Short Histories of the Literatures of the World : I. Edited by Edmund Gosse Short Histories of the Literatures of the World EDITHD BY EDMUND GOSSE, LL.D. Large Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. each Volume ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE By Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, M.A. FRENCH LITERATURE By Prof. EDWAKD DOVVDEN, D.C.I,., LL.D, MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE By the EDITOR ITALIAN LITERATURE By RICHARD GARNETT, C.B., LL.D. SPANISH LITERATURE By JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY JAPANESE LITERATURE By WILLIAM GEORGE ASTON, C.M.G., D.Lit. BOHEMIAN LITERATURE By THIS COUNT LUTZOW, D.Litt., D.Ph. SANSKRIT LITERATURE By Prof. A. A. MACDONELL, M.A. HUNGARIAN LITEJRATURE By Dr. RIKDL AMERICAN LITERATURE By Prof. W. P. TRENT RUSSIAN LITERATURE By K. WALISZKWSKI CHINESE LITERATURE By Prof. A. GILES ARABIC LITERATURE By C. HUART In preparation HEBREW LITERATURE By Prof. PHILIPPE BERGER GERMAN LITERATURE By CALVIN THOMAS, LL.D. LATIN LITERATURE By MARCUS DIMSDALE, M.A. Other volumes ivi II follow LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN All rights reserved. A History of ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE BY GILBERT MURRAY, M.A. AUTHOR OF "CARLYON SAHIB," "ANDROMACHE" " EURIPIDES I MEDEA," ETC. WILLIAM HEINEMANN MCMXI First Impression, 1897 New Impressions, 1898, 1902, 1907, 1911 Copyright, London 1897, by William Heinemann Stack Annex ffl A HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 204GSS2 PREFACE To read and re-read the scanty remains now left to us of the Literature of Ancient Greece, is a pleasant and not a laborious task ; nor is that task greatly increased by the inclusion of the 'Scholia' or ancient commen- taries. But modern scholarship has been prolific in the making of books ; and as regards this department of my subject, I must frankly accept the verdict passed by a German critic upon a historian of vastly wider erudition than mine, and confess that I 'stand help- less before the mass of my material.' To be more precise, I believe that in the domain of Epic, Lyric, and Tragic Poetry, I am fairly familiar with the re- searches of recent years ; and I have endeavoured to read the more celebrated books on Prose and Comic Poetry. Periodical literature is notoriously hard to control ; but I hope that comparatively few articles of importance in the last twenty volumes of the Hermes, the Rheinisches Museum, the Philologies, and the Eng- lish Classical Journals, have escaped my consideration. More than this I have but rarely attempted. If under these circumstances I have nevertheless sat down to write a History of Greek Literature, and have even ventured to address myself to scholars as well as to the general public, my reason is that, after Vlll PREFACE all, such knowledge of Greek literature as I possess has been of enormous value and interest to me ; that for the last ten years at least, hardly a day has passed on which Greek poetry has not occupied a large part of my thoughts, hardly one deep or valuable emotion has come into my life which has not been either caused, or interpreted, or bettered by Greek poetry. This is doubtless part of the ordinary narrowing of the specialist, the one-sided sensitiveness in which he finds at once his sacrifice and his reward ; but it is usually, perhaps, the thing that justifies a man in writing. I have felt it difficult in a brief and comparatively popular treatise to maintain a fair proportion between the scientific and aesthetic sides of my subject. Our ultimate literary judgments upon an ancient writer generally depend, and must depend, upon a large mass of philological and antiquarian argument. In treating Homer, for instance, it is impossible to avoid the Homeric Question ; and doubtless many will judge, in that particular case, that the Question has almost ousted the Poet from this book. As a rule, however, I have tried to conceal all the laboratory work, except for purposes of illustration, and to base my exposition or criticism on the results of it. This explains why I have so rarely referred to other scholars, especially those whose works are best known in - this country. I doubt, for instance, if the names of Jebb, Leaf, and Monro occur at all in the following pages. The same is true of such writers as Usener, Gomperz, Susemihl, and Blass, to whom I owe much ; PREFACE ix and even of W. Christ, from whose Geschichte der Griechischen Litteratur I have taken a great deal of my chronology and general framework. But there are two teachers of whose influence I am especially conscious : first, Mr. T. C. Snow, of St. John's College, Oxford, too close a friend of my own for me to say more of him; and secondly, Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellen- dorff, of Gottingen, whose historical insight and singular gift of imaginative sympathy with ancient Greece seem to me to have changed the face of many departments of Hellenic study within the last fifteen years. My general method, however, has been somewhat personal, and independent of particular authorities. I have tried at first unconsciously, afterwards of set purpose to realise, as well as I could, what sort of men the various Greek authors were, what they liked and disliked, how they earned their living and spent their time. Of course it is only in the Attic period, and perhaps in the exceptional case of Pindar, that such a result can be even distantly approached, unless history is to degenerate into fiction. But the attempt is helpful even where it leads to no definite result. It saves the student from the error of conceiving 'the Greeks' as all much alike a gallery of homogeneous figures, with the same ideals, the same standards, the same limitations. In reality it is their variety that makes them so living to us the vast range of their interests, the suggestiveness and diversity of their achievements, together with the vivid personal energy that made the achievements possible. It was not by 'classic repose' nor yet by ' worship of the human body,' it was not x PREFACE even by the mere possession of high intellectual and aesthetic gifts, that they rose so irresistibly from mere barbarism to the height of their unique civilisation : it was by infinite labour and unrest, by daring and by suffering, by loyal devotion to the things they felt to be great ; above all, by hard and serious thinking. Their outer political history, indeed, like that of all other nations, is filled with war and diplomacy, with cruelty and deceit. It is the inner history, the history of thought and feeling and character, that is so grand. They had some difficulties to contend with which are now almost out of our path. They had practically no experience, but were doing everything for the first time ; they were utterly weak in material resources, and their emotions, their ' desires and fears and rages} were probably wilder and fierier than ours. Yet they produced the Athens of Pericles and of Plato. The conception which we moderns form of these men certainly varies in the various generations. The ' serene and classical' Greek of Winckelmann and Goethe did good service to the world in his day, though we now feel him to be mainly a phantom. He has been suc- ceeded, especially in the works of painters and poets, by an aesthetic and fleshly Greek in fine raiment, an abstract Pagan who lives to be contrasted with an equally abstract early Christian or Puritan, and to be glorified or mishandled according to the sentiments of his critic. He is a phantom too, as unreal as those marble palaces in which he habitually takes his ease. He would pass, perhaps, as a ' Graeculus ' of the Decadence ; but the speeches Against Timarchus and Against Leocrates show PREFACE xi what an Athenian jury would have thought of him. There is more flesh and blood in the Greek of the anthropologist, the foster-brother of Kaffirs and Hairy Ainos. He is at least human and simple and emotional, and free from irrelevant trappings. His fault, of course, is that he is not the man we want, but only the raw material out of which that man was formed : a Hellene without the beauty, without the spiritual life, without the Hellenism. Many other abstract Greeks are about us, no one perhaps greatly better than another ; yet each has served to correct and complement his prede- cessor ; and in the long-run there can be little doubt that our conceptions have become more adequate. We need not take Dr. Johnson's wild verdict about the 'savages' addressed by Demosthenes, as the basis of our comparison : we may take the Voyage d'Anacharsis of the Abbd Bartelemi. That is a work of genius in its way, careful, imaginative, and keen-sighted ; but it was published in 1788. Make allowance for the per- sonality of the writers, and how much nearer we get to the spirit of Greece in a casual study by Mr. Andrew Lang or M. Anatole France ! A desire to make the most of my allotted space, and also to obtain some approach to unity of view, has led me to limit the scope of this book in several ways. Recognising that Athens is the only part of Greece of which we have much real knowledge, I have accepted her as the inevitable interpreter of the rest, and have, to a certain extent, tried to focus my reader's attention upon the Attic period, from ^Eschylus to Plato. I have xii PREFACE reduced my treatment of Philosophy to the narrowest dimensions, and, with much reluctance, have deter- mined to omit altogether Hippocrates and the men of science. Finally, I have stopped the history proper at the death of Demosthenes, and appended only a rapid and perhaps arbitrary sketch of the later literature down to the fall of Paganism, omitting entirely, for instance, even such interesting books as Theophrastus's Characters, and the Treatise on the Sublime. In the spelling of proper names I have made no great effort to attain perfect consistency. I have in general adopted the ordinary English or Latin modifications, except that I have tried to guide pronunciation by leaving k unchanged where c would be soft, and by marking long syllables with a circumflex. Thus Kimon is not changed to Cimon, and Demades is distinguished from ^Eschines. I have not, however, thought it necessary to call him Dmades, or to alter the aspect of a common word by writing Demeter, Thukydide~s. In references to ancient authors, my figures always apply to the most easily accessible edition ; my reading, of course, is that which I think most likely to be right in each case. All the authors quoted are published in cheap texts by Teubner or Tauchnitz or the English Universities, except in a few cases, which are noted as they occur. Aristotle, Plato, and the Orators are quoted by the pages of the standard editions; in the Constitution of Athens, which, of course, was not contained in the great Berlin Aristotle, I follow Kenyon's editio princeps. Philologists may be surprised at the occasional ac- ceptance in my translations of ancient and erroneous PREFACE xiii etymologies. If, in a particular passage, I translate r)\i@aTo?, VIK&VTCS, can only have come into the poems on Attic soil, and scarcely much before the year 500 B.C. At least, the fragments of Solon's Laws have, on the whole, a more archaic look. But for the purposes of history we must distinguish. There are first the remov- able Atticisms. A number of lines which begin with eia>9 will not scan until we restore the Ionic form 7^09. That is, they are good Ionic lines, and the Attic form is only a mistake of the Attic copyist. But there are also fixed Atticisms lines which scan as they stand, and refuse to scan if turned into Ionic ; these are in the strict sense late lines ; they were composed on Attic soil after Athens had taken possession of the epos. Again, there are ' false forms ' by the hundred attempts at a compromise made by an Athenian reciter or scribe between a strange Ionic form and his own natural Attic, when the latter would not suit the metre. The Ionic for ' seeing ' was opeovres, the Attic opwvres three syllables instead of four ; our texts give the false s i.e. they have tortured the Attic form into fout 'ATTICISMS' AND '^EOLISMS' 25 syllables by a quaver on the w. Similarly wei-ovs is an attempt to make the Attic o-Treou? fill the place of the uncontracted o-vreeo?, and ev^erdao-dat is an elongated ev^erdaOai. Spelling, of course, followed pronunciation ; the scribe wrote what the reciter chanted. The historical process which these forms imply, can only have taken place when Athens looked nowhere outside herself for literary information, when there were no Ionic-speaking bards to correct the Attic bookseller. Some of them, indeed, can only have ceased to be absurd when the Koin$, the common literary language, had begun to blur the characters of the real dialects and to derive everything from the Attic standard. That is, they would date from late in the fourth century. But to eliminate the Attic forms takes us a very little way; there is another non-Ionic element in 'Homer's' language which has been always recognised, though variously estimated, from antiquity onwards, and which seems to belong to the group of dialects spoken in Thessaly, Lesbos, and the yEolian coast of Asia including the Troad. Forms like : Arpei8ao, Mova-dwv, KCV for dv, TTwrtyje? for reaaape^, intensities in epi-, adjectives in -evvos, and masses of verbal flexions are proved to be yolic, as well as many particular words like 7ro\wjrdfj,/jLovo<;, There is also another earlier set of 'false forms,'' neither ^olic nor Ionic, but explicable only as a mixture of the two. /ee/cX777 is no form ; it is an original AZolic KeK\^yovTff, for 'shouting herald/ is the ^Eolic airwra brought as near as metre permits to the Ionic ^TrvTT/?. Most significant of all is the case of the Digamma or Vau, a W-sound, which disappeared in 26 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE Ionic and Attic Greek, both medially (as in our Norwich, Berwick) and initially (as in who, and the Lancashire 'oomari). It survived, however, in Doric inscriptions, and in such of the ^Eolic as were not under Ionian influence, till the fifth and sometimes the fourth century. It is called in antiquity the '^Eolic letter.' Now there are 3354 places in the poems which insist on the restoration of this Vau i.e. the lines will not scan without it ; 617 places, on the other hand, where in ancient JEolic it ought to stand, but is metrically inadmissible. That is, through the great mass of the poems the habit and tradition of the ^Eolic pronunciation is preserved ; in a small part the Ionic asserts itself. These facts have been the subject of hot controversy ; but the only effective way to minimise their importance is to argue that we have no remains of ^olic of the seventh century, and that the apparent ^Eolisms may be merely 'old Greek' forms dating from a period before the scattered townships on the coast of Asia massed them- selves into groups under the names of Idnes and Aioleis an historical hypothesis which leads to difficulties. It is not disputed that the '^Eolic' element is the older. Philology and history testify to it, and weight must be allowed to the curious fact, that to turn the poems into ^Eolic produces the rhymes and assonances characteristic of primitive poetry in numbers far too large to be the result of accident. 1 And it holds as a general rule that when the ^Eolic and Ionic forms are metrically indifferent i.e. when the line scans equally well with either the Ionic is put ; when they are not indifferent, then in the oldest parts of the poems the 1 E.g. Fpt^ofjitv adSavdroifft rot ftppavov ftpvv ?x l(Tt i X^ * ^ ( uv S-ypiot &ypr] )> and apfirvuu EVIDENCE OF THE LANGUAGE 27 /Eolic stands and the Ionic cannot, in the later parts the Ionic stands and the .^Eolic cannot. And further, where the two dialects denote the same thing by entirely dif- ferent words, the JEolic word tends to stand in its native form ; e.g. Xao?, ' people/ keeps its a, because the Ionic word was &?/i09. For a 'temple' the Ionic vrjos stands everywhere, but that is just because temples are a late development ; the oldest worship was at altars in the open air. 1 There are many exceptions to these rules. Dr. Pick of Gottingen, who has translated all the ' older parts ' of Homer back to a supposed original ^Eolic, leaving what will not transcribe as either late or spurious, has found himself obliged to be inconsistent in his method ; when ASecr&u occurs without a F he sometimes counts it as evidence of lateness, sometimes alters it into iKeaOcu. In the same way a contraction like viK&vres may represent an ^olic vUavr^ from i/i/ra/u, or may be a staring Atticism. When we see further that, besides the lonisms which refuse to move, there are numbers of JEolisms which need never have been kept for any reason of metre, the conclusion is that the Ionising of the poems is not the result of a deliberate act on the part of a particular Ionic bard Pick gives it boldly to Kynaethus of Chios but part of that gradual semi-conscious modernising and re-forming to which all saga-poetry is subject. The same process can be traced in the various dialectic versions of the Nibelungenlied and the Chanson de Roland. A good instance of it occurs in the English ballad of Sir Degrevant, where the hero ' Agravain ' has not only had a D put before his name, but sometimes rhymes with 'retenaunce' or 'chaunce' and sometimes 1 Cauer, Grundfragen, p. 203. 28 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE with ' recreaunt ' or ' avaunt.' It comes from an Anglo- Norman original, in which the Sieur dAgrivauns formed his accusative d Agrivaunt} THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF HOMER The evidence of language is incomplete without some consideration of the matter of the poems. What nation- ality, for instance, would naturally be interested in the subject of the Iliad? The scene is in the Troad, on vEolic ground. The hero is Achilles, from ^Eolic Thes- saly. The chief king is Agamemnon, ancestor of the kings of JEolic Kyme. Other heroes come from Nor- thern and Central Greece, from Crete and from Lycia. The lonians are represented only by Nestor, a hero of the second rank, who is not necessary to the plot. This evidence goes to discredit the Ionian origin of the main thread of the Iliad ; but does not the same line of argument, if pursued further, suggest something still more strange vu., a Peloponnesian origin? Agamem- non is king of Argos and Mycena3 ; Menelaus is king of Sparta ; Diomedes, by some little confusion, of Argos also ; Nestor, of Pylos in Messenia. The answer to this difficulty throws a most striking light on the history of the poems. All these heroes have been dragged down to the Peloponnese from homes in Northern Greece. Diomedes, first, has no room in Argos ; apart from the difficulty with Agamemnon, he is not in the genealogy v and has to inherit through his mother. A slight study of the local worships shows what he is, an idealised vEtolian. He is the founder of cities in Italy ; the constant com- panion of Odysseus, who represents the North -West 1 Thornton Romances^ Caraden Soc-, 1844, esp. p. 289. THE SUBJECT OF THE ILIAD 29 islands. He is the son of Tydeus, who ate his enemy's head, and the kinsman of Agrios ('Savage') and the 'sons of Agrios' the mere lion-hero of the ferocious tribes of the North-West, Agamemnon himself comes from the plain of Thessaly. He is king of Argos ; only in a few late passages, of Mycenae. Aristarchus long ago pointed out that ' Pelas- giun Argos ' in Homer means the plain of Thessaly. But ' horse-rearing Argos ' must be the same, for Argos of the Peloponnese was without cavalry even in historical times. And a careful treatment of the word ' Argos ' shows its gradual expansion in the poems from the plain of Thessaly to Greece in general, and then its second localisation in the Peloponnese. Agamemnon is the rich king of the plain of Thessaly ; that is why he is from the outset connected with Achilles, the poor but valiant chief from the seaward mountains ; that is why he chooses Aulis as the place for assembling his fleet. Aias in the late tradition is the hero of Salamis ; but in the poems he has really no fixed home. He is the hero of the seven-fold shield, whose father is 'Shield-strap' (Telamon), and his son, ' Broad-buckler ' (Eurysakes) ; if he has connections, we must look for them in the neighbourhood of his brother the Locrian, and his father's brother, Phokos, whose name suggests Phokis ; though it is true that some of the legends seem to derive his name from (fxaKij (seal), and treat him as a seal-hero. 1 So far we get a general conception of an original stage of the story in which the chiefs were all from Northern Greece. Where was the righting ? Achilles and Agamemnon must be original ; so must Hector and Ilion ; so, above all, must Alexander-Paris 1 He was clubbed to death on the sea-shore ; his mother was called ' Psamatheia t ' 'Sea-sand.' 30 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE and Helene". But need Ilion be in Troia on the site of Hissarlik ? It is worth observing that the scenery of the similes in the oldest parts of the poems is Thes- salian, and not Asiatic ; that Hector (' Upholder ') is not connected in local legend with the historical Troy its heroes are ^Eneas and one Dares; 1 that this ^neas, though afterwards identified with a hero at Hissarlik, seems to be in origin the tribal hero of the ^Eneanes in South Thessaly, just as Teukros (' Hitter'), the archer, gets in later tradition connected with Ilion, and the Ilion- men become Teukroi ? Of course it is ultimately a myth that we have to deal with. The original battle for Helen was doubtless a strife of light and darkness in the sky, just as the Niblungs were cloud-men and Sigurd a sun- god, before they were brought down to Worms and Burgundy. But it looks as if the Helen-feud had its first earthly localisation, not in Troy, but on the southern frontier of those Thessalian bards who sang of it. 2 When Dr. Schliemann made his first dazzling dis- coveries at Mycenae and Hissarlik, he believed that he had identified the corpse of Agamemnon and recovered the actual cup from which Nestor drank, the pigeons still intact upon the handles. We all smile at this now ; but it remains a difficult task to see the real relation which subsists between the civilisation described in the Homeric poems, and the great castles and walls, the graves and armour and pottery, which have now been unearthed at so many different sites in Greece. Of the nine successive cities at Hissarlik, the sixth from the bottom corresponds closely with the civilisa- tion of Mycenae, a civilisation similar in many respects to that implied in the earliest parts of the Iliad. The 1 Duncker, Greece, chap. xiii. 2 See Preface. MYCENAE: THE MIGRATIONS 31 Homeric house can be illustrated by the castle of Tiryns; the "cornice of blue kyanos," a mystery before, is explained by the blue glass-like fragments found at Mycenae. The exhumed graves and the earliest parts of Homer agree in having weapons of bronze and ornaments of iron ; they agree substantially in their armour and their works of art, the inlaid daggers and shields, the lion-hunts and bull -hunts by men in chariots, and in the ostensible ignorance of writing. On the other hand, the similarity only holds good for the earliest strata of the poems, 'and not fully even for them. Mycenae buried her dead ; the men of the epos burnt theirs a practice which probably arose during the Sea Migrations, when the wanderers had no safe soil to lay their friends in. Tiryns actually used stone tools to make its bronze weapons, whereas the earliest epos knows of iron tools ; and in general we may accept E. Meyer's account that the bloom of the epos lies in a 'middle age' between the Mycenaean and the classical