CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVI
Christ made a friend of Matthew, who continued to be an agent of the Roman power; he uttered no criticism of the civil government, took no known part in the Jewish movement for national liberation, and counseled a submissive gentleness hardly smacking of political revolution. He advised the Pharisees to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." 82 His story of the man who, before going on a journey, "called on his slaves, and put his property in their hands," 83 contains no complaint against interest or slavery, but takes these institu tions for granted. Christ apparently approves of the slave who invested the ten minas ($600) that the master had entrusted to him, and made ten more; he disapproves of the slave who, left with one·mina, held it in unproductive safekeeping against the master's return; and he puts into the master's mouth the hard saying that "to him who has, more will be given, and from him who has nothing, even that which he has will be taken away" 84-an ex
cellent summary of market operations, if not of world history. In another parable workers "grumbled at their employer," who paid as much to one
who had labored an hour as to those who had toiled all day; Christ makes the employer answer: "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own?" 85 Jesus does not seem to have thought of ending poverty; "the poor ye have always with you." He takes for granted, like all ancients, that a slave's duty is to serve his master well; "blessed is the slave whom his master, returning, finds performing his charge." 86 He is not concerned to attack existing economic or political institutions; on the contrary, he condemns those ardent souls who would "take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm." 87 The revolution he sought was a far deeper one, without which reforms could only be superficial and transitory. If he could cleanse the human heart of selfish desire, cruelty, and lust, utopia would come of itself, and all those institutions that rise out of human greed and violence, and the consequent need for law, would disappear. Since this would be the profoundest of all , revolutions, beside which all others would be mere coups d'etat of class• ousting class and exploiting in its tum, Christ was in this spiritual sense the greatest revolutionist in history.
His achi veme t laY: not in ushering i a new state, but in outlining an ideal morality. His ethical code was predicated on the early comina of the Kingdom,88 and was designed to make men worthy of entering it Hence the Beatitudes, with their unprecedented exaltation of humility, poverty, gentleness, and peace; the counsel to tum the other cheek, and be as little children (no paragons of vinue!); the indi.ffe nce to economic provision, property, government; the preference of celibacy to marriage; the com mand to abandon all family ties: these ·were not rules for -0rdinary life, they
CHAP.XXVI)	JESUS
were a semi.monastic regimen fitting men and women for election by God into an imminent Kingdom in which there would be no law, no marriage, no sexual relations, no property, and no war. Jesus praised those who "leave house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children," even those "who make themselves eunuchs, for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake"; 89 obviously this was intended for a devoted religious minority, not for a continuing society. It was an ethic limited in purpose but universal in its scope, for it applied the conception of brotherhood and the Golden Rule to foreigners and ene mies as well as to neighbors and friends. It visioned a time when men would worship God not in temples but "in spirit and truth," in every deed rather than in passing words.
Were these moral ideas new? Nothing is new except arrangement. The central theme of Christ's preaching-the coming Judgment and Kingdom
-was already a century old among the Jews. The Law had long since in culcated brotherhood: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," said Leviticus; even "the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself." 90 Exodus had commanded the Jews to do good to their enemies.91 Jeremiah 92 and Isaiah 93 had counseled, "Let him give his cheek to him that smiteth him." The prophets, too, had ranked a good life above all ritual; and Isaiah 94 and Hosea 95 had begun to change Yahveh from a Lord of Hosts into a God of Love. Hillel, like Confucius, had phrased the Golden Rule. We must not hold it against Jesus that he inherited and used the rich moral lore of his people.
For a long time Christ thought of himself purely as a Jew, sharing the ideas of the prophets, continuing their work, and preaching like them only to Jews. In dispatching his disciples to spread his gospel he sent them only to Jewish cities; "go not into the way of the gentiles, nor into the city of the Samaritans"; 96 hence the apostles, after his death, hesitated to bring the Good News to the "heathen" world.97 When he met the Samaritan woman at the well he told her, "Salvation is of the Jews" 98-though we must not judge him from words perhaps put into his mouth by one who was not present, and who wrote sixty years after the event. When a Ca naanite woman asked him to heal her daughter, he at first refused, saying "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." 99 He told the leper whom he had cured to "go to the priest and . . . offer the gift that Moses pre scribed." 100 "Do everything that the scribes and Pharisees tell you, and observe it all; but do not do as they do." 101 In suggesting modifications and mitigations of the Judaic Law Jesus, like Hillel, did not think that he was overthrowing it; "I came not to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfill
568	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXVI
it." 102 "It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle " of the Law to fail." 103 t
Nevertheless, he transformed everything by the fo!ce of his character and his feeling. He added to the Law the injunction to prepare for tl}e Kingdom by a life of justice, kindliness, and simplicity. He hardened the Law in matters of sex and divorce,10" but softened it toward a readier for giveness,106 and reminded the Pharisees that the Sabbath was made for man.107 He relaxed the code of diet and cleanliness, and omitted cenain fasts. He brought religion back from -ritual to righteousness, and condemned con spicuous prayers, showy charities, and ornate funerals. He left the im pression, at times, that the Judaic Law would be abrogated by the coming of the Kingdom.108
Jews of all sects except the Essenes opposed his innovations, and especially resented his assumption of authority to forgive sins and to speak in the name of God. They were shocked to see him associate with the hated employees of Rome, and with women of low repute. The priests of the Temple and the members of the Sanhedrin watched his activity with suspicion; like Herod with John, they saw in it the semblance or cover of a political revolu tion; they feared lest the Roman procurator should accuse them of neg lecting their responsibility for maintaining social order. They were a bit frightened by Christ's promise to destroy the Temple, and not quite sure that it was only a metaphor. For his pan Christ denounced them in sharp and bitter terms:
The scribes and Pharisees . . . put heavy loads of the Law upon men's shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. They do everything they do to have men see it. They wear wide Scripture texts as charms, and large tassels, and they like the best places at din ners and the front seats in the synagogues. . . . But alas for you hypocritical scribes and Pharisees . . . you blind guides . . . blind fools! ... You let the weightier matters of the Law go-justice, mercy, and integrity.... You clean the outside of the cup and the
dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence	you
hypocritical scribes and Pharisees are like whitewashed tombs! ... Outwardly you appear to men to be upright, but within you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness	You are descended from the mur
derers of the prophets. Go on and fill up the measure of your fore fathers' guilt! You serpents! You brood of snakes! How can you
A vowel point placed over a Heb ew consonant.
t These passages may hav be_en mte lated by Judaic Christians anxious to discredit Paul; 104 but we may not arbnranly assume so.
CHAP. XA'Vl)	JESUS
escape being sentenced to the pit? ...	The publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of God before you.109
Was Jesus just to the Pharisees? Probably there were some among them who deserved this castigation, many who, like numberless Christians a few centuries later, substituted outward piety for inward grace. But there were also many Pharisees who agreed that the Law should be softened and hu manized.110 Very likely a large number of the sect were sincere men, rea sonably decent and honorable, who felt that the ceremonial laws neglected by Jesus should be judged not in themselves but as part of a code that served to hold the Jews together, in pride and decency, amid a hostile world. Some of the Pharisees sympathized with Jesus, and came to warn him that plots were being made to kill him.111 Nicodemus, one of the defenders of Jesus, was a rich Pharisee.
The final break came from Jesus' growing conviction and clear announce ment that he was the Messiah. At first his followers had looked upon him as the successor to John the Baptist; gradually they came to believe that he was the long-awaited Redeemer who would raise Israel out of Roman bondage and establish the reign of God on earth. "Lord," they asked him, "will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" 112 He put them off by saying, "It is not for you to know the times and seasons which the Father has set"; and he gave an equally vague answer to emissaries of the Baptist who asked him, "Art thou he that was to come?" To turn his followers from their conception of him as a political Messiah, he repudiated all claim to Davidic descent.113 Gradually, however, the intense expectations of his followers, and his discovery of his unusual psychic powers, seem to have persuaded him that he had been sent by God, not to restore the sovereignty
of Judea, but to prepare men for the reign of God on earth. He did not (in the synoptic Gospels) identify or equate himself with the Father. "\rVhy do you call me good?" he asked; "there is none good but one, that is God." 11-1 "Not as I will," he prayed in Gethsemane, "but as thou wilt." 115 He took the phrase "Son of Man," which Daniel 116 had made a synonym for the Messiah, used it at first without clearly meaning himself, and ended by apply ing it to himself in such statements as "The Son of l\'1an is master of the Sabbath" 117-which seemed high blasphemy to the Pharisees. He called God "Father" at times in no exclusive sense; occasionally, however, he spoke of "my Father," apparently signifying that he was the son of God in an especial manner or degree.m For a long time he forbade the disciples to call him the Messiah; but at Caesarea Philippi he approved Peter's recog nition of him as "the Christ, the Son of the living God." 119 \Vhen, on the last l\1onday before his death, he approached Jerusalem to make a final ap-


53°	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXV
On the death of Vologases IV (A.D. 209) his sons Vologases V andArtabanus IV fought for.the throne. Artabanus won, and_ then defea ed the R?mans _at Nisibis. Three centuries of ,var between the empires ended m a modified victory for Parthia; on the Mesopotamian plains the Roman legions were at a disadvantage against the Parthian cavalry. Artabanus in  fell in civ!l war. is conque!or, Ardashir or Artaxerxes, feudal lord of Persia, made himself Kmg of Kings (A.D. 227) and established the Sassanid dynasty. The Zoroastrian religion was restored, and Persia entered upon a greater age.
