Sexual morality was relaxed even beyond the loose standards of the Periclean age. Homosexualism remained popular; the youth Delphis "is in love," says Theocritus' Simaetha, "but whether for a woman or for a man. I cannot say.".., The courtesan still reigned: Demetrius Poliorcetes levied a tax of two hundred and fifty talents ($750,000) upon the Athenians, and then gave it to his mistress Lamia on the ground that she needed it for soap; which led the angry Athenians to remark how unclean the lady must be... Dances of naked women were accepted as part of the mores, and were performed before a Macedonian king... Athenian life was portrayed in Menander's plays as a round of triviality, seduction, and adultery.
Greek women participated actively in the cultural pursuits of the time, and contributed to letters, science, philosophy, and art. Aristodama of Smyrna gave recitals of her poetry throughout Greece, and received many honors. Some philosophers, like Epicurus, did not hesitate to admit women into their schools. Literature began to stress the physical loveliness of woman rather than her worth and charm as a mother; the literary cult of feminine beauty arose in this period alongside the poetry and fiction of romantic love. The partial emancipation of woman was accompanied by a revolt against wholesale maternity, and the limitation of the family became the outstanding social phenomenon of the age. Abortion was punishable only if practiced by a woman against the wish of her husband, or at the instigation of her seducer. When a child came it was in many cases exposed. Only one family in a hundred, in the old Greek cities, reared more than one daughter: "Even a rich man," reports Poseidippus, "always exposes a daugh ter." Sisters were a rarity. Families with no child, or only one, w.ere
568	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXlII
numerous. Inscriptions enable us to trace the fertility of seventy-nine families in Miletus about 200 u.c.: thirty-two had one child, thirty-one had two; altogether they had one hundred and eighteen sons and twenty-eight daughters... At Eretria only one family in twelve had two sons; hardly any had two daughters. Philosophers condoned infanticide as reducing the pressure of population; but when the lower classes took up the practice on a large scale, the death rate overtook the birth rate. Religion, which had once frightened men into fertility lest their dead souls be untended, no longer had the power to outweigh considerations of comfort and cost. In the colonies immigration replaced the old families; in Attica and the Pelo ponnesus immigration trickled down to a negligible figure, and population declined. In Macedonia Philip V forbade the limitation of the family, and in thirty years raised the man power of the country fifty per cent;"' we may judge from this how widespread the practice of limitation had become, even in half-primitive Macedon. "In our time," wrote Polybius about
150 B.C.,
the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a gen eral decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit   For as men had
fallen into such a state of luxury, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or, if they married, to rear the children born to them, or at most but one or two of them, so as to leave these in afflu ence and bring them up to waste their substance-the evil insensibly but rapidly grew. For in cases where, of one or two children, the one was carried off by war and the other by sickness, it was evident that the houses must have been left empty  and by small degrees cities
became resourceless and feeble.""
IV. REVOLUTION IN SPARTA
Meanwhile that concentration of wealth, which everywhere in Greece was enflaming the eternal conflict of classes, produced in Sparta two at tempts at revolutionary reform. Isolated by its mountain barriers, Sparta had maintained its independence, had fought back the Macedonians, and had bravely defeated the immense army of Pyrrhus ( 2 72).  But the greed of the strong generated from within the ruin that enemy forces had failed to bring from without. The Lycurgean laws against alienating the land from the family by sale, or dividing it in bequests, had been abrogated,t? and the fortunes made by Spartans in empire or war had gone to buyi11g
Perhaps because the latter had led to family limitation, as in modem France.
CHAP.XXIII)	GREECE  AND MACEDON
up the soil.11 By 244 the 700,000 acres of Laconia were owned by one hun dred families,.. and only seven hundred men had preserved ,the rights of citizenship. Even these no longer ate in common; the poor could not make the necessary contribution, while the rich preferred to feast in private. A large majority of the families that had once enjoyed the franchise had sunk into poverty, and called for a cancellation of debts and a redivision of the land.
It is to the credit of monarchy that the attempt to reform this condition came from the Spartan kings. In 242 Agis IV and Leonidas succeeded to the dual throne. Convinced that Lycurgus had meant the land to be equally divided among all freemen, Agis proposed to redistribute it, to annul all debts, and to restore the semicommunism of Lycurgus. Those landowners whose property was mortgaged supported the move for cancellation; but when the measure nad been passed they resisted violently the remaining elements of Agis' reforms. At the instigation of Leonidas, Agis was mur dered, along with his mother and his grandmother, both of whom had vol unteered to surrender their great estates for division among the people. In this royal drama the noblest characters were women. Chilonis, daughter of Leonidas, was the wife of Cleombrotus, who supported Agis. When Leonidas was exiled, and Cleombrotus seized his throne, Chilonis left her triumphant husband to share her father's banishment; when Leonidas re captured power and exiled Cleombrotus, Chilonis chose exile with her hus band.•
Leonidas, to get the rich property of Agis' widow into his family, com pelled her to marry his son Cleomenes. But Cleomenes fell in love with his wife, and imbibed from her the ideas of the dead king. When he came to the throne as Cleomenes III he resolved to carry out Agis' reforms. Having won over the army by his courage in war, and the people by the simplicity of his life, he abolished the oligarchic ephorate on the ground that Lycurgus had never sanctioned it; he killed fourteen resisters, exiled eighty, canceled all debts, divided the land among the free population, and restored the Lycurgean discipline. Not content, he set out to conquer the Peloponnese for the revolution. The proletariat everywhere hailed ham as a liberator, and many towns surrendered to him gladly; he took Argos, Pellene, Phlius, Epidaurus, Hermione, Troezen, at last even rich Corinth. The ferment of his program spread: in Boeotia the payment of debts was abandoned, and the state appropriated funds to appease the poor; in Megalopolis the philosopher Cercidas pied with the rich to aid the needy before revolution destroyed all wealth.• When Cleomenes invaded Achaea and defeated Aratus all upper-class Greece trembled for its prop-
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIII
erty. Aratus appealed to Macedonia. Antigonus Doson came down, over whelmed Cleomenes at Sellasia ( 2 2 r), and restored the oligarchic regime in Lacedaemon. Cleomenes fled to Egypt, tried and failed to win the help of Ptolemy III, tried and failed to rouse the Alexandrians to revolution, and killed himself."
The class war continued. A generation after Cleomenes the people of Sparta overthrew the government, and set up a revolutionary dictatorship. Philopoemen, who had succeeded Aratus as head of the Achaean League, invaded Laconia, and restored the rule of property. As soon as Philopoe men had gone the people rose again, and set up Nabis as dictator: (207). Nabis was a Syrian Semite who had been captured in war and sold into slavery at Megalopolis; smarting under suppressed ability, he had revenged himself by organizing a revolt among the Helots. Now he gave Spartan citizenship to all freemen, and freed all the Helots with one word. When the rich obstructed him he confiscated their wealth and cut off their heads. The news of his doings went abroad, and he found it a simple matter, with the help of the poorer classes, to conquer Argos, Messenia, Elis, and part of Arcadia. Everywhere he nationalized large estates, redistributed the land, and abolished debts... The Achaean League, unable to overthrow him, appealed to Rome for aid. Flamininus came, but Nabis offered so resolute a resistance that the Roman accepted a truce by which Nabis was to release the imprisoned rich, but would retain his power. At this juncture Nabis was assassinated by an agent of the Aetolian League ( r92) :• Four years later Philopoemen marched in again, propped up the oligarchs, abol ished the Lycurgean regimen, and sold three thousand of Nabis' followers into slavery. The revolution was ended, but so was Sparta; it continued to exist, but it played no further part in the history of Greece.
V. THE ASCENDANCY OF RHODES
Frightenerl by the violence of faction and drawn by the movements of popu Jation, trade and capital passed from the mainland and sought new havens in the Aegean. Delos, once rich through A?ollo, flourished in the second century as a free port under the protection of Rome and the management of Athens. The tittle isle was crowded with alien merchants, business offices, palaces and hovels, and the diverse temples of exotic faiths.
Rhodes reached her zenith in the third century, and was then by common consent the most civilized and beautiful city in Hellas. Strabo described the great port as "so far superior to all others in harbors, roads, walls, and improve-
CHAP.XXIII)	GREECE  AND  MACEDON	571
ments that I am unable to speak of any other city as equal to it, or even as almost equal to it."'0 Situated at one of the crossroads of the Mediterranean, in a posi tion to take advantage of that expanding trade which Alexander's conquests had made possible between Europe, Egypt, and Asia, Rhodes' spacious harbors re placed Tyre and the Piraeus as a port of reshipment for goods, and as a clearing house for the organization and financing of commerce in the eastern sea. Her merchants established a profitable reputation for honesty, her banks and her government for stability, in a world of treachery and change; her powerful fleet, manned by her citizens, cleared the Aegean of pirates, maintained an equal security for the merchant vessels of all nations, and established a code of mari time law so ably devised and so widely accepted that it governed Mediterranean trade for centuries, and passed down into the marine law of Rome, Constanti nople, and Venice.
Having freed herself from Macedonian domination by her heroic resistance_ to Demetrius Poliorcetes (305), Rhodes steered successfully through the troubled poUtics of the age by maintaining a wise neutrality, or by going to war only to check the growth of an aggressor state, or to preserve the freedom of the seas. She united many of the Aegean cities in an "Island League," and exercised her pr idency so fairly that no one questioned her right to lead. Her government an aristocracy resting on a democratic base as in republican Rome-ruled the synoecized cities of Lindus, Camirus, Ialysus, and Rhodes with skill and com parative justice, gave to alien residents such privileges as Athens had never yielded to her metics, protected a large population of slaves so well that when in danger it dared to arm them, and laid upon the rich men of the city the obliga tion to take care of the poor.u The state met its expenses by a two per cent tax upon imports and exports. It lent money generously, sometimes without inter est, to cities in distress.