periods. Thus the general evidence of the subject-matter conspires with that of the language, to show that the oldest strata have been worked over from an ^olic into an Ionic shape ; that the later parts were origin- ally composed in Ionia in what then passed as 'Epic' that is, in the same dialect as then appeared in the rest of the poems, with an unconsciously stronger tincture of lonism ; further, that the translation was gradual, and that the general development took cen- turies ; and lastly, perhaps, that an all-important epoch in this development was formed by the great Race Migrations which are roughly dated about 1000 B.C. It seems to have been the Migrations that took the 32 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE legendary war across the sea, when historical ^Eolians found themselves fighting in the Troad against Hissarlik, and liked to identify their own enemies with those of their ancestors ; the Migrations, which drew down the Northern heroes to the Peloponnese, when a stream of Greeks from the Inachus valley met in Asia a stream from Thessaly. The latter contributed their heroic saga ; the former brought the memory of the gigantic castles and material splendour of Tiryns and Mycenae. These Migrations present a phenomenon common enough in history, yet one which in romantic horror baffles a modern imagination : the vague noise of fighting in the North; the silly human amusement at the troubles of one's old enemies over, the border ; the rude awaken- ing ; the flight of man, woman, and child ; the hasty shipbuilding ; the flinging of life and fortune on un- known waters. The boats of that day were at the mercy of any weather. The ordinary villagers can have had little seamanship. They were lost on the waves in thou- sands. They descended on strange coasts and died by famine or massacre. At the best, a friendly city would take in the wives and children, while the men set off grimly to seek, through unknown and monster-peopled seas, some spot of clear land to rest their feet upon. Aristarchus put Homer at the ' Ionic Migration.' This must be so far true that the Migrations both /Eolic and Ionic stirred depths of inward experience which found outlet by turning a set of ballads into the great epos, by creating ' Homer.' It was from this adventurous exile that Ionia rose ; and the bloom of Ionia must have been the bloom of the epos. ADVANCES IN CIVILISATION 33 CRITERIA OF AGE As to determining the comparative dates of various parts of the poems, we have already noticed several pos- sible clues. Bronze weapons are earlier than iron, open- air altars earlier than temples, leathern armour earlier than metal armour, individual foot-fighting (witness ' swift-footed Achilles ') earlier than chariot-fighting, and this again than riding and the employment of columns of infantry. The use of ' Argos ' for the plain of Thessaly is earlier than its vague use for Greece, and this than its secondary specialisation in the Peloponnese. But all such clues must be followed with extreme caution. Not only is it always possible for a late poet to use an archaic formula even Sophocles can use ^aX/co? for a sword but also the very earliest and most essential episodes have often been worked over and re-embellished down to the latest times. The slaying of Patroclus, for in- stance, contains some of the latest work in Homer ; it was a favourite subject from the very outset, and new bards kept ' improving ' upon it. We find 'Hellas' and 'Achaia' following similar lines of development with Argos. They denote first Achilles's own district in Phthia, the home of those tribes which called their settlement in the Peloponnese ' Achaia,' and that in Italy 'Great Hellas.' But through most of the Iliad ' Achaioi ' means the Greeks in general, while ' Hellas ' is still the special district. In the Odyssey we find ' Hellas ' in the later universal sense, and in B we meet the idea ' Panhell6nes.' This is part of the expan- sion of the poet's geographical range : at first all the actors had really been ' Achaioi ' or ' Argeioi '; afterwards the old C 34 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE names ' Achaioi ' and ' Argeioi ' continued to be used to denote all the actors, though the actual area of the poems had widened far beyond the old limits and was widening still. The last parts of the Odyssey are quite familiar with Sicily and Kyrne, and have some inklings of the interior of Russia, and perhaps of the Vikings of the far North. 1 Another gradual growth is in the marriage-customs. Originally, as Aristotle noticed, the Greeks simply bought their wives ; a good-looking daughter was valuable as being aX, the very latest rag of the Odyssey, gives an account of the Suitor-slaying which agrees not with our version, but with the earlier account which our version has sup- planted (p. 40). Besides verbal imitations, we have more general refer- ences. For instance, the great catalogues in Homer, that of ships in B, of myrmidons in IT, of women in X, are almost without question extracts from a Boeotian or ( Hesiodic ' source. Again, much of 8 consists of abridged and incomplete stories about the Nostoi or Homecomings of Agamemnon, Aias the Less, and Menelaus. They seem to imply a reference to some fuller and more detailed original in all probability to the series of lays called the Nostoi, which formed 38 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE one of the rejected epics. The story in 8 (242 ff.) about Helen helping Odysseus in Troy, is definitely stated by Proclus a suspected witness, it is true to occur in the Little Iliad.* The succeeding one (271 ff.), makes Helen hostile to the Greeks, and cannot come from the same source. But it also reads like an abridgment. So does the story of Bellerophon in Z : " Proitos first sent him to slay the Chimaira : now she was a thing divine and not mortal, in front a lion, and behind a serpent, and in the middle a wild goat, breathing furious fire. Yet he slew her, obeying the signs of the gods" What signs, and how ? And what is the meaning of the strange lines 200 f . ? " But when he, too, was hated of all the gods, then verily down the Plain of Wandering alone he wandered, eating his heart, shunning the tread of men" The original poem, whatever it was, would have told us ; the resumt takes all the details for granted. Space does not allow more than a reference to that criterion of date which has actually been most used in the ' Higher Criticism ' the analysis of the story. It might be interesting to note that the wall round the ships in the Iliad is a late motive ; that it is built under impossible circumstances ; that it is sometimes there and sometimes not, and that it seems to return mysteriously after Apollo has flattened it into the ditch ; or that Achilles in IT speaks as if the events of I had not occurred ; or that Odysseus' adventures in K and JJL, and perhaps in i, seem to have been originally composed in the third person, not the first, while his supposed false stories in and r seem actually to represent older versions of the real Odysseus-legend ; or that the poets of T and the following books do not seem to know that Athena had transformed their hero in v into a decrepit ANALYSIS OF STORY: SUITOR-SLAYING 39 old man, and that he had consistently remained so to the end of . The story he tells is not that of our Odyssey: it is the old Bow-slaying, based on a plot between husband and wife (esp. 167). As to the Spear-fight, there is a passage in TT, 281-298, which was condemned by the Alexandrians as incon- sistent with the rest of the story. There Odysseus arranges with Telemachus to have all the weapons in the banquet hall taken away, only two spears, two swords, and two shields to be left for the father and son. This led up to a Suitor-slaying with spears by Odysseus and Telemachus, which is now incorporated as the second part of our Suitor-slaying. Otto Seeck 1 has tried to trace the Bow-fight and the Spear-fight (which was itself modified again) through all the relevant parts of the Odyssey. It is curious that in points where we can compare the myths of our poems with those expressed elsewhere in literature, and in fifth-century pottery, our poems are often, perhaps generally, the more refined and modern. In the Great Eotai* the married pair Alkinoiis and Aret are undisguisedly brother and sister : our Odyssey explains elaborately that they were really only first cousins. When the shipwrecked Odysseus meets Nausicaa, he pulls a bough off a tree what for ? To show that he is a suppliant, obviously : and so a fifth- 1 Quellen der Odyssee, 1887. MORAL GROWTH 41 century vase represents it. But our Odyssey makes him use the branch as a veil to conceal his naked- ness ! And so do the vases of the fourth century. A version of the slaying of Hector followed by Sophocles in his Niptra* made Achilles drag his enemy alive at his chariot wheels. That is the cruder, crueller version. Our poems cannot suppress the savage insult, but they have got rid of the torture. How and when did this humanising tendency come ? We cannot say ; but it was deliberately preferred and canonised when the poems were prepared for the sacred Athenian recitation. This moral growth is one of the marks of the last working over of the poems. It gives us the magni- ficent studies of Helen and Andromache, not dumb objects of barter and plunder, as they once were, but women ready to take their places in the conception of ^Eschylus. It gives us the gentle and splendid chivalry of the Lycians, Sarpedon and Glaucus. It gives us the exquisite character of the swineherd Eumaeus ; his eager generosity towards the stranger who can tell of Odysseus, all the time that he keeps professing his incredulity ; his quaint honesty in feeding himself, his guest, and even Telemachus, on the young inferior pork, keeping the best, as far as the suitors allow, for his master (, 3, 80 ; TT, 49) ; and his emotional breach of principle, accompanied with much apology and justi- fication, when the story has entirely won him : " Bring forth the best of the hogs ! " (, 414). Above all, it seems to have given us the sympathetic development of Hector. The oldest poem hated Hector, and rejoiced in mangling him, though doubtless it feared him as well, and let him have a better right to his name ' Man-slayer ' than he has now, when not only Achilles, but Diomedes, Aias, 42 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE Idomeneus, and even Menelaus, have successively been made more than a match for him. In that aspect Hector has lost, but he has gained more. The pre- vailing sympathy of the later books is with him. The two most explicit moral judgments in the poems are against Achilles for maltreating him. 1 The gods keep his body whole, and rebuke his enemy's savagery. The scenes in Z,, the parting with Andromache, the com- forting of little Astyanax frightened at his father's plume, the calm acceptance of a battle which must be fatal, and of a cause which must be lost all these are in the essence of great imagination ; but the absolute master- piece, one of the greatest feats of skill in imaginative literature, is the flight of Hector in X. It is simple fear, undisguised ; yet you feel that the man who flies is a brave man. The act of staying alone outside the gate is much ; you can just nerve yourself to it. But the sickening dread of Achilles' distant oncoming grows as you wait, till it simply cannot be borne. The man must fly ; no one can blame him ; it is only one more drop in the cup of divine cruelty, which is to leave Hector dead, Troy burned, Astyanax butchered, and Andromache her enemy's slave. If the old poet went with the conqueror, and exulted in Hector's shame, there has come one after him who takes all his facts and turns them the other way ; who feels how far more intense the experience of the conquered always is, and in this case how far more noble. The wonder is that Achilles is not spoilt for us. Some- how he remains grand to the end, and one is grieved, not alienated, by the atrocities his grief leads him to. The last touch of this particular spirit is where Achilles receives 1 *, 24 ; X, 395 ; and *, 176 ; T, 467. IMAGINATIVE SYMPATHY OF HOMER 43 Priam in his tent. Each respects the other, each con- quers his anguish in studied courtesy ; but the name of Hector can scarcely be spoken, and the attendants keep the dead face hidden, lest at the sight of it Priam's rage should burst its control, "and Achilles slay him and sin against God" (fl, 585). It is the true pathos of war : the thing seen on both sides ; the unfathomable suf- fering for which no one in particular is to blame. Homer, because he is an 'early poet,' is sometimes supposed to be unsubtle, and even superficial. But is it not a marvel of sympathetic imagination which makes us feel with the flying Hector, the cruel Achilles, the adulterous Helen, without for an instant losing hold of the ideals of courage, mercifulness, and chastity ? This power of entering vividly into the feelings of both parties in a conflict is perhaps the most charac- teristic gift of the Greek genius ; it is the spirit in which Homer, ^Eschylus, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, find their kinship, and which enabled Athens to create the drama. II LESSER HOMERIC POEMS; HESIOD; ORPHEUS THE REJECTED EPICS WHEN amid the floating masses of recited epos two poems were specially isolated and organised into com- plex unity, there remained a quantity of authorless poetry, originally of equal rank with the exalted two, but now mangled and disinherited. This rejected poetry was not fully organised into distinct wholes. The lays and groups of lays were left for each reciter to modify and to select from. It is an anachronism to map out a series of epics, to cut off Cypria* Iliad, sEthiopis* Little Iliad* Sack of Ilion,* Homecomings,* Odyssey, Telegoneia* as so many separate and continuous poems composed by particular authors. The Cypria* for instance, a great mass of ' Epe ' centring in the deeds of Paris and the Cyprian goddess before the war, is attributed to Homer, Creo- ph^lus, Cyprias, Hegsias, and Stasinus ; the Sack* is claimed by Homer, Arctinus, Lesches, and a poet whose name is given as Hegias, Agias, or Augias, and his home as Troizen or Colophon. Some of these names perhaps belonged to real rhapsodes ; some are mere inventions. 'Cyprias/ for instance, owes his existence to the happy thought that in the phrase ra KvTrpia ITTI; the second word might be the Doric genitive of a proper name, and then the question of authorship would be solved. 'CYCLES' 45 When the oral poetry was dead, perhaps in the fourth century B.C., scholars began to collect the remnants of it, the series being, in the words of Proclus, " made com- plete out of the works of divers poets." But this collec- tion of the original ballads was never widely read, and soon ceased to exist. Our knowledge of the rejected epics comes almost entirely from the handbooks of mythology, which collected the legendary history con- tained in them into groups or 'cycles.' We possess several stone tablets giving the epic history in a series of pictures. 1 The best known is the Tabula Iliaca, in the Capitoline Museum, which dates from just before our era, and claims to give 'the arrangement of Homer' according to a certain Theodorus. One of the tables speaks of the 'Trojan Cycle' and the 'Theban Cycle'; and we hear of a 'Cycle of History' of all history, it would seem compiled by Dionysius of Samos 2 in the third or second century B.C. The phrase ' Epic Cycle ' then denotes properly a body of epic history collected in a handbook. By an easy misapplication, it is used to denote the ancient poems themselves, which were only known as the sources of the handbooks. Athenaeus, for instance, makes the odd mistake of calling Dionysius' 'Cycle of History' a 'Book about the Cycle' i.e. Athenasus took the word ' cycle ' to mean the original poems. 3 Our main ostensible authority is one Proclus, apparently a Byzantine, from whom we derive a summary of the Trojan Cycle, which is given in the Venetian MS. A and in the works of the patriarch Photius. If what he said were true, it would be of great importance. But not 1 Jahn-Michaelis, Bilder-Chroniken. The Tab. II. is in Baumeister's Dtnkmaler. 1 See Bethe in Hermes, 26. ! Ath. 481 e, 477 d. 46 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE only does he start from a false conception of what the poems were they had probably perished before the days of Pausanias, centuries earlier he also seems to have reached his results by first taking the contents of some handbook, of which we can only say that it often agrees word for word with that of Apolloddrus, and then, by conjecture or otherwise, inserting "Here begins the Little Iliad of Lesches of Mitylene" or "Here comes the ALthiopis of Arcttnus of Miletus" It is known from quotations in earlier writers that the individual poems covered much more ground than he allows them. For instance, the Little Iliad* begins in Proclus with the contest of Aias and Odysseus for the arms of Achilles, and stops at the reception of the Wooden Horse. But a much earlier beginning is suggested by the opening words of the poem itself, which still survive : " / sing of I lion and Dardania, land of chivalry \ for which the Danaoi, hench- men of Ares, suffered many things;" and a later ending is proved by the quotations which are made from it to illustrate the actual sack. It is the origin, for instance, of Vergil's story about the warrior who means to slay Helen, but is restrained by Venus ; only in the Little Iliad it is Helen's beauty unaided that paralyses Menelaus. In general, however, Vergil, like Proclus's authority, pre- fers the fuller version derived from the special epic on the Sack by 'Arctinus of Miletus,' while Theoddrus again sets aside both epics and follows the lyrical Sack of Stesichorus. Again, Proclus makes the ^Ethiopis* and the Sack* two separate poems with a great gap between them. His JEthiopis* begins immediately at the end of the Iliad, gives the exploits of the Amazon Penthesileia and the ^Ethiop Memnon, and ends with the contest for the HISTORY OF THE REJECTED EPICS 47 arms of Achilles ; the Sack * begins after the reception of the Wooden Horse. The ^Ethiopis* has five books, the Sack* two ; seven in all. But one of the tables treats them both as a single continuous poem of 9500 lines, which must mean at the very least ten books. On the other hand, Proclus makes the Homecomings* which must have been a series of separate lays almost as elastic as the Eoiai* themselves (see p. 60), into a single poem. As for the date of these poems, they were worked into final shape much later than our Homer, and then appa- rently more for their historical matter than for their poetic value. They quote Iliad, Odyssey, and Theogony ; they are sometimes brazen in their neglect of the digamma ; they are often modern and poor in their language. On the other hand, it is surely perverse to take their mentions of ancestor-worship, magic, purification, and the like, as evidence of lateness. These are all practices of date- less antiquity, left unmentioned by ' Homer,' like many other subjects, from some conventional repugnance, whether of race, or class, or tradition. And the actual matter of the rejected epics is often very old. We have seen the relation of 8 to the Little Iliad* In the Cypria* Alexander appears in his early glory as con- queror of Sidon ; there is a catalogue of Trojans which cannot well have been copied from our meagre list in B, and is perhaps the source of it ; there is a story told by Nestor which looks like the original of part of our Hades- legend in X. And as for quotations, the words " The purpose of Zeus was fulfilled" are certainly less natural where they stand in the opening of the Iliad than in the Cypria* where they refer to the whole design of relieving Earth of her burden of men by means of the Trojan War. We have 125 separate quotations from the 48 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE Cypria* which seems to have stood rather apart and independent in the general epic tradition. The Telegoneia* too, though in its essence a mere sequel, making Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Kirke, sail in search of his father, just as Telemachus did, is full of genuine saga-stuff. Odysseus is repeated in his son, like Achilles, like Launcelot and Tristram. The sons of the 'Far-wanderer' are 'Far-fighter' and 'Far- born/ and a third, by Calypso, is ' Far-subduer ' (Tele- damus). The bowman has a bowman son, and the son wanders because the father did. And the end of the Tttegoneia* is in the simplest saga-spirit. Telegonus unknowingly slays his father, who gives him Penelope to wed and protect. He takes all the characters to Kirke in the magic island ; she purifies him of blood, and makes Telemachus and Penelope immortal ; finally, the two young men marry their respective step-mothers, Odysseus apparently remaining dead. That is not late or refined work. 'Eugamon' (' Happy -marrier ') of Cyrene must have seemed a grotesque figure to the men of the fifth century ; he was at home among those old saga -makers who let Heracles give Deianira to Hyllus, and CEdipus take on the late king's wife as part of the establishment. The critical questions suggested by the rejected epics are innumerable. To take one instance, how comes it that the Little Iliad* alone in our tradition is left in so thin a dress of conventional 'Epic' language that the JEolic shows through ? One line actually gives the broad a and probably the double consonants of ^Eolic, vv% fjLev erjv iizaaa, Xdyu-Trpa $' e7rereA,Xe ae\dva. Others are merely conventionalised on the surface. Possibly some epics continued to be sung in Lesbos in the THE HOMERIC HYMNS 49 native dialect till the era of antiquarian collection in the fourth century B.C. or after ; and perhaps if this poem were ever unearthed from an Egyptian tomb, we should have a specimen of the loose and popular epic not yet elaborated by Ionic genius. Its style in general seems light and callous compared with the stern tragedy of the Milesian AZthiopis * and Sack of Ilion* Among the other rejected epics were poems of what might be called the World-cycle. Of these, Proclus uses the Theogony* and the Titan War* of which last there exists one really beautiful fragment. The Theban 'Ring,' which was treated by grammarians as an introduction to the Trojan, had an CEdipodea* a Thebais* and a Lay of the After-born* treating of the descendants of the Seven, who destroyed Thebes. The Driving forth of Amphia- raus* the Taking of (Echalia* the Phocais* the Danais,* and many more we pass over. HYMNS OR PRELUDES It was a custom in epic poetry for the minstrel to 'begin from a god,' generally from Zeus or the Muses. 