THE  HASMONEANS
In 143 B.C. Simon Maccabee, taking advantage of the struggles among the Parthians, Seleucids, Egyptians, nd Romans, wrested the independence of Judea from the Seleucid king. A popular assembly named him general and high priest of the Second Jewish Commonwealth ( 142 B.C-A.D. 70), and made the latter office hereditary in his Hasmonean family. Judea became again a theocracy, under the Hasmonean dynasty of priest-kings. It has been a characteristic of Semitic societies that they closely associated the spiritual and temporal powers, in the family and in the state; they would have no sovereign but God.
Recognizing the weakness of the little kingdom, the Hasmoneans spent two generations widening its borders by diplomacy and force. By 78 B.c. they had conquered and absorbed Samaria, Edom, Moab, Galilee, ldumea, Transjordania, Gadara, Pella, Gerasa, Raphia, and Gaza, and had made Pales tine as extensive as under Solomon. The descendants of those brave Mac cabees who had fought for religious freedom enforced Judaism and circum cision upon their new subjects at the point of the sword.5 At the same time the Hasmoneans lost their religious zeal and, over the bitter protests of the Pharisees, yielded more and more to the Hellenizing elements in the popula tion. Queen Salome Alexandra (78-69 B.c.) reversed this trend and made peace with the Pharisees, but even before her death her sons Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II began a war of succession. Both parties submitted their claims to Pompey, who now (63 B.c.) stood with his victorious legions at Damascus. When Pompey decided for Hyrcanus, Aristobulus fortified him self with his anny in Jerusalem. Pompey laid siege to the capital and gained its lower sections; but the followers of Aristobulus took refuge in the walled precincts of the Temple and held out for three months. Their piety, we are told, helped Pompey to overcome them; for perceiving that they would not fight on the Sabbath, he had his men prepare unhindered on each Sabbath the monnds and battering rams for the next day's assault. Meanwhile
CHAP.xxv)	ROME  AND  JUDEA	531
the priests offered the usual prayers and sacrifices in the Temple. vVhen the ramparts fell 12,000 Jews were slaughtered; few resisted, none surrendered, many leaped to death from the walls.6 Pompey ordered his men to leave the treasures of the Temple untouched, but he exacted an indemnity of 10,000 talents ($3,600,000) from the nation. The cities that the H::ismoneans had conquered _were transferred from the Judean to the Roman power; Hyrcanus II was made high priest and nominal ruler of Judea, but as the ward of Antipater the Idumean, who had helped Rome. The independent monarchy was ended, and Judea became part of the Roman province of Syria.
In 54 B.C. Crassus, on his way to play the part of Pentheus at Ctesiphon, robbed the Temple of the treasures that Pompey had spared, amounting to some 10,000 talents. vVhen news came that Crassus had been defeated and killed, the Jews took the opportunity to reclaim their freedom. Longinus, successor of Crassus as governor qf Syria, suppressed the revolt and sold 30,000 Jews into slavery (43 B.c.).7 In that same year Antipater died; the Parthians swept across the desert into Judea and set up, as their puppet king, Antigonus, the last of the Hasmoneans. Antony and Octavian countered by naming Herod-son of Antipater-king of Judea and financing his Jewish army with Roman funds. Herod drove out the Parthians, protected Jeru salem from pillage, sent Antigonus to Antony for execution, slew all Jewish leaders who had supported the puppet, and so auspiciously entered upon one of the most colorful reigns in history ( 37-4 B.c.).
HEROD THE  GREAT
His character was typical of an age that had produced so many men of intellect without morals, ability without scruple, and courage without honor. He was in his lesser way the Augustus of Judea: like Augustus he overlaid the chaos of freedom with dictatorial order, beautified his capital with Greek architecture and sculpture, enlarged his realm, made it prosper, achieved more by subtlety than by arms, married widely, was lJroken by the treachery of his offspring, and knew every good fortune but happiness. Josephus describes him as a man of great physical bravery and skill, a perfect marks man with arrow and javelin, a mighty hunter who in one day caught forty wild beasts, and "such a warrior as could not be withstood." 8 He must have added some charm of personality to these qualities, for he was always able to outtalk or outbribe the enemies who sought to discredit him with Antony, Cleopatra, or Octavian. From every crisis with the Triumvirs he emerged
532	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXV
with larger powers and territory than before, until Augustus judged him "too great a soul for so small a dominion," restored the cities of Hasmonean Palestine, to his kingdom, and wished Herod might rule Syria and Egypt too.9 ";i'he Idumean" was a generous as well as a ruthless man, and the bene fits he conferred upon his subjects were equaled only by the injuries he did them.	,
He was molded in part by the hatred of those whom he had defeated or
whose relatives he had slain, and by the scornful hostility of a people that resented his harsh autocracy and his alien descent. He had become king by the help and money of Rome, and remained to the end of his life a friend and vassal of the power from which the people night and day plotted to re gain their liberty. The modest economy of the country bent and at last broke under the taxes imposed upon it by a luxurious court and a building program out of proportion to the national wealth. Herod sought in various ways to appease his subjects, but failed. He forgave taxes in poor years, per suaded Rome to reduce the tribute it exacted, secured privileges for Jews abroad, relieved famine and oth r calamities promptly, maintained internal order and external security, and developed the natural resources of the land. Brigandage was ended, trade was stimulated, the markets and ports were noisy with life. At the same time the King alienated public sentiment by the looseness of his morals, the cruelty of his punishments, and the "accidental" drowning, in the bath, of Aristobulus, grandson of Hyrcanus II and there fore the legitimate heir to the throne. The priests whose power he had ended, and whose leaders he appointed, conspired against him, and the Pharisees abominated his apparent resolution to make Judea a Hellenistic state.
Ruling many cities that were more Greek than Jewish in population and culture, and impressed with the .refinement and variety of Hellenic civiliza tion, Herod, himself not by origin or conviction a Jew, naturally sought a cultural unity for his realm, and an imposing fas:ade for his rule, by encour aging Greek ways, dress, ideas, literature, and art. He surrounded himself with Greek scholars, entrusted to them high affairs of state, and made Nicolas of Damascus, a Greek, his official counselor and historian. He raised at great expense a theater and n amphitheater in Jerusalem, adorned them with monuments to Augustus and other pagans, and introduced Greek athletic and musical contests and Roman gladiatorial combats.10 He beautified Jerusalem with other buildings in what seemed to the people a foreign archi tectural style, and set up in public places Greek statuary whose nudity startled the Jews as much as the nakedness of the wrestlers in the games. He built himself a palace, doubtless on Greek models, filled it with gold and marble and costly furniture, and surrounded it with extensive gardens after
CHAP. xxv)	ROME  AND  JUDEA	533
the manner of his Roman friends. He shocked the people by telling them that the Temple which Zerubbabel had set up five centuries before was too small, and proposing to tear it down and erect a larger one on its site. Despite their protests and their fears he realized his plan and reared the lordly Temple that Titus would destroy.