When Rhodes herself was physically ruined by an earthquake (225), all the Greek world came to her aid, for everyone recognized that her disappearance from the Aegean would lead to commercial and financial chaos. Hieron II sent one hundred gold talents ($300,000), and set up in the restored city a statuary group showing the people of Rhodes being crowned by the people of Syracuse. Ptolemy III sent three hundred talents• of silver; Antigonus III sent three thou sand, together with great quantities of timber and pitch for building; his queen Chryseis gave three thousand talents of lead, and 150,000 bushels of com. Seleu cus III sent 300,0Qo bushels of com and ten fully equipped quinqueremes. "As for the towns that contributed each according to its means," says Polybius, "it would be difficult to enumerate them."'" It was a bright interlude in the dark annals of political history, one of the rare occasions when all the Greek world thought and acted as one.


The state specified the best age of marriage as thirty for men and twenty for women. Celibacy in Spana was a crime; bachelors were excluded from the franchise, and from the sig ublic processions in which young men and women danced in the nude. According to Plutarch the bachelors them selves were compelled to march in public, naked even in winter, singing a song to the effect that they were justly suffering this punishment for hav ing disobeyed the laws. Persistent avoiders of marriage might be set upon at any time in the streets by groups of women, and be severely handled.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IV
Those who married and had no children were only less completely dis graced; and it was understood that men who were not fathers were not entitled to the respect that the youth of Sparta religiously paid to their elders.•
Marriages were usually arranged by the parents, without purchase; but after this agreement the bridegroom was expected to carry off the bride by force, and she was expected to resist; the word for marriage was httrpadzein, to seize... If such arrangements left some adults still unmarried, several men might be pushed into a dark room with an equal number of girls, and be left to pick their life mates in the darkness;00 the Spartans thought that such choosing would not be blinder than love. It was usual for the bride to stay with her parents for a while; the bridegroom remained in his barracks, and visited his wife only clandestinely; "in this relation," says Plutarch, "they lived a long time, insomuch that they sometimes had children by their wives before even they saw their faces by daylight." When they were ready for parentage custom allowed them to set up a home. Love came after mar riage rather than before, and marital affection appears to have been as strong in Sparta as in any other civilization.11 The Spartans boasted that there was no adultery among them, and they may have been right, for there was much freedom before marriage, and many husbands could be persuaded to share their wives, especially with brothers.• Divorce was rare. The Spartan general Lysander was punished because he left his wife and wished to marry a prettier one.•
All in all,' the position of woman was better in Sparta than in any other
Greek community. There more than elsewhere she preserved her high Homeric status, and the privileges that survived from an early matrilinear society. Spartan women, says Plutarch," "were bold and masculine, over bearing to their husbands . . . and speaking openly even on the most im portant subjects." They could inherit and bequeath property; and in the course of time-so great was their influence over men-nearly half the real wealth of Sparta was in their hands.• They lived a life of luxury and liberty at home while the men bore the brunt of frequent war, or dined on simple fare in the public mess.
For every Spartan male, by a characteristic ordinance of the constitution, was required from his thirtieth to his sixtieth year to eat his main meal daily in a public dining hall, w ere the food was simple in quality and slightly but deliberately inadequate in amount. In this way, says Plutarch,
CHAP.IV)	SPARTA	85
the legislator thought to harden them to the privations of war, and to keep them from the degeneration of peace; they "should not spend their lives at home, laid on costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves up to the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, to fatten them in comers like greedy brutes, and to ruin not their minds only but their very bodies, which, enfeebled by indulgence and excess, would stand in need of long sleep, warm bathing, freedom from work, and, in a word, of as much care and attendance as if they were continually sick.".. To supply the food for this public meal each citizen was required to contribute to his dining club, periodically, stated quantities of com and .other provisions; if he failed in this his citizenship was forfeited.
Normally, in the earlier centuries of the code, the simplicity and asceti cism to which Spartan youth was trained persisted into later years. Fat men were a rarity in Lacedaemon; there was no law regulating the size of the stomach, but if a man's belly swelled indecently he might be publicly reproved by the government, or banished from Laconia.• There was little of the drinking and the revelry that flourished in Athens. Diffel'ences of wealth were real, but hidden; rich and poor wore the same simple dress a woolen peplos, or shirt, that hung straight from the shoulders without pretense to beauty or form. The accumulation of movable riches was diffi cult; to lay up a hundred dollars' worth of iron currency required a large closet, and to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen.68 Human greed remained, however, and found an outlet in official corruption. Senators, ephors, envoys, generals, and kings were alike purchasable, at prices befit ting their dignity."" When an ambassador from Samos displayed his gold plate at Sparta, King Cleomenes I had him recalled lest the citizens be spoiled by alien example.10
The Spartan system, fearful of such contamination, was inhospitable beyond precedent. Foreigners were rarely welcomed. Usually they were made to understand that their visits must be brief; if they stayed too long they were escorted to the frontier by the police. The Spartans themselves were forbidden to go abroad without permission of the government, and to dull their curiosity they were trained to a haughty exclusiveness that would not dream that other nations could teach them anything." The sys tem had to be ungracious in order to protect itself; a breath from that excluded world of freedom, luxury, letters, and arts might topple over this strange and artificial society, in which two thirds of the people were serfs, and all the masters were slaves.
86	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
An Estimate of Sparta
What type of man, and what kind of civilization, did this code produce? First of all, a man of strong body, at home with hardship and privation. A luxury-loving Sybarite remarked of the Spartans that "it was no com mendable thing in them to be so ready to die in the wars, since by that they were freed from much hard labor and miserable living."'111 Health was one of the cardinal virtues in Sparta, and sickness was a crime; Plato's heart must have been gladdened to find a land so free from medicine and democ racy. And here was courage; only the Roman would equal the Spartan's record for fearlessness and victory. When the Spartans surrendered at Sphacteria, Greece could hardly believe it; it was unheard of that Spartans
should not fight to the last man; even their common soldiers, on many occasions, killed themselves rather than survive defeat.'18 When the news of the Spartan disaster at Leuctra-so overwhelming that in effect it put an end to Sparta's history-was brought to the ephors as they presided over the Gymnopedia games, the magistrates said nothing, but merely added, to the roster of the holy deaq whom the games honored, the names of the newly slain. Self-control, moderation, equanimity in fortune and adver sity-qualities that the Athenians wrote about but seldom showed-were taken for granted in every Spartan citizen.
If it be a virtue to obey the laws, the Spartan was virtuous beyond most men. "Though the Lacedaemonians are free," the ex-king Demaratus told Xerxes, "yet they are not free in all things; for over them is set law as a master, whom they fear much more than thy people fear thee."" Sel dom-probably never again except in Rome and medieval Jewry-has a peo ple been so strengthened by reverence for its laws. Under the Lycurge:t.n constitution Sparta, for at least two centuries, became always stronger. Though it failed to conquer Argos or Arcadia, it persuaded all the Pelo ponnesus except Argos and Achaea to accept its leadership in a Peloponne sian League that for almost two hundred years (560-380) kept the peace in Pelops' isle. All Greece admired Sparta's army and government, and looked to it for aid in deposing burdensome tyrannies. Xenophon tells of "the astonishment with which I first noted the unique position of Sparta among the states of Hellas, the relatively sparse population, and at the same time the extraordinary power and prestige of the community. I was puzzled to account for the fact. It was only when I came to consider the peculiar institutions of the Spartans that my wonderment ceased.',.,. Like Plato and Plutarch, Xenophon was never tired of praising Spartan ways.
CHAP.IV)	SPARTA
Here it was, of course, that Plato found the outlines of his utopia, a little blurred by a strange indifference to Ideas. Weary and fearful of the vul garity and chaos of democracy, many Greek thinkers took refuge in an idolatry of Spanan order and law.
They could afford to praise Sparta, since they did not have to live in it. They did not feel at close range the selfishness, coldness, and cruelty of the Spartan character; they could not see from the select gentlemen whom they met, or the heroes whom they commemorated from afar, that the Spartan code produced good soldiers and nothing more; that it made vigor of body a graceless brutality because it killed nearly all capacity for the things of the mind. With the triumph of the code the arts that had flour ished before its establishment died a sudden death; we hear of no more poets, sculptors, or builders in Sparta after 550.* Only choral dance and music remained, for there Spartan discipline could shine, and the individ ual could be lost in the mass. Excluded from commerce with the world, barred from travel, ignorant of the science, the literature, and the philoso phy of exuberantly growing Greece, the Spartans became a nation of excel lent hoplites, with the mentality of a lifelong infantryman. Greek travelers marveled at a life so simple and unadorned, a franchise so jealously con fined, a conservatism so tenacious of every custom and superstition, a cour age and discipline so exalted and limited, so noble in character, so base in purpose, and so barren in result; while, hardly a day's ride away, the Athe nians were building, out of a thousand injustices and errors, a civilization broad in scope and yet intense in action, open to eve1y new idea and eageir for intercourse with the world, tolerant, varied, complex, luxurious, inno vating, skeptical, imaginative, poetical, turbulent, free. It was a contrast that would color and almost delineate Greek history.
In the end Spana's narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of
soul. She descended to the sanctioning of any means to gain a Spartan aim; at last she stooped so far to conquer as to sell to Persia the liberties that Athens had won for Greece at Marathon. Militarism absorbed her, and made her, once so honored, the hated terror of her neighbors. When she fell, all the nations marveled, but none mourned. Today, among the scanty ruins of that ancient capital, hardly a torso or a fallen pillar sur vives to declare that here there once lived Greeks.
Gitiadas adorned a temple of Athena with excellently wrought bronze plates; Bathycles of Magnesia built the stately throne of Apollo at Amyclae; and Theodorus of Samos built for Spana a famous town hall. After that Spartan art, even by imported artists, is hardly heard of anymore.