1 This gave rise to the cultivation of the ' Pro-oimion ' or Prelude as a separate form of art, specimens of which survive in the so-called Homeric ' Hymns,' the word v/iiw having in early Greek no religious connotation. The shortest of these preludes merely call on the god by his titles, refer briefly to some of his achievements, and finish by a line like, "Hail to thee, Lord; and now begin my lay" or, " Beginning from thee, I will pass to another song'' 2 The five longer hymns are, like Pindar's victory songs, illustrations of the degree to which a 1 Find., Nem. 2. Cf. 0, 499. * See esp. 31. D 50 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE form of art can grow beyond itself before it is felt to be artistically impossible. The prelude was developed as a thing apart until it ceased to be a prelude. The collection which we possess contains poems of diverse dates and localities, and the tradition of the text is singularly confused. The first 546 lines, for instance, are given as one hymn 'to Apollo.' But they comprise certainly two hymns : the first (1-178) by an Ionic poet, on the birth of the Ionian God in the floating island of Delos ; the second by a poet of Central Greece, on the slaying of the great Earth-serpent, and the estab- lishment of the Dorian God at Delphi. Further, these two divisions are not single poems, but fall into separate incomplete parts. Athenaeus actually calls the whole 'the hymns to Apollo.' The Ionic portion of this hymn is probably the earliest work in the extant collection. It is quoted as Homer's by Thucydides (iii. 104), and Aristophanes (Birds, 575), and attributed by Didymus the grammarian to the rhapsode Kynaethus of Chios ; which puts it, in point of antiquity, on a level with the rejected epics. The hymn to Hermes partly dates itself by giving seven strings to the original lyre as invented by that god. It must have been written when the old four-stringed lyre had passed, not only out of use, but out of memory. The beautiful fragment (vii.) on the capture of Dionysus by brigands looks like Attic work of the fifth or fourth century B.C. The Prelude to Pan (xix.) may be Alexandrian ; that to Ares (viii.) suggests the fourth century A.D. In spite of their bad preservation, our Hymns are delightful reading. That to Aphrodite, relating nothing but the visit of Aphrodite to Anchises shepherding his kine on Mount Ida, expresses perhaps more exquisitely HYMN TO DEMETER 51 than anything else in Greek literature that frank joy in physical life and beauty which is often supposed to be characteristic of Greece. The long hymn to Demeter, extant in only one MS., which was discovered last century at Moscow 'among pigs and chickens/ is perhaps the most beautiful of all. It is interesting as an early Attic or Eleusinian composition. Parts are perhaps rather fluent and weak, but most of the poem is worthy of the magnificent myth on which it is founded. Take one piece at the opening, where Persephone "was playing with Okeanos 1 deep-breasted daughters, and pluck- ing flowers, roses and crocus and pretty pansies, in a soft meadow, and flags and hyacinth, and that great narcissus that Earth sent up for a snare to the rose-face maiden, doing service by Gods zvill to Him of the Many Guests. The bloom of it was wonderful, a marvel for gods undying and mortal men / from the root of it there grew out a hundred heads, and the incensed smell of it made all the wide sky laugh above, and all the earth laugh and the salt swell of the sea. And the girl in wonder reached out both her hands to take the beautiful thing to play with; then yawned the broad-trod ground by the Flat of Nysa, and the deathless steeds brake forth, and the Cronos-born king, He of the Many Names, of the Many Guests ; and He swept her away on his golden chariot!' The dark splendour of Aiddneus, " Him of the Many Thralls, of the Many Guests,' is in the highest spirit of the saga. COMIC POEMS Of the Comic Poems which passed in antiquity as Homer's, the only extant example is the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, rather a good parody of the fighting 52 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE epic. The opening is Boeotian ; the general colour of the poem Attic. An obvious fable followed strangely enough by A. Ludwich in his large edition gives it to one Pigres, a Carian chief, who fought in the Persian War. The battle began because a mouse named Psicharpax, flying from a weasel, came to a pond to quench his thirst. He was accosted by a frog of royal race, Physignathos, son of Peleus (the hero of Mount Pelion has become ' Mudman,' and his son ' Puff-cheek' !) who persuaded him to have a ride on his back and see his kingdom. Unhappily a ' Hydros ' usually a water- snake, here perhaps some otter-like animal lifted its head above the water, and the frog instinctively dived. The mouse perished, but not unavenged. A kinsman saw him from the bank, and from the blood-feud arose a great war, in which the mice had the best of it. At last Athena besought Zeus to prevent the annihilation of the frogs. He tried first thunderbolts and then crabs, which latter were more than the mice could stand ; they turned, and the war ended. There were many comic battle-pieces ; we hear of a Spider-fight* a Crane-fight,* a Fieldfare-poem* Some were in iambics, and consequently foreign to the Home- ric style. The most celebrated comic poem was the Mar- gttes,* so called after its hero, a roaring blade (/jLapyos), high-spirited and incompetent, whose characteristic is given in the immortal line TroXX' f)irit,\oxfJfMrlri Zirdprav <5Xec THE EARLY ELEGISTS 81 Alexandria, and has the special title Eunomia, l Law and Order.' The greatest poet among the elegists is MIMNERMUS of Colophon. He is chiefly celebrated for his Nanno* a long poem, or a collection of poems, on love or past lovers, called by the name of his mistress, who, like himself, was a flute-player. But his war fragments are richer than those of Tyrtasus or Callinus, and apart from either love or war he has great romantic beauty. For instance, the fragment : " Surely the Sun has labour all his days, And never any respite, steeds nor god. Since os first, -whose hands are rosy rays, Ocean forsook, and Heaven's high pathway trod; At night across the sea that wondrous bed Shell-hollow, beaten by Hephaisto? hand, Of wingld gold and gorgeous, bears his head Half-waking on the wave, from eve's red strand To the Ethiop shore, where steeds and chariot are, Keen-mettled, waiting for the morning star" The influence of Mimnermus increased with time, and the plan of his Nanno* remained a formative idea to the great elegiac movement of Alexandria and its Roman imitators. There is music and character in all that he writes, and spirit where it is wanted, as in the account of the taking of Smyrna. The shadowiness of these non-Attic poets strikes us as soon as we touch the full stream of Attic tradition in SOLON, son of Exekestides (639-559 B - c .Ov The tradition is still story rather than history, but it is there : his travels, his pretended madness, his dealings with the tyrant Pisistratus. The travels were probably, in reality, ordinary commercial voyages, but they made a fine F 82 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE background for the favourite Greek conception of the Wise Wanderer. We hear, in defiance of chronology, how he met the richest of kings, Croesus, who showed all his glory and then asked who was the 'most fortu- nate' man in the world. Solon named him certain obscure persons who had done their duty and were loved by their neighbours and were now safely dead. The words seemed meaningless at the time, but had their due effect afterwards on Croesus when Cyrus was in the act of burning him to death ; and on Cyrus when he heard the story and desisted from his cruel pride. Solon was a soldier and statesman who had written love-poetry in his youth, and now turned his skill in verse to practical purposes, circulating political poems as his successors two centuries later circulated speeches and pamphlets. It is not clear how far this practice was borrowed from the great towns of Ionia, how far it was a growth of the specially Athenian instinct for politics. We possess many considerable fragments, elegiac, iambic, and trochaic, which are of immense interest as historical documents ; while as poetry they have something of the hardness and dulness of the practical man. The most interesting bits are on the war against Megara for the possession of Salamis, and on the ' Seisachtheia ' or ' Off- shaking of Burdens} as Solon's great legislative revolu- tion was called. As a reforming statesman, Solon was beaten by the extraordinary difficulties of the time ; he lived to see the downfall of the constitution he had framed, and the rise of Pisistratus ; but something in his character kept him alive in the memory of Athens as the type of the great and good lawgiver, who might have been a 'Tyrannos,' but would not for righteousness' sake. THEOGNIS OF MEGARA 83 THEOGNIS of Megara, by far the best preserved of the elegists, owes his immortality to his maxims, the brief statements of practical philosophy which the Greeks called ' Gn6mai ' and the Romans ' Sententice.' Some are merely moral " Fairest is righteousness, and best is health^ And sweetest is to win the hearts desire" Some are bitter " Few men can cheat their haters, Kyrnos mine; Only true love is easy to betray / " Many show the exile waiting for his revenge " Drink while they drink, and, though thine heart be galled, Let no man living count the wounds of it: There comes a day for patience, and a day For deeds and joy, to all men and to thee ! " Theognis's doctrine is not food for babes. He is a Dorian noble, and a partisan of the bitterest type in a state renowned for its factions. He drinks freely ; he speaks of the Demos as { the vile' or as ' my enemies'; once he prays Zeus to "give him their black blood to drink" That was when the Demos had killed all his friends, and driven him to beggary and exile, and the proud man had to write poems for those who enter- tained him. We hear, for instance, of an elegy on some Syracusans slain in battle. Our extant remains are entirely personal ebullitions of feeling or monitory addresses, chiefly to his squire Kyrnos. His relations with Kyrnos are typical of the Dorian soldier. He takes to battle with him a boy, his equal in station, to whom he is ( like a father' (1. 1049). He teaches him all the duties of Dorian chivalry to fight, to suffer in silence, 84 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE to stick to a friend, to keep clear of falsehood, and to avoid associating with 'base men.' He is pledged to bring the boy back safe, or die on the field himself ; and he is disgraced if the boy does not grow up to be a worthy and noble Dorian. In the rest of his rela- tions with the squire, there is some sentiment which we cannot enter into : there were no women in the Dorian camps. It is the mixed gift of good and evil brought by the Dorian invaders to Greece, which the true Greek sometimes over-admired because it was so foreign to him self-mastery, courage, grossness, and pride, effective devotion to a narrow class and an un- civilised ideal. Our MSS. of Theognis come from a collection made for educational purposes in the third century B.C., and show that state of interpolation which is characteristic of the schoolbook. Whole passages of Solon, Mimnermus, Tyrtaeus, and another elegist Euenus, originally jotted on the margin for purposes of com- parison, have now crept into the text. The order of the ' Gnomes ' is confused ; and we sometimes have what appear to be two separate versions of the same gnome, an original and an abbreviation. There is a certain blindness of frank pride and chivalry, a depth of hatred and love, and a sense of mystery, which make Theognis worthy of the name of poet. The gnomic movement receives its special expression in the conception of the Seven Wise Men. They pro- vide the necessary mythical authorship for the wide- spread proverbs and maxims the ' Know thyself] which was written up on the temple at Delphi ; the ' Nothing too much,' ' Surety; loss to follow j and the like, which were current in people's mouths. The Wise Ones were GNOMIC POETRY 85 not always very virtuous. The tyrant Periander occurs in some of the lists, and the quasi-tyrant Pittacus in all : their wisdom was chiefly of a prudential tendency. A pretended edition of their works was compiled by the fourth-century (?) orator, Lobon of Argos. Riddles, as well as gnomes, are a form of wisdom ; and several ancient conundrums are attributed to the sage Kleobu- lus, or else to ' Kleobulina/ the woman being explained as a daughter of the man : it seemed, perhaps, a feminine form of wisdom. The gnome is made witty by the contemporaries PHOKYLIDES of Miletus and DEMODOCUS of Leros (about 537 B.C.). Their only remains are in the nature of epigrams in elegiac metre. Demodocus claims to be the inventor of a very fruitful jest: "This, too, is of Demodocus : The Chians are bad ; not this man good and that bad, but all bad, except Procles. And even Procles is a Chian ! " There are many Greek and Latin adaptations of that epigram before we get to Person's condemnation of German scholars : " All save only Hermann ; and Her- mann's a German ! " The form of introduction, " This, too, is of Phokylides" or " of Demodocus" seems to have served these two poets as the mention of Kyrnos served Theognis. It was a 'seal' which stamped the author's name on the work. We have under the name of Phokylides a poem in two hundred and thirty-nine hexameters, containing moral precepts, which Bernays has shown to be the work of an Alexandrian Jew. It begins, "First honour God, and next thy parents" ; it speaks of the resurrection of the body, and agrees with Deuteronomy (xxii. 6) on the taking of birds' nests. SEMONIDES of Amorgos (fl. 625 B.C.) owes the peculiar spelling of his name to grammarians who wished to 86 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE distinguish him from his more illustrious namesake, Simonides of Keos. His elegies, a history of Samos among them, are lost ; but Stobaeus has preserved in his Anthology an iambic poem on women a counter-satire, apparently, to the waggon-songs in which the village women at certain festivals were licensed to mock their male acquaintances. The good woman in Semonides is like a bee, the attractive and extravagant like a mare, and so on. The pig-woman comes comparatively high in the scale, though she is lazy and fond of food. There were three iambic poets regarded as ' classical ' by the Alexandrian canon Semonides, Archilochus, and Hipponax. But, except possibly the last-named, no poet wrote iambics exclusively ; and the intimate literary con- nection between, for instance, Theognis, Archilochus, and Hesiod, shows that the metrical division is unimportant. Much of Solon's work might, as far as the subject or the spirit is concerned, have been in elegiacs or iambics in- differently. The iambic metres appear to have been con- nected with the popular and homely gods Dionysus and Demeter, as the stately dactylic hexameters were with Zeus and Apollo. The iambic is the metre nearest to common speech ; a Greek orator or an English news- paper gives a fair number of iambic verses to a column. Its service to Greek literature was to provide poetry with a verse for dialogue, and for the ever-widening range of subjects to which it gradually condescended. A Euri- pides, who saw poetry and meaning in every stone of a street, found in the current iambic trimeter a vehicle of expression in some ways more flexible even than prose. When it first appears in literature, it has a satirical colour. ARCHILOCHUS of Paros (^.650 B.C.?) eclipsed all earlier IAMBIC POETRY. ARCHILOCHUS 87 writers of the iambus, and counts in tradition as the first. He was the 'Homer' of familiar personal poetry. This was partly due to a literary war in Alexandria, and partly to his having no rivals at his side. Still, even our scanty fragments justify Quintilian's criticism: "The sentences" really are " strong, terse, and quivering, full of blood and muscle ; some people feel that if his work is ever inferior to the very highest, it must be the fault of his subject, not of his genius." This has, of course, another side to it. Archilochus is one of those masterful men who hate to feel humble. He will not see the greatness of things, and likes subjects to which he can feel himself superior. Yet, apart from the satires, which are blunt bludgeon work, his smallest scraps have a certain fierce enigmatic beauty. " Oh, hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon ! " is a cry to bury his friends' shipwrecked corpses. " In my spear is kneaded bread, in my spear is wine of Ismarus ; and I lie upon my spear as I drink ! " That is the defiant boast of the outlaw turned freebooter. " There were seven dead men trampled under foot, and we were a thousand mur- derers" What does that mean ? One can imagine many things. The few lines about love form a comment on Sappho. The burning, colourless passion that finds its expression almost entirely in physical language may be beautiful in a soul like hers ; but what a fierce, impossible thing it is with this embittered soldier of fortune, whose intense sensitiveness and prodigious intellect seem some- times only to mark him out as more consciously wicked than his fellows ! We can make out something of his life. He had to leave Paros one can imagine other reasons besides or before his alleged poverty and settled on Thasos, " a wretched island, bare and rough as a hog's back in the sea," in company with all the worst scoundrels in 88 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE Greece. In a battle with the natives of the mainland he threw away his shield and ran, and made very good jokes about the incident afterwards. He was betrothed to Cleobftle, the daughter of a respectable Parian citizen, Lycambes. Lycambes broke off the engagement ; Archi- lochus raged blindly and indecently at father and daughter for the rest of his life. Late tradition says they hanged themselves. Archilochus could not stay in Paros ; the settlement in Thasos had failed ; so he was thrown on the world, sometimes supporting himself as a mercenary soldier, sometimes doubtless as a pirate, until he was killed in a battle against Naxos. " I am a servant of the lord god of war, and I know the lovely gift of the Muses" He could fight and he could make wonderful poetry. It does not appear that any further good can be said of him. Lower all round than Archilochus is HIPP6NAX of Ephesus. Tradition makes him a beggar, lame and deformed himself, and inventor of the ' halting iambic ' or 'scazon,' a deformed trimeter which upsets all one's expectations by having a spondee or trochee in the last foot. His works were all abusive. He inveighed especially against the artists Bupalos and Athnis, who had caricatured him ; and of course against women e.g., "A woman gives a man two days of pleasure: the day he marries her, and the day he carries out her corpse" Early satire does not imply much wit ; it implies hard hitting, with words instead of sticks and stones. The other satirical writers of classical times, Ananius and Hermippus, Kerkidas and Aischrion, were apparently not much admired in Alexandria. One form of satire, the Beast Fable, was especially developed in collections of stories which went under HIPP6NAX: '.ESOP' 89 the name of ^SOP. He seems to be a mere story- figure, like Kerk6ps or Kreoph^lus, invented to pro- vide an author for the fables. He was a foreign slave Thracian, Phrygian, or Ethiopian under the same master as Rhoddpis, the courtesan who ruined Sappho's brother. He was suitably deformed ; he was murdered at Delphi. Delphi dealt much in the deaths or tombs of celebrities. It used the graves of Neoptolemus and Hesiod to attract the sight-seer ; it extorted monetary atonement from the slayer of Apollo's inspired servant Archilochus. But in ^sop's case a descendant of his master ladmon made his murder a ground for claiming money from the Delphians ; so it is hard to see why they countenanced the story. Tradition gave ^Esop interviews with Croesus and the Wise Men ; Aristo- phanes makes it a jocular reproach, not to have 'trodden well' your vEsop. He is in any case not a poet, but the legendary author of a particular type of story, which any one was at liberty to put into verse, as Socrates did, or to collect in prose, like Demetrius of Phalrum. Our oldest collections of fables are the iambics of Phaedrus and the elegiacs of Avianus in Latin, and the scazons of Babrius in Greek, all three post-Christian. IV THE SONG THE PERSONAL SONG SAPPHO, ALOEUS, ANACREON THE Song proper, the Greek ' Melos,' falls into two divisions the personal song of the poet, and the choric song of his band of trained dancers. There are remains of old popular songs with no alleged author, in various styles : the Mill Song a mere singing to while away time "Grind, Mill, grind; Even Pittacus grinds ; Who is king of the great Mytilene " , the Spinning Song and the Wine-Press Song, and the Swallow Song, with which the Rhodian boys went round begging in early spring. Rather higher than these were the 'Skolia,' songs sung at banquets or wine-parties. The form gave rise to a special Skolion-tune, with the four -line verse and the syllable-counting which characterises the Lesbian lyric. The Skolion on Harmodius and Aristo- geiton is the most celebrated ; but nearly all our remains are fine work, and the "Ah, Leipsydrion, false to them who loved thee" the song of the exiles who fled from the tyrant Pisistratus to the rock of that name, is full of a haunting beauty. The Lesbian 'Melos' culminates in two great names, Alcaeus and Sappho, at the end of the seventh century. 1 1 The dates are uncertain. Athens can scarcely have possessed Sig^um before the reign of Pisistratus. Beloch, Griechischt Geschichte, i. 330. 