On Mt. Moriah an area was cleared 750 feet square. Along its boundaries cloisters were built roofed with cedar "curiously graven," and supported by multiple rows of Corinthian columns, each a marble monolith so large that three men could barely join hands around it. In this main court were the booths of the money-changers, who for the convenience of pilgrims changed foreign coins into those acceptable to the Sanctuary; here, too, were the stalls where one might buy animals to offer in sacrifice, and the rooms or porticoes where teachers and pupils met to study Hebrew and the Law, and the noisy beggars inevitable in Oriental scenes. From this "Outer Temple" a broad flight of steps led up to an inner walled space which non Jews were forbidden to enter; here was the "Court of the \Vomen," where "such men as were pure came 'in with their wives." 11 From this second en closure the worshiper passed up another flight of steps, and through gates plated with silver and gold, into the "Court of the Priests," where stood, in the open air, the altar upon which burnt sacrifice was offered to Yahveh. Still other steps led through bronze doors seventy-five feet high and twenty-four wide, overhung with a famous golden vine, into the temple proper, open only to priests. It was built entirely of white marble, in set-back style, and its fa ade was plated with gold. The interior was divided crosswise by a great em broidered veil, blue and purple and scarlet. Before the veil were the golden seven-branched candlestick, the altar of incense, and the table bearing the unleavened "shewbread" that the priests laid before Yahveh. Behind the veil was the Holy of Holies, which in the earlier temple had contained a golden censer and the Ark of the Covenant, but in this temple, says Josephus, contained "nothing whatever." Here human foot trod only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, when the high priest entered alone. The main struc tures of this historic edifice were finished in eight years; the work of adorn ment, however, continued for eighty years, and was just completed when Titus' legions came.12
The people were proud of the great shrine, which was ranked among the marvels of the Augustan world; for its splendor they almost forgave the Corinthian columns of the porticoes and the golden eagle that-defying the Jewish prohibition of graven images-symbolized at the very entrance to the Temple the power of Judea's enemy and master, Rome. Meanwhile Jews who traveled brought back news of the completely Greek buildings with which Herod was remaking the other cities of Palestine, and told how he was
534	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(cHAP.XXV
spending national funds, and (rumor said) the gold that had been hidden in David's tomb,13 in constructing a great harbor at Caesarea, and lavishing gifts upon such foreign cities as Damascus, Byblus, Berytus, Tyre, Sidon, Antioch, Rhodes, Pergamum, Sparta, and Athens. Herod, it became clear, wished to be the idol of the Hellenic world, not merely the King of the Jews. But the Jews lived by their religion, by their faith that Yahveh would someday rescue them from bondage and oppression; the triumph of the Hellenic over the Hebraic spirit in the person of their ruler foreboded to them a disaster as great as the persecutions of Antiochus. Plots were formed against Herod's life; he discovered them, arrested the conspirators, tortured and killed them, and in some cases put their entire families to death.14 He set spies among the people, disguised himself to eavesdrop on his subjects, and punished every hostile word.15
He foiled all his enemies except his wives and his children. Of wives he had ten, once nine at a time; of children, fourteen. His second wife, Mariamne, was the grandaughter of Hyrcanus II and the sister of Aristobulus, both of whom Herod had slain. She was, says Josephus, "a ch:iste woman, but some what rough by nature, and treated her husband imperiously because she saw he was so fond of her as to be her slave.    She would also expose his
mother and sister openly, on account of the meanness of their birth, and would speak unkindly of them, insomuch that there was an unpardoning hatred among the women" of the royal household. Herod's sister persuaded him that Mariamne was plotting to poison him. He accused his wife before the members of his court; they condemned her, and she was executed. Doubtful of her guilt, Herod was for a time mad with remorse; he called out her name repeatedly, sent his servants to_ summon her, gave up public affairs, went into the desert, "afflicted himself bitterly," and was brought to his palace in a state of fever and insanity. i\1ariamne's mother joined with others in an attempt to depose him; he suddenly recovered his powers of mind and throne, and put the plotters to death. Soon thereafter Antipater, his son by his first wif , laid proof before him of an attempted conspiracy by Alexander and Aristobulus, his sons by i\Iariamne; he submitted the matter to a council of 1 50 men, who sentenced the youths to die (6 B.C.). Twoyears later Nicolas of Damascus convicted Antipater himself of schem ing to replace his father. Herod had the youth brought before him and "be gan to weep, lamenting the misfortunes he had suffered from his children." 16 In a moment of mercy he ordered Antipater jailed.
Meanwhile the old king was breaking down with disease and grief. He suffered from dropsy, ulcer, fever, convulsions, and loathsome breath. After frustrating so many attempts against his life he tried to kill himself, but was prevented. Hearing that Anripater had sought to bribe the guard to free
CHAP. XXV)	ROME  AND  JUDEA	535


THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XV
engage in discussion any person who gave promise of a stimulating intelli gence or an amusing stupidity. "Is not the road to Athens made for con versation?" he asked.1'11 His method was simple: he called for the definition of a large idea; he examined the definition, usually to reveal its incomplete ness, its contradictoriness, or its absurdity; he led on, by question after question, to a fuller and juster definition, which, however, he never gave. Sometimes he proceeded to a general conception, or exposed another, by investigating a long series of particular instances, thereby introducing a measure of induction into Greek logic; sometimes, with the famous So cratic irony, he unveiled the ridiculous consequences of the definition or opinion he wished to destroy. He had a passion for orderly thinking, and liked to classify individual things according to their genus, species, and specific difference, thereby preparing for Aristotle's method of definition as well as for Plato's theory of Ideas. He liked to describe dialectic as the art of careful distinctions. And he salted the weary wastes of logic with a humor that died an early death in the history of philosophy.
His opponents objected that he tore down but never built, that he re jected every answer but gave none of his own, and that the results de moralized morals and paralyzed thought. In many cases he left the idea that he had set out to clarify more obscure than before. When a resolute fellow like Critias tried to question him he turned his reply into another question, and at once recaptured the advantage. In the Protagoras he offers to answer instead of asking, but his good resolution lasts but a moment; whereupon Protagoras, being an old hand at the game of logic, quietly with draws from the argument.ue Hippias rages at Socrates' elusiveness: "By Zeus!" he cries, "you shall not hear [ my answer] until you yourself declare what 'you think justice to be; for it is not enough that you laugh at others, questioning and confuting everybody, while you yourself are unwilling to give a reason to anybody, or to declare your opinion on any subject."""' To such taunts Socrates replied that he was only a midwife like his mother. ''The reproach which is often made against me, that I ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself, is very just. The reason is that the god compels me to be a midwife, but forbids me to bring forth"211
-a deus ex machina wonhy of his friend Euripides.
In many ways he resembled the Sophists, and the Athenians applied the name to him without hesitation, and usually without reproach.2'"' Indeed, he was often a Sophist in the modem sense: he was rich in crafty dodges and argumentative tricks, slyly changed the scope or meaning of tenns, drowned the problem in loose analogies, quibbled like a schoolboy, and
CHAP. XVI)  THE  CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION	369
beat the wind bravely with words.™ The Athenians might be excused for giving him hemlock, since there is no pest like a conscious logician. In four points he differed from the Sophists: he despised rhetoric, he wished to strengthen morality, he did not profess to teach anything more than the art of examining ideas, and he refused to take pay for his instruction though he appears to have accepted occasional help from his rich friends."" With all his irritating faults his students loved him deeply. "Perhaps," he says to one of them, "I may be able to assist you in the pursuit of honor and virtue, from being mutually disposed to love; for whenever I conceive a liking for persons I devote myself with ardor, and with my whole mind, to love them, and be loved by them in return, regretting their absence and having mine regretted by them, and longing for their society while they long for mine."""
Aristophanes' Clouds represents the pupils of Socrates as forming a school with a regular meeting place; and a passage in Xenophon lends some color to this conception.""" Usually he is pictured as teaching wherever he found a pupil or a listener. But no common doctrine united his followers; they differed so widely among themselves that they became the leaders of the most diverse philosophical schools and theories in Greece-Platonism, Cyni cism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism. There was the proud and humble Antisthenes, who took from his master the doctrine of simplicity in life and needs, and founded the Cynic school; perhaps he was present when Socrates said to Antiphon: "You seem to think that happiness consists in luxury and extravagance; but I think that to want nothing is to resemble the gods, and that to want as little as possible is to make the nearest approach to the gods."'" There was Aristippus, who derived from Socrates' placid acceptance of pleasure as a good the doctrine which he later developed at Cyrene, and which Epicurus would preach at Athens. There was Eucleides of Megara, who sharpened the Socratic dialectic into a skepticism that denied the possibility of any real knowledge. There was the young Phaedo, who had been reduced to slavery, and had been ransomed by Crito at the behest of Socrates; Socrates loved the lad, and "made him a philosopher."'"" There was the restless Xenophon who, though he gave up philosophy for soldiering, testified that "nothing was of greater benefit than to associate with Socrates, and to converse with him, on any occasion, on any subject whatever.",.. There was Plato, upon whose vivid imagination the sage made so lasting an impression that the two minds are mingled forever in philo sophical history. There was the rich Crito, who "looked upon Socrates with the greatest affection, and took care that he should never be in want
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVI
of anything."'"" There was the dashing young Alcibiades, whose infidelities were to discredit and endanger his teacher, but who now loved Socrates with characteristic abandon, and said:
When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, his words produce absolutely no effect upon us in comparison, whereas the very fragments of your words, Socrates, even at second hand, and however imperfectly reported, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman and child who comes within hearing of them  I am
conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him and fly from the voice of the siren, he would detain me until I grew old sitting at his feet. . .. I have known in my soul, or in my heart   that
greatest of pangs, more violent in ingenuous youth than any ser pent's tooth, the pang of philosophy.... And you, Phaedrus, you, Agathon, you, Eryximachus, you, Pausanias, you, Aristodemus, you, Aristophanes, all of you, and I need not say Socrates himself, have all had experience of the same madness and passion for philosophy.'"'
There was the oligarchic leader Critias, who enjoyed Socrates' quips against democracy, and helped to incriminate him by writing a play in which he described the gods as the invention of clever statesmen who used them as night watchmen to frighten men into decency.'.. And there was the son of the democratic leader Anytus, a lad who preferred to hear Socrates discourse rather than to attend to his business, which was dealing in leather. Anytus complained that Socrates had unsettled the boy with skepticism, that the boy no longer respected his parents or the gods; more over, Anytus resented Socrates' criticisms of democracy.•- "Socrates," says Anytus, "I think you are too ready to speak evil of men; and if you will take my advice, I would recommend you to be careful. Perhaps there is no city in which it is not easier to do men harm than to do them good; and this is certainly the case at Athens.'".. Anytus bided his time.
The Philosophy of Socrates
Behind the method was a philosophy, elusive, tentative, unsystematic, but so real that in effect the man died for it. At first sight there is no Socratic philosophy; but this is largely because Socrates, accepting the relativism of Protagoras, refused to dogmatize, and was certain only of his ignorance.