88	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
FOR N STATES
Northward from Sparta the valley of the Eurotas reaches across the frontier of Laconia into the massed mountains of Arcadia. They would be more beautiful if they were not so dangerous. They have not welcomed the narrow roads cut out of their rock slopes, and seem to threaten gloom ily all disturbers of these Arcadian retreats. No wonder the conquering Dorians and Spartans were both baffled here, and left Arcadia, like Elis and Achaea, to the Achaean and Pelasgian stocks. Now and then the trav eler comes upon a plain or a plateau, and finds flourishing new towns like Tripolis, or the remains of ancient cities like Orchomenos, Megalopolis, Tegea, and Mantinea, where Epaminondas won both victory and death. But for the most part it is a land of scattered peasants and shepherds, living precariously with their flocks in these grudging hills; and though after Marathon the cities awoke to civilization and art, they hardly enter the story before the Persian War. Here in these perpendicular forests once


THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXVD
The age was rich in now anonymous masterpieces that almost call the roll of the major gods. The majestic Head of Zeus found at Otricoli, and the Ludovisi Hera now in the Musco delle Terme so pleased the young Goethe that he took casts of them with him to Germany as, so to speak, the authentic autographs of Jove and Juno. The once acclaimed Apollo Belvedere• is academically cold and lifeless; and yet, two centuries ago, it set Winckelmann aflame.• A world away from this smooth weakling is the Farnese Heracles, copied by Glycon of Athens from an original attributed to Lysippus-all muscle in the overdone body, all weariness, kindliness, and wonder in the face-as if power was asking itself its never answered question: what should be its goal? Of Aphrodite the age had representatives only less numerous than her devotees; several of these statues have survived, mostly through Roman copies. The Aphrodite of Melos-the Venus de Milo of the Louvre-is apparently an original Greek work of the second century B,c. It was found on the island of Melos in 1820, near a pedestal fragment bearing the letters-sandros; perhaps Agesander of Antioch carved this modest nudity. The face is not as delicately fair as that which fonns the symbol of this volume, but the figure itself is a poem of that health whose natural flower is beauty; the wasp waist finds no encouragement in this full
body and these sturdy hips. Not so near perfection, but still pleasant to the eye, are the Capitoline Venus and the Venus de Medici.t Candidly and disarmingly sensual is the Venus Callipyge, or Venus of the Lovely Buttocks,t who drapes
her charms to reveal them, and turns to admire her nates in the pool; More im pressive than any of these is the superb Nike, or Victory of Srmzothrace, found there in 1863, and now the sculptural masterpiece of the Louvre.§ The goddess of victory is shown as if alighting in full flight up0n the prow of a swiftly mov ing ship and leading the vessel on to attack; her great wings seem to pull the craft along in the face of the breeze that confuses her robes. Again the Greek conception of woman as no mere delicacy, but as a strong mother, dominates the work; this is not the frail and passing beauty of youth, but the lifelong call of the woman to the man to lift himself up to achievement, as if the artist had wished to illustrate the last lines of Goethe's Faust. The civilization that could conceive and carve this figure was yet far from dead.
The gods were not the chief interest of the sculptors who brightened the eve ning of Greek art. These men looked upon Olympus as a quarry of subjects, and no more. When that quarry had been worn down by repetition they turned
So called from the pavilion in the Vatican where the statue was formerly placed.
t In the Capitoline Museum at Rome, and the Uffizi at Florence.
:j: In the Naples Museum.
§ It was formerly described as a dedication set up by Demetrius Poliorcetes in 305 to com memorate his defeat of Ptolemy I off Cyprian Salamis in 306; but recent discussion tends to connect it with the battle of Cos (ca. 258), in which the fleets of Macedonia, Seleucia, and Rhodes defeated Ptolemy II.111
CHAP.XXVII)	THE  ART  OF  THE  DISPERSION	625
to the earth and took delight in representing the wisdom and loveliness, the strangeness and absurdities of human life. They carved or cast impressive heads of Homer, Euripides, and Socrates. They made a number of smooth and deli cate Hermaphrodites, whose equivocal beauty arrests the eye in the Archeolog ical Museum at Constantinople, or the Borghese Gallery in Rome, or the Louvre. Children offered refreshingly natural poses, like the boy who removes a thorn
from his foot, and another who struggles with a goose,• and-finest of this class the trustful Praying Youth attributed to Lysippus' pupil Boethus.t Or the sculp tors went to the woods and depicted sylvan sprites like the Barberini Ftmn of Munich, or hilarious satyrs like the Drunken Silenus of the Naples Museum. And here and there, with jolly frequency, they inserted among their figures the
rosy cheeks and impish pranks of the god of love.
IV. COMMENTARY
This sudden irruption of humor into the once formal sanctuaries of Greek sculpture is a distinctive mark of Hellenistic art. Every museum has preserved from the ruins of the age some laughing faun, some singing Pan, some rioting Bacchus, some urchin serving as a fountain with alarming indecency. Perhaps the return of Greek art to Asia restored to it the variety, feeling, and warmth which it had almost lost in its classic subordi nation to religion and the state. Nature, which had been adored, began now to be enjoyed. Not that classic moderation disappeared: the Y outb of Subiaco in the Museo delle Terme, the Sleeping Ariadne of the Vatican, the Sitting Maiden of the Palace of the Conservatori continue the delicate tradition of Praxiteles; and in Athens, throughout this period, many sculp tors fought the "modernistic" tendencies of their time by deliberately going back to fourth- and fifth-century styles, even, now and then, to the archaic dignity of the sixth. But the spirit of the age was for experiment, individualism, naturalism, and realism, with a strong countercurrent toward imagination, idealism, sentiment, and dramatic effect. Artists carefully followed the progress of anatomy, and worked more from models in studios; sculptors carved their figures to be seen not only from in front, but from all sides. They used novel materials-crystal, chalcedony, topaz, glass, dark basalt, black marble, porphyry-to imitate the pigment of Negroes or the ruddy faces of satyrs illumined with wine.
Their fertility of invention equaled their mastery of technique. They
Both in the Vatican.
t In the State Museum, Berlin.
626	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVII
were tired of repeating types; they anticipated Ruskin's criticism,* and were resolved to show the reality and individuality of the persons and objects they portrayed. They no longer confined themselves to the perfect and the beautiful, to athletes, heroes, and gods; they made genre pictures or terra cottas of workingmen, fishermen, musicians, market men, jockeys, eunuchs; they sought unhackneyed subjects in children and peasants, in characterful features like those of Socrates, in bitter old men like Demos thenes, in powerful, almost brutal faces like that of Euthydemus the Greco Bactrian king, in desolate derelicts like the Old Market Woman of the Metropolitan Museum in New York; they recognized and relished the variety and complexity of life. They did not hesitate to be sensual; they were not parents anxious about the chastity of their daughters, nor phil osophers disturbed by the social consequences of an epicurean individual ism; they saw the charms of the flesh, and carved them into a beauty that might for a while laugh at wrinkles and time. Freed from the conventions of the classic age, they indulged themselves in tender sentiment, and pic tured, possibly with sincere feeling, shepherds dying of undisillusioned love, pretty heads lost in romantic reverie, mothers fondly contemplating their children: these, too, seemed to them a part of the reality they would record. And finally they faced the facts of pain and grief, of tragic catastrophes and untimely death; and they resolved to find a place for them in their repre sentation of human life.
No student with a mind of his own will join in any sweeping judgment about Hellenistic decay; a general conclusion to this effect serves too easily as an excuse for ending the story of Greece before the task is done. We feel in this period a slackening of creative impulse, but we are compensated by the lavish abundance of an art now completely master of its tools. Youth cannot last forever, nor are its charms supreme; the life of Greece, like every life, had to have a natural subsidence, and accept a ripe old age. De cadence had set in, it had bitten into religion, morals, and letters, and had left its stigmata upon individual works here and there; but the impetus of the Greek genius kept Greek art, like Greek science and philosophy, near their zenith to the end. And never in its isolated youth had the Greek passion for beauty, or the Greek power and patience to embody it, spread so triumphantly, or with such rich stimulation and result, into the sleeping cities of the East. There Rome would find it, and pass it on.
"There is no personal character in Greek art-abstract ideas of youth and age,strength and swiftness, virtue and vice-yes; but there is no individuality.'"" Ruskin thought only of fifth and founh-century Greek an, just as Winckelmann and Lessing knew chiefly the an of the Hellenistic age.
CHAPTER  XXVIII
TheClimax of Greek Science
EUCLID AND APOLLONIUS


CHAP.m)	THE	HEROIC  AGE	39
Hittite inscriptions mention an Atarissyas as King of the Ahhijavas in the thirteenth century B.c.; he is probably Atreus, King of the Achaeans.0 In Greek story Zeus begat Tantalus, King of Phrygia,* who begat Pelops, who begat Atreus, who begat Agamemnon. Pelops, being exiled, came to Elis in the western Peloponnesus about 1 283, and determined to marry Hip podameia, daughter of Oenomaus, Elis' king. The east pediment of the great temple of Zeus at Olympia still tells us the story of their courtship. The King made a practice to test his daughter's suitors by competing with them in a chariot race: if the suitor won he would receive Hippodameia; if he lost he was put to death. Several suitors had tried, and had lost both race and life. To reduce the risks Pelops bribed the King's charioteer, Myrtilus, to remove the linchpins from the royal chariot, and promised to share the kingdom with him if their plan succeeded. In the contest that ensued the King's chariot broke down, and he was killed. Pelops married Hippodameia and ruled Elis, but instead of sharing the kingdom with Myrtilus he threw Myrtilus into the sea. As Myrtilus sank he laid an ominous curse upon Pelops and all his descendants.
Pelops' daughter married Sthenelus, son of Perseus and King of Argos; the throne passed down to their son Eurystheus, and, after the latter's death, to his uncle Atreus. Atreus' sons Agamemnon and Menelaus married Clytaemnestra and Helen, daughters of King Tyndareus of Lacedaemon; and when Atreus and Tyndareus died, Agamemnon and Menelaus between them ruled all the eastern Peloponnesus from their respective capitals at Mycenae and Sparta. The Peloponnesus, or Island of Pelops, came to be called after their grandfather, whose descendants had quite forgotten the curse of Myrtilus.