90 ALGOUS OF LESBOS 91 The woman has surpassed the man, if not in poetical achievement, at least in her effect on the imagination of after ages. A whole host of poetesses sprang up in different parts of Greece after her Corinna and Myrtis in Bceotia, Telesilla in Argos, Praxilla in Sikyon ; while Erinna, writing in the fourth century, still calls herself a ' comrade ' of Sappho. ALC^EUS spent his life in wars, first against Athens for the possession of Sigeum, where, like Archilochus, he left his shield for the enemy to dedicate to Athena ; then against the democratic tyrant Melanchr6s and his successor Myrsilos. At last the Lesbians stopped the civil strife by appointing Pittacus, the 'Wise Man/ dictator, and Alcaeus left the island for fifteen years. He served as a soldier of fortune in Egypt and else- where : his brother Antimenidas took service with Nebuchadnezzar, and killed a Jewish or Egyptian giant in single combat. Eventually the poet was pardoned and invited home. His works filled ten books in Alexandria ; they were all ' occasional poetry,' hymns, political party-songs (crrao-fam/ea), drinking-songs, and love-songs. His strength seems to have lain in the political and personal reminiscences, the "hardships of travel, banishment, and war," that Horace speaks of. Sappho and Alcaeus are often represented together on vases, and the idea of a romance between them was inevitable. Tradition gives a little address of his in a Sapphic metre, "Thou violet - crowned, pure, softly- smiling Sappho," and an answer from Sappho in Alcaics a delicate mutual compliment. Every line of Alcaeus has charm. The stanza called after him is a magni- ficent metrical invention. His language is spontaneous and musical ; it seems to come straight from a heart as 92 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE full as that of Archilochus, but much more generous. He is a fiery ^Eolian noble, open-handed, free-drinking, frank, and passionate ; and though he fought to order in case of need, he seems never to have written to order. His younger contemporary SAPPHO the name is variously spelt ; there is authority for Psappha, Psaffo, and even Pspha born at Ephesus, dwelling at Mitylene, shared the political fortunes of Alcaeus's party. We hear of a husband, whose name, Kerkylas of Andros, is not above suspicion ; and of a daughter Kle'fs, whose existence is perhaps erroneously inferred from a poem " / have a fair little child, with a shape like a golden flower ; Klets, my darling." She seems to have been the leader of a band of literary women, students and poetesses, held together by strong ties of intimacy and affection. It is compared in antiquity * to the circle of Socrates. Sappho wrote in the most varied styles there are fifty different metres in our scanty remains of her but all bear a strong impress of personal character. By the side of Alcasus, one feels her to be a woman. Her dialect is more the native speech of Mitylene, where she lived ; his the more literary. His interests cover war and drinking and adventure and politics ; hers are all in personal feeling, mostly tender and introspective. Her suggestions of nature the line, "/ heard the footfall of the flowery spring" ; the marvellously musical comparison, "Like the one sweet apple very red, up high on the highest bough, that the apple-gatherers have forgotten ; no, not forgotten, but could never reach so far" are perhaps more definitely beautiful than the love-poems which have made Sappho's name immortal. Two of these are preserved by accident ; the rest of Sappho's poetry was publicly burned in 1073 1 Maximus Tyiius. SAPPHO OF LESBOS 93 at Rome and at Constantinople, as being too much for the shaky morals of the time. One must not over-estimate the compliments of gallantry which Sappho had in plenty : she was 'the Poetess' as Homer was 'the Poet'; she was ' the Tenth Muse,' ' the Pierian Bee ' ; the wise Solon wished to " learn a song of Sappho's and then die." Still Sappho was known and admired all over Greece soon after her death ; and a dispassionate judgment must see that her love-poetry, if narrow in scope, has unrivalled splendour of expression for the longing that is too intense to have any joy in it, too serious to allow room for metaphor and imaginative ornament. Unfor- tunately, the dispassionate judgment is scarcely to be had. Later antiquity could not get over its curiosity at the woman who was not a ' Hetaira ' and yet published passionate love-poetry. She had to be made a heroine of romance. For instance, she once mentioned the Rock of Leucas. That was enough ! It was the rock from which certain saga-heroes had leaped to their death, and she must have done the same, doubtless from unrequited passion ! Then came the deference of gallantry, the reckless merriment of the Attic comedy, and the defiling imagination of Rome. It is a little futile to discuss the private character of a woman who lived two thousand five hundred years ago in a society of which we have almost no records. It is clear that Sappho was a ' respect- able person ' in Lesbos ; and there is no good early evidence to show that the Lesbian standard was low. Her extant poems address her women friends with a passionate intensity ; but there are dozens of questions to be solved before these poems can be used as evidence : Is a given word-form correct ? is Sappho speaking in her own person, or dramatically ? what occasion are the 94 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE verses written for ? how far is the poem a literary exer- cise based on the odes written by Alcaeus to his squire Lykos, or by Theognis to Kyrnus ? No one need defend the character of ANACREON of Teos ; though, since he lived in good society to the age of eighty-five, he cannot have been as bad as he wishes us to believe. His poetry is derived from the Lesbians and from the Skolia of his countryman Pythermus. He was driven from Teos by the Persian conquest of 545 B.C. ; he settled in Abdra, a Teian colony in Thrace ; saw some fighting, in which, he carefully ex- plains, he disgraced himself quite as much as Alcaeus and Archilochus ; finally, he attached himself to various royal persons, Polycrates in Samos, Hipparchus in Athens, and Echekrates the Aleuad in Thessaly. The Alexandrians had five books of his elegies, epigrams, iambics, and songs ; we possess one satirical fragment, and a good number of wine and love songs, addressed chiefly to his squire Bathyllus. They were very popular and gave rise to many imitations at all periods of literature ; we possess a series of such Anacreontea, dating from various times between the third century B.C. and the Renaissance. These poems are innocent of fraud : in one, for instance (No. i), Anacreon appears to the writer in a dream 1 ; in most of them the poet merely assumes the mask of Anacreon and sings his love-songs to 'a younger Bathyllus.' The dialect, the treatment of Er6s as a frivolous fat boy, the personifications, the descriptions of works of art, all are marks of a later age. Yet there can be no doubt of the extraordinary charm of these poems, true and false alike. Anacreon stands out among Greek writers for his limpid ease of rhythm, thought, and expression. A child can 1 C/. 30 and 59. ANACREON OF TEOS 95 understand him, and he ripples into music. But the false poems are even more Anacreontic than Anacreon. Compared with them the real Anacreon has great variety of theme and of metre, and even some of the stateliness and reserved strength of the sixth century. Very likely our whole conception of the man would be higher, were it not for the incessant imitations which have fixed him as a type of the festive and amorous septuagenarian. These three poets represent the personal lyric of Greece. In Alcaeus it embraces all sides of an adven- turous and perhaps patriotic life ; in Sappho it expresses with a burning intensity the inner life, the passions that are generally silent ; in Anacreon it spreads out into light snatches of song about simple enjoyments, sensual and imaginative. The personal lyric never reached the artistic grandeur, the religious and philosophic depth of the choric song. It is significant of our difficulty in really appreciating Greek poetry, that we are usually so much more charmed by the style which all antiquity counted as easier and lower. THE CHOIR-SONG GENERAL Besides the personal lyric, there had existed in Greece at a time earlier than our earliest records the practice of celebrating important occasions by the dance and song of a choir. The occasion might of course be public or private ; it was always in early times more or less religious a victory, a harvest, a holy day, a birth, death, or marriage. At the time that we first know the choir- song it always implies a professional poet, a band of professional performers, and generally a new production 96 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE new dance, new music, new words for each new occasion. Also, it is international. The great lyric poets are from Lesbos, Italian Locri, Rhegion, Keos, Bceotia ; the earliest is actually said to be a Lydian. A poet can even send his composition across the sea to be repre- sented, secure of having trained performers in another country who will understand the dancing and singing. The dialect is correspondingly international. It has AZolic, ' Epic,' and Doric elements, the proportions vary- ing slightly in various writers. These facts suffice to show that the choir-poem which we get even in Alcman, much more that of Simdnides, is a highly-developed pro- duct. Our chief extant specimens, the prize-songs of Pindar, represent the extreme fulness of bloom upon which decay already presses. What is the history implied in this mixture of dia- lects ? The yolic is the language of song, because of Sappho and Alcaeus. No singer followed them who was not under their spell. The ' Epic ' element comes from the ' Homer ' which had by this time grown to be the common property of Greece. 1 The Doric element needs explanation. The poets, as we have seen, were not especially Dorian; but the patrons of the poetry were, and so to a great extent was its spirit. It was the essence of the Ionian and ^Eolian culture to have set the individual free ; the Dorian kept him, even in poetry, subordinated to a larger whole, took no interest in his private feelings, but required him to express the emotions of the com- munity. The earliest choir-poets, Alcman and Tisias, 1 What this ' Homer ' dialect was in Bceotia, or Lesbos, or Argos, we are not able to say. The ' Epic ' element in our lyric remains has been Ionised and Atticised just as the Iliad has been. THE CHOIR SONG: PATRONAGE 97 were probably public servants, working for their re- spective states. That is one Dorian element in the choir -song. Another is that, as soon as it ceases to be genuinely the performance by the community of a public duty, it becomes a professional entertainment for the pleasure of a patron who pays. The non-choral poets, Alcaeus, Sappho, Archilochus, wrote to please themselves ; they were 'their own,' as Aristotle puts it, and did not become aX\ov, 'another's.' Anacreon lived at courts and must really have depended on patronage; but his poems are ostensibly written at his own pleasure, not at the bidding of Polycrates. The training of a professional chorus, however, means expense, and expense means a patron who pays. Pindar and Simdnides with their trained bands of dancers could only exist in dependence on the rich oligarchies. The richest Ionian state, Athens, looked askance at this late development. Her dithyrambs and tragedies were not composed to the order of a man, nor exe- cuted by hired performers ; they were solemnly acted by free citizens in the service of the great Demos. Occa- sionally a very rich citizen might have a dithyramb performed for him, like a Dorian noble ; but even Megacles, who employed Pindar, cuts a modest and economical figure by the side of the ./Eginetans and the royalties ; and the custom was not common in Athens. Alcibiades employed Euripides for a dithy- ramb, but that was part of his ostentatious munifi- cence. The Ionian states in general were either too weak or too democratic to exercise much influence on the professional choir-song. The choir-song formed a special branch of literature with a unity of its own, but it had no one name. Aris- G 98 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE totle often uses the special name ' dithyramb ' to denote the whole genus ; this is a popular extension of meaning, influenced by the growth of the later Attic dithyramb in the hands of Timotheos and Philoxenos. Even the names of the different kinds of choir-song are vague. When Alexandrian scholars collected the scattered works of Pindar or Simonides, they needed some principle of arrangement and division. Thus, according to the subjects, we have drink-songs, marriage-songs, dirges, victory-songs, &c.; or, by the composition of the choirs, maiden-songs, boy-songs, man-songs ; or, from another point of view again, standing-songs, marching-songs, dancing-songs. Then there come individual names, not in any classification : a ' paean ' is a hymn to Apollo ; a ' dithyramb/ to Dionysus ; an ' ialemos ' is perhaps a lament for sickness, and not for death. The confusion is obvious. The collectors in part made divisions of their own ; much more they utilised the local names for local varieties of song which were not intended to have any reference to one another. If an ' ialemos ' really differed from a 'thre'nos/ and each from an ' epikdeion/ it was only that they were all local names, and the style of dirge-singing happened to vary in the different localities. The dithyramb proper was a song and dance to Dionysus, practised in the earliest times in Naxos, Thasos, Boeotia, Attica ; the name looks as if it were compounded of Ai-, i god,' and some form of triumphus, OplaplSos, 'rejoicing.' It was a wild and joyous song. It first appears with strophic correspondence ; afterwards it loses this, and has no more metre than the rhapso- dies of Walt Whitman. It was probably accompanied with disguise of some sort ; the dancers represented the VARIETIES OF CHOIR-SONG 99 daemonic followers of Bacchus, whom we find in such hordes on the early Attic drinking-vessels. We call them satyrs ; but a satyr is a goat-daemon, and these have the ears and tail of a horse, like the centaurs. The difference in sentiment is not great : the centaurs are all the wild forces that crash and speed and make music in the Thessa- lian forests ; the satyr is the Arcadian mountain-goat, the personification of the wildness, the music and mystery, of high mountains, the instincts that are at once above and below reason : his special personification is Pan, the Arcadian shepherd-god, who has nothing to do with Dionysus. When we are told that Arton " invented, taught, and named" the dithyramb in Corinth, it may mean that he first joined the old Dionysus-song with the Pan-idea ; that he disguised his choir as satyrs. Corinth, the junction of Arcadia and the sea-world, would be the natural place for such a transition to take place. Thus the dithyramb was a goat-song, a ' tragoidia ' ; and it is from this, Aristotle tells us, that tragedy arose. It is remarkable that the dithyramb, after giving birth to tragedy, lived along with it and survived it. In Aristotle's time tragedy was practically dead, while its daughter, the new comedy, and its mother the Attic dithyramb, were still flourishing. THE EARLY MASTERS ALCMAN The name ALCMAN is the Doric for Alcmaeon, and the bearer of it was a Laconian from Messoa (circa 650 B.C.). But Athenian imagination could never assimilate the idea TOO LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE of a Spartan being a poet. In the case of Tyrtaeus they made the poet an Athenian ; in that of Alcman, some chance words in one of his poems suggested that he or his ancestors came from Lydia. Hence a romance he was a Lydian, made a slave of war by the wild Kimme- rians, and sold across seas to Sparta, where his beauti- ful songs procured him his freedom. Alcman is very near the Lesbians ; he speaks freely in his own person, using the choir merely as an instrument ; the personal ring of his love-passages made Archytas (4th cent. B.C.) count him the inventor of love-poetry ; he writes in a fresh country dialect, as Sappho does, with little literary varnish ; his personal enthusiasm for the national broth of Sparta is like that of Carlyle for porridge. His metres are clear and simple ; and the fragment imitated by Tennyson in In Memoriam shows what his poetry can be : " No more, oh, wild sweet throats, voices of love, will my limbs bear me; would, would I were a ceryl-bird, that flies on the flower of the wave amid the halcyons, with never a care in his heart, the sea-purple bird of the spring!" His longest fragment is on an Egyptian papyrus, found by Mariette in 1855, and containing part of a beautiful ' Parthenion/ or choir-song for girls. It is a dramatic part-song. When we hear first that Agido among the rest of the chorus is like " a race-horse among cows" and afterwards that " the hair of my cousin Agesi- chora gleams like pure gold" this does not mean that the 'boorish' poet is expressing his own frank and fickle preferences would the ' cows ' of the choir, in that case, ever have consented to sing such lines ? it is only that the two divisions of the chorus are paying each other compliments. This poem, unlike those of the Lesbians, has a strophic arrangement, and is noteworthy as showing ALCMAN: ARION 101 a clear tendency towards rhyme. There are similar traces of intentional rhyme in Homer and ^Eschylus ; z whereas the orators and Sophocles, amid all their care for euphony in other respects, admit tiresome rhyming jangles with a freedom which can only be the result of unsensitiveness to that particular relation of sounds. AR!ON ARION of Methymna, in Lesbos, is famous in legend as the inventor of the dithyramb, and for his miraculous preservation at sea : some pirates forced him to ' walk the plank ' ; but they had allowed him to make music once before he died, and when he sprang overboard, the dol- phins who had gathered to listen, carried him on their backs to Mount Taenarum. It is an old saga-motive, applied to Phalanthos, son of Poseidon, in Tarentum, to Enalos at Lesbos, and to the sea-spirits Palaemon, Melikertes, Glaucus, at other places. Aden's own works disappeared early ; Aristophanes of Byzantium could not find any (and cent. B.C.), though an interesting piece of fourth-century dithyramb in which the singer represents Arion, has been handed down to us as his through a mistake of ^Elian. ST&3ICHORUS The greatest figure in early choric poetry is that of TtsiAS, surnamed STSICHORUS(' Choir-setter') of Himera. The man was a West-Locrian from Matauros, but be- came a citizen of Himera in the long struggles against Phalaris of brazen-bull celebrity. The old fable of the 1 Sept. 778 ff., 785 ff. 102 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE horse making itself a slave to man in order to be revenged on the stag, was one of his warnings against the tyrant. When Phalaris triumphed, Stesichorus re- tired to Catana ; where his octagonal grave outside the gate became in Roman times one of the sights of Sicily. Apart from such possible fragments of good tradition as may survive in the notorious forgeries called the Letters of Phalaris, we possess only one personal fact about his life. He was attacked with a disease of the eyes ; and the thought preyed upon his mind that this was the divine wrath of Helen, of whom he had spoken in the usual way in some poem perhaps the Helen* or the Sack of I lion* His pangs of conscience were intensified by historical difficulties. It was incredible that all Troy should have let itself be destroyed merely to humour Paris. If the Trojans would not give up Helen, it must have been that they never had her. Tisias burst into a recantation or ' Palinddia,' which remained famous : " That tale was never true / Thy foot never stepped on the benched galley, nor crossed to the towers of Troy'' We cannot be sure what his own version was ; it cannot well have been that of Herodotus and Euripides, which makes Helen elope to Egypt, though not to Troy. But, at any rate, he satisfied Helen, and recovered his sight. A very similar story is told of the Icelandic Skald Thormod. The service that Stesichorus did to Greek literature is threefold : he introduced the epic saga into the West ; he invented the stately narrative style of lyric ; he vivified and remodelled, with the same mixture of boldness and simple faith as the Helen story, most of the great canonical legends. He is called "the lyric Homer," and described as " bearing the weight of the epos on his lyre." 1 1 Quint x. i. STESICHORUS OF HIMERA 103 The metres specially named ' Stesichorean ' though others had used them before Stesichorus show this half-epic character. They are made up of halves of the epic hexameter, interspersed with short variations epitrites, anapaests, or mere syncopae just enough to break the dactylic swing, to make the verse lyrical. His diction suits these long stately lines ; it is not passionate, not very songful, but easily followed, and suitable for narrative. This helps to explain why so important a writer has left so few fragments. He was not difficult enough for the grammarian ; he was not line by line exquisite enough for the later lover of letters. The ancient critics, amid all their praises of Stesichorus, complain that he is long ; the Oresteia * alone took two books, and doubtless the Sack of Ilion * was equal to it. His whole works in Alexandrian times filled twenty-six books. He had the fulness of an epic writer, not the vivid splendour that Pindar had taught Greece to ex- pect in a lyric. Yet he gained an extraordinary position. 1 Simonides, who would not over-estimate one whom he hoped to rival, couples him with Homer " So sang to the nations Homer and Stesichorus." In Athens of the fifth century he was universally known. Socrates praised him. Aristophanes ridiculed him. " Not to know three lines of Stesichorus " was a proverbial description of illiteracy. 2 There was scarcely a poet then living who was not in- fluenced by Stesichorus ; scarcely a painter or potter who did not, consciously or unconsciously, represent his version of the great sagas. In tracing the historical 1 The coins of Hlmera bearing the figure of StSsichorus are later than 241 B.C., when he had become a legend. Cf, also Cic. Verr. ii. 35. 4 No reference, as used to be thought, to the strophe, antistrophe, epode of choric music. 104 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE development of any myth, research almost always finds in Stsichorus the main bridge between the earliest re- mains of the story and the form it has in tragedy or in the late epos. In the Agamemnon legend, for instance, the concentration of the interest upon Clytaemnestra, which makes the story a true tragedy instead of an ordinary tale of blood - feud, is his ; Clyta3mnestra's dream of giving suck to a serpent is his ; the con- science-mad Orestes is probably his ; so are many of the details of the sack of Troy, among them, if the tradition is right, the flight of vEneas to Italy. This is enough to show that Stesichorus was a creative genius of a very high order though, of course, none of these stories is absolutely his own invention. Confessed fiction was not possible till long after Stesichorus. To the men of his day all legend was true history ; if it was not, what would be the good of talking about it ? The originality lies, partly, in the boldness of faith with which this antique spirit examines his myths, criticising and freely altering details, but never suspecting for an in- stant that the whole myth is an invention, and that he himself is inventing it. It is the same with Pindar. Pindar cannot and will not believe that Tantalus offered his son to the gods as food, and that Demeter ate part of his shoulder. Therefore he argues, not that the whole thing is a fable, nor yet that it is beyond our knowledge ; agnosticism would never satisfy him : he argues that Poseidon must have carried off Pelops to heaven to be his cup-bearer, and that during his ab- sence some 'envious neighbour' invented the cannibal- story. This is just the spirit of the Palinddia. But, apart from this, even where Stesichorus did not alter his saga-material, he shows the originality of genius ORIGINALITY OF STESICHORUS. IBYCUS 105 in enlarging the field of poetry. He was the first to feel the essence of beauty in various legends which lived in humble places : in the death of the cowherd Daphnis for shame at having once been false to his love (that rich motive for all pastoral poetry afterwards) ; in the story of the fair Kalyke, who died neglected ; of the ill-starred Rhadina, who loved her cousin better than the tyrant of Corinth. This is a very great achievement. It is what Euripides did for the world again a little later, when the mind of Greece, freeing itself from the stiffer Attic tradition, was ready to understand. THE MIDDLE PERIOD IBYCUS IBYCUS of Rhegion, nearly two generations later than Stsichorus, led a wandering life in the same regions of Greece, passing on to the courts of Polycrates and Periander. Like Arlon, he is best known to posterity by a fabulous story of his murder being avenged by cranes, 'ibykes.' His songs for boy-choirs are specially praised. He is said to have shown an ' JEolo-lonic spirit' in songs of Dorian language and music, and the charming fragments full of roses and women's attire and spring and strange birds, 1 and " bright sleep- less dawn awaking the nightingales" show well what this means. It is curious that the works of Stesi- chorus were sometimes attributed to him for instance, the Games at Pelias's Funeral.* Our remains of the two have little in common except the metre. 