses his ignorance, but recalls the advice and example of the rich landowner Ischomachus. The latter voices the knightly Xenophon's disdain for any occupation except husbandry and war. He expounds not only the secrets of successful tillage, but the art of managing one's property and one's wife. In pages that for a moment rival the grace of Plato, Ischomachus tells how he taught his bride-only half his age-the business of caring for the home, keeping all things in place, governing her servants with kindness but without familiar ity, and building a good name for herself not through artificial beauty but through a faithful performance of her obligations as wife, mother, and friend. In the view of Ischomachus-Xenophon marriage is an economic as well as a physical association, and decays when the silent partner does all the work. Perhaps the readiness with which the young bride accepts all this is merely the devout wish of a general who won no victories on the domestic battlefield; but we should be willing to believe everything in the account except the tale of how lschomachus, with but a moment's reason ing, persuaded his wife to abandon powder and rouge.20
Having expounded the art of marriage, Xenophon describes in the Cyro paedia (i.e., The Education of Cyrus) his ideals of schooling and govern ment, as if in answer to Plato's Republic. Cleverly adapting fictitious biog raphy to the uses of philosophy, he gives an imaginary account of the training, career, and administration of Cyrus the Great. He makes the story dramatically personal, enlivens it with dialogue, and decorates it with the oldest romantic love story in extant literature. He almost ignores cultural education,. and concentrates upon making the boy a healthy, able, and honorable man; the youth learns the virile sports, the arts of war, the habit of silent obedience, and finally the capacity for effective and persuasive command over subordinates. The best government, Xenophon thinks, is
CHAP. XX)  LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY	491
an enlightened monarchy supported and checked by an aristocracy de voted to agricultural and military pursuits. He admires the laws of Persia for rewarding good as well as punishing evil,21 and points out to the in dividualistic Greeks, from the example of Persia, the possibility of uniting many cities and states in• an empire enjoying internal order and peace. Xenophon began, like Philip, with a vision of conquest; he ends, like Alex ander, captivated by the people whom he thought to conquer.
He is a masterly storyteller, but a middling philosopher. He is an ama teur in everything but war; he considers a hundred subjects, but always from the viewpoint of a general. He exaggerates the virtues of order and has not a word to say for liberty; we may judge from this how far disorder had gone in Athens. If antiquity ranked him with Herodotus and Thucyd ides it must have been because of his style-the fresh charm of its Attic purity, the harmonious flo of a prose that Cicero called "sweeter than honey,"'" the human touches of personality, the transparent simplicity of language that allows the reader to see through the clear medium the
thought or subject in hand. Xenophon and Plato stand to Thucydides and Socrates in the same relation as Apelles and Praxiteles to Polygnotus and Pheidias-the culmination of artistry and grace after an age of creative originality and power.
APELLES
The highest excellence of the fourth century lay not in literature but in philosophy and art. In art, as in politics, the individual liberated himself from the temple, the state, the tradition, and the school. As patriotic devotion yielded to private loyalties, architecture took on a more modest scale, and became increasingly secular; the great choral forms of music and dance made way for pr vate performances by professionals; painting and sculpture continued to adorn public buildings with the representation of gods or noble human types, but at the same time they entered upon that service and portrayal of living individuals which characterized the succeeding age. Where cities could still afford to patronize art on a national scale it was because-like Cnidus, Hali camassus, or Ephesus-they had not been deeply touched by war, or, like Syracuse, had found in natural resources and governmental order the means of a rapid recovery.
On the mainland architecture marked time. In 338 Lycurgus rebuilt the Theater of Dionysus, the Stadium, and the Ly,;:eum; and under his adminis tration Philon raised an impressive arsenal at the Piraeus. As the tendency to a delicate refinement increased, the Doric order became less fashionable, irs-
492	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XX
stem simplicity finding no counterpart in the soul; the Ionic style rose in popularity, and served as an architectural analogue to Praxiteles' elegance and Plato's charm; while the Corinthian order made modest conquests in the Tower of the Winds and the choragic monument of Lysicrates. At Arcadian Tegea Scopas raised a temple of Athena in all three styles-one colonnade Doric, another Ionic, another Corinthian28-and beautified it with statuary from his own masculine hand.