Possibly, as Plutarch and Athenaeus assure us, Anytus loved Alcibiades, who rejecte<t
him for Socrates.'"'
CHAP. XVI)	THE  CONFLICT OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION	371
Though condemned for irreligion, Socrates gave at least lip service to the gods of his city, participated in its religious ceremonies, and was never kno:wn to utter an impious word.180 He professed to follow, in all important negative decisions, an inner daimonion which he described as a sign from heaven. Perhaps this spirit was another play of the Socratic irony; if so, it was remarkably well sustained; and it is but one class of many appeals, in Socrates, to oracles and dreams as messages from the gods.- He argued that there were too many instances of amazing adaptation and apparent design to allow us to ascribe the world to chance or any unintelligent cause. On immortality he was not so definite; he pleads for it tenaciously in the Phaedo, but in the Apology he says, "Were I to make any claim to be wiser than others, it would be because I do not think that I have any sufficient knowl edge of the other world, when in fact I have none."108 In the Cratylus he applies the same agnosticism to the gods: "Of the gods we know nothing.'"111 He advised his tollowers not to dispute of such matters; like Confucius, he asked them did they know human affairs so well that they were ready to meddle with those of heaven? 170 The best thing to do, he felt, was to acknowledge our ignorance, and meanwhile to obey the oracle at Delphi, which, when asked how one should worship the gods, answered, "Accord ing to the law of your country."'11
He applied this skepticism even more rigorously to the physical sciences. One should study them only so far as to guide his life; beyond that they are an inscrutable maze; each mystery, when solved, reveals a deeper mystery."" In his youth he had studied science with Archelaus; in his maturity he turned from it as a more or less plausible myth, and interested himself no longer in facts and origins but in values and ends. "He dis coursed," says Xenophon, "always of human affairs.""' The Sophists had also "turned around" from natural science to man, and had begun the study of sensation, perception, and knowledge; Socrates went further inward to study human character and purpose. "Tell me, Euthydemus, have you ever gone to Delphi?" "Yes, twice." "And did you observe what is written on the temple wall-Know thyself?" "I did." "And did you take no thought of that inscription, or did you attend to it, and try to examine yourself, and ascertain what sort of character you are? mn
Philosophy, therefore, was for Socrates neither theology nor metaphysics nor physics, but ethics and politics, with logic as an introduction and a means. Coming at the close of the Sophistic period, he perceived that the Sophists had created one of the most critical situations in the history of any culture-the weakening of the supernatural basis of morals. Instead of a
372	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XVI
frightened return to onhodoxy, he moved forward to the profoundest ques tion that ethics can ask: is a natural ethic possible? Can morality survive without supernatural belief? Can philosophy, by molding an effective secu lar moral code, save the civilization which its freedom of thought has threatened to destroy? When, in the Euthyphro, Socrates argues that the good is not good because the gods approve of it, but that the gods approve of it because it is good, he is proposing a philosophical revolution. His con ception of good, so far from being theological, is earthly to the point of being utilitarian. Goodness, he thinks, is not general and abstract, but spe cific and practical, "good for something." Goodness and beauty are forms of usefulness and human advantage; even a dung basket is beautiful if it is well formed for its purpose."" Since (Socrates thought) there is nothing else so useful as knowledge, knowledge is the highest virtue, and all vice is ignorance'.,.-though "vinue" (arete) here means excellence rather than sinlessness. Without proper knowledge right action is impossible; with proper knowledge right action is inevitable. Men never do that which they know to be wrong-i.e., unwise, injurious to themselves. The highest good is happiness, the highest means to it is knowledge or intelligence.
If knowledge is the highest excellence, Socrates argues, aristocracy is the


The Attic or Athenian school added to the Peloponnesians and to Myron what woman gives to man-beauty, tenderness, delicacy, and grace; and because in doing this it still retained a masculine element of strength, it reached a height that sculpture may never attain again. Calamis was still a little archaic, and Nesiotes and Critius, in casting a second group of Tyran nicides, did not free themselves from the rigid simplicity of the sixth cen tury; Lucian warns orators not to behave like such lifeless figures. But when, about 42 3, Paeonius of Thracian Mende, after studying sculpture at Athens, made for the Messenians a Nike, or Victory, he touched heights of grace and loveliness that no Greek would reach again until Praxiteles; and not even Praxiteles would surpass the flow of this drapery, or the ecstasy of this motion.•
Pheidias
From 447 to 438 Pheidias and his aides were absorbed in carving the statues and reliefs of the Parthenon. As Plato was first a dramatist and then became a dramatic philosopher, so Pheidias was first a painter and then be came a pictorial sculptor. He was the son of a painter, and studied for a while under Polygnotus; from him, presumably, he learned design and com position, and the grouping of figures for a total effect; from him, it may be, he acquired that "grand style" which made him the greatest sculptor in Greece. But painting did not satisfy him; he needed more dimensions. He took up sculpture, and perhaps studied the bronze technique of Ageladas. Patiently he made himself master of every branch of his art.
He was already an old man when, about 438, he formed his Athene Parthenos, for he depicted himself on its shield as aged and bald, and not unacquainted with grief. No one expected him to carve with his own hands the hundreds of figures that filled the metopes, frieze, and pediments of the Parthenon; it was enough that he superintended all Periclean building, and designed the sculptural ornament; he left it to his pupils, above all to Alcamenes, to execute the plans. He himself, however, made three statues
The Nike was pieced together from fragments unearthed by the Germans at Olympia in 1890, and is now m the Olympia Musewn.-Almost as beautiful are the Nereids, or Sea Maidens, which were found headless among the ruins of a monument in Lycian Xanthus, and are now in the British Musewn. The Greek spirit had penetrated even into non-Greek Asia.
CHAP.XIV)	THE   ART  OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE	325
of the city's goddess for the Acropolis. One was commissioned by Athenian colonists in Lemnos; it was of bronze, a little larger than life, and so deli cately molded that Greek critics considered this Lemnian Athena the most beautiful of Pheidias' works.•"' Another was the Athene Promachos, a colossal bronze representation of the goddess as the warlike defender of her city; it stood between the Propylaea and the Erechtheum, rose with its pedestal to a height of seventy feet, and served as a beacon to mariners
and a warning to enemies.t The most famous of the three, the Athene
Parthenos, stood thirty-eight feet high in the interior of the Parthenon, as the virgin goddess of wisdom and chastity. For this culminating figure Pheidias wished to use marble, but the people would having nothing less than ivory and gold. The artist used ivory for the visible body, and forty four talents (2545 lbs.) of gold for the robe;"" furthermore, he adorned it with precious metals, and elaborate reliefs on the helmet, the sandals, and the shield. It was so placed that on Athena's feast day the sun would shine through the great doors of the temple directly upon the brilliant drapery and pallid face of the Virgin.t
The completion of the work brought no happiness to Pheidias, for some of the gold and ivory assigned to him for the statue disappeared from his studio and could not be accounted for. The foes of Pericles did not over look this opportunity. They charged Pheidias with theft, and convicted
him.§ But the people of Olympia interceded for him, and paid his bail of forty (?) talents, on condition that he come to Olympia and make a chrys elephantine statue for the temple of Zeus;"' they were glad to trust him with more ivory and gold. A special workshop was built for him and his assistants near the temple precincts, and his brother Panaenus was commissioned to decorate the throne of the statue and the walls of the temple with paint ings.:ia Pheidias was enamored of size, and made his seated Zeus sixty feet high, so that when it was placed within the temple critics complained that the god would break through the roof if he should take it into his head to stand up. On the "dark brows" and "ambrosial locks"88 of the Thunderer, Pheidias placed a crown of gold in the form of olive branches and leaves; in
No authentic copy remains.
t It was carried off to Constantinople about A.D. 330, and appears to have been destroyed in
a riot there in 1203.n
:j: If we may judge from the "Lenonnant" and "Varvaka" models of this statue that are preserved in the Athens Museum, we should not have cared much for the Athene Parthenos. The first has· a stout frame and a swollen face, and the breast of the second is crawling with sacred snakes.