Meanwhile the remainder of Greece was also busy with heroes, usually founding cities. In the fifteenth century before our era, said Greek tradi tion, the iniquity of the human race provoked Zeus to overwhelm it with a flood, from which one man, Deucalion, and his wife Pyrrha, alone were saved, in an ark or chest that came to rest on Mt. Parnassus. From Deuca lion's son Hellen had come all the Greek tribes, and their united name, Hellenes. Hellen was grandfather of Achaeus and ·ion, who begot the
Tantalus angered the gods by divulging their secrets, stealing their nectar and ambrosia, and offering them his son Pelops, boiled and sliced. Zeus put Pelops together again, and punished Tantalus, in Hades, with a raging thirst; Tantalus was placed in the midst of a lake whose waters receded whenever he tried to drink of them; over his head branches rich in fruit were hung, which withdrew when he sought to reach them; a great rock was suspended above him, which at every moment threatened to fall and crush him.'
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
Achaean and Ionian tribes, which, after many wanderings, peopled re spectively the Peloponnesus and Attica. One of Ion's descendants, Cecrops, with the help of the goddess Athena, founded (on a site whose acropolis had already been settled by Pelasgians) the city that was named after her, Athens.• It was he, said the story, that gave civilization to Attica, instituted marriage, abolished bloody sacrifices, and taught his subjects to worship the Olympian gods-Zeus and Athena above the rest.
The descendants of Cecrops ruled Athens as kings. The fourth in line
was Erechtheus, to whom the city, honoring him as a god, would later dedicate one of its loveliest temples. His grandson, Theseus, about 12 50, merged the twelve demes or villages of Attica into one political unity, whose citizens, wherever they lived, were to be called Athenians; perhaps it was because of this historic synoikismos, or municipal cohabitation, that Athens, like Thebes and Mycenae, had a plural name. It was Theseus who brought order and power to Athens, ended the sacrifice of her children to Minos, and gave her people security on the roads by slaying the highwayman Procrustes, who had liked to stretch or cut the legs of his captives to make them fit his bed. After Theseus' death Athens worshiped him, too, as a god. As late as 476, in the skeptical age of Pericles, the city brought the bones of Theseus from Scyros and deposited them as sacred relics in the temple of Theseus.
To the north, in Boeotia, a rival capital had equally stirring traditions, destined to become the very substance of Greek drama in the classic age. Late in the fourteenth century B.c. the Phoenician or Cretan or Egyptian prince Cadmus founded the city of Thebes at the meeting of the roads that cross Greece from east to west and from north to south, taught its people letters, and slew the dragon (perhaps an ancient phrase for an infecting or infesting organism) that hindered the settlers from using the waters of the Areian spring. From the dragon's teeth, which Cadmus sowed in the earth, sprang armed men who, like the Greeks of history, attacked one another until only five survived; these five, said Thebes, were the founders of her royal families. The government established itself on a hill citadel called the Cadmeia, where in our own time a "palace of Cadmus" has been unearthed.• There, after Cadmus, reigned his son Poly_dorus, his grand c;on Labdacus, and his great-grandson Laius, whose son Oedipus, as all the world knows, slew his father and married his mother. When Oedipus died
Assigned to 1400-1200 B.c. It contained fragments of writing in undeciphered characters,
probably of Cretan lineage.
CHAP.ill)	THE  HEROIC AGE
his sons quarreled over the scepter, as is the habit of princes. Eteocles drove out Polynices, who persuaded Adrastus, King of Argos, to attempt his restoration. Adrastus tried (ca. r 2 r 3), in the famous war of the Seven (Allies) against Thebes, and again sixteen years later in the war of the Epigoni, or sons of the Seven. This time both Eteocles and Polynices were killed, and Thebes was burned to the ground.
Among the Theban aristocrats was one Amphitryon, who had a charm ing wife, Alcmene. Her Zeus visited while Amphitryon was gone to the wars; and Heracles (Hercules) was their son.* Hera, who did not relish these jovial condescensions, sent two serpents to destroy the babe in the cradle; but the boy grasped one in each hand and strangled them both; therefore he was called Heracles, as having won glory through Hera. Linus, oldest name in the history of music, tried to teach the youth how to play and sing; but Heracles did not care for music, and slew Linus with the lyre. When he grew up-a clumsy, bibulous, gluttonous, kindly giant-he undertook to kill a lion that was ravaging the flocks of Amphitryon and Thespius. The latter, King of Thespiae, offered his home and his fifty daughters to Heracles, who rose to the occasion manfully.1° He slew the lion, and wore its skin as his garb. He married Megara, daughter of Creon of Thebes, and tried to settle down; but Hera sent a madness upon him, and unwittingly he killed his own children. He consulted the oracle at Delphi, and was instructed to go and live at Tiryns and serve Eurystheus, the Argive king, for twelve years; after which he would become an immortal
god. He obeyed, and carried out for Eurystheus his famous twelve labors.t
Released by the king, Heracles returned to Thebes. He performed many
''Zeus," says Diodorus, "made that night three times its normal length; and by the magni tude of the time expended on the procreation he presaged the exceptional might of the child.""
t He strangled the lion that troubled the flocks at Nemea; he destroyed the many-headed
hydra that ravaged Lerna; he captured a fleet stag and carried it to Eurystheus; he caught a wild boar from Mt. Eurymanthus and carried it to Eurystheus; in one day he cleansed all the stables of Augeas' three thousand oxen by diverting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus into the st·lls-and paused long enough in Elis to establish the Olympic games; he destroyed the murderous Stymphalian birds of Arcadia; he captured the mad bull that was devastating Crete, and carried it on his shoulders to Eurystheus; he caught and tamed the man-eating horses of Diomedes; he slew nearly all the Amazons; he set up two confronting promontories as the "Pillars of Hercules" at the mouth of the Mediterranean. captured the oxen of Geryon and brought them through Gaul, across the Alps, through Italy, and across the sea to Eurystheus; he found the apples of the Hesperides, and for a while held up the earth for Atlas; he descended into Hades, and delivered Theseus and Ascalaphus from torment.-The Hesperides, daughters of Atlas, had been entrusted by Hera with the golden apples given her by Gaea (Earth) at her wedding with Zeus. The apples were guarded by a dragon. and con ferred semidivine qualities upon those who ate them.
42	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.m
other exploits; he joined the Argonauts, sacked Troy, helped the gods to win their battle against the giants, freed Prometheus, brought Alcestis back to life, and, now and then, killed his own friends by accident. After his death he was worshiped as hero and god; and since he had had countless loves, many tribes claimed him as their progenitor.*
His sons made their home at T rachis in Thessaly; but Eurystheus, fear ing lest they depose him in revenge for the unnecessary labors that he had laid upon their father, ordered the Trachinian king to exile them from Greece. The Heracleidae (i.e., children of Heracles) found refuge in Athens; Eurystheus sent an army to attack them, but they defeated and killed him. When Atreus came against them with another force, Hyllus, one of the sons, offered to fight any of Atreus' men in single combat, on condition that if he won, the Hcracleidae should receive the kingdom of Mycenae; if he lost, the Heracleidae would depart and not return for fifty years, after which time their children were to receive Mycenae."" He lost, and led his partisans into exile. Fifty years later a new generation of Hera cleidae returned; it was they, not the Dorians, said Greek tradition, who, being resisted in their claims, conquered the Peloponnesus, and put an end to the Heroic Age.
If the tale of Pelops and his descendants suggests the Asia Minor origin of the Achaeans, the theme of their destiny is struck in the story of the Argonauts. Like so many of the legends that served as both the historical tradition and the popular fiction of the Greeks, it is an excellent narrative, with all the elements of adventure, exploration, war, love, mystery, and death woven into a fabric so rich that after the dramatists of Athens had almost worn it bare it was rewoven into a very passable epic, in Hellenistic days, by Apollortius of Rhodes. It begins in Boeotian Orchomenos on the harsh note of human sacrifice, like Agamemnon's tragedy. Finding his land stricken with famine, King Athamas proposed to offer his son Phrixus to the gods. Phrixus learned of the plan and escaped from Orchomenos with his sister Helle, riding with her through the air on a ram with a golden fleece. But the ram was unsteady, and Helle fell off and was drowned in the strait which after her was called the Hellespont. Phrixus reached land
This amazing "culture hero," Diodorus thought, was a primitive engineer, a prehistoric Empedocles; the legends told about him meant that he had cleansed the springs, cleaved mountains, changed the courses of rivers, reclaimed waste areas, rid the woods of dangerous beasts, and made Greece a habitable land.11 In another aspect Heracles is the beloved son of JOd who suffers for mankind, raises the dead to life, descends into Hades, and then ascends mto heaven.


Probably named by the Phoenicians from sbalam, peace; cf. Salem.116
t Tradition placed this event in the thirteenth century n.c.; but the union of Attica under Athens could hardly have been completed before 700, since the "Homeric" Hymn to Demeter, composed about that date, speaks of Eleusis as still having its own king.•
A possibly legendary event attributed by tradition to 1068 B.c.
110	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.V
democracy, but a recapture of mastery by a feudal aristocracy-one more swing of the pendulum in the historical alternation between localized and centralized authority. By this piecemeal revolution the royal office was shorn of all its powers, and its holder was confined to the functions of a priest. The word king remained in the Athenian constitution to the end of its ancient history, but the reality was never restored. Institutions may with impunity be altered or destroyed from above if their names are left unchanged.
The Eupatrid oligarchs-i.e., the well-born ruling few-continued to govern Attica for almost five centuries. Under their rule the population was divided into three political ranks: the hippes, or knights, who owned horses* and could serve as cavalry; the zeugitai, who owned a yoke of oxen and could equip themselves to fight as hoplites or heavy-armed troops; and the tbetes, hired laborers who fought as light-armed infantry. Only the first two were accounted citizens; and only the knights could serve as archons, judges, or priests. After completing their term of office the archons, if no scandal had tarnished them, became automatically and for life members of the boule or Council that met in the cool of the evening on the Areopagus, or Ares' hill, chose the archons, and ruled the state. Even under the monarchy this Senate of the Areopagus had limited the authority of the king; now, under the oligarchy, it was as supreme as its counterpart in Rome...