1 Cf. No. 8. io6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE SIM6NIDES On the day, it is said, that Tisias died, there was born in Keos the next great international lyrist of Greece, SlMONiDES (556-468 B.C.). A man of wide culture and sympathies, as well as great poetic power, he was soon famous outside the circle of Ionian islands. Old Xeno- phanes, who lived in Italy, and died before Simdnides was thirty, had already time to denounce him as a well-known man. He travelled widely first, it is said, to Western Greece, at the invitation of Stesichorus's compatriots ; afterwards to the court of Hipparchus in Athens ; and, on his patron's assassination, to the princes of Thessaly. At one time he crossed to Asia ; during the Persian War he was where he should have been with the patriots. He ended his life with ^Eschylus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Epicharmus, and others, at the court of Hiero of Syracuse. If he was celebrated at thirty, in his old age he had an international position comparable perhaps to that of Voltaire. He was essentially 6 ro9 which comes when the most sensi- tive language meets the most exquisite thought, and which " not even a god though he worked hard " could keep unhurt in another tongue. Pindar was little influenced either by the movements of his own time or by previous writers. Stesichorus and Homer have of course affected him. There are just a few notes that seem echoed from ^Eschylus : the eruption of ^Etna is treated by both ; but Pindar seems quite by himself in his splendid description (Pyth. i.). It is possible that his great line XCcre Be Zevs aOiToi\oao(f)ia. We are apt to apply to the sixth century the terminology of the fourth, and to distinguish philosophy from history. But when Solon the philosopher "went over much land in search of knowledge," he was doing exactly the same thing as the historians Herodotus and Hecatasus. And when this last made a 'Table' of the world, with its geography and anthropology, he was in company with the philosophers Anaximander and Democritus. ' Historic ' is inquiry, and ' Philosophia ' is love of knowledge. The two cover to a great extent the same field though, on the whole, philosophy aims more at ultimate truth and less at special facts ; and, what is more important, philosophy is generally the work of an organised school with more or less fixed or similar doctrines Milesians, Pythagoreans, Eleatics while the ' Historikos ' is mostly a traveller and reciter of stories. A prose book in the sixth century was, except in the case of a text-book for a philosophic school, the result of the author's 'Historic' ; it was his 'Logos,' the thing he had to say. Neither the book itself nor the kind of literature to which it belonged had any name. The first sentence served as a kind of title-page. The simplest form is " Alkmceon of Crotdn says this" ; "This is the 124 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE setting forth of the research of Herodotus of Halicarnassus" In a more specialised ' Historic" ' "Antiochus, Xenophanes 1 son, put tJiese things together about Italy" ; or without the author's name " This I say about the whole world" (Democritus) ; " Touching the disease called Holy, thus it is" (Hippocrates). And what was the man who so wrote ? He was obviously \oyoypdos, or \oy arrow, since he had made a ' Logos.' He was probably ye(oypd(j)o<; and #60X0705 ; presumably o9, and in the eyes of his admirers a o-o^>o^). The Athenians of the past generations had been too busy making history to be able to write it. The foreign savant did it for them. It is un- fortunate that his interests were more in the past than the present. He began with Ogygos, who was king a thou- sand and twenty years before the first Olympiad, and ran mercilessly through all the generations of empty names requisite to fill in the gaping centuries. He had started from the Argive list, which was very full ; and he had to extend the meagre Attic list of kings by supposing duplicates of the same name. When he comes to the times that we most wish to know about the fifty years after the Persian War the method which he had laboriously built up for the treatment of legend, leaves him helpless in dealing with concrete fact. " Short, and 1 ii. 2 ; iv. 133. HELLANICUS 131 in his treatment of dates inexact," is the judgment passed upon him by Thucydides. But dates were the man's great glory ! He reckoned by generations, three to a cen- tury, in the earliest times, by the annual archons as soon as they were established. Thucydides, in all probability, means that the system of putting the events down in a lump against the archon's name, was inexact compared with his own division of succeeding summers and winters. Hellanicus was a widely-read and influential author, but he gets rough handling from his critics : Ephorus " puts him in the first rank of liars." 1 Apollodorus says, " He shows the greatest carelessness in almost every treatise " ; Strabo himself " would sooner believe Homer, Hesiod, and the tragedians." This last statement seems only to mean that the general tradition embodied in the poets is safer than the local tradition followed by Hellanicus. He was an able, systematic, conscientious historian, though it might possibly have been better for history had he never existed. 1 h TO Tr\eiffrov. Cf. Josephus c. Ap. i. 3 ; Strabo, x. 451, and xiii. 6 1 2. VI HERODOTUS HERODOTUS, SON OF LYXES OF HALICARNASSUS ( 4 84(?)- 4 25(?)B.c.) HERODOTUS, the father of history, 1 was an exiled man and a professional story-teller ; not of course an ' impro- visatore,' but the prose correlative of a bard, a narrator of the deeds of real men, and a describer of foreign places. His profession was one which aimed, as Thucy- dides severely says, more at success in a passing enter- tainment than at any lasting discovery of truth ; its first necessity was to interest an audience. Herodotus must have had this power whenever he opened his lips ; but he seems to have risen above his profession, to have advanced from a series of public readings to a great history perhaps even to more than that. For his work is not only an account of a thrilling struggle, politically very important, and spiritually tremendous ; it is also, more perhaps than any other known book, the expression of a whole man, the representation of all the world seen through the medium of one mind and in a particular perspective. The world was at that time very interesting ; and the one mind, while strongly individual, was one of the most comprehensive known to human records. 1 Cic. de Leg. i. i. 13* HERODOTUS 133 Herodotus's whole method is highly subjective. He is too sympathetic to be consistently critical, or to remain cold towards the earnest superstitions of people about him : he shares from the outset their tendency to read the activity of a moral God in all the moving events of history. He is sanguine, sensitive, a lover of human nature, interested in details if they are vital to his story, oblivious of them if they are only facts and figures ; he catches quickly the atmosphere of the society he moves in, and falls readily under the spell of great human in- fluences, the solid impersonal Egyptian hierarchy or the dazzling circle of great individuals at Athens ; yet all the time shrewd, cool, gentle in judgment, deeply and un- consciously convinced of the weakness of human nature, the flaws of its heroism and the excusableness of its apparent villainy. His book bears for good and ill the stamp of this character and this profession. He was a native of Halicarnassus, in the far south of Asia Minor, a mixed state, where a Dorian strain had first overlaid the native Carian, and then itself yielded to the higher culture of Ionian neighbours, while all alike were subjects of Persia : a good nursery for a historian who was to be remarkable for his freedom from prejudices of race. He was born about 484 B.C. amid the echoes of the great conflict. Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, fought for Xerxes at Salamis, and her grandson Lygdamis still held the place as tyrant under Artaxerxes after 460. Herodotus's first years of man- hood were spent in fighting under the lead of his rela- tive, the poet and prophet Panyasis, to free his city from the tyrant and the Persian alike. He never men- tions these wars in his book, but they must have marked his character somewhat. Panyasis fell into the tyrant's 134 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE hands and was put to death. Herodotus fled to Samos. At last, in what way we know not, Lygdamis fell and Herodotus returned ; but the party in power was for some reason hostile to him possibly they were 'auto- nomists,' while he stood for the Athenian League and Herodotus entered upon his life of wandering. He found a second home in Athens, where he had a friend in Sophocles, and probably in Pericles and Lampon. He was finally provided for by a grant of citizenship in Thurii, the model international colony which Athens founded in South Italy, in 443, on the site of the twice- ruined Sybaris. Of his later life and travels we know little definite. He travelled in Egypt as far as Elephan- tine at some time when the country was in the hands of Persia, and of course when Persia was at peace with Athens after 447, that is. He had then already finished his great Asiatic journey (ii. 150) past Babylon to the neighbourhoods of Susa and Ecbatana. At some time he made a journey in the Black Sea to the mouths of the Ister, the Crimea, and the land of the Colchians. Pericles went through the Black Sea with a large fleet in /\/\/\ ; perhaps Herodotus had been employed before- hand to examine the resources of the region. Besides this, he went by ship to Tyre, and seems to have travelled down the Syrian coast to the boundary of Egypt. He went to Cyrene and saw something of Libya. He knew the coast of Thrace, and traversed Greece itself in all directions, seeing Dod6na, Acarnania, Delphi, Thebes, and Athens, and, in the Peloponnese, Tegea, Sparta, and Olympia. What was the object of all this travelling ; and how was a man who had lost his country, and presumably could not draw on his estate, able to pay for it ? It is a LIFE OF HERODOTUS 135 tantalising question, and the true answer would probably tell us much that is now unknown about Greek life in the fifth century B.C. Herodotus may have travelled partly as a merchant ; yet he certainly speaks of mer- chants in an external way ; and he not only mentions as is natural considering the aim of his book but seems really to have visited, places of intellectual interest rather than trade-centres. In one place (ii. 44) he says explicitly that he sailed to Tyre in order to find out a fact about Heracles. The truth seems to be that he was a professional ' Logopoios/ a maker and reciter of ' Logoi,' ' Things to tell,' just as Kynaithos, perhaps as Panyasis, was a maker and reciter of ' Ep/ ' Verses.' The anecdotic tradition which speaks of his public readings at Athens, Thebes, Corinth, and Olympia, certainly has some sub- stratum of truth. He travelled as the bards and the sophists travelled ; like the Homeridae, like Pindar, like Hellanicus, like Gorgias. In Greek communities he was sure of remunerative audiences ; beyond the Greek world he at least collected fresh ' Logoi.' One may get a little further light from the fact attested by Diyllus the Aristotelian (end of 4th cent. B.C.), that Herodotus was awarded ten talents (.2400) on the motion of Anytus by a decree of the Athenian Demos. That is not a payment for a series of readings : it is the reward of some serious public service. And it seems better to interpret that service as the systematic collection of knowledge about the regions that were politically important to Athens- Persia, Egypt, Thrace, and Scythia, to say nothing of states like Argos than as the historical defence of Athens as the ' saviour of Hellas,' at the opening of the Pelopon- nesian War. Even the published book, as we have it, is full of information which must have been invaluable 136 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE to an Athenian politician of the time of Pericles ; and it stands to reason that Herodotus must have had masses of further knowledge which he could impart to the Athenian ' Foreign Office/ but decidedly not publish for the use of all Hellas. The histories of Herodotus are ordinarily divided into nine books, named after the nine Muses. The division is of course utterly post-classic ; Herodotus knew nothing of his ' Muses,' but simply headed his work, " This is the account of the research of Herodotus of Thurii" In our editions it is " Herodotus of Halicarnassus" but he must have written "of Thurii" by all analogy, and Aristotle read " of Thurii! 1 The Athenian or Eastern book-trade, appealing to a public which knew the man as a Hali- carnassian, was naturally tempted to head its scrolls accordingly. It is like the case of the Anabasis, which appeared pseudonymously as the work of Themisto- genes of Syracuse (see p. 319) ; but it was known to be really Xenophon's, and the book-trade preferred to head it with the better-known name. The last three books of Herodotus give the history of the invasion of Xerxes and its repulse ; the first six form a sort of introduction to them, an account of the gradual gathering up of all the forces of the world under Persia, the restive kicking of Ionia against the irresistible, and the bursting of the storm upon Greece. The connection is at first loose, scarcely visible ; only as we go on we begin to feel the growing intensity of the theme the concentration of all the powers and nations to which we have been gradually introduced, upon the one great conflict. Starting from the mythical and primeval enmity be- tween Asia and Europe, Herodotus takes up his history ANALYSIS OF HERODOTUS'S HISTORIES 137 with Croesus of Lydia, the first Asiatic who enslaved Greek cities. The Lydian ' Logoi,' rich and imagina- tive, saturated with Delphic tradition, lead up to the conquest of Lydia by Cyrus, and the rise of Persia to the empire of Asia. The past history and subjugation of Media and Babylon come as explanations of the greatness of Persia, and the story goes on to the con- quest of Egypt by Cambyses. Book II. is all occupied with the Egyptian 'Logoi.' Book III. returns to the narrative, Cambyses' wild reign over Egypt, the false Smerdis, the conspiracy and rise of Darius, and his elaborate organisation of the Empire. In Book IV., Darius, looking for further conquests, marches against the Scythians, and the hand of Persia is thus first laid upon Europe in the north here come the Scythian ' Logoi ' ; while meantime at the far south the queen of Gyrene has called in the Persian army against Barca, and the terrible power advances over Libya as well here is a place for the Libyan ' Logoi.' In Book V., while a division of the Scythian army is left behind under Megabazos, to reduce Thrace here come the Thracian ' Logoi ' Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, prompted by his father-in-law the ex-tyrant, harassed with debt, and fearing the consequences of certain military failures, plunges all Ionia into a desperate revolt against the Persian. He seeks help from the chief power of Greece, and from the mother-city of the lonians. Sparta refuses ; Athens consents. Eretria, the old ally of Miletus, goes with Athens ; and in the first heat of the rising the two strike deep into the Persian dominion and burn Sardis, only to beat forthwith an inevitable retreat, and to make their own destruction a necessity for Persian honour. Book VI. gives the steady reduction of Ionia, I 3 8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE the end of Aristagoras, the romantic and terrible flights of whole communities from the Persian ven- geance ; the hand of the king is uplifted over Greece. In the north the great Mardonius advances, persistently successful, recovering Thrace and the islands, and receiving the submission of Macedonia ; in the south, Datis comes by sea direct upon Eretria and Athens. And at the same time heralds are sent to the Greek states demanding 'earth and water,' the token of sub- mission to the king's will. Through all these books, but in VI. more than any, the history of the Greek states has been gathered up in digressions and notes, historically on a higher plane than the main current of the narrative in Asia. Datis lands in Eubcea and discharges the first part of his orders by sweeping Eretria from the face of the earth, then pro- ceeds to Marathon to fulfil the remaining part. He is met, not by the united Greeks, not even by the great Dorian cities, only by the Athenians and a band of heroic volunteers from Plata3a met, and by God's help, to man's amazement, defeated. After this the progress of the narrative is steady. Book VII. indeed moves slowly : there is the death of Darius and the succession of Xerxes ; the long massing of an invincible army, the preparations which 'shake Asia' for three years. There are the heart-searchings and waverings of various states, the terror, and the hardly -sustained heroism ; the eager inquiries of men who find the plain facts to be vaster than their fears ; the awful voice of the God in whom they trust at Delphi, bidding them only despair, fly, "make their minds familiar with horrors'" "Athens, who had offended the king, was lost. Argos and other towns might buy life by submission, by HERODOTUS'S METHOD OF COMPOSITION 139 not joining the fools who dared fight their betters." Then comes the rising of the greater part of Greece above its religion, the gathering of "them that were better minded" and thus at last the tremendous narrative of battle. Much has been written about the composition of the histories of Herodotus. They fall apart very easily, they contain repetitions and contradictions in detail, and the references to events and places outside the course of the story raise problems in the mind of an interested reader. Bauer worked at this question on the hypothesis that the book was made up of separate ' Logoi ' inorganically strung together. Kirchhoff held that the work was originally conceived as a whole, and composed gradually. Books I.-III. 119, which show no reference to the West, were written before 447, and before the author went to Thurii ; some time later he worked on to the end of Book IV. ; lastly, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War he returned to Athens, and in that stirring time wrote all the second half of his work, Books V.-IX. He had meant to go much further ; but the troubles of 431 interrupted the work, and his death left it unfinished. Mr. Macan sup- poses that the last three books were the first written, and that the rest of the work is a proem, "composed of more or less independent parts, of which II. is the most obvious, while the fourth book contains two other parts, only one degree less obvious " ; but that internal evidence can never decide whether any of these parts were composed or published independently. Some little seems certain : the last events he mentions are the attack on Plataea in 431 B.C., the subsequent invasion of Attica by the Lacedaemonians, and the 140 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE execution of the Spartan ambassadors to Persia in 430.* We know he was in Athens after 432, because he had seen the Propylaea finished. His book must have been fresh in people's memory at Athens in 425, when Aristophanes parodied the opening of Book I. 2 Arguing from what he does not mention, it is probable that he was not writing after 424, when Nikias took Cythera (vii. 235), and almost certain that he did not know of the Sicilian expedition of 415 or the occupation of Dekeleia in 413. His theme was the deliverance of Greece and the rise of the Athenian Empire, and he died before that Empire began to totter. For it is clear that he did not live to finish his work. Kirchhoff argues that he meant to carry the story down to the Battle of Eurymedon, to the definite point where the liberated lonians swore their oath of union under the hegemony of Athens. That, Kirchhoff holds, is the real finish -of the ' Medika ' ; not the siege of Sestos, which is the last event given in our narrative. 3 And does not Herodotus himself show that he intended to go further when he promises (vii. 213) to tell Mater' the cause of the feud in which the traitor Ephialtes was murdered, an event which occurred some time after 476 ? Kirchhoff says, Yes ; but the conclusion is not convincing. The cause of the feud may have come long before the murder, and it is perfectly clear from a number of passages that Herodotus regards all events later than 479-8 as not in the sphere of his history. He dismisses them with the words, "But these things happened afterwards'' Thus he does, it seems, reach his last date ; but he has not finished the revising and fitting. He leaves 1 vii. 233 ; ix. 73 ; vii. 137 ; cf. vi. 91. * Atharnians, 524 ff. * Meyer, Kh. Mus. xlii. 146. DID HERODOTUS FINISH HIS HISTORY? 141 unfulfilled the promise about Ephialtes ; he mentions twice in language very similar, but not identical (i. 175 ; viii. 104), the fact, not worthy of such signal prominence, that when any untoward event threatened the city of Pedasus, the priestess of Athena there was liable to grow a beard. More remarkable still, he refers in two places to what he will say in his 'Assyrian Logoi' (i. 106 ; i. 184), which are not to be found. The actual end of the work is hotly fought over. Can it, a mere anecdote about Cyrus, tacked on to an unimpressive miracle of Protesi- laus's tomb, be the close of the great life-work of an artist in language ? It is a question of taste. A love for episodes and anecdotes is Herodotus's chief weakness, and Greek literary art liked to loosen the tension at the end of a work, rather than to finish in a climax. As to the 'Assyrian Logoi,' the most notable fact is that Aristotle seems to have read them. In the Natural History (viii. 18) he says that " crook-clawed birds do not drink. Herodotus 1 did not know this, for he has fabled his ominous eagle drinking, in his account of the siege of Nineveh." That must be in the 'Assyrian Logoi.' * This clue helps us to a rough theory of the composition of the whole work, which may throw some light on ancient writings in general. If Herodotus was telling and writing his ' Historiai ' most of his life, he must have had far more material than he has given us, and parts of that material doubtless in different forms. It is " against nature " to suppose that a ' Logographos ' would only utilise a particular ' Logos ' once, or never alter the form of it. The treatment of the Pedasus story shows how the anecdote unintentionally varies and gets inserted in 1 Some MSS. 