§ Ca. 438. There is much uncertainty about the date, and about the sequence of events in the later years of Pheidias' life.81
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XIV
the right hand he set a small statue of Victory, also in ivory and gold; in the left hand a scepter inlaid with precious stones; on the body a golden robe engraved with flowers; and on the feet sandals of solid gold. The throne was of gold, ebony, and ivory; at its base were smaller statues of Victory, Apollo, Artemis, Niobe, and Theban lads kidnaped by the Sphinx... The final result was so impressive that legend grew around it: when Pheidias had finished, we are told, he begged for a sign from heaven in approval; where upon a bolt of lightning struck the pavement near the statue's base-a sign which, like most celestial messages, admitted of diverse interpretations.• The work was listed among the Seven Wonders of the World, and all who could afford it made a pilgrimage to see the incarnate god. Aemilius Paullus, the Roman who conquered Greece, was struck with awe on seeing the colossus; his expectations, he confessed, had been exceeded by the reality." Dio Chrysostom called it the most beautiful image on earth, and added, as Beethoven was to say of Beethoven's music: "If one who is heavy laden in mind, who has drained the cup of misfortune and sorrow in life, and whom sweet sleep visits no more, were to stand before this image, he would forget all the griefs and troubles that befall the life of man.".. "The beauty of the statue," said Quintilian, "even made some addition to the received religion; the majesty of the work was equal to the god."'°
Of Pheidias' last years there is no unchallenged account. One story pic tures him as returning to Athens and dying in jail;"' another lets him stay in Elis, only to have Elis put him to death in 432;" there is not much to choose between these denouements. His pupils carried on his work, and attested his success as a teacher by almost equaling him. Agoracritus, his favorite, carved a famous Nemesis; Alcamenes made an Aphrodite of the Gardens which Lucian ranked with the highest masterpieces of statuary.t'" The school of Pheidias came to an end with the fifth century, but it left Greek sculpture considerably further advanced than it had found it. Through Pheidias and his followers the art had neared perfection at the very moment when the Peloponnesian War began the ruin of Athens. Technique had been mastered, anatomy was understood, life and movement and grace had been poured into bronze and stone. But the characteristic achievement of Pheidias was the attainment and definitive expression of the classic style, the "grand style" of Winckelmann: strength reconciled with beauty, feeling with restraint, motion with repose, flesh and bone with mind and soul. Here, after five centuries of effort, the famed "serenity" so imaginatively
Nothing remains of this Zeus but fragments of the pedestal.
t A Draped Venus in the Louvre may be a copy of this statue.
CHAP. XIV)	THE   ART  OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE
ascribed to the Greeks was at least conceived; and the passionate and turbu lent Athenians, contemplating the figures of Pheidias, might see how nearly, if only in creative sculptury, men for a moment had been like gods.
IV.  THE BUILDERS
1. The Progress of Architecture


I brought fair silence and a tranquil eye
For Hector's greeting, and watched well the way Of living, where to guide and where obey ...
One night-aye, men have said it-maketh tame A woman in a man's arms. 0 shame, shame!
What woman's lips can.so forswear her dead, And give strange kisses in another's bed?
Why, not a dumb beast, not a colt will run
In the yoke untroubled, when her mate is gone ...
0 my Hector! best beloved That, being mine, wast all in all to me,
My prince, my wise one, 0 my majesty
Of valiance! No man's touch had ever come Near me, when thou from out my father's home
Didst lead me and make me thine ... And thou art dead, And I war-flung to slavery and the bread
Of shame in Hellas, over bitter seas!
Hecuba, dreaming of some distant revenge, bids Andromache accept her new master graciously, that he may allow her to rear Astyanax, and that Astyanax may some day restore the house of Priam and the splendor of Troy. But the Greeks have thought of this too; and Talthybius comes to announce that Astyanax must die: " 'Tis their will thy son from this crested wall of Troy be dashed to death." He tears the child from its mother's arms, and Andromache, holding it for a last moment, bids it an hysterical farewell.
Go, die, my best beloved, my cherished one, In fierce men's hands, leaving me here alone. Thy father was too valiant; that is why They slay thee....
And none to pity thee!	Thou little thing
That curlest in my arms, what sweet scents cling All round thy neck! Beloved, can it be
All nothing, that this bosom cradled thee
And fostered, all the weary nights wherethrough
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
I watched upon thy sickness, till I grew
Wasted with watching? Kiss me. This one time; Not ever again. Put up thine arms, and climb About my neck; now kiss me, lips to lips ...
Oh, ye have found an anguish that outstrips All tortures of the East, ye gentle Greeks! . . .
Quick, take him; drag him; cast him from the wall, If cast ye will! Tear him, ye beasts, be swift!
God hath undone me, and I cannot lift
One hand, one hand, to save my child from death.
(CHAP,XVD


eligibility is determined by rotation, every citizen, in the average of chance, becomes a juror every third year. He does not have to serve, but the payment of two-later three-obols per day obtains an attendance of two or three hundred jurors for each panel. Important cases, like that of Socrates, may be tried before vast dicasteries of twelve hundred men. To reduce corruption to a minimum, the panel before which a case is to be tried is determined by lot at the last minute; and as most trials last but a day we do not hear much of bribery in the courts; even the Athenians find it difficult to bribe in a moment three hundred men.
Despite expedition, the courts of Athens, like courts the world over, are usu ally behind their calendar, for the Athenians itch to litigate. To cool this fever public arbitrators are chosen by lot from the roster of citizens who have reached their sixtieth year; the parties to a dispute submit their complaint and defense to one of these, again chosen by lot at the last minute; and each party pays him a small fee. If he fails to reconcile them he gives his judgment, solemnized by an oath. Either party may then appeal to the courts, but these usually refuse to hear minor cases that have not been submitted to arbitration. When a case is accepted for trial the plea is entered or sworn to, the witnesses make their depositions and swear to them, and all these statements are presented to the court in written form. They are sealed in a special box, and at a later date they are opened and examined, and judgment is given, by a panel chosen by lot. There is no public prosecutor; the government relies upon private citi zens to accuse before the courts anyone guilty of serious offenses against morals, religion, or the state. Hence arises a class of "sycophants," who make such charges a regular practice, and develop their profession into an art of black mail; in the fourth century they earn a good li ing by bringing-or, better, threatening to bring-actions against rich men, believing that a popular court will be loath to acquit those who can pay substantial fines.• The expenses of the courts are mostly covered by fines imposed upon convicted men. Plaintiffs who fail to substantiate their charges are also fined; and if they receive less than a fifth of the jurors' votes they are subject to a lashing, or to a penalty of a thousand drachmas ($rooo). Each party in a trial usually acts as his own lawyer, and has to make in person the first presentation of his case. But as the com plexity of procedure rises, and litigants detect in the jurors a certain sensitivity to eloquence, the practice grows of engaging a rhetor or orator, versed in the law, to support the complaint or defense, or to prepare, in his client's name and
Crito, rich friend of Socrates, complained that it was difficult for one who wished to mind his own business to live at Athens. "For at this very time," he said, "there are people bring ing actions against me, not because they have suffered any wrongs from me, but because they think that I would rather pay them a sum of money than have the trouble of law proceed ings.""
CHAP.XI)  PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT   261
character, a speech that the client may read to the court. From these special rhetor-pleaders comes the lawyer. His antiquity in Greece appears from a remark in Diogenes Laertius that Bias, Wise Man of Priene, was an eloquent pleader of causes, who always reserved his talents for the just side. Some of these lawyers are attached to the courts as exegetai, or interpreters; for many of the jurors have no more legal knowledge than the parties to the case.
Evidence is ordinarily presented in writing, but the witness must appear and swear to its accuracy when the grmmnateus, or clerk of the court, reads it to the jurors. There is no cross-examination. Perjury is so frequent that cases are sometimes decided in the face of explicit sworn evidence. The testimony of women and minors is accepted only in murder trials; that of slaves is admitted only when drawn from them by torture; it is taken for granted that without torture they will lie. It is a barbarous aspect of Greek law, destined to be out done in Roman prisons and Inquisition chambers, and perhaps rivaled in the secret rooms of police courts in our time. Torture, in Pericles' day, is forbidden in the case of citizens. Many masters decline to let their slaves be used as wit nesses, even when their case may depend upon such testimony; and any per manent injvry done to a slave by torture must be made good by those who inflicted it.'"
Penalties take the form of flogging, fines, disfranchisement, branding, con, fiscation, exile, and death; imprisonment is seldom used as a punishment. It is a principle of Greek law that a slave should be punished in his body, but a free man in his property. A vase painting shows a slave hung up by his arms and legs, and mercilessly lashed." Fines are the usual penalty for citizens, and are assessed on a scale that opens the democracy to the charge of fattening its purse through unjust condemnations. On the other hand a convicted person and his accuser are in many cases allowed to name the fine or punishment that they think just; and the court then chooses between the suggested penalties. Mur der, sacrilege, treason, and some offenses that seem minor to us are punished with both confiscation and death; but a prospective death penalty may usually be avoided before trial by voluntary exile and the abandonment of property. If the accused disdains flight, and is a citizen, death is inflicted as painlessly as possible by administering hemlock, which gradually benumbs the body from the feet upward, killing when it reaches the heart. In the case of slaves the death penalty may be effected by a brutal cudgeling.'" Sometimes the con demned, before or after death, may be hurled over a cliff into a pit called the barathron. When a sentence of death is laid upon a murderer it is carried out by the public executioner in the presence of the relatives of the victim, as a concession to the old custom and spirit of revenge.
The Athenian code is not as enlightened as we might expect, and advances only moderately upon Hammurabi's. Its basic defect is the limitation of legal
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XI
rights to freemen constituting hardly a seventh of the population. Even free women and children are excluded from the proud isonomia of the citizens; metics, foreigners, and slaves can bring suit only through a patron citizen. Sycophantic blackmail, frequent torture of slaves, capital punishment for minor offenses, personal abuse in forensic debate, the diffusion and weakening of judicial responsibility, the susceptibility of jurors to oratorical displays, their in ability to temper present passions with a knowledge of the past or a wise calcula tion of the future-these are black marks against a system of law envied throughout Greece for its comparative mildness and integrity, and sufficiently dependable and practical to give to Athenian life and property that orderly pro tection which is so necessary for economic activity and moral growth. One test of Athenian law is the reverence that nearly every citizen feels for it: the law is for him the very soul of his city, the essence of its beneficence and strength. The best judgment of the Athenian code is the readiness with which other Greek states adopt a large part of it. "Everyone would admit," says Isocrates, "that our laws have been the source of very many and very great benefits to the life of humanity."'" Here for the first time in history is a government of laws and not of men.