Economically the population fell again into three groups. At the top were the Eupatrids, who lived in relative luxury in the towns while slaves and hired men tilled their holdings in the country, or merchants made profits for them on their loans. Next in wealth were the demiurgoi, or pub lic workmen-i.e., professional men, craftsmen, traders, and free laborers. As colonization opened up new markets, and coinage liberated trade, the rising power of this class became the explosive force that under Solon and Peisistratus won for it a share in the government, and under Cleisthenes and Pericles raised it to the zenith of its influence. Most of the laborers were freemen; slaves were as yet in the minority, even in the lower classes."-Poorest of all were the georgoi, literally land workers, small peas ants struggling against the stinginess of the soil and the greed of money lenders and baronial lords, and consoled only with the pride of owning a bit of the earth.
Some of these peasants had once held extensive tracts; but their wives had
been more fertile than their land, and in the course of generations their
The mark of a gentleman then, as in the days of Roman equites, French chevaliers, and
English cavaliers.
CHAP,V)	ATHENS	Ill
holdings had been divided and redivided among their sons. The collective ownership of property by clan or patriarchal family was rapidly passing away, and fences, ditches, and hedges marked the rise of jealously indi vidual property. As plots became smaller and rural life more precarious, many peasants sold their lands-despite the fine and disfranchisement that punished such sales-and went to Athens or lesser towns to become traders or craftsmen or laborers. Others, unable to meet the obligations of owner ship, became tenant tillers of Eupatrid estates, hectemoroi, or "share-crop pers" who kept a part of the produce as their pay.08 Still others struggled on, borrowed money by mortgaging their land at high rates of interest, were unable to pay, and found themselves attached to the soil by their creditors, and working for them as serfs. The holder of the mortgage was considered to be the hypothetical owner of the property until the mortgage was satisfied, and placed upon the mortgaged land a stone slab announcing this ownership... Small holdings became smaller, free peasants fewer, great holdings greater. "A few proprietors," says Aristotle, "owned all the soil, and the cultivators with their wives and children were liable to be sold as slaves," even into foreign parts, "on failure to pay their rent" or their debts.'° Foreign trade, and the replacement of barter with coin age, hurt the peasant further; for the competition of imported food kept the prices of his products low, while the prices of the manufactured arti cles that he had to buy were determined by forces beyond his control, and rose inexplicably with every decade. A bad year ruined many farmers, and starved some of them to death. Rural poverty in Attica; became so great that war was welcomed as a blessing: more land might be won, and fewer mouths would have.to be fed."
Meanwhile, in the towns, the middle classes, unhindered by law, were reducing the free laborers to destitution, and gradually replacing them with slaves." Muscle became so cheap that no one who could afford to buy it deigned any longer to work with his hands; manual labor became a sign of bondage, an occupation unworthy of freemen. The landowners, jealous of the growing wealth of the merchant class, sold abroad the corn that their tenants needed for food, and at last, under the law of debt, sold the Athenians themselves.'"
For a time men hoped that the legislation of Draco would remedy these evils. About 620 this thesmothete, or lawmaker, was commissioned to cod ify, and for the first time to put into writing, a system of laws that would restore order in Attica. So far as we know, the essential advances of his code were a modera.te extension, among the newly rich, of eligibility to the archonship, and the replacement of feud vengeance with law: here,
112	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.V
after the Senate of the Areopagus was to try all cases of homicide. The last was a basic and progressive change; but to enforce it, indeed to persuade vengeful men to accept it as more certain and severe than their own re venge, he attached to his laws penalties so drastic that after most of his legislation had been superseded by Solon's he was remembered for his punishments rather than for his laws. Draco's code congealed the cruel customs of an unregulated feudalism; it did nothing to relieve debtors of slavery, or to mitigate the exploitation of the weak by the strong; and though it slightly extended the franchise it left to the Eupatrid class full control of the courts, and the power to interpret in their own way all laws and issues affecting their interests." The owners of property were pro tected more zealously than ever before; petty theft, even idleness, was punished in the case of citizens with disfranchisement, in the case of others with death....
As the seventh century drew to a close the bitterness of ,the helpless poor against the legally entrenched rich had brought Athens to the edge of revo lution. Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, in equality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The con centration of wealth begins by being inevitable, and ends by being fatal. "The disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor," says Plutarch, "had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances ... seemed possible but a despotic power.'"" The poor, finding their situation worse with each year-the government and the army in the hands of their mas ters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them"-began to talk of a violent revolt, and a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth.'" The rich, unable any longer to collect the debts legally due them, and angry at the challenge to their savings and their property, invoked ancient laws," and prepared to defend themselves by force against a mob that seemed to threaten not only property but all established order, all religion, and all civilization.
The Solonian Revolution
It seems incredible that at this juncture in Athenian affairs, so often re peated in the history of nations, a man should have been found who, with out any act of violence or any bitterness of speech, was able to persuade the rich and the poor to a compromise that not only averted social chaos
"Those that stole a cabbage or an apple were to suffer even as villains that committed sacrilege or murder."-Plutarch, Solon.
CHAP. V)	ATHENS	113
but established a new and more generous political and economic order for the entire remainder of Athens' independent career. Solon's peaceful revo lution is one of the encouraging miracles of history.
His father was a Eupatrid of purest blood, related to the descendants of King Codrus and, indeed, tracing his origin to Poseidon himself. His mother was cousin to the mother of Peisistratus, the dictator who would first violate and then consolidate the Solonian constitution. In his youth Solon participated lustily in the life of his time: he wrote poetry, sang the joys of "Greek friendship,""" and, like another Tyrtaeus, stirred the peo ple with his verses to conquer Salamis."' In middle age his morals improved in inverse ratio to his poetry; his stanzas became dull, and his counsel excel lent. "Many undeserving men are rich," he tells us, "while their betters are poor. But we will not exchange what we are for what they have, since the one gift abides while the other passes from man to man." The riches of the rich "are no greater than his whose only possessions a:re stomach, lungs and feet that bring him joy, not pain; the blooming charms of lad or maid; and an existence ever in harmony with the changing seasons of life.""" Once, when a sedition occurred in Athens, he remained neutral, luckily before his own reputed legislation making such caution a crime."" But he did not hesitate to denounce the methods by which the wealthy had reduced the masses to a desperate penury."
If we may believe Plutarch, Solon's father "ruined his estate in doing


CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	135
Propontis, and the Eu:xine. Miletus alone had eighty such colonies, sixty of them in the north. From Abydos, Cyzicus, Sinope, Olbia, Trapezus, and Dioscurias, Miletus drew flax, timber, fruit, and metals, and paid for these with the products of her handicrafts. The wealth and luxury of the city became a proverb and a scandal throughout Greece. Milesian merchants, overflowing with profits, lent money to enterprises far and wide, and to the municipality itself. They were the Medici of the Ionian Renaissance.
It was in this stimulating environment that Greece first developed two of its most characteristic gifts to the world-science and philosophy. The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins. Here in Miletus, as later in Athens, were men from a hundred scattered states; mentally active through competitive commerce, and freed f om the bondage of tradition by long absences from their native altars and homes. Milesians themselves traveled to distant cities, and had their eyes opened by the civilizations of Lydia, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Egypt; in this way, among others, Egyp tian geometry and Babylonian astronomy entered the Greek mind. Trade and mathematics, foreign commerce and geography, navigation and astron omy, developed hand in hand. Meanwhile wealth had created leisure; an aristocracy of culture was growing up in which freedom of thought was tolerated because only a small minority could read. No powerful priesthood, no ancient and inspired text limited men's thinking; even the Homeric poems, which were to become in some sense the Bible of the Greeks, had hardly taken yet a definite form; and in that final form their mythology was to bear the imprint of Ionian skepticism and scandalous merriment. Here for the first time thought became secular, and sought rational and consistent answers to the problems of the world and man.•
Nevertheless the new plant, mutation though it was, had its roots and ancestry. The hoary wisdom of Egyptian priests and Persian Magi, per haps even of Hindu seers, the sacerdotal science of the Chaldeans, the poetically personified cosmogony of Hesiod, were m'ingled with the natu ral realism of Phoenician and Greek merchants to produce Ionian philoso phy. Greek religion itself had paved the way by talking of Moira, or Fate, as ruler of both gods and men: here was that idea of law, as superior to incalculable personal decree, which would mark the essential difference between science and mythology, as well as between despotism and democ-
Similar movements. however, appeared in India and China in this sixth century B.c.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VI
racy. Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law. That the Greeks, so far as our knowledge goes, were the first to achieve this recognition and this freedom in both philosophy and government is the secret of their accomplishment, and of their importance in history.
Since life proceeds by heredity as well as by variation, by stabilizing cus tom as well as by experimental innovation, it was to be expected that the religious roots of philosophy would form as well as feed it, and there should remain in it, to the very end, a vigorous element of theology. Two cur rents run side by side in the history of Greek philosophy: one naturialistic, the other mystical. The latter stemmed from Pythagoras, and ran through Parmenides, Heracleitus, Plato, and Cleanthes to Plotinus and St. Paul; the other had its first world figure in Thales, and passed down through Anaxi mander, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Hippocrates, and Democritus to Epicurus and Lucretius. Now and then some great spirit-Socrates, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius-merged the two currents in an attempt to do justice to the un formulable complexity of life. But even in these men the dominant strain, characteristic of Greek thought, was the love and pursuit of reason.