'Hia). How could these things be attained ? A ' HagnisteV could make you pure if you were denied; an ' Andrapodistes ' could make you a slave ; was there such a thing as a 'Sophistes' who could make you wise ? They came in answer to the demand, men of diverse characters and seeing ' wisdom ' in very different lights. Some rejected the name of ' Sophistes ' : it claimed too much. Some held that wisdom might be taught, but not virtue : that could only be ' learned by practice.' Gorgias doubted if he could teach anything ; ne only claimed to be 'a good speaker.' PROTAGORAS boldly accepted the name and professed to teach TTOXITIKT) dperij, social virtue ; he preached the characteristic doctrine of periods of ' enlightenment,' that vice comes ignorance, and that education makes character. THE SOPHISTS IN PLATO 161 The Sophists were great by their lives and influence, more than by their writings, and even what they did write has almost completely perished (see p. 334). We hear of them now only through their opponents : from Aristophanes and the party of ignorance on one side, on the other from the tradition of the fourth century, opposed both in politics and in philosophy to the spirit of the fifth. If we had any definite statement of Plato's opinion of the great Periclean Sophists, it would probably be like Mr. Ruskin's opinion of Mill and Cobden. But we have no such statement. Plato does not write his- tory ; he writes a peculiar form of dramatic fiction, in which the actors have all to be, first, historical person- ages, and, secondly, contemporaries of the protagonist Socrates. When he really wishes to describe the men of that time, as in the Protagoras, he gives us the most delicate and realistic satire ; but very often his thoughts are not with that generation at all. Some orator of 370-360 displeases him ; he expresses himself in the form of a criticism by Socrates on Lysias. He proposes to confute his own philosophical opponents ; and down go all Antisthenes's paradox-mongering and Aristippus's new-fangled anarchism of thought to the credit of the ancient Protagoras. In these cases we can discover the real author of the doctrine attacked. Sometimes the doctrine itself seems to be Plato's invention. Suppose, for instance, Plato seeks to show that morality has a basis in reason or that the wicked are always unhappy, he is bound to make some one uphold the opposite view. And suppose he thinks controversialists often do that the opposite view would be more logical if held in an extreme and shame- L 162 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE less form ; his only resource is to make his puppet, either with cynical coolness or in blind rage, proceed to the necessary extremes, and be there confounded. And who is the puppet to be ? Somebody, if possible, who is not too notoriously incongruous to the part ; whose supposed tenets may vaguely be thought to imply some- thing analogous to the infamous sentiments which have to be defended. Thrasymachus of Chalkdon is made in Republic I. to advocate absolute injustice, to maintain that law and morality are devices of the weak for paralysing the free action of the strong. It is very improbable that this re- spectable democratic professor held such a view : in politics he was for the middle class ; and in 41 1 he pleaded for moderation. He went out of his way to attack the current type of successful injustice, Arche- laus of Macedon. He was celebrated as a sentimental speaker ; he says in an extant fragment that the success of the unrighteous is enough to make a man doubt the existence of divine providence. Plato's fiction is, in fact, too improbable ; no wonder he has to make the puppet lose its temper before it will act. This is the chief crime which has made Thrasymachus the typical " corrupt and avaricious sophist " ; the other is that, being a professional lecturer, he refused to lecture gratuitously and in public to Socrates and his young friends whose notorious object was to confute whatever he might say. What Aristophanes says of the Sophists is of course mere gibing ; happily he attacks Socrates too, so we know what his charges are worth. What the Socratics tell us and they are our chief informants is coloured by that great article of their faith, the ideal One Righteous INDIVIDUAL SOPHISTS 163 Man murdered by a wicked world : nobody is to stand near Socrates. Socrates himself only tells us that the philosophy of the Sophists would not bear his criticism any more than the sculpture of Pheidias or the statesmanship of Pericles. They were human ; perhaps compared to him they were conventional ; and their real fault in his eyes was the spirit they had in common the spirit of enlightened, progressive, democratic, over-confident Athens in the morning of her greatness. Their main mission was to teach, to clear up the mind of Greece, to put an end to bad myths and unproven cosmogonies, to turn thought into fruitful paths. Many of them were eminent as original thinkers : Gorgias re- duced Eleaticism to absurdity ; Protagoras cleared the air by his doctrine of the relativity of knowledge. The many sophists to whom ' wisdom ' meant knowledge of nature, are known to us chiefly by the Hippocratic writ- ings, and through the definite advances made at this time in the various sciences, especially Medicine, Astronomy, Geometry, and Mechanics. Cos, Abdra, and Syracuse could have told us much about them ; Athens, our only informant, was thinking of other things at the time of social and human problems. In this department Prota- goras gave a philosophic basis to Democracy. The mass of mankind possesses the sense of justice and the sense of shame the exceptions are wild beasts, to be extermi- nated and it is these two qualities rather than intel- lectual powers that are the roots of social conduct. Alkidamas, a disciple of Gorgias, is the only man recorded as having in practical politics proposed the abolition of slavery ; in speculation, of course, many did so. Anti- phon the sophist represents, perhaps alone) the sophistic 1 64 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE view that a wife is a ' second self ' and more than any friend. In history, Hippias laid the foundations of a national system of chronology by publishing the list of Olym- pian victors. The whole science of language rests on the foundations laid by such men as Prodicus and Protagoras : the former insisting on the accurate dis- crimination of apparent synonyms ; the latter showing that language is not a divine and impeccable thing, but a human growth with conventions and anomalies. As to morals in general, most of the Sophists were essentially preachers, like Hippias and Prodicus ; others, like Gorgias, were pure artists. The whole movement was moral as well as intellectual, and was singularly free from the corruption and lawlessness which accompanied, for example, the Italian Renaissance. The main fact about the Sophists is that they were set to educate the nation, and they did it. The character of the ordinary fourth - century Greek, his humanity, sense of justice, courage, and ethical imagination, were raised to some- thing like the level of the leading minds of the fifth century, and far above that of any population within a thousand years of him. After all, the Sophists are the spiritual and intellectual representatives of the age of Pericles ; let those who revile them create such an age again. OCCASIONAL WRITINGS The real origin of Attic prose literature is not to be found in the florid art of Gorgias, nor yet in the technical rhetoric of Teisias, where Aristotle rather mechanically seeks it : it lies in the political speeches and pamphlets ION AND STESIMBROTUS 165 of Athens herself. If we look for a decisive moment by which to date it, we may fix upon the transference of the Federation Treasure from Delos in 454 B.C., the most typical of all the events which made Athens not only the Treasury, Mint, and Supreme Court, but the ordinary legal and commercial centre of Eastern Hellas. The movement of the time brought an im- mense amount of legal and judicial work to Athens, and filled the hands of those who could speak and write ; it attracted able men from all parts of the Empire ; it gave the Attic dialect a paramount and international validity. Athens herself wrote little during the prime of the Empire ; she governed, and left it for the subject allies to devote to literature the energies which had no legitimate outlet in politics. ION of Chios (before 490-423 B.C.) is an instance. He was an aristocrat, a friend of Kimdn and King Archidamus, and he probably fought in the allied forces against Eion in 470. But there was no career for him except in letters. He wrote tragedies, of course in Attic, with great success ; and it is pleasant to see (frag. 63) that he could openly express enthusiastic admiration of Sparta to an Athenian audience without any known disagreeable result. He wrote a Founding of Chios * and some books on Pytha- gorean philosophy. What we most regret is his book of Memoirs, telling in a frank, easy style of the Passing Visits* (ETTL^fjbiaC) to his island of various notable foreigners. The long fragment about Sophocles is in- teresting ; though the idea it gives of contemporary wit and grace is on the whole as little pleasing to our taste as the jests of the court of Queen Elizabeth. An utterly different person was STESIMBROTUS of Thasos, a man with a pen and some education, and in 1 66 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE place of character a settled bitterness against everything that represented the Empire. He was like that malcontent islander whom Isocrates answers in his Panegyricus, a representative of the Oligarchic and Particularist party in the allied states, the aristocrats and dependents of aris- tocrats, whose influence and property were lost through the Athenian predominance, and to whom the Demo- cracy and the Empire were alike anathema. Yet he came to Athens like every one else, like those 'dozens of Thasians' mentioned by Hegmon the satirist : " Close-shorn, not over nice, whom sheer Want ships on the packet, Damaged and damaging men, to prof ess bad -verses in Athens? Stesimbrotus lectured successfully as a sophist ; wrote on Homer and on current politics. At last he was able to relieve his feelings by a perfect masterpiece of libel, Upon Themistodes, Thucydides, and Pericles* The first and last were his especial arch-fiends; the son of Melesias, being Pericles's opponent, probably came off with the same mild treatment as Kimdn, who, "although an abject boor, ignorant of every art and science, had at least the merit of being no orator and possessing the rudiments of honesty ; he might almost have been a Peloponnesian ! " If Stesim- brotus were not such an infamous liar, one would have much sympathy for him. As it is, the only thing to be urged in his favour is that he did not, as is commonly supposed, combine his rascality with sanctimoniousness. His book on the The Mysteries* must have been an attack. The mysteries were a purely and characteris- tically Athenian possession, to which, as Isocrates says, they only admitted other Greeks out of generosity ; and Stesimbrotus would have falsified his whole position if he had praised them. The man is a sort of intransigeant ultramontane journalist, wearing rather a modern look THE 'OLD OLIGARCH' 167 among his contemporaries, a man of birth, ability, and learning, shut out by political exigencies from the due use of his gifts. Similar to Stesimbrotus in general political views, vastly removed from him in spirit, is the 'OLD OLIGARCH/ whose priceless study of the Athenian constitution is preserved to us by the happy accident of the publisher taking it for Xenophon's. It is not only unlike Xenophon's style and way of thinking, but it demon- strably belongs to the first Athenian Empire, before the Sicilian catastrophe. It is, in fact, the earliest piece of Attic prose preserved to us, and represents almost alone the practical Athenian style of writing, before literature was affected by Gorgias or the orators. It is familiar, terse, vivid ; it follows the free grammar of conversa- tion, with disconnected sentences and frequent changes of number and person. It leaves, like some parts of Aristotle, a certain impression of naked, unphrased thought. The Old Oligarch has a clear conception of the meaning of Athenian democracy, and admitting for the moment that he and his friends are the ' Noble and Good/ while the masses are the 'Base and Vile/ he sees straight and clear, and speaks without unfairness. "/ dislike the kind of constitution, because in choosing it they have definitely chosen to make the Vile better off than the Noble. This I dislike. But granted that this is their intention, I will show that they conserve the spirit of their constitution well, and manage their affairs in general well, in points where the Greeks think them most at fault." There is even a kind of justice in the arrangement ; "for it is the masses that row the ships, and the ships that have made the Empire" They do not follow the advice of the Good men no ; " the first Vile man who likes, stands up 168 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE and speaks to the Assembly? and, as a fact, "does somehow find out what is to his interest and that of the masses. Ignorance plus Vileness plus Loyalty is a safer combination in an adviser of the Demos than Wisdom plus Virtue plus Disaffection." As for the undue licence allowed to slaves and resident aliens, it is true that you cannot strike them, and they will not move out of your way ; but the reason is that neither in dress nor in face is the true Athenian commoner at all distinguishable from a slave, and he is afraid of being hit by mistake ! The writer goes over the constitution in detail without finding a serious flaw : everything is so ordered the elective offices, the arrangements with the allies, the laws about comedy and about the public buildings as to secure the omnipotence of the Demos. For in- stance, the system of making the allies come to Athens for their lawsuits is oppressive, and sometimes keeps litigants waiting as long as a year before their cases can be heard. But it provides the pay of the jury- courts ! It enables the Demos to keep an eye on the internal affairs of the whole Empire and see that the 'Good' do not get the upper hand anywhere. It makes the allies realise that the ' Mob ' is really their master, and not the rich admirals and trierarchs whom they see representing Athens abroad. Then it brings taxes ; it means constant employment for the heralds, and brisk trade for the lodging-house keepers and the cabmen and those who have a slave to hire out. If only we had a hundred pages of such material as this instead of thirteen, our understanding of Athenian history would be a more concrete thing than it is. It is hard to see the exact aim of the Old Oligarch. He discusses coolly the prospect of a revolution. No POLITICAL WRITINGS 169 half-measures are of the least use ; and to strike a death- blow at the Democracy is desperately hard. There are not enough malcontents; the Demos has not been unjust enough. On the whole, a land invasion is the only hope ; if Athens were an island she would be invulnerable. The work reads like the address of an Athenian aristo- crat to the aristocrats of the Empire, defending Athens at the expense of the Demos. 'We aristocrats sympathise with you ; your grievances are not the results of de- liberate oppression or of the inherent perversity of the Athenians, they are the natural outcome of the demo- cratic system. If a chance comes for a revolution, we shall take it ; at present it would be madness.' CRITIAS the 'Tyrant' wrote Constitutions* ; his style, to judge from the fragments, was like our Oligarch's, and he is quoted as using the peculiar word SiaSi/cd&iv in the exact sense in which it occurs here. The spirit of this tract indeed is quite foreign to the restless slave of ambition whom we know in the Critias of 404. Never- theless, the Critias who objected to action in the revolu- tion of 411, who proposed the recall of Alcibiades, and the banishment of the corpse of Phrynichus, may perhaps lead us back to a moderate and not too youthful Critias of 417-414, the date given to our Oligarch by Miiller- Striibing and Bergk. Among the other political writings of this time were Antiphon's celebrated Defence* Critias's Lives* and Pamphlets* Thrasymachus's explanation of the Consti- tution of our Fathers* and a history of the events of 41 1 which serves as the basis of Aristotle's account in his Constitution of Athens. It contained a glorification of Theramenes's action, and a bold theory that the revolu- tion he aimed at was really the restoration of the true 1 70 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE constitution of Draco. It can scarcely have been by Theramenes himself, since it shows no special hostility to Critias and the Oligarchical extremists. The same pamphleteering spirit infected even Pausanias, the exiled Spartan king, and led him to attack Lysander and the Ephors under the cover of a Life of Lycurgus* SOCRATES, SON OF SOPHRONISCUS FROM AL6PEK& (468-399 B.C.) Among the Sophists of the fifth century is one who scarcely deserves that name, or, indeed, any other which classes him with his fellows : a man strangely detached ; living in a world apart from other men a life of incessant moral and intellectual search ; in that region most rich to give and hungry to receive sympathy, elsewhere dead to the feelings and conventions of common society. It is this which makes the most earnest of men a centre of merri- ment, a jester and a willing butt. He analyses life so gravely and nakedly that it makes men laugh, as when he gropes his way to the conclusion that a certain fiery orator's aim in life is " to make many people angry at the same time." The same simpleness of nature led him to ask extraordinary questions ; to press insistently for answers ; to dance alone in his house for the sake of exercise ; to talk without disguise of his most intimate feelings. He was odd in appearance too ; stout, weather- stained, ill-clad, barefooted for the most part, deep-eyed, and almost fierce in expression ; subject to long fits of brooding, sometimes silent for days, generally a persistent and stimulating talker, sometimes amazingly eloquent ; a man who saw through and through other men, left them paralysed, Alcibiades said, and feeling Mike very LIFE OF SOCRATES 171 slaves'; sometimes inimitably humorous, sometimes in- explicably solemn ; only, always original and utterly un- self-conscious. The parentage of Socrates was a joke. He was the son of a midwife and a stone-mason; evidently not a success- ful stone-mason, or his wife would not have continued her profession. He could not manage such little property as he had, and was apt to drop into destitution without minding it. He had no profession. If he ever learned sculpture, he did not practise it. He took no fees for teaching ; indeed he could not see that he taught any- thing. He sometimes, for no visible reason, refused, sometimes accepted, presents from his rich friends. Naturally he drove his wife, Xanthippe, a woman of higher station, to despair ; he was reputed henpecked. In the centre of education he was ill educated ; in a hot- bed of political aspirations he was averse to politics. He never travelled ; he did not care for any fine art ; he knew poetry well, but insisted on treating it as bald prose. In his military service he showed iron courage, though he had a way of falling into profound reveries, which might have led to unpleasant results. In his later years, when we first know him, he is notorious for his utter indifference to bodily pleasures or pains. But we have evidence to show that this was not always so ; that the old man who scarcely knew whether it was freezing or whether he had breakfasted, who could drink all night without noticing it, had passed a stormy and passionate youth. Spintharus, the father of Aristoxenus, one of the few non-disciples who knew him in his early days, says that Socrates was a man of terrible passions, his anger ungovernable and his bodily desires violent, "though," he adds, " he never did anything unfair." i/2 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE Socrates's positive doctrines amounted to little : he clung to a paradoxical belief that Virtue is Knowledge ; a view refuted before him by Euripides, and after him by Aris- totle in its ordinary sense, at least: to him, of course, it meant something not ordinary. He had no accom- plishments, and did not as a rule care to acquire them ; though, when it occurred to him, late in life, to learn music, he went straight to a school and learned among the boys. He was working incessantly at a problem which he never really could frame to himself, which mankind never has been able to frame. He felt that the great truth he wanted must be visible everywhere, if we knew how to look for it. It is not more knowledge that we want : only the conscious realising of what is in us. Accept- ing the jest at his mother's profession, he described his process of questioning as assisting at the birth of truth from spirits in travail. Along with this faith in a real truth inside man, Socrates possessed a genius for destructive criticism. Often unfair in his method, always deeply honest in his purpose, he groped with deadly effect for the funda- mental beliefs and principles of any philosopher, poli- tician, artist, or man of the world, who consented to meet him in discussion. Of course the discussions were oral ; Athens had not yet reached the time for pamphlet criticism, and Socrates could not write a con- nected discourse. He objected to books, as he did to long speeches, on the ground that he could not follow them and wanted to ask questions at every sentence. Socrates was never understood ; it seems as if, for all his insistence on the need of self-consciousness, he never understood himself. The most utterly divergent schools of thought claimed to be his followers. His TEACHING OF SOCRATES 173 friends Euclides at Megara, and Phaedo at Elis, seem to have found in him chiefly dialectic abstract logic and metaphysics, based on Eleaticism. Two others, ^Eschines and Apollodorus, found the essence of the man in his external way of life (see p-34o). Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynic school, believed that he followed Socrates in proclaiming the equal nullity of riches, fame, friendship, and everything in the world except Virtue. Virtue was the knowledge of right living ; all other knowledge was worthless, nay, impossible. Equally contemptuous of theoretic knowledge, equally restricted to the pursuit of right living, another Socratic, Aristippus of Cyrene, identified Right Living with the pursuit of every momentary pleasure ; which, again, he held to be the only way of life psychologically possible. If one can attempt to say briefly what side of Socrates was developed by Plato, it was perhaps in part his negative criticism, leading to the scepticism of the later Academics ; and in part his mystical side, the side that was eventually carried to such excess by the Neo-Platonists of the fourth century A.D. Socrates was subject to an auditory hallucination : a Divine Sign used to 'speak' to him in warning when he was about to act amiss. But the most fundamental likeness between Plato and Socrates seems to lie in a different point in their con- ception of Love. The great link that bound Socrates to his fellows, the secret, perhaps, of the affection and worship with which so many dissimilar men regarded him, was this passionate unsatisfied emotion to which he could give no other name. The Pericleans were Movers' of Athens. Socrates Moved' what he called Beauty or Truth or Goodness ; and, through this far- 174 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE off cause of all Love, loved his disciples and all who were working towards the same end. Plato realises this to the full. Socrates perhaps had only glimpses of it ; but it is clear that that intense vibrating personal affection between man and man, which gives most modern readers a cold turn in reading the Platonic dia- logues, is in its seed a part of Socrates. It is remark- able, considering the possibilities of Greek life at the time, that this ' Erds ' gave rise to no scandal against Socrates, not even at his trial. 