Athenian law prevails throughout the Athenian Empire of two million souls while that Empire endures; but for the rest Greece never achieves a common system of jurisprudence. International law makes as sorry a picture in fifth century Athens as in the world today. Nevertheless external trade requires some legal code, and commercial treaties (symbola) are described by Demos thenes as so numerous in his time that the laws governing commercial disputes "are everywhere identical.""° These treatises establish consular representation, guarantee the execution of contracts, and make the judgments given in one signatory nation valid in the others."' This, however, does not put an end to piracy, which breaks out whenever the dominant fleet is weakened, or relaxes its watchfulness. Eternal vigilance is the price of order as well as of liberty; and lawlessness stalks like a wolf about every settled realm, seeking some point of weakness which may give it entry. The right of a city to lead foraging expeditions upon the persons and property of other cities is accepted by some Greek states so long as no treaty specifically forbids it... Religion succeeds in making temples inviolable unless used as military bases; it protects heralds and pilgrims to Panhellenic festivals; it requires a formal declaration of war before hostilities, and the granting of a truce, when asked, for the return and burial of the dead in battle. Poisoned weapons are avoided by general custom, and prisoners are usually exchanged or ransomed at the recognized tariff of two minas-later one mina ($100)-each;'" otherwise war is nearly as brutal among the Greeks as in modem Christendom. Treaties are numerous, and are solemn ized with pious oaths; but they are almost always broken. Alliances are fre-
CHAP.XI)  PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT   263
quent, and sometimes generate lasting leagues, like the Delphic Amphictyony in the sixth century and the Achaean and Aetolian Leagues in the third. Occa sionally two cities exchange the courtesy of isopoliteia, by which each gives to the other's freemen the rights of citizenship. International arbitration may be arranged, but the decisions arrived at in such cases are as often as not rejected or ignored. Towards foreigners the Greek feels no moral obligation, and no legal one except by treaty; they are barbaroi•-not quite "barbarians," but out siders-aliens speaking outlandish tongues. Only in the Stoic philosophers of the cosmopolitan Hellenistic era will Greece rise to the conception of a moral code embracing all mankind.
Administration
As early as 487, perhaps earlier, the method of election in the choice of archons is replaced by lot; some way must be found to keep the rich from buying, or the knaves from smiling, their way into office. To render the selection less than wholly accidental, all those upon whom the lot falls are subjected, before taking up their duties, to a rigorous dokimasia, or character examination, conducted by the Council or the courts. The can didate must show Athenian parentage on both sides, freedom from physi cal defect and scandal, the pious honoring of his ancestors, the perform ance of his military assignments, and the full payment of his taxes; his whole life is on this occasion exposed to challenge by any citizen, and the pros pect of such a scrutiny presumably frightens the most worthless.from the sortition. If he passes this test the archon swears an oath that he will. prop erly perform the obligations of his office, and will dedicate to the gods a golden statue of life-size if he should accept presents or bribes."' The fact that chance is allowed to play so large a part in the naming of the nine archons suggests the diminution which the office has suffered since Solon's day; its functions are now in the nature of administrative routine. The archon basileus, whose name preserves the empty title of king, has become merely the chief religious official of the city. Nine times yearly the archon is required to obtain a vote of confidence from the Assembly; his actions and judgments may be appealed to the boule or the heliaea; and any citizen may indict him for malfeasance. At the end of his term all his official acts, accounts, and documents are reviewed by a board of logistai responsible to
The word is cousin to the Sanskrit barbara and the Latin balbus, both of which mean stammering; cf. our babble. The Greeks implied by barbaros rather strangeness of speech than lack of civilization, and used barbarismos precisely as we, following them, use barb1ZTism
-to  mean an alien or quasi-alien distortion of a nation's idiom.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XI
the Council; and severe penalties, even death, may avenge serious miscon duct. ff the archon escapes these democratic dragons he becomes, at the end of his year of office, a member of the Areopagus; but this, in the fifth century, is a well-nigh empty honor, since that body has lost nearly all its powers.
The archons are but one of many committees which, under the direction and scrutiny of the Assembly, the Council, and the courts, administer the affairs of the city. Aristotle names twenty-five such groups, and estimates the number of municipal officials at seven hundred. Nearly all of these are chosen annually by lot; and since no man may be a member of the same committee twice, every citizen may expect to be a city dignitary for at least one year of his life. Athens does not believe in government by ex perts.
More importance is attached to military than to civil office. The ten strategoi, or commanders, though they too are appointed for a year only, and are at all times subject to examination and recall, are chosen not by lot but by open election in the Assembly. Here ability, not popularity, is the road to preferment; and the ekklesia of the fourth century shows its good sense by choosing Phocion general forty-five times, despite the fact that he is_the most unpopular man in Athens and makes no secret of his scorn for the crowd. The functions of the strategoi expand with the growth of international relations, so that in the later fifth century they not only manage the army and the navy, but conduct negotiations with foreign states, and control the revenues and expenditures of the city. The com mander in chief, or strategos autokrator, is therefore the most powerful man in the government; and since he may be re-elected year after year, he can give to the state a continuity of purpose which its constitution might other wise render impossible. Through this office Pericles makes Athens for a generation a democratic monarchy, so that Thucydides can say of the Athenian polity that though it is a democracy in name it is really govern ment by the greatest of the citizens.
The army is identical with the electorate; every citizen must serve, and
is subject, until the age of sixty, to conscription in any war. But Athenian life is not militarized; after a period of youthful training there is little of martial drill, no strutting of uniforms, no interference of soldiery with the civilian population. In active service the army consists of light-armed in fantry, chiefly the poorer' citizens, carrying slings or spears; the heavy armed infantry, or hoplites, those prosperous citizens who can afford armor, shield, and javelin; and the cavalry of rich men, clad in armor and helmet,
CHAP.XI) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT  265
and equipped with lance and sword. The Greeks excel the Asiatics in mili tary discipline, and perhaps owe their achievements to a striking combina tion of loyal obedience on the battlefield with vigorous independence in civil affairs. Nevenheless there is no science of war among them, no definite principles of tactics on strategy, before Epaminondas and Philip. Cities are usually walled, and defense is-among the Greeks as among ourselves more effective than offense; otherwise man might have no civilization to record. Siege armies bring up great beams suspended by chains, and, draw ing the beams back, drive them forward against the wall; this is as far as siege machinery develops before Archimedes. As for the navy, it is kept up by choosing, each year, four hundred trierarchs, rich men whose privi lege it is to recruit a crew, equip a trireme with materials supplied by the state, pay for its building and launching, and keep it in repair; in this way Athens supports in peacetime a fleet of some sixty ships.""


t Cf. Greek alpha, Phoenician aleph (bull); beta, beth (tent); gamma, gimel  (camel);
delta, daleth (door); e-psilon, he (window); zeta, zain Oance); beta, kheth (paling); iota. yod (hand), etc.
io6	THE  LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.IX
tions, stone, bronze, or lead; for ordinary writing, clay tablets as in Mesopo tamia;• then wooden tablets covered with wax, which were •popular, in retro spect, with schoolboys;' for more permanent purposes papyrus, which the Phoenicians brought from Egypt, and (in the Hellenistic and Roman periods) parchment, made from the skins or membranes of goats or sheep. A metal stylus was used on wax tablets; on papyrus or parchment a reed dipped in ink. Wax writing was erased with the flat butt of the stylus, ink with a sponge; so the poet Martial sent a sponge with his poems to his friend, so that they might be wiped out with a stroke.• Many a critic will mourn the passing of this courtesy.
In no field have the old words so regularly come down to us as in that of writing. Paper, of course, is papyrus, and once again, in the cycle of fashion, the substance is a compressed plant. A line of writing was a stichos or row; the Latins called it a versus or verse-i.e., a turning back. The text was written in columns upon a strip of papyrus or parchment from twenty to thirty feet long, wound about a stick. Such a roll was called a biblos, from the Phoenician city, so named, whence papyrus came to Greece. A smaller roll was called
biblion; our Bible was originally ta biblia, the rolls.t When a roll formed part
of a larger work it was called a tomos, or cutting. The first sheet of a roll was called the protokollon-i.e., the first sheet glued to the stick. The edgesl of the roll were smo?thed with pumice and sometimes colored; if the author could affqrd-the expense, or the roll contained important matter, it might be wrapped in a diphthera (membrane), or, as the Latins called it, a vellum. Since a large roll would be inconvenient for handling or reference, literary works were usually divided into several rolls, and the word biblos, or book, was applied not to each work as a whole, but to each roll or part. These divisions were seldom made by the author; later editors divided the Histories of Herodotus into nine books, the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides into eight, Plato's Re public into ten, the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four. Since papyrus was costly, and each copy had to be written by hand, books were very limited in the classic world; it was easier than now to be educated, though as hard as now to be intelligent. Reading was not a universal accomplishment; most know!.. edge was handed down by oral tradition from one generation or craftsman to the next; most literature was read aloud by trained reciters to persons who learned through the ear.§ There was no reading public in Greece before the seventh century; there were no Greek libraries till those collected by Polycrates
•araphein, which we translate to 'Write, originally meant to engrll'IJe.
t The Latins called a roll volumen-wound up
:j: Latin frontes, whence our frontispiece.