Thales was born about 640, probably at Miletus, reputedly of Phoeni cian parentage," and derived much of his education from Egypt and the Near East; here, as if personified, we see the transit of culture from East to West. He appears to have engaged in business only so far as to provide himself with the ordinary goods of life; everyone knows the story of his successful speculation in oil presses.* For the rest he gave himself to study, with the absorbed devotion suggested by the tale of his falling into a ditch while watching the stars. Despite his solitude, he interested himself in the affairs of his city, knew the dictator Thrasybulus intimately, and advo cated the federation of the Ionian states for united defense against Lydia and Persia.08
To him tradition unanimously ascribed the introduction of mathematical
and astronomical science into Greece. Antiquity told how, in Egypt, he calculated the heights of the pyramids by measuring their shadows when a man's shadow equaled his height. Returning to Ionia, Thales pursued the fascinatingly logical study of geometry as a deductive science, and demon-
Let Aristotle tell the story: "They say that Thales, perceiving by his skill in astrology (astronomy) that there would be great plenty of olives that year, while it was yet winter hired at a low price all the oil presses in Miletus and Chios, there being no one to bid against him. But when the season came for making oil, many persons wanting them, he all at once let them upon what terms he pleased; and raising a large sum of mQney- by that means, con vinced them that it was easy for philosophers to be rich .if they chose. 1t."""
CHAP. VI)	THE  GB.EAT  MIGRATION	137
sttated several of the theorems later collected by Euclid.• As these theorems founded Greek geometry, so his studies of astronomy established that sci ence for Western civilization, and disentangled it from its Oriental asso ciations with astrology. He made several minor observations, and startled all Ionia by successfully predicting iin eclipse of the sun for May 28, 585 B.c.,211 probably on the basis of Egyptian records and Babylonian calcula tions. For the rest his theory of the universe was not appreciably superior to the current cosmology of the Egyptians and the Jews. The world, he thought, was a hemisphere resting on an endless expanse of water, and the earth was a flat disk floating on the flat side of the interior of this hemisphere. We are 'reminded of Goethe's remark that a man's vices (or errors) are common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own.
As some Greek myths made Oceanus the father of all creation,"" so Thales made water the first principle of all things, their original form and their final destiny. Perhaps, says Aristotle, he had come to this opinion from observing "that the nutriment of everything is moist, and that . . . the seeds of everything have a moist nature;   and that from which every
thing is generated is always its first principle.".. Or perhaps he believed that water was the most primitive or fundamental of the three forms-gas, liquid, solid-into which, theoretically, all substances may be changed. The significance of his thought lay not in reducing all things to water, but in reducing all things to o!1e; here was the first monism in recorded history. Aristotle describes Thales' vi w as materialistic; but Thales adds that every particle of the world is alive, that matter and life are inseparable and one, that there is an immortal "soul" in plants and metals as well as in animals and men; the vital power changes form, but never dies."' Thales was wont to say that there is no essential difference between living and dead. When someone sought to nettle him by asking why, then, he chose life instead of death, he answered, "Because there is no difference.,,..,
In his old age he received by common consent the title of sophos, or sage; and when Greece came to name its Seven Wise Men it placed Thales first. Being asked what was very difficult, he answered, in a famous apophthegm, "To know thyself." Asked what was very easy, he answered, "To give advice." To the question, what is God? he replied, "That which has neither beginning nor end." Asked how men might live most virtuously
That a circle is bisected by its diameter; that the angles at the base of any isosceles tri angle are "similar" (i.e., equal); that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle; that the op posite angles formed by two intersecting straight lines are equal; that two triangles having two angles and one side respectively equal are themselves equal...
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.VI
and justly, he answered, "If we never do ourselves what we blame in others.".. He died, says Diogenes Laertius,81 "while present as a spectator at a gymnastic contest, being worn out with heat and thirst and weakness, for he was very old.,,
Thales, says Strabo,.., was the first of those who wrote on physiologia i.e., on the science of nature (physis), or on the principle of being and de velopment in things. His work was vigorously advanced by his pupil Anaximander, who, though he lived from 611 to 549 B.c., expounded a philosophy surprisingly like that which Herbert Spencer, trembling before his own originality, published in A.D. 1860. Thefirst principle, says Anaxi mander, was a vast Indefinite-Infinite (apeiron), a boundless mass possessing no specific qualities, but developing, by its inherent forces, into all the varied realities of the universe.* This animate and eternal but impersonal and unmoral Infinite is the only God in Anaximander's system; it is the unvary ing and everlasting One, as distinguished from the mutable evanescent Many of the world of things. (Here stems the metaphysics of the Eleatic School
-that only the eternal One is real.) From this characterless Infinite are born new worlds in endless succession, and to it in endless succession they return as they evolve and die. In the primordial Infinite all opposites are con tained-hot and cold, moist and dry, liquid and solid and gas ... ; in devel opment these potential qualities become actual, and make diverse and definite things; in dissolution these opposed qualitiC:.§ are again resolved into the Infinite. (A source for Heracleitus as well as for Spencer.) In this rise and fall of worlds the various elements struggle with one another, and encroach upon each other as hostile opposites. For this opposition they pay with dissolution; "Things perish into those from which they have been born."
Anaximander, though he too can be guilty of astronomic biZJ1rreries for givable in an age without instruments, advanced on Thales by conceiving the earth as a cylinder freely suspended in the center of the universe, and sustained only by being equidistant from all things."' The sun, moon, and stars, he thought, moved in circles around the earth. To illustrate all this Anaximander, probably on Babylonian models, constructed at Sparta a g;nomon, or sundial, on which he showed the movement of the planets, the
Cf. Spencer's definition of evolution as substantially a change from "indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity."81
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT  MIGRATION	139


rest though it is composed (we are told) of the most excitably mobile "electrons." Par menides saw the world as we see the table; the electron would see the table as we see the world.
CHAP. XVI)  THE  CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION	351
It was not to be expected that men would listen patiently to all this; and apparently the Parmenidean Rest became the target of a thousand metaphysical assaults. The significance of Parmenides' subtle follower, Zeno of Elea, lay in an attempt to show that the ideas of plurality and mo tion were, at least theoretically, as impossible as Parmenides' motionless One. As an exercise in perversity, and to amuse his youth, Zeno published a book of paradoxes, of which nine have come down to us, and of which three will suffice. First, said Zeno, any body, in order to move to point A, must reach B, the middle of its course toward A; to arrive at B it must reach C, the middle of its course toward B; and so on to infinity. Since an infinity of time would be required for this infinite series of motions, the motion of any body to any point is impossible in a finite time. Second, as a variant of the first, swift-footed Achilles can never overtake the leisurely tortoise; for as often as Achilles reaches the point which the tortoise occupied, in that same moment the tortoise has moved beyond that point. Third, a fly ing arrow is really at rest; for at any moment of its flight it is at only one point in space, that is, is motionless; its motion, however actual to the senses, is logically, metaphysically unreal.••
Zeno came to Athens about 450, perhaps with Parmenides, and set the
impressionable city astir by his skill in reducing any kind of philosophical theory to absurd consequences. Timon of Phlius described
The two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who, Say what one would, would argue it untrue.•
This pre-Socratic gadfly was (in the relative sense which our ignorance of the past compels us to give to such phrases) the father of logic, as Par menides was for Europe the father of metaphysics. Socrates, who de nounced Zeno's dialectical method," imitated it so zealously that men had to kill him in order to have peace of mind. Zeno's influence upon the skeptical Sophists was decisive, and in the end it was his skepticism that triumphed in Pyrrho and Carneades. In his old age, having become a man "of great wisdom and learning,"'0 he complained that the philosophers had taken too seriously the intellectual pranks of his youth. His final escapade was more fatal to him: he joined in an attempt to depose the tyrant Nearches at Elea, was foiled and arrested, tortured and killed.11 He bore his suffer ings bravely, as if to associate his name so soon with the Stoic philosophy.
The discussion of these paradoxes has gone on from Plato• to Bertrand Russell,' and may continue as long as words are mistaken for things. The assumptions that invalidate the puzzles are that "infinite" is a thing instead of merely a word indicating the inability of the mind to conceive an absolute end; and that time, space, and motion are discontinuous, i.e., are com posed of separate points or parts.
352	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
II, THEMATERIALISTS
As Pannenides' denial of motion and change was a reaction against the fluid and unstable metaphysics of Hercleitus, so his monism was a counter blast to the atomism of the later Pythagoreans. For these had developed the number theory of their founder into the doctrine that all things are com posed of numbers in the sense of indivisible units."" When Philolaus of Thebes added that "all things take place by necessity and by harmony,",. everything was ready for the Atomic school in Greek philosophy.
About 435 Leucippus of Miletus came to Elea, and studied under Zeno; there, perhaps, he heard of the number atomism of the Pythagoreans, for Zeno had aimed some of his subtlest paradoxes at this doctrine of plurality.1' Leucippus finally settled in Abdera, a flourishing Ionian colony in Thrace. Of his direct teaching only one fragment remains: "Nothing happens without a reason, but all things occur for a reason, and of necessity.",. Presumably it was in answer to Zeno and Parmenides that Leucippus de veloped the notion of the void, or empty space; in this way he hoped to make motion theoretically possible as well as sensibly actual. The uni verse, said Leucippus, contains atoms artd space and nothing else. Atoms tumbling about in a vortex fall by necessity into the first forms of all things, like attaching itself to like; in this way arose the planets and the stars.1° All things, even the human soul, are composed of atoms.
Democritus was the pupil or associate of Leucippus in developing the atomistic philosophy into a rounded system of materialism. His father was a man of wealth and position in Abdera;" from him, we are told, Democritus inherited a hundred talents ($600,000), most.of which he spent in travel... Unconfirmed stories send him as far as Egypt and Ethiopia, Babylonia, Persia, and India."" "Among my contemporaries," he says, "I have traveled over the largest portion of the earth in search of things the most remote, and have seen the most climates and countries, and heard the largest number of thinkers.,,,..,., At Boeotian Thebes he stopped long enough to imbibe the number atomism of Philolaus.• Having spent his money he became a philosopher, lived simply, devoted himself to study and contemplation, and said, "I would rather discover a single demonstration" (in geometry) "than win the throne of Persia."• There was some modesty in him, for he shunned dialectic and discussion, founded no school, and sojourned in Athens without making himself known to any of the philosophers there."