Vaster and more famous was the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The second temple had burned down on the day of Alexander's birth in 356, a coin cidence which, says the usually kindly Plutarch, Hegesias of Magnesia "made the occasion of a conceit frigid enough to have stopped the conflagration.'* The new building was begun soon afterward, and was completed by the end of the century. Alexander offered to bear the whole cost of the work if his name as donor were recorded on the edifice; but the proud Greeks of Ephesus refused for the disarming (or possibly satirical) reason that "it was not meet for one god to build a temple to another.''"' Nevertheless, Alexander's favorite architect, Dinocrates, designed the temple, on a scale that made it the largest in Bellas. Thirty-six of the columns were carved with bas-reliefs by various sculptors, including the ubiquitous Scopas; one sculptured column drum sur vives in the British Museum, as if to prove by its drapery alone that Greek sculpture was still near the height of its curve. The heads of the figures are not immobile and idealized types, but individualized faces alive with feeling and character-a premonition of Hellenistic realism.
At the opposite extreme of size the fourth century distinguished itself in terra-cotta statuettes. Boeotian Tanagra made its name synonymous with little figures in baked and unglazed clay, cast in generalized types but then molded and painted by hand into a thousand individual shapes quick with the color and variety of common life. As in earlier centuries, painting was called in to aid other arts; but now it acquired an independent status and dignity, and its mas ters received commissions from all the Greek world. Pamphilus of Amphipolis, who taught Apelles, refused to take any pupil for less than twelve years, and charged $6000 for the course. Mnason, dictator of Locrian Elatea, paid ten minas for each of the hundred figures in a battle scene by Aristides of Thebes, making $100,000 for one painting; and the same enthusiast gave Asclepiodorus
$360,000 for a panel of the twelve major Olympians. Lucullus paid $12,000
for a copy of the portrait that Pausias of Sicyon had painted of Menander's mistress Glycera.• A picture by Apelles, says Pliny, sold for a sum equal to the treasuries of whole cities."'
"Apelles of Cos," says the same enthusiastic amateur, "surpassed all the other painters who either preceded or succeeded him. Singlehanded, he
CHAP. xx)  LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY	493
contributed more to painting than all the others together.',. Apelles must have been supreme in his day and art, since he could afford the rare extrava gance of praising other painters. Learning that his greatest rival, Protog enes, was living in poverty, Apelles sailed for Rhodes to visit him. Pro togenes, unwarned, was not in his studio when Apelles came. An old woman attendant asked Apelles whom she should name as visitor when her master returned. Apelles replied only by taking a brush and tracing upon a panel, with one stroke, an outline of exceeding fineness. When Protogenes came back the old woman regretted that she could not tell him the name of his departed visitor; but Protogenes, seeing the outline and noting its deli
cacy, exclaimed: "Only Apelles could have drawn that line." Then he drew a still finer line within that of Apelles, and bade the woman show it if the stranger should return. Apelles came, marveled at the absent; Protog enes' skill, but drew, between the two lines, a third of such slenderness and grace that when Protogenes saw it he confessed himself surpassed, and rushed to the harbor to detain and welcome Apelles. The panel was trans mitted as a masterpiece from generation to generation, until it was bought by Julius Caesar and perished in the fire that destroyed his palace on the
Palatine Hill. Anxious to awaken the Greek world to Protogenes' worth, Apelles asked him what he wanted for some of his paintings; Protogenes mentioned a modest sum, but Apelles offered him, instead, fifty talents ($300,000), and then circulated a report that he intended to sell these works as his own. The Rhodians, aroused to a better appreciation of their artist, paid Protogenes more than the sum Apelles had named, and kept the pic tures among the public treasures of the city.•
Apelles meanwhile had captured the plaudits of the Greek world by his painting of Aphrodite Anadyomene-i.e., Aphrodite rising from the sea. Alexander sent for him, and sat for many portraits. The young conqueror was not satisfied with the representation of his horse Bucephalus in one of these pictures, and had the animal brought closer to the panel for compari son. Bucephalus, looking at the picture, whinnied; whereupon Apelles remarked, "Your Majesty's horse seems to know more about painting than you do."80 On another occasion, when the King was holding forth about art in Apelles' studio, Apelles begged him to talk of anything else, lest the boys who were grinding the colors should laugh at him. Alexander took it good-naturedly; and when he engaged the artist to paint his favorite con cubine, and Apelles fell in love with her, the King sent her to him as a gift.11
-Over his finished pictures Apelles painted a thin coat of varnish, which preserved the colors, softened their glare, and yet made them livelier than
494	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XX
before. He worked to the last, and death came upon him while he was once more delineating the eternal Aphrodite.
PRAXITELES