§ Though we have been eye-minded since the development of printing, and writing is seldom read aloud, style and punctuation are still formed with a.view to easy breathing in the reader, and a rhythmic souod in the words. Probably our dev.endants will be ear minded again.
CHAP. IX)  THE  COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE    207
and Peisistratus in the sixth.' In the fifth century we hear of the private libraries of Euripides and the archon Eucleides; in the fourth, of Aristotle's. We know of no public library before Alexandria's, none in Athens till Hadrian."' Perhaps the Greeks of Pericles' day were so great because they did not have to read many books, or any long one.
m. LITERATURE
Literature, like religion, divided and united Greece. The poets sang in their local dialects, and often of their native scenes; but all Bellas listened to the more eloquent voices, and stirred them now and then to broader themes. Time and prejudice have destroyed too much of this early poetry to let us feel its wealth and scope, its reputed vigor of utterance and finish of form; but as we move thr_ough the isles or cities of sixth-century Greece our wonder rises at the abundance and excellence of Greek literature be fore the Periclean age. The lyric poetry reflected an aristocratic society in which feeling, thought, and morals were free so long as they observed the amenities of breeding; this style of urbane and polished verse tended to disappear under the democracy. It had a rich variety of structure and meter, but seldom shackled itself with rhyme; poetry meant to the Greeks, feeling imaginatively and rhythmically expressed.*
While the lyric singers tuned their lyres to love and war, the wander ing bards, in great men's halls, recited in epic measures the heroic deeds of the race. Guilds of "rhapsodes"t built up through generations a cycle of lays centering around the sieges of Thebes and Troy and the homing of the warriors. Song was socialized among these minstrels; each stitched his story together from earlier fragments, and none pretended to have com posed a whole sequence of these tales. In Chios a clan of such rhapsodes called themselves Homeridae, and claimed descent from a poet Homer who, they said, was the author of the epics that they recited throughout eastern Greece.11 Perhaps this blind bard was but an eponym, the imag inary ancestor of a tribe or group, like Hellen, Dorus, or lon.111 The Greeks of the sixth century attributed to Homer not only the Iliad and the Odyssey but all the other epics then existing. The Homeric poems are the oldest epics known to us; but their very excellence, as well as their many refer ences to earlier bards, suggest that the surviving epics stand at the end of a long line of development from simple lays to lengthy "stitched" songs. In
Rhyme was mostly confined to oracles and religious prophecies.
t From raptein, to stitch together, and oide, a song.
208	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. IX
sixth-century Athens-possibly under Solon,14 probably under Peisistratus a governmental commission selected or collated the Iliad and the Odyssey from the epic literature of the preceding centuries, assigned them to Homer, and edited-perhaps wove-them into substantially their present shape.u
It is one of the miracles of literature that poems so complex in origin achieved in the end so artistic a result. It is quite true that both in language and in structure the Iliad falls considerably this side of perfection: that Aeolian and Ionic forms are mingled as if by some polyglot Smyrnan, and that the meter requires now one dialect and now the other; that the plot is marred by inconsistencies, changes of plan and emphasis, and contradic tions of character; that the same heroes are killed two or three times over in the course of the tale; that the original theme-the wrath of Achilles and its results-is interrupted and obscured by a hundred episodes apparently taken from other lays and sewn into the epic at every seam. Nevertheless, in its larger aspects the story is one, the language is powerful and vivid, the poem is all in all "the greatest that ever sounded on the lips of men."u Such an epic could have been begun only in the active and exuberant youth of the Greeks, and could have been completed only in their artistic maturity. Its characters are nearly all warriors or their women; even the philosophers,
like Nestor, put up an enviably good fight. These individuals are intimately and sympathetically conceived; and perhaps the finest thing in all Greek literature is the unbiased manner in which we are made to feel now with Hector and now with Achilles. In his tent Achilles is a thoroughly unheroic and unlikable figure, complaining to his mother that his luck does not befit his semidivinity, and that Agamemnon has stolen his plum, the unhappy Briseis; letting the Greeks die by the thousands while he eats and pouts and sleeps in his ship or his tent; sending Patroclus unaided to death, and then rending the air with unmanly lamentations. When finally he goes into battle he is not stirred by patriotism but mad with grief over the loss of his friend. In his rage he loses all decency, and sinks to savage cruelty with both Lycaon and Hector. In truth he is an undeveloped mind, un settled and uncontrolled, and overshadowed with prophecies of death. "Nay, friend," he says to the fallen Lycaon, who sues for mercy, "die like another! What wouldst thou vainly weeping? Patroclus died, who was far better than thou. Look upon me! Am I not beautiful and tall, and sprung of a good father, and a goddess the mother that bare me? Yet, lo, Death is over me, and the mighty hand of Doom. There cometh a dawn of day, a noon or an evening, and a hand that I know not shall lay me dead.',. So he stabs the unresisting Lycaon through the neck, flings the body into
CHAP. IX)  T H E CO MM  ON  CULT UR E OF E ARLY GREECE    209
the river, and makes one of those grandiose speeches that adorn the slaugh ter in the Iliad, and laid the foundation for oratory among the Greeks. Half of Hellas worshiped Achilles for centuries as a god;" we accept him, and forgive him, as a child. At the worst he is one of the supreme creations of the poetic mind.
What carries us along through the Iliad when we do not have to study or translate it is not merely these characterizations, so numerous and diverse, nor merely the flow and turmoil of the tale, but the rushing splendor of the verse. It must be admitted that Homer repeats as well as nods; it is part of his plan to recall as in refrain certain epithet's and lines; so he sings with fond repetition, of Emos d'erigeneia phane rhododactylos Eos-"when ap peared the morning's daughter, rosy-fingered Dawn."18 But if these are flaws they are lost in the brilliance of the language, and the wealth of similes that now and then, amid the shock of war, calm us with the quiet beauty of peaceful fields. "As when flies in swarming myriads haunt the herds man's stalls in spring time, when new milk has filled the pails-in such vast multitudes mustered the long-haired Greeks upon the plain."18 Or •


.in 431 the island had 30,000 freemen, 100,000 slaves..., Chios became a clearing house for slaves; slave dealers bought the families of insolvent debtors from their creditors, and purchased boys to make eunuchs of them for the palaces of Lydia and Persia.ea In the sixth century Drimachus led his fellow slaves in revolt, defeated all armies sent against him, established himself in a mountain fastness, levied toll upon the richer citizens by discriminating robbery, offered them "protection" for a consideration after our own fashion, terrified them into dealing more justly with their slaves, gave his voluntarily severed head to his friends so that they might claim the reward that had been promised for it, and was worshiped for centuries afterward as the patron deity of slaves:99 here· is an excellent epic for some Spartacus of the pen. Art and literature flourished amid the wealth and bondage of Chios; here the Homeridae, a guild and succes sion of bards, had their seat; here Ion the dramatist and Theopompus the his torian would be born; here Glaucus (tradition said) discovered, about 560, the technique of welding iron; here Archermus and his sons, Bupalus and Athenis, made the finest statuary in sixth-century Greece.
Returning to the mainland, the traveler passes by the sites of Erythrae and Oazomenae-birthplace of Pericles' teacher and friend, Anaxagoras. Farther east, on a well-sheltered inlet, is Smyrna. Settled by Aeolians as far back as J015'° it was changed by immigration and conquest into an Ionian city. Already famous in the days of Achilles, sacked by Alyattes of Lydia about 600 B.c., destroyed again and again, and recently by the Greeks in A.D. 1924, Smyrna, rivaling Damascus in age, has known all the vicissitudes of history.• The re mains of the ancient town suggest its rich and varied life; a gymnasium, an
•acropolis, a stadium, and a theater have been dug out of the earth. The avenues were broad and well paved; temples and palaces adorned them; the main street, called Golden, was famous throughout Greece.
The northernmost of lonia's cities was Phocaea, still functioning as Fokia. The river Hermus connected it almost with Sardis itself, and gave it a lucrative advantage in the commerce of the Greeks with Lydia. Phocaean merchants undertook distant voyages in the search for markets; it was they who brought Greek culture to Corsica, and founded Marseilles.