1 In Plato's case it showed itself to be a little imprudent ; Aristotle's mag- nificent conception of Friendship is best explained when we see that it is the Platonic Love under a -cooler and safer name. What was the source of Socrates's immense influence over all later philosophy, since in actual philosophic achievement he is not so great as Protagoras, not com- parable with Democritus ? It was largely the daemonic, semi-inspired character of the man. Externally, it was the fact of his detachment from all existing bodies and institutions, so that in their wreck, when Protagoras, Pericles, Gorgias fell, he was left standing alone and un- discredited. And, secondly, it was the great fact that he sealed his mission with his blood. He had enough of the prophet in him to feel that it was well for him to die ; that it was impossible to unsay a word of what he believed, or to make any promise he did not personally approve. Of course the Platonic Apology is fiction, but there is evidence to show that Socrates's indifference, or rather superiority, to life and death is true in fact. The world was not then familiarised with religious per- secutions, and did not know how many people are ready 1 He speaks quite positively on the point : Xen. Symp. viii. 32 ff. DEATH OF SOCRATES 175 to bear martyrdom for what they believe. But there is one point about Socrates which is unlike the religious martyr : Socrates died for no supposed crown of glory, had no particular revelation in which he held a fanatical belief. He died in a calm, deliberate conviction, that Truth is really more precious than Life, and not only Truth but even the unsuccessful search for it. The trial has been greatly discussed both now and in antiquity. The Socratics, like ^Eschines and Antisthenes, poured out the vials of their wrath in literature. Plato wrote the Apology and the Gorgias ; Lysias the orator stepped in with a defence of Socrates in speech form ; Polycrates the sophist dared to justify probably not as a mere jeu cT esprit the decision of the court; Isocrates fell upon him with caustic politeness in the Busiris^ and Xenophon with a certain clumsy convincingness in the Memorabilia. The chief point to realise is that the accusers were not villains, nor the judges necessarily Mice' as M. Aurelius tersely puts it. Socrates had always been surrounded by young men of leisure, drawn mainly from the richer and more dissolute classes. He had in a sense ' corrupted ' them : they had felt the de- structive side of his moral teaching, and failed to grasp his real aim. His political influence was markedly sceptical. He was no oligarch ; his oldest apostle Chairephon fought beside Thrasybulus at Phyl ; but he had analysed and destroyed the sacred principle of Democracy as well as every other convention. The city had barely recovered from the bloody reign of his two close disciples Critias and Charmides ; could never recover from the treason of his 'beloved' Alci- biades. The religious terrors of the people were 1 76 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE keenly awake confusedly occupied with oligarchic plots, religious sins, and divine vengeance. Of his accusers, the poet Meldtus was probably a fanatic, who objected to the Divine Sign. He was a weak man ; he had been intimidated by the Thirty into executing an illegal arrest at their orders the same arrest, according to the legend of the Socratics, which Socrates had refused to perform. Lycdn seems to have been an average re- spectable politician ; the Socratics have nothing against him except that he was once the master's professed friend. These men could hardly have got a conviction against Socrates in the ordinary condition of public feeling ; but now they were supported by Anytus. A little later in the same year, when Meletus attempted another pro- secution for impiety against Andokides, in opposition to Anytus, he failed to get a fifth of the votes. Anytus was one of the heroes of the Restored Democracy, one of the best of that generous band. As an outlaw at Phyle" he had saved the lives of bitter oligarchs who had fallen into the hands of his men. When victorious he was one of the authors of the amnesty. He left the men who held his confiscated property undisturbed in enjoyment of it. He had had relations with Socrates before. He was a tanner, a plain well-to-do tradesman, himself ; but he had set his heart on the future of his only son, and was prepared to make for that object any sacrifice except that which was asked. The son wished to follow Soc- rates. He herded with young aristocrats of doubtful principles and suspected loyalty ; he refused to go into his father's business. Socrates, not tactfully, had pleaded his cause. Had Socrates had his way, or Anytus his, all might have been well. As it was, the young man SOCRATES AND ANYTUS 177 was left rebellious and hankering ; when his father be- came an outlaw for freedom's sake, he stayed in the city with Socrates and the tyrants ; he became ultimately a hopeless drunkard. As the old tradesman fought his way back through the bloody streets of the Piraeus, he thought how the same satyr-faced sophist was still in Athens, as happy under the tyrants as under the constitution, always gibing and probing, and discussing ambiguous subjects with his ruined son. It needed little to convince him that here was a centre of pestilence to be uprooted. The death of Socrates is a true tragedy. Both men were noble, both ready to die for their beliefs ; it is only the nobler and greater who has been in the end triumphant. VIII THUCYDIDES AT the time when the old Herodotus was putting the finish to his history in Athens, a new epoch of struggle was opening for Greece and demanding a writer. The world of Herodotus was complete, satisfying. Persia was tamed ; the seas under one law ; freedom and order won " Equal laws, equal speech, democracy." The culture which, next to freedom, was what Herodotus cared for most, was realised on a very wide scale : he lived in a great city where every citizen could read and write, where everybody was Seivbs and ^tXo'/eaXo?. There had never been, not even in the forced atmosphere of tyrants' courts, such a gathering of poets and learned men as there was in this simply-living and hard-working city. There was a new kind of poetry, natural only to this soil, so strangely true and deep and arresting, that it made other poetry seem like words. And the city which had done all this the fighting, the organising, the imaginative creating alike was the metropolis of his own Ionia, she whom he could show to be the saviour of Hellas, whom even the Theban had hailed, " O shining, violet-crowned City of Song, great Athens, bulwark of Hellas, walls divine." x That greeting of Pindar's struck the keynote of the Athenians' own feeling. Again and 1 Find. frag. 76. THE PERICLEAN IDEAL 179 again the echoes of it come back ; as late as 424 B.C. the word 'violet-crowned' could make an audience sit erect and eager, and even a judicious use of the ad- jective ' shining ' by a foreign ambassador could do diplo- matic wonders. 1 It was a passionate romantic patriotism. In the best men the love for their personified city was inextricably united with a devotion to all the aims that they felt to be highest Freedom, Law, Reason, and what the Greeks called 'the beautiful.' Theirs was a peerless city, and they made for her those overweening claims that a man only makes for his ideal or for one he loves. Pericles used that word : called himself her ' lover ' (epapo6iriai>, Kvvovpla, iv. 56 5 MeraT/ow, iii. 101. N 194 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE course he cannot have known by his own wits. In another passage (iii. 105), where our text says that Olpas, a place on the extreme border of Acarnania towards Amphilochia, was "the common tribunal of the Acarnanians^' Stephen quotes it as "of the Acarnanians and Amphilockians" which is just what its position demands. The upshot of this is that all criticism of Thucydides must recognise the demonstrable imperfection of our text. For instance, in the well-known Mitylenaean story, when the Assembly has condemned the whole military population to death in a moment of passion, repented the same day, and, by the tremendous exertion of the galley-rowers who bore the reprieve, saved them, it proceeds to condemn and execute the ringleaders of the rebellion, " those most guilty" " They numbered rather more than 1000 " (iii. 50) ! Is that number remotely credible ? There is nothing in which MSS. are so utterly untrustworthy as figures, the Greek numeral system lending itself so easily to enormous mistakes. The ringleaders were in Athens at the time. It was a deliberate execution of prisoners, not a hot-blooded massacre ; and nobody, either in Thucydides or for centuries after him, takes the least notice of it ! Dio- ddrus, with his Thucydides before him, makes Hermo- crates of Syracuse deliver a speech upon all the crimes of Athens ; he tells of many smaller things ; he tells of the cruel decision of the first Assembly and of the enormity which the Athenians thought of committing and omits to mention that they executed 1000 of their subjects in cold blood. It is clear that Diodorus did not read our story. It all rests on the absolute cor- rectness of the figure a ; and our editors cry aloud and EXAMPLES OF PROBABLE CORRUPTION 195 cut themselves with knives rather than admit that the a can possibly be wrong ! 1 In the same way, in i. 51 our text can be checked by a contemporary inscription. 2 The stone agrees exactly with Thucyclides in the names of the first set of generals mentioned ; in the second it gives "Glaukon (Metage)nes and Drakonti(des)." Our text gives " Glaukon , son of Leagros ; Andokides, son of Leo- goras" that is, Andokides the orator. Is this a mere mistake of the historian's ? Not necessarily. Suppose the owner of some copy in which there was a blot or a tear was not sure of the form 'Leagros'; " Leogoras," he would reflect, " is a real name ; Andokides was son of a Ledgoras." Hence enters the uninvited orator and ousts the two real but illegible names. Something of that sort is far more likely than such a mistake on the part of Thucydides. In a passage at the end of Book I. where the narra- tive is easy and the style plain, the scholiast observes that "here the lion laughs." The lion would laugh more often and more pleasantly if we could only see his real expres- sion undistorted by the accidents of tradition. To return from this inevitable digression, we see easily how Thucydides was naturally in some antagonism to Herodotus's whole method of viewing things. Thucy- dides had no supernatural actors in his narrative. He sees no suggestion how could he in the wrecked world that lay before him ? of the working of a Divine Providence. His spirit is positif ; he does not speak of things he knows nothing about. He is a little sardonic about 1 Miiller-Striibing of course thinks the passage an interpolation. Thucy- dides used the decadic system of numerals, not that of the Attic inscriptions. 2 C. I. A. 179. 1 96 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE oracles, which of course filled the air at the time. He instances their safe ambiguity (ii. 17, 54), and mentions as a curiosity the only one he had ever known to come definitely true (v. 26). He speaks little of persons. He realises the influence of a great man such as Pericles, a mere demagogue such as Cleon, an unscrupulous genius such as Alcibiades. Living in a psychological age, he studies these men's characters and modes of thought, studies them sometimes with vivid dramatic personation, in the speeches and elsewhere ; but it is only the mind, never the manner or the matter, that he cares for, and he never condescends to gossip. He cares for great move- ments and organised forces. He believes above all things in reason, brain-power, intelligence. There is another point in which he is irritated by Hero- dotus. He himself was a practical and highly-trained soldier. Herodotus was a man of letters who knew no- thing of war except for some small Ionian skirmishing in his youth. Herodotus speaks of the 'regiment of Pitane/ showing that he thought Spartan regiments were raised by localities ; it makes Thucydides angry that a professed historian should not know better than that. 1 Except in topography, which is always difficult before the era of maps, Thucydides is very clear and pointed in his military matters ; and it is interesting to observe that he lays his hand on almost all the weaknesses of Greek military organisation which were gradually made clear by experience in the times after him. In the Pelopon- nesian War the whole strength of the land army was in the heavy infantry. Thucydides shows the helpless- ness of such an army against adequate light infantry. 2 Iphicrates and Xenophon learned the lesson. He shows J L 20 ; cf. Hdt. ix. 53. a iii 102 ; iv. 39. THUCYDIDES AS A HISTORIAN 197 the effect of the Syracusan superiority in cavalry, both for scouting and foraging and in actual engagements. It was cavalry that won Chaeronea for Philip, and the empire of Darius for Alexander. He points out, too, the weakest spot of all in Greek strategy, the hampering of the general's action in the field by excessive control at home. The Sicilian Expedition was lost, not by Nikias, but by the Athenian Assembly ; or if Nikias also made grave errors, they were largely due to the state of para- lysing subjection in which he was kept by that absent body. The Roman Senate, composed so largely of mili- tary men, was as sympathetic to its generals' failures as it was to their extortions. The Athenian Assembly was largely affected by the private soldier and the man, who, though liable to serve, was in reality no soldier at all. Sparta was almost as bad for a different reason. Only an exceptional position like that of Brasidas in Chalcidice, or Agis at Dekeleia, enabled a general to act with real freedom, 1 though even Agis was materially hindered by jealousy. Here again we see one of the secrets of the power of Philip and Alexander. Like most thoughtful soldiers Bauer 8 quotes parallels from Moltke and others Thucydides is consistently impressed with the uncertainty of war, the impossibility of foreseeing everything, or of knowing in a battle what exactly is being done. He does not judge men, as the stupid do, by their success. He had personal reasons, of course, for not doing so in military matters ; but this principle, one of the greatest marks of the real thinker, is with him all through his work. Pericles was convinced from the facts before him that Athens would win the war ; and she lost it. Pericles was profound and correct 1 viii. 5, Agis. 8 Pkilologus, 1. 401. 198 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE in his reckoning, but he could not foresee the plague, nor be responsible for the abandonment of his policy after his death. It is very remarkable, indeed, how Thucydides never expresses a personal judgment which could be de- duced from the facts he has given. He only speaks when he thinks the facts likely to be misinterpreted. Cleon's undertaking (iv. 28) to capture Sphacteria in less than twenty days was fulfilled. It was nevertheless an insane boast, says Thucydides. At the end of the Sicilian Ex- pedition, we are full of admiration for Demosthenes ; our pity for Nikias is mingled with irritation, and even contempt. Thucydides sobers us : "Of all the Greeks of my time, he least deserved so miserable an end, for he lived in the performance of all that was counted virtue" (vii. 86). Generous praise ; but the man's limitations are given "all that was counted virtue'' We should never have discovered this about Nikias from the mere history. But Thucydides knew the man ; is perfectly, almost cruelly, frank about him ; and that is Thucy- dides's final judgment. It is the same with Antiphon. He is a sinister figure : he was responsible for a reign of terror. But Thucydides, who knew him, admired him, while he deliberately recorded the full measure of his offences. Macchiavelli's praise of Cassar Borgia suggests itself. Antiphon's aperij was perhaps rather like Borgia's Virtu, and Macchiavelli had a great ideal for Italy, something like that of Thucydides for Athens. Or one might think of Philippe de Commines' praise of Louis XI. But Thucydides, though in intellect not unlike these two, is a much bigger man than De Corn- mines, a much saner and fuller man than Macchiavelli, and a much nobler man than either. He is very chary of moral judgments, but surely it needs some blindness CHARACTERISTICS OF THUCYDIDES 199 in a reader not to feel the implication of a very earnest moral standard all through. It has been said that he attributes only selfish motives even to his best actors, a wish for glory to Brasidas, a desire to escape punish- ment to Demosthenes. But he seldom mentions per- sonal motives at all, and when such motives do force their way into history they are not generally unselfish. He certainly takes a high standard of patriotism for granted. One would not be surprised, however, to learn that Thucydides's speculative ethics found a diffi- culty in the conception of a strictly ' unselfish ' action. Of course Thucydides is human ; he need not always be right. For instance, the ' Archaeologia,' or introduc- tion to ancient history in Book I., is one of the most striking parts of his whole work. For historical imagi- nation, for breadth of insight, it is probably without a parallel in literature before the time of the Encyclop6- distes ; and in method it is superior even to them. Nevertheless it is clear that Thucydides does not really understand Myth. He treats it merely as distorted history, when it often has no relation to history. Given Pelops and Ion and Hellen, his account is luminous ; but he is still in the stage of treating these conceptions as real men. Of course in the ' Archaeologia ' there is no room for party spirit ; but even where there is, the essential fairness and coolness of the writer's mind remain un- broken. He is often attacked at the present day. But the main facts that most antiquity took him as a type of fair-mindedness, while some thought him philo-Spartan and some philo-Athenian ; that Plato and Aristotle cen- sured him for being too democratic, while his modern opponents complain that he is not democratic enough 200 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE speak volumes. His own politics are clearly moderate. The time when Athenian political affairs pleased him best, he tells us not counting, presumably, the excep- tional 'Greatest-Man-Rule' of Pericles was during the first months of the Restored Constitution in 411. It was " a fair combination of tJte rights of the Few and the Many" l He seems to be a man with strong personal opinions, and a genius for putting them aside while writing narrative. His reference to 'a certain' Hyperbolus (viii. 73) when Hyperbolus had been for some time the most prominent politician in Athens is explicable when one realises that his history was addressed to the whole Greek world, which neither knew nor cared about Athenian internal politics. The contemptuous condemnation of the man which fol- lows, is written under the influence of the spirit current in Athens at the end of the century. His tone about Cleon is certainly suggestive of personal feeling. But the second introduction of him 8 is obviously due to some oversight either of author or scribe ; and the astound- ing sentence in iv. 28, 5, becomes reasonable when we realise that "the Athenians" who " would sooner be rid of Cleon than capture Sphact$ria" are obviously the then majority of the Assembly, the party of Nikias. After all, his account of Cleon is the least unfavourable that we possess ; and if it is harsh, we should remember that Thucydides was under a special obligation to show that Cleon is not Pericles. It must be borne in mind that Thucydides returned to Athens in 403 like a ghost from the tomb, a remnant of the old circle of Pericles. He moved among men who were strangers to him. His spirit was one which had practically died out of Athens nearly a generation 1 viii. 97 ; cf, ii. 65, 5, and iii. 82, 8. * iv. 21 =iii. 36. RETURN OF THUCYDIDES TO ATHENS 201 before, and the memory of it vanished under the strain and bloodshed and misery of the last fifteen years. The policy of Pericles, the idea of the Empire, the Demo- cracy itself, was utterly, hopelessly discredited in the circles where Thucydides naturally moved. The thinkers of the day took the line of the oligarchical writers, the line of Aristotle afterwards. Athenian history was the ' succession of demagogues,' Aristeides, Ephialtes, Pericles, Cleon, Cleophdn, Callicrates " and from that time on in succession all who were ready for the greatest extremes in general recklessness, and in pandering to the people for their immediate advantage"'*- The Democracy, in a moderate and modified form, had to be accepted ; but it was, as Alcibiades had pronounced it, ' folly con- fessed] 2 and its leaders were all so many self-seeking adventurers. 'Pericles why, look at Stesimbrotus and the comedies of that day he was just as bad as the worst of them ; and Aristeides the Just, we could tell some queer stories about him!' The men of the early fourth century are living among ruins, among shattered hopes, discredited ideals, blunted and bewildered aims. The best of them 8 "has seen the madness of the multitude. He knows that no politician is right eous } nor is there any champion of justice at whose side he may fight and be saved'' In public life he would be "a man fallen among wild beasts." It is better that he " retires under the shelter of a wall while the hurrying wind and the storm of dust and sleet go by" Testifying solitarily among these is the old returned exile of the time of Pericles. His life is over now, without dis- tinction, his Athens ruined beyond recognition, the old mistress of his love dead and buried. But he keeps 1 Ar. Ath. Pol. xxviii. 8 Thuc. vi. 89. Plato, Rep, 496 D. 202 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE firm the memory of his real city and his leader the man whom they called a demagogue because he was too great for them to understand ; who never took a gift from any man ; who dwelt in austere supremacy ; who, if he had only lived, or his counsels been followed, would have saved and realised the great Athens that was now gone from the earth. Other men of the day wrote pamphlets and arguments. Thucydides has not the heart to argue. He has studied the earlier and the mythical times, and prepared that marvellous introduc- tion. He has massed all the history of his own days as no man ever had massed history before. He knows ten times more than any of these writers, and he means to know more still before he gives out his book. Above all, he is going to let the truth speak for itself. No man shall be able to contradict him, no man show that he is ever unfair. And he will clothe all his story in words like the old words of Gorgias, Prodicus, Antiphon, and Pericles himself. He will wake the great voices of the past to speak to this degenerate world. His death came first. The book was unfinished. Even as it stood it was obsolete before it was pub- lished. As a chronicle it was continued by Xenophon, and as a manifesto on human vanity by Theopompus ; but the style and the spirit of it passed over the heads of the fourth century. Some two hundred years later, indeed, he began to be recognised among the learned as the great truthful historian. But within fifty years of his death Ephorus had rewritten, expanded, popu- larised, and superseded him, and left him to wait for the time of the archaistic revival of the old Greek litera- ture in the days of Augustus Caesar. IX THE DRAMA INTRODUCTION LOOKING at the Drama of Sophocles as a finished product, without considering its historical growth, we are constantly offended by what seem to be inexplicable pieces of conventionalism. From some conventional elements, indeed, it is singularly free. There are one or two traditional ficelles oracles, for instance, and exposure of children ; but on the whole the play of incident and character is as true as it is unostentatious. There is no sham heroism, no impossible villainy, no maudlin sentiment. There is singular boldness and variety of plot, and there is perfect freedom from those pairs of lovers who have been our tyrants since modern drama began. One group of alleged conventions may be at once set aside. We must for the present refuse to listen to those who talk to us of masks and buskins and top-knots and sacerdotal dress, repeat to us the coarse half- knowledge of Pollux and Lucian, show us the grotesques of South Italy and the plasterer's work of Pompeian degradation, compile from them an incorrect account of the half -dead Hellenistic or Roman stage the stage that competed with the amphitheatre and bid us construct an idea of the drama of Euripides out of 204 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE the ghastly farrago. It is one of the immediate duties of archaeological research to set us right again where archaeological text-books have set us so miserably wrong. Still our undoubted literary tradition does contain strong elements of conventionalism. The characters are all saga-people ; l they all speak in verse ; they tend to speak at equal length, and they almost never interrupt ecept at the end of a line. Last and worst, there is eternally present a chorus of twelve or fifteen homo- geneous persons maidens, matrons, elders, captives, or the like whose main duty is to minimise the inconve- nience of their presence during the action, and to dance and sing in a conventional Doric dialect during the inter- vals. The explanation of this is, of course, historical. We have seen above (p. 99) how the Silenus-choir of the Centaur-like followers of Dionysus was merged into the Satyr-choir of wild mountain-goats in the suite of the Arcadian mountain-god Pan. 