"To the wise and good man," he writes, "the whole earth is his fatherland."•
CHAP. XVI)  THE  CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION	353
Diogenes Laertius gives a long list of his publications in mathematics, physics, astronomy, navigation, geography, anatomy, physiology, psychol ogy, psychotherapy, medicine, philosophy, music, and art.• Thrasyllus called him pentathlos in philosophy, and some contemporaries gave him the very name of Wisdom (sophia)."" His range was as wide as Aristotle's, his style as highly praised as Plato's.sr Francis Bacon, in no perverse mo ment, called him the greatest of ancient philosophers.•
He begins, like Parmenides, with a critique of the senses. For practical purposes we may trust them; but the moment we begin to analyze their evidence we find ourselves taking away from the external world layer after layer of the color, temperature, flavor, savor, sweetness, bitterness, and sound that the senses lay upon it; these "secondary qualities" are in our selves or in the total process of perception, not in the objective thing; in an earless world a falling forest would make no noise, and the ocean, however angry, would never roar. "By convention (nomos) sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.""" Hence the senses give us only obscure knowledge, or opinion; genuine knowledge comes only by investigation
and thought. "Verily, we know nothing. Truth is buried deep   We
know nothing for certain, but only the changes produced in our body by the forces that impinge upon it.mo All sensations are due to atoms dis charged by the object and falling upon our sense organs.st All senses are forms of touch.a
The atoms that constitute the world differ in figure, size, and weight; all have a tendency downward; in the resultant rotatory motion like atoms combine with like and produce the planets and the stars. No nous, or in telligence, guides the atoms, no Empedoclean "love" or "hate" assorts them, but necessity-the natural operation of inherent causes-rules over all.11 There is no chance; chance is a fiction invented to disguise our ignorance." The quantity of matter remains always the same; none is ever created, none ever destroyed;"" only the atom combinations change. Forms, however, are innumerable; even of worlds there is probably an "infinite" number, coming into being and passing away in an interminable pageantry.aa Organic beings arose originally from the moist earth.irr Every thing in man is made of atoms; the soul is composed of tiny, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. Mind, soul, vital heat, vital principle, are all one and the same thing; they are not confined to men or animals, but are
354	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVI
diffused throughout the world; and in man and other animals the mental atoms whereby we think are distributed throughout the body.••
Nevertheless these fine atoms that constitute the soul are the noblest and most wonderful part of the body. The wise man will cultivate thought, will free himself from passion, superstition, and fear, and will seek in con templation and understanding the modest happiness available to human life. Happiness does not come from external goods; a man "must become accustomed to finding within himself the sources of his enjoyment."'" "Culture is better than riches   No power and no treasure can outweigh
the extension of our knowledge."'" Happiness is fitful, and "sensual pleasure affords only a brief satisfaction"; one comes to a more lasting content by acquiring peace and serenity of soul (atara:xia), good cheer (euthwmia), moderation (metriotes), and a certain order and symmetry of life (biou symmetria)." We may learn much from the animals-"spinning from the spider, building from the swallow, singing from the nightingale and the swan";45 but "strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in man."'8 So, like the heretics of Victorian England, Democritus raises upon his scandalous metaphysics a most presentable ethic. "Good actions should be done not out of compulsion but from conviction; not from hope of reward, but for their own sake. . . . A man should feel more shame in doing evil before himself than before all the world.""
He illustrated his own precepts, and perhaps justified his counsels, by living to the age of a hundred and nine, or, as some say, to merely ninety, years.'8 Diogenes Laertius relates that when Democritus read in public his most important work, the megas diakosmos, or Great World, the city of Abdera presented him with a hundred talents ($600,000) ; but perhaps Ab dera had depreciated its currency. When someone asked the secret of his longevity, he answered that he ate honey daily, and bathed his body with '>ii... Finally, having lived long enough, he reduced his food each day, de


has made the average holding small113 ( the rich Alcibiades has only seventy acres), and the squire in most cases labors personally on the soil, or in the management of his property. But though the aristocrat is not rich, he is proud; he adds his father's name to his own as a title of nobility, and he remains aloof as long as he can from the mercantile bourgeoisie which is capturing the wealth of Athens' growing trade. His wife, however, cries for a city home and the varied life and opportunities of the metropolis; his
The great fortunes of Greek antiquity were of course modest in amount by modem standards. Callias, the wealthiest of the Athenians, is said to have had two hundred talents (Sr,zoo,ooo); Nicias, one hundred.111
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, XII
daughters wish to live in Athens and snare rich husbands; his sons hope to find hetairai there and to give gay parties in the style of the nouveaux riches. As the aristocrat cannot compete in luxury with the merchants and manu facturers, he accepts them, or their children, as sons-in-law or daughters in-law; they are anxious to climb, and willing to pay. The upshot is a union of the rich in land with the rich in money,_ and the formation of an upper class of oligarchs, envied and hated by the -poor, angry at the excesses and extravagance of democracy, and fearful of revolution.
It is the insolence of the new wealth that brings on the second phase of the class war-the struggle of the poorer citizens against the rich. Many of the bourgeoisie flaunt their wealth like Alcibiades, but few others can so charm the "mechanic multitude" by dramatic audacity and elegance of person or speech. Young men conscious of ability and frustrated with poverty translate their personal need for opportunity and place into a gen eral gospel of revolt; and intellectuals eager for new ideas and the applause of the oppressed formulate for them the aims of their rebellion." They call not for the socialization of industry and trade but for the abolition of debts and the redistribution of the land-among the citizens; for the radical move ment in fifth-century Athens is confined to the poorer voters, and never dreams, at this stage, of liberating the slaves, or letting the metics in on the reallotment of the soil. The leaders talk of a golden past in which all men were equal in possessions, but they do not wish to be taken too literally when they speak of restoring that paradise. It is an aristocratic communism that they have in mind-not a nationalization of the land by the state, but an equal sharing of it by the citizens. They point out how unreal is the equality of the franchise in the face of mounting economic inequality; but they are resolved to use the political power of the poorer citizenry to per suade the Assembly to sluice into the pockets of the needy-by fines litur gies, confiscations, and public works111-some of the concentrated wealth of the rich.'" And to give a lead to future rebels they adopt red as the sym bolic color of their revolt."
In the face of this threat the rich band themselves in secret organizations pledged to take common action against what Plato, despite his commu will call the "monstrous beast" of the aroused and hungry mob.'" The free workers also organize-have at least since Solon organized-themselves into clubs (erarzoi, thiasoi) of stonemasons, marble cutters, woodworkers, ivory workers, potters, fishermen, actors, etc.; Socrates is a member of a sculptor's thiasos.*" But these groups are not so much trade-unions as mutual benefit
The sculptors and architects of Greece formed a guild of builders, with their own re ligious mysteries, and became the forerunners of the Freemasons of later Europe.•
CHAP.XII)	WORK  AND WEALTH  IN  ATHENS
societies: they come together in meeting places called synods or synagogues, have banquets and games, and worship a patron deity; they make payments to sick members, and contract collectively for specific enterprises; but they do not enter visibly into the Athenian class war. The battle is fought on the fields of literature and politics. Pamphleteers like the "Old Oligarch" issue denunciations or defenses of democracy. The comic poets, since their plays require rich men to finance their production, are on the side of the drachmas, and pour ridicule upon the radical leaders and their utopias. In the Ecclesi-azusae ( 392) Aristophanes introduces us to the lady communist Praxagora, who makes an oration as follows:
I want all to have a share of everything, and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; no longer shall we see one man harvesting vast tracts of land, while another has not ground enough to be buried in   Iintend that there shall only be
one and the same condition of life for all	Ishall begin by making
land, money, everything that is private property, common to all....
Women shall belong to all men in common.111
''But who," asks Blepyrus, "will do the work?" "The slaves," is her reply. In another comedy, the Plutus (408), Aristophanes allows Poverty, who is threatened with extinction, to defend herself as the necessary goad to human toil and enterprise:
I am the sole cause of all your blessings, and your safety depends upon me alone.... Who would wish to hammer iron, build ships, sew, tum, cut up leather, bake bricks, bleach linen, tan hides, or break up the soil with the plow and gamer the gifts of Demeter if he could live in idleness and free from all this work?  If your sys
tem [communism] is applied ... you will not be able to sleep in a bed, for no more will ever be manufactured; nor on carpets, for who would weave them if he had gold?111
The reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles are the first achievement of the democratic revolt. Pericles is a man of judgment and moderation; he does not wish to destroy the rich but to preserve them and their enterprise by easing the condition of the poor; but after his death (429} the democracy becomes so radical that the oligarchic party conspires again with Sparta, and makes in 411, and once more in 404, a rich man's revolution. Never theless, because wealth is great in Athens and trickles down to many, and because fear of a slave uprising gives the citizenry pause, the class war in Athens is milder, and sooner reaches a working compromise, than in Greek states where the middle class is not strong enough to mediate between rich
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XII
and poor. At Samos, in 412, the radicals seize the government, execute two hundred aristocrats, banish four hundred more, divide up the lands and houses among themselves,"" and develop another society like that which they have overthrown. At Leontini, in 422, the commoners expel the oligarchs, but soon afterward take to flight. At Corcyra, in 42 7, the oli garchs assassinate sixty leaders of the popular party; the democrats seize the government, imprison four hundred aristocrats, try fifty of them before a kind of Committee of Public Safety, and execute all fifty at once; seeing which a considerable number of the surviving prisoners slay one another, others kill themselves, and the rest are walled up in the temple in which they have sought sanctuary, and are starved to death. Thucydides describes the class war in Greece in a timeless passage:
During seven days the Corcyraeans were engaged in butchering those of their fellow-citizens whom they regarded as their enemies; and although the crime imputed was that of attempting to put down the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by their debtors because of the monies owed to them. Death thus raged in every shape, and as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants were dragged from the altar or slain upon it.
. . . Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places where it arrived last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions
. . . and the atrocity of their reprisals. . . . Corcyra gave the first example of these crimes ... of the revenge exacted by the governed
-who had never experienced equitable treatment, or, indeed, aught but violence from their rulers-when their hour came; of the iniqui tous resolves of those who desired to get rid of their accustomed pov erty, and ardently coveted their neighbors' goods; and the savage and pitiless excesses into which men who had begun the struggle not in a class but in a party spirit, were hurried by their passions. . .. In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for jus tice, and the enemy of all superiority.... Reckless audacity came now to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unman liness; ability to see all sides of a question was accounted inability to act on any....