Today, under the DlU]le of Ismir (this and Smyrna are probably connected with the ancient trade in myrrh), it is the second city of Turkey in population, and the largest in Asia Minot,
CHAP. VI)	THE  GREAT MIGRATION	151
Such were the Twelve Cities of Ionia, seen superficially as if in an hour's flight through space and time. Though they were too competitive and jealous to form a union for mutual defense, their citizens acknowledged some solidarity of background and interest, and met periodically on the promontory of Mycale near Priene, in the great festival of the Panionium. Thales begged them to form a sympolity in which every adult male would be a citizen both of his city and of a Panionian union; but commercial rivalries were too strong, and led rather to internecine wars than to politi cal unity. Hence, when the Persian attack came (546-5), the alliance im provised for defense proved rootlessly weak, and the Ionian cities came under the power of the Great King. Nevenheless this spirit of independ ence and rivalry gave to the Ionian communities the stimulus of competi tion and the zest of libeny. It was under these conditions that.Ionia devel oped science, philosophy, history, and the Ionic capital, while at the same time it produced so many poets that the sixth century in Hellas seems almost as fertile as the fifth. When Ionia fell her cities bequeathed their culture to the Athens that had fought to save them, and transmitted to it the intellectual leadership of Greece.
SAPPHO OF LESBOS
Above the Ionian Dodecapolis lay the twelve cities of mainland Aeolis, settled by Aeolians and Achaeans from northern Greece soon after the fall of Troy had opened Asia Minor to Greek immigration. Most of these cities were small, and played a modest role in history; but the Aeolian isle of Lesbos rivaled th"e Ionian centers in wealth, refinement, and literary genius. Its volcanic soil made the island a very garden of orchards and vines. Of its five cities Mytilene was the greatest, almost as rich, through its commerce, as Miletus, Samos, and Ephesus. Towards the end of the seventh century a coalition of the mercantile classes with the poorer citizens ovenhrew the landed aristocracy, and made the brave, rough Pit tacus dictator for ten years, with powers like those of his friend and fellow Wise Man, Solon. The aristocracy conspired to recapture power, but Pittacus foiled them and exiled their leaders, including Alcaeus and Sappho, first from Mytilene and then from Lesbos itself.
Alcaeus was a roistering firebrand who mingled politics with poetry and made every other lyric raise the tocsin of revolt. Of aristocratic birth, he attacked Pittacus with a lusty scurrility that merited the crown of ban ishment. He molded his own poetic forms, to which posterity gave the
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VI
name "alcaics"; and every stanza, we are told, had melody and charm. For a while he sang of war, and described his home as hung with martial tro phies and accouterments;" however, when his own chance for heroism came he threw away his shield, fled like Archilochus, and complimented himself lyrically on the valor of his discretion. Occasionally he sang of love, but dearest to his pen was the wine for which Lesbos was as famous as for its poetry. Nwn. chre methusthen, he advises us: nunc bibamus, let us drink deeply; in summer to cool our thirst, in autumn to put a bright color upon death, in winter to warm our blood, in spring to celebrate nature's resurrection.
The rain of Zeus descends, and from high heaven
A storm is driven,
And on the running water-brooks the cold Lays icy hold.
Then up! beat down the winter, make the fire Blaze higher and higher;
Mix wine as sweet as honey of the bee Abundantly;
Then drink, with comfortable wool around
Your temples bound.
We must not yield our hearts to woe, or wear With wasting care;
For grief will profit us no whit, my friend, Nor nothing mend;
But this is our best medicine, with wine fraught To cast out thought."'
It was his misfortune-though he bore it with lighthearted unconscious ness-to have among his contemporaries the most famous of Greek women. Even in her lifetime all Greece honored Sappho. "One evening over the wine," says Stobaeus, "Execestides, the nephew of Solon, sang a song of Sappho's which his uncle liked so much that he bade the boy teach it to him; and when one of the company asked, 'What for?' he answered, 'I want to learn it and die!'""" Socrates, perhaps hoping for similar lenience, called her "The Beautiful," and Plato wrote about her an ecstatic epigram:
Some say there are Nine Muses. How careless they are! Behold, Sappho of Lesbos is the Tenth!"
"Sappho was a marvelous woman," said Strabo; "for in all the time of which we have record I do not know of any woman who could rival her even


He plots with Cymus another counterrevolution; he argues that even if
one has taken a vow of loyalty to the new government it is permissible to assassinate a tyrant; and he pledges himself to work with his friends until they have taken full vengeance upon their foes.. Nevertheless, after many years of exile and loneliness, he bribes an official to let him return to Megara.w He is revolted at his own duplicity, and writes lines of despair that hundreds of Greeks would quote:
Not to be born, never to see the sun No worldly blessing is a greater one! And the next best is speedily to die, And lapt beneath a load of earth to lie.SDI
In the end we find him back in Megara, old and broken, and promising, for safety's sake, never again to write of politics. He consoles himself with
CHAP.IV)	SPARTA	95
wine and a loyal wife,100 and does his best to learn at last the lesson that
everything natural is forgivable.
Learn, Cyrnus, learn to bear an easy mind; Accommodate your humor to mankind And human nature; take it as you find.
A mixture of ingredients good and bad Such are we all, the best that can be had. The best are found defective, and the rest, For common use, are equal to the best.
Suppose it had been otherwise decreed,
How could the business of the world proceed?:uo
AEGINA AND EPIDAURUS
Across the bay from Megara and Corinth earthquake had raised, or left, one of their earliest rivals in industry and trade-the island of Aegina. There, in Mycenaean times, a prosperous city developed, whose graves gave up much gold.lll The conquering Dorians found the land too barren for tillage, but admirably placed for commerce. When the Persians came the island knew only an aristocracy of tradesmen, eager to sell the excellent vases and bronzes produced in their shops for the slaves whom they imported in great number to work in their factories, or for sale to the cities of Greece. Aristotle, about 350, calculated that Aegina had a population of half a million, of whom 470,000 were slaves.lD Here the first Greek coins were made, and the Aeginetan weights and measures remained standard in Greece till its conquest by Rome.
That such a commercial community could graduate from wealth to art was revealed when, in 18 1 1, a traveler discovered in a heap of rubbish the vigorous and finely carved figures that once adorned the pediment of the temple of Aphaea. Of the temple itself twenty-two Doric columns stand, still bearing their architrave. Probably the Aeginetans built it shortly before the Persian War; for though its architecture is classic, its statuary shows many traces of the archaic, semi-Oriental style. Possibly, however, it wiis raised after Salamis; for the statuary, which represents Aeginetans overcoming Trojans, may sym bolize the perennial conflict between Greece and the Orient, and the recent victory won by the Greek fleet under the very brows of Aegina at Salamis. To that fleet the little island contributed thirty ships; and one of these, after
the victory, was awarded by the Greeks the first prize for bravery.
A pleasant boat ride takes the traveler from Aegina to Epidaurus, now a village of five hundred souls, but once among the most famous cities of
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
Greece. For here-or rather ten miles out in a narrow gorge among the loftiest mountains of the Argolic peninsula-was the chief home of Ascle pius, the hero-god of healing. "O Asclepius!" Apollo himself had said through his oracle at Delphi, "thou who art born a great joy to all mortals, whom lovely Coronis bare to me, the child of love, at rocky Epidaurus.',ua Asclepius cured so many people-even raising a man from the dead-that Pluto, god of Hades, complained to Zeus that hardly anyone was dying any more; and Zeus, who would hardly know what to do with the human race if it were not for death, destroyed Asclepius with a thunderbolt.u. But the people, first in Thessaly, then in Greece, worshiped him as a savior god. At Epidaurus they raised to him the greatest of his temples, and there the physician-priests who from him were called Asclepiads established a
sanitarium known throughout Hellas for its success in treating disease. Epi daurus became a Greek Lourdes; pilgrims flocked to it from every part of the Mediterranean world, seeking what to the Greeks seemed the great est boon of all-health. ·They slept in the temple, submitted hopefully to the regimen prescribed, and recorded their cures, which they believed to be miraculous, on stone tablets that still lie here and there among the ruins of the sacred grove. It was out of the fees and gifts of these patients that Epi daurus built its theater, and the stadium whose seats and .goals still lie in the lap of the neighboring hills, and the lovely tholos-a circular, colon naded building whose surviving fragments, preserved in the little museum, are among the most exquisitely carved marbles in Greece. Today such patients go to Tenos in the Cyclades, where the priests of the Greek Church heal them111 as those of Asclepius healed their forerunners two thousand five hundred years ago. And the gloomy peak where once the people of Epidaurus sacrificed to Zeus and Hera is now the sacred mount of St. Elias. The gods are mortal, but piety is everlasting.
What the student looks for most eagerly at Epidaurus is not the leveled ruins of the Asclepium. The land is well wooded here, and he does not see the perfect theater that he is seeking until a tum in the road spreads it out against the mountainside in a gigantic fan of stone. Polycleitus the Younger built it in the fourth century before our era, but even to this day it is almost completely preserved. As the traveler stands in the center of the orchestra, or dancing place-a spacious circle paved with stone-and sees before him fourteen thousand seats in rising tiers, so admirably designed that every seat directly faces him; as his glance follows the radiating aisles that rise in swift straight lines from the stage to the trees of the mountain slope above; as he speaks quietly to his friends on the farthest, highest seats, two hun-
CHAP. IV)	SPARTA	97
dred feet away, and perceives that his every word is understood: then he visions Epidaurus in the days of its prosperity, sees in his mind's eye the crowds coming out in gay freedom from shrine and city to hear Euripides, and feels, more than he can ever express, the vibrant, plein-air Iife of ancient Greece.
CHAPTER  V
Athens
I, HESIOD'S BOEOTIA