The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from
greed and ambition. . . . The leaders in the cities, each provided


432	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVII
foreign informants he makes his greatest mistakes; so he thinks that Nebuchadrezzar was a woman, that the Alps are a river, and that Cheops came after Rameses III. But when he deals with matters that he has had a chance to observe in person he is more reliable, and his statements are increasingly confirmed as our knowledge grows.
He swallows many superstitions, records many miracles, quotes oracles piously, and darkens his pages with omens and auguries; he gives the dates of Semele, Dionysus, and Heracles; and presents all history, like a Greek Bossuet, as the drama of a Divine Providence rewarding the virtues and punishing the sins, crimes, and insolent prosperity of men. But he has his rationalistic moments, perhaps having heard the Sophists in his later years: he suggests that Homer and Hesiod gave name and form to the Olympian deities, that custom determines men's faiths, and that one man knows as much as another about the gods;"" having accepted Providence as the final arbiter of history, he puts it aside, and looks for natural causes; he com pares and identifies the myths of Dionysus and Osiris in the manner of a scientist; he smiles tolerantly at some tales of divine intervention, and offers a possible natural explanation;'" and he reveals his general method with a twinkle in his eye when he says: "I am under obligation to tell what is re ported, but I am not obliged to believe it; and let this hold for every nar rative in this history.":ua He is the first Greek historian whose works have come down to us; and in that sense Cicero may be forgiven for calling him the Father of History. Lucian, like most of the ancients, ranked him above Thucydides.'"'
Nevertheless the difference between the mind of Herodotus and that of Thucydides is almost the difference between adolescence and maturity. Thucydides is one of the phenomena of the Greek Enlightenment, a descendant of the Sophists as Gibbon was a spiritual nephew of Bayle and Voltaire. His father was a rich Athenian who owned gold mines in Thrace; his mother was a Thracian of distinguished family. He received all the education available in Athens, and grew up in the odor of skepticism. When the Peloponnesian War broke out he kept a record of it from day to day. In 430 he suffered from the plague. In 424, aged thirty-six (or forty), he was chosen one of two generals to command a naval expedition to Thrace. Because he failed to lead his forces to Amphipolis in time to relieve it from siege, he was exiled by the Athenians. He spent the next twenty years of his life in travel, especially in the Peloponnesus; to this direct acquaint ance with the enemy we owe something of the impressive impartiality
CHAP.XVII)  THE  LITERATURE  OF THE  GOLDEN  AGE	433
that distinguishes his book. The oligarchic revolution of 404 ended his exile, and he returned to Athens. He died-some say by murder-in or before 396, leaving unfinished his History of the Peloponnesian War.
He begins it simply:
Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians from the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be an important war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.
He opens his introductory narrative where Herodotus left off, at the close of the Persian War. It is a pity that the genius of the greatest Greek historians saw nothing worthier of relation in Greek life than its wars. Herodotus wrote partly with an eye to entertain the educated reader; Thucydides writes to furnish information for future historians, and the guidance of precedent for future statesmanship. Herodotus wrote in a loose and easygoing style, inspired perhaps by the rambling epics of Homer; Thucydides, like one who has heard the philosophers, the orators, and the dramatists, writes in a style often involved and obscure because it attempts to be at once brief, precise, and profound, a style occasionally spoiled by Gorgian rhetoric and embellishment, but sometimes as terse and vivid as Tacitus, and rising, in the more crucial moments, to a dramatic power as intense as anything in Euripides; nothing in the dramatists can surpass the pages that describe the expedition to Syracuse, the vacillations of Nicias, and the horrors that followed his defeat. Herodotus ranged from place to place and from age to age; Thucydides forces his story into a rigid chronological frame of seasons and years, sacrificing the continuity of his narrative. Herodotus wrote in terms of personalities rather than processes, feeling that processes operate through personalities; Thucydides, though he recognizes the role of exceptional individuals in history, and occasion ally lightens his theme with a portrait of Pericles or Alcibiades or Nicias, leans rather to impersonal recording and the consideration of causes, de velopments, and results. Herodotus wrote of far-off events reported to him in most cases at second or third hand; Thucydides speaks often as an eyewitness, or as one who has spoken with eyewitnesses, or has seen the original documents; in several instances he gives the documents concerned. He has a keen conscience for accuracy; even his geography has been veri fied in detail. He seldom passes moralistic judgments upon men or events; he lets his patrician scorn of Athenian democracy get the better of him in picturing Cleon, but for the greater pan he keeps himself aloof from his
434	THE	LIFE  OF.  GREECE	(CHAP.xvn·
story, gives the facts with f irness to both sides, and recounts the story of Thucydides' brief military career as if he had never known, much less been, the man. He is the father of scientific method in history, and is proud of the care and industry with which he has worked. "On the whole," he says, with a glance at Herodotus,
the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, be safely relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense-the subjects they treat being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by en throning them in the region of legend. Turning from these, we can rest satisfied with having proceeded upon the clearest data, and having arrived at conclusions as exact as can be expected in matters of such antiquity.... The absence of romance in my his tory will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future-which, in the course of human affairs, must resemble, if it does not reflect, the past-I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time."'
Nevertheless, he yields accuracy to interest in one particular: he has a passion for putting elegant speeches into the mouths of his characters. He frankly admits that these orations are mostly imaginary, but they help him to explain and vivify personalities, ideas, and events. He claims that each speech represents the substance of an address actually given at the time; if this is true, all Greek statesmen and generals must have studied rhetoric with Gorgias, philosophy with the Sophists, and ethics with Thrasy machus. The speeches have all the same style, the same subtlety, the same realism of view; they _make the laconic Laconian as windy as any Sophist bred Athenian. They put the most undiplomatic arguments into the mouths of diplomats,• and the most compromising honesty into the words of gen erals. The "Funeral Oration" of Pericles is an excellent essay on the virtues of Athens, and comes with fine grace from the pen of an exile; but Peri cles was famous for simplicity of speech rather than for rhetoric; and Plutarch spoils the romance by saying that .Pericles left nothing written, and that of his sayings hardly anything was preserved.:ua
E.g., the speech of Alcibiades at Spana, vi, 20.89.
CHAP.XVII)  THE  LITERATURE  OF THE  GOLDEN  AGE	435
Thucydides has defects corresponding to his virtues. He is as severe as a Thracian, and lacks the vivacity and wit of the Athenian spirit; there is no humor in his book. He is so absorbed in "this war, of which Thucydides is the historian" (a proudly recurring phrase) that he has an eye only for political and military events. He fills his pages with martial details, but makes no mention of any artist, or any work of art. He seeks causes sedu lously, but seldom sinks beneath political to economic factors in the de termination of events. Though writing for future generations, he tells us nothing of the constitutions of the Greek states, nothing of the life of the cities, nothing of the institutions of society. He is as exclusive towards women as towards the gods; he will not have them in his story; and he makes the gallant Pericles, who risked his career for a courtesan advocate of feminine freedom, say that "a woman's best fame is to be as seldom as possible mentioned by men, either for censure or for praise."''" Face to face with the greatest age in the history of culture, he loses himself in the logic chopping fluctuations of military victory and defeat, and leaves unsung the vibrant life of the Athenian mind. He remains a general even after he has become an historian.
We are grateful for him, nevertheless, and must not complain too much
that he did not write what he did not undertake to write. Here at least is an historical method, a reverence for truth, an acuteness of observation, an impartiality of judgment, a passing splendor of language and fascination of style, a mind both sharp and profound, whose ruthless realism is a tonic to our naturally romantic souls. Here are no legends, no myths, and no miracles. He accepts the heroic tales, but tries to explain them in natural istic terms. As for the gods, he is devastatingly silent; they have no place in his history. He is sarcastic about oracles and their safe ambiguity,160 and scornfully exposes the stupidity of Nicias in relying upon oracles rather than knowledge. e recognizes no guiding Providence, no divine plan, not even "progress"; he sees life and history as a tragedy at once sordid and noble, redeemed now and then by great men, but always relapsing into superstition and war. In him the conflict between religion and philosophy is decided; and philosophy wins.
Plutarch, and Athenaeus refer to hundreds of Greek historians. Nearly all of them but Herodotus and Thucydides, in the Golden Age, have been covered up by the silt of time; and of the later historians only paragraphs remain. The case is no different with the other forms of Greek literature. Of the hundreds of tragic dramatists who won prizes at the Dionysia, we
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
have a few plays by three; of the many comic writers we have one; of the great philosophers we have two. All in all, not more than one-twentieth survives from the critically acclaimed literature of fifth-century Greece; and from the earlier and later centuries even less.= Most of what we have comes from Athens; the other cities, as we can tell from the philosophers that they sent to Athens, were fertile in genius too, but their culture was sooner engulfed by barbarism from without and from below, and their manuscripts were lost in the disorder of revolution and war. We must judge the whole from the fragments of a part.
Even so it is a rich heritage, if not in quantity (but who has absorbed it all?), surely in form. Form and order are the essence of the classic style in literature as well as in art: the typical Greek writer, like the Greek artist, is never satisfied with mere expression, but longs to give.form and beauty to his material. He cuts his matter down to brevity, rearranges it into clar ity, transforms it into a complex simplicity; he is always direct, and seldom obscure; he shuns exaggeration and bias, and even when he is romantic in feeling he struggles to be logical in thought. This persistent effort to sub ordinate fancy to reason is the dominant quality of the Greek mind, even of Greek poetry. Therefore Greek literature is "modem," or rather con temporary; we find it hard to understand Dante or Milton, but Euripides and Thucydides are kin to us mentally, and belong to our age. And that is because, though myths may differ, reason remains the same, and the life of reason makes brothers of its lovers in all times, and everywhere.
CHAPTER  XVIII
TheSuicide of Greece
THE GREEK WORLD IN THE AGE OF PERICLES