'Tragos' is a goat; 'tragikos chores' a goat-choir; and 'tragoidia' a goat -song. The meaning of the word only changed because the thing it denoted changed. Tragedy de- veloped from the Dorian goat-choirs of the Northern Peloponnese those of Arion at Corinth, and of the precursors of Pratfnas at Phlius, and those which the tyrant Cleisthenes suppressed at Sikyon for " celebrating the sufferings of Adrastus." * 1 The best known exception is the Antheus* (not Flower) of Agathon. Agathon left Athens (about 407) at the age of forty, when he had already won a position inferior only to that of Sophocles and Euripides, but before his in- dividual originality and his Socratic or Platonic spirit had a permanent effect on the drama. Aristophanes had assailed him vehemently in the Thcsmo- phoriazusa and Gtrytadcs * a testimony to his ' advanced ' spirit in art. 1 Hdt. v. 67. See Preface. ORIGINS OF TRAGEDY 205 Of course, other influences may also have helped. There was a mimetic element in the earliest popular poetry, and we hear of ' dromena ' (things performed) the word lies very near ' drdma' (performance) in many religious cults. The birth of Zeus was acted in Crete ; his marriage with Hera, in Samos, Crete, and Argos. There were sacred puppets, ' Daidalaj at Plataea. The ' Crane-Dance ' of Delos showed Theseus saving the children from the Labyrinth ; and even the mysteries at Eleusis and elsewhere made their revelations more to mortal eyes by spectacle than to mortal ears by definite statement. The first step in the transformation of the goat-choir took place on Attic soil, when the song poetry of the Dorian met the speech poetry of Ionia. A wide-spread tradition tells us that Thespis of the village Icaria was the first poet who, " to rest his dancers and vary the enter- tainment," came forward personally at intervals and recited to the public a speech in trochaic tetrameters, like those metrical harangues which Solon had declaimed in the market-place. 1 His first victory was in 534 B.C. His successors were Choirilus and a foreigner who performed in Attica, Pratinas of Phlius. The choir were still satyrs at this stage. What was the poet? Probably he represented the hero of the play, the legendary king or god. An old saying, not under- stood afterwards, speaks of the time " when Choirilus was a king among satyrs." But if the poet represented one character, why should he not represent more ? If he 1 Aristotle does not mention Thespis ; and the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Minos says expressly that tragedy did not start, "as people imagine," with Thespis, nor yet with Phrynichus, but was much older. See Hiller in Rh, Mus. xxxix. 321. 206 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE came on first, say, as the King Lycurgus, let him change his dress during the next song and re-enter as the priest whom Lycurgus has scorned; next time he may be a messenger announcing the tyrant's death. All that is needed is a place to dress in. A section of the round dancing-floor ('orchestra') is cut off; a booth or l sken' is erected, and the front of it made presentable. Normally it becomes a palace with three doors for the actor-poet to go in and out of. Meantime the character of the dancing is somewhat altered, because there is no longer a ring to dance in ; the old ring-dance or ' cyclic chorus ' has turned into the ' square ' chorus of tragedy. Of course, the choir can change costume too : Pratinas once had a choir representing Dymanian dancing girls. But that was a more serious business, and seems to have required a rather curious intermediate stage. There are titles of plays, such as The Huntsmen- Satyrs* Herald- Satyrs* Wrestler -Satyrs.* Does not this imply 1 something like the Maccus a Soldier, Maccus an Innkeeper, of the Italian 'Atellanae/ like The Devil a Monk in English ? The actor does not represent a soldier simply ; he represents the old stage buffoon Maccus pretending to be a soldier. The choir are not heralds ; they are satyrs masquerading as such. It is the natural end of this kind of entertainment to have the disguise torn off, and the satyrs, or Maccus, or the Devil, revealed in their true characters. In practice the tragic choirs were allowed three changes of costume before they appeared as satyrs confessed. That is, to use the language of a later time, each per- formance was a ' tetralogy ' three ' tragedies ' (' little myths,' Aristotle calls them by comparison with the i W. M. Herakles, i. p. 88. THE STAGE AND THE ACTORS 207 longer plays of his own day), followed by a satyric drama. The practice did not die till the middle period of Euripides. His Cyclops is the one satyr-play extant, while his Alkfctis is a real drama acted as a concluding piece to three tragedies. The Greek word for actor, 'hypocrites/ means 'an- swerer.' The poet was really the actor ; but if he wanted to develop his solitary declamation into dia- logue, he needed some one to answer him. The chorus was normally divided into two parts, as the system of strophe and antistrophe testifies. The poet perhaps took for answerers the leaders of these two parts. At any rate, 'three actors' are regularly found in the fully- developed tragedy. The old round choir consisted of fifty dancers and a poet : the full tragic company of forty-eight dancers, two 'answerers/ and a poet. That was all that the so-called ' chorigus' the rich citizen who undertook the expenses of the perform- ance was ever bound to supply; and munificent as this functionary often was in other respects, his 'para- choregemataj or gifts of supererogation, never took the form of a fourth actor in the proper sense. Nor did he provide four changes of costume for the whole forty- eight dancers; they appeared twelve at a time in the four plays of the tetralogy. The tradition says loosely that Thespis had one actor, ^schylus two, and Sophocles three, though sometimes it is ^Eschylus who introduced the third. As a matter of fact, it was the state, not the poet, which gave fixed prizes to the actors, and settled the general conduct of the Dionysus Feast. Accordingly, when we find an ancient critic attributing particular scenic changes to particular poets, this as a rule only means that the changes appeared to him to occur for 208 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE the first time in their works. A mutilated inscription 1 seems to give us the date of some important altera- tion or ratification of stage arrangements. It admitted Comedy to the great Dionysia ; it perhaps established the ' three actors/ perhaps raised the tragic chorus from twelve to fifteen, and perhaps made the palace-front scene a permanency. The poets tended naturally to retire from acting. ^Eschylus ceased in his later life. Sophocles is said to have found his voice too weak. The profession of actor must have been established before 456 B.C., when we first find the victorious actors mentioned officially along with the poet and the ' choregus.' The chorus was the main substance of the tragedy. Two main processes were needed to make a complete performance : the ' choregus ' ' provided a chorus/ the poet ' taught the chorus ' those were the difficult things. The mere composition was a matter of detail, which any good poet was ready to do for you. All the technical terms are formed with reference to the chorus. The ' prologue ' is all that comes before their entrance ; an 'episodion' is the { entry to' the chorus of any fresh character ; the close of the play is an ' exodus/ because they then depart. But the chorus was doomed to dwindle as tragedy grew. Dialogue is the essence of drama ; and the dialogue soon became, in Aristotle's phrase, 'the protagonist.' We can see it developing even in our scanty remains. It moves from declaimed poetry to dramatic speech ; it grows less grand and stiff, more rapid and conversational. It also increases in extent. In the Suppliants of ^Eschylus (before 470 B.C.) the chorus are really the heroines of the 1 C. I. A. ii. 971. MUSIC IN TRAGEDY 209 play. They are singing for two-thirds of it. They are present from the first line to the last. Tn the Philoctetes of Sophocles (409 B.C.) they are personally unimportant, they do not appear till the play is well in train, and their songs fill about one-sixth of the whole. This is one reason why the later plays are so much longer than the earlier : they were quicker to act. There was, however, another influence affecting the musical side of tragedy in a very different manner. The singing gradually ceased to be entirely in the hands of the chorus. The historical fact is that with the rise of the Athenian Democracy the chorus ceased to be professional. It consisted of free burghers who under- took the performance of the public religious dances as one of their privileges or duties. 1 The consequence was that the dancing became less elaborate. The metres and the singing had to be within the capabilities of the average musical man. But meanwhile the general in- terest in music was growing deeper, and the public taste more exacting in its demands. The average choir- song lost its hold on the cultivated Athenian of the war time. If he was to have music, let him have something more subtle and moving than that, something more like the living music of the dithyramb, which was now increasingly elaborate and professional. So while be- tween ^Eschylus and the later plays of Sophocles the musical side of the drama is steadily falling back, between the earlier and later plays of Euripides it is growing again. But it is no longer the music of the chorus. Euripides used 'answerers' who were also trained singers ; he abounds in ' monodies ' or solos. In the Medea (431 B.C.) the lyrical part is about a fifth 1 Resp. At A. i. 13. Q 210 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE of the whole ; in the Ion (414 B.C.) it is nearly half, but the monodies and part-songs amount to half as much again as the choir-songs. In the Orestes (408 B.C.) the solo parts are three times as long as the choral parts. One apparent exception to this rule really illustrates its meaning. The Baccha, one of the very latest plays, has a large choral element and no monodies. Why ? Because when Euripides wrote it he had migrated to Macedonia, and apparently had not taken his operatic actors with him. Macedonia had no drama ; but it had a living dithyramb with professional performers, and it was they who sang in the Baccha. This upward movement of the satyr-song was due to various causes to the spiritual crises that ennobled the Athenian people ; to the need for some new form of art to replace the dying epos as a vehicle for the heroic saga ; to the demand made by Dionysus-worship for that intensity of emotion which is almost of necessity tragic. The expropriated satyrs were consigned, with their quaint old-world buffoonery, to a private corner at the end of the three tragedies, and the comic element was left to develop itself in a separate form of art. To us in our reflective moods comedy and tragedy seem only two sides of the same thing, the division between them scarcely tangible ; and so thought the Athens of Menander. But. historically they are of different pedigree. Tragedy springs from the artistic and professional choir-song ; comedy, from the mum- ming of rustics at vintage and harvest feasts. " Tragedy arose from the dithyramb," says Aristotle ; " comedy, from the phallic performances." These were celebrated in honour of the spirits of fructification and increase in man, beast, or herb, which were worshipped under ORIGINS OF COMEDY 211 various names in different parts of Greece. It was Dionysus at Acharnae, in Rhodes, and in Delos. It was Damia and Auxesia in ^gina ; Demeter and Kore~ in some parts of Attica ; Pan in the Northern Pelopon- nese. It is always a shock to the modern imagination to come upon the public establishment of such mon- strously indecent performances among a people so far more simple and less self-indulgent than ourselves. But, apart from possible elements of unconscious hypocrisy on our own part, there are many things to be borne in mind. In dealing with those elements in human nature which are more permanent than re- spectable, the characteristic Greek method was frank recognition and regulation. A pent-up force becomes dangerous ; let all natural impulses be given free play in such ways and on such occasions as will do least damage. There were the strictest laws against the abuse of these festivals, against violence, against the undue participation of the young ; but there was, roughly speaking, no shame and no secrecy. We have, unfortunately, lost Aristotle's philosophy ot comedy. It was in the missing part of the Poetics. But when he explains the moral basis of tragedy as being "to purge our minds of their vague impulses of pity and terror " by a strong bout of these emotions ; when he justifies 'tumultuous' music as affording a ( purgation ' of the wild emotional element in our nature which might else break out in what he calls ' enthousiasmos ' ; it is easy to see that the licences in comedy might be supposed to effect a more obvious and necessary purgation. 1 Besides this, we must not 1 The definition in frag. 3, Vahlen, says this directly: "ijSoi^ and 7Awi are to be so purged by comedy." But is the whole passage a genuine quota- tion, or is it rather a deduction of Aristotle's views ? 212 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE forget that there was always present in Greece an active protest against these performances ; that even absolute asceticism was never without its apostles ; and, lastly, that where religion gives sanctity to a bad custom it palsies the powers of the saner intellect. Without a doubt many a modest and homely priestess of Dionysus must have believed in the beneficial effects both here and hereafter of these ancient and symbolical processions. One of the characteristics of the processions was 'parrMsia ' (' free speech ') ; and it remained the proud privilege of comedy. You mocked and insulted freely on the day of special licence any of those persons to whom fear or good manners kept you silent in ordinary life. In some of the processions this privilege was speci- ally granted to women. As soon as comedy began to be seriously treated, the central point of it lay in a song, written and learned, in which the choir, acting merely as the mouthpiece of the poet, addressed the public on 'topical' subjects. This became the 'parabasis' of the full-grown comedy. For the rest, the germ of comedy is a troop of mummers at the feast of Dionysus or some similar god, who march with flute and pipe, sing a phallic song, and amuse the onlookers with improvised buffoonery. They are unpaid, unauthorised. It was not till about 465 B.C. that public recognition was given to the ' kdmoi,' or revel-bands, and l komoidia' allowed to stand by the side of ' tragoidia! It came first at the Lenaea, afterwards at other Dionysiac festivals. But it was not till the beginning of the Peloponnesian War that two gifted young writers, Eupolis and Aristophanes, eventually gave the Old Comedy an artistic form, wove the isolated bits of farce into a plot, and more or less DEVELOPMENT OF COMEDY 213 abolished or justified the phallic element. 1 After that comedy develops even more rapidly than tragedy. The chorus takes a more real and lifelike part in the action ; its inherent absurdity does much less harm, and it dis- appears more rapidly. The last work of Aristophanes is almost without chorus, and marks the intermediate development known as the Middle Comedy, tamer than the Old, not so perfect as the New. Then comes, in weaker hands, alas ! and brains less ' daemonic,' the realisation of the strivings of Euripides, the triumph of the dramatic principle, the art that is neither tragic nor comic but both at once, which aims self-consciously at being " the imitation of life, the mirror of human inter- course, the expression of reality." 2 This form of art once established lasted for centuries. It began shortly after 400 B.C., when public poverty joined with artistic feeling in securing the abolition of the costly chorus, and when the free libel of public persons had, after long struggles and reactions, become finally recognised as offensive. It reached its zenith with Menander and Philemon about 300 B.C. ; while inscriptions of various dates about 160 have recently taught us that even at that time five original comedies a year were still ex- pected at the great Dionysia, besides the reproduc- tion of old ones. It is a curious irony of fortune that has utterly obliterated, save for a large store of 'fragments' and a few coarse Latin adaptations, the whole of this exceptionally rich department of ancient literature. 1 Abolished in the Clouds, justified in the Lysistrata. " Cic. d Rejnib, iv. II, quoting a Peripatetic (?). 214 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE PHRYNICHUS, SON OF POLYPHRADMON (/. 494 B.C.) The least shadowy among the pre-^Eschylean drama- tists is PHRYNICHUS. Tradition gives us the names of nine of his plays, and tells us that he used the trochaic tetrameter in his dialogue, and introduced women's parts. We hear that he made a play on the Capture of Miletus; * that a fine was put on him for doing so, and notice issued that the subject must not be treated again. The fall of Miletus was a national grief, and perhaps a disgrace ; at any rate, it involved party politics of too extreme a sort. Phrynichus had better fortune with his other play from contemporary history, the PJuxnissa; * its chorus representing the wives of Xerxes' Phoenician sailors, and its opening scene the king's council-chamber, with the elders waiting for news of the great war. He won the prize that time, and probably had for 'chorgus' Themistocles himself, the real, though of course unmentioned, hero of the piece. It is the lyrics that we most regret to have lost, the quaint obsolete songs still hummed in the days of the Pelo- ponnesian War by the tough old survivors of Marathon, who went about at unearthly hours of the morning " Lights in their hands, old music on their lips t Wild honey and the East and loveliness? l A certain grace and tenderness suggested by our remains of Phrynichus enable us to realise how much ^Eschylus's grand style is due to his own character rather than to the conditions of the art in his time ; though it remains true that the Persian War did for tragedy what the Migrations seem to have done for Homer, and that Phrynichus and are both of them ' men of Marathon.' 1 Aristoph. Vesp. 220. ^SCHYLUS ^SCHYLUS, SON OF EUPHORION, FROM ELEUSIS (525-456 B.C.) ^SCHYLUS was by birth an Eupatrid, of the old nobility. He came from Eleusis, the seat not only of the Demeter Mysteries, but also of a special worship of Dionysus-Zagreus, and close to Thespis's own deme Icaria. We hear that he began writing young ; but he was called away from his plays, in 490, to fight at Marathon, where his brother Kynegeirus met a heroic death, and he won his first victory in the middle of the nine years of peace which followed (484). Four years later he joined in the general exodus to the ships and Salamis, leaving the stones of Athens for the barbarians to do their will upon. These were years in which tragedies and big thoughts might shape themselves in men's minds. They were not years for much actual writing and play-acting. In 476 yschylus seems to have been at the wars in Thrace ; we have echoes of them in the Lycurgus* Trilogy and in the Persce (esp. 866). Soon after that again he was in Syracuse, perhaps on a diplomatic mission, and wrote his Women of Etna* in honour of the town of that name which Hiero had just founded (476-475) on the slopes of the mountain. From 484 onwards he was probably the chief figure 216 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE in Attic letters ; though his old rivals Pratinas and Phrynichus, and their respective sons Aristias and Polyphradmon, among others, doubtless won prizes over his head from time to time, and, for all we know, deserved them. The earliest play we possess is the Suppliant -Women ; the earliest of known date is the PerscB, which won the first prize in 472. In 470 he was again in Syracuse, and again the reason is not stated, though we hear that he repro- duced the PerscB there. In 468 he was beaten for the first time by the young Sophocles. The next year he was again victor with the Seven against Thebes. We do not know the year of his great Prometheus Trilogy, but it and the Lykurgeia * seem to have come after this. His last victory of all was the Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides) in 458. He was again in Sicily after this the little men of the Decadence sug- gest that he was jealous of Sophocles's victory of ten years back! and died suddenly at Gela in 456. His plays went in and out of fashion at Athens, and a certain party liked to use him chiefly as a stick for beating Euripides ; but a special law was passed after his death for the reproduction of his tragedies, and he had settled into his definite place as a classic before the time of Plato. The celebrated bronze statue of him was made for the stone theatre built by Lycurgus about 330. The epitaph he is said to have written for his tomb at Gela is characteristic : no word of his poetry ; only two lines, after the necessary details of name and birth- place, telling how the "grove of Marathon can bear witness to his good soldierhood, and the long-haired Mede who felt it" It is very possible that the actual facing of death on that first great day remained with him as the supreme LIFE OF AESCHYLUS: EARLY PLAYS 217 moment of his life, and that his poetry had failed to satisfy him. It often leaves that impression, even at its most splendid heights. Of the ninety plays ^Eschylus wrote, we possess seven. The earliest, on internal grounds, is the Suppliant- Women a most quaint and beautiful work, like one of those archaic statues which stand with limbs stiff and coun- tenance smiling and stony. The subject, too, is of the primitive type, more suited for a cantata than for a play. The suppliants are the fifty daughters of Danaus, who have fled to Argos to avoid marrying their cousins, the fifty sons of ^Egyptus. Their horror is evidence of a time when the marriage of first cousins was counted incestuous. They appeal for protection to Pelasgus, king of Argos, who refers the question to the Demos. The Demos accepts the suppliants, and the proud Egyptian herald is defied. The other plays of the trilogy had more action. In the Makers of the Bride-Bed* the sons of ^Egyptus follow the Danaids, conquer Danaus in battle, and insist on the marriage. Danaus, preferring murder to incest, com- mands his daughters to stab their husbands on their bridal night ; all do so except Hypermestra, who is put on trial in the Danaides* for marriage with a cousin and for filial disobedience, and is acquitted by the help of Aphrodite. Our play seems to have been acted on the old round dancing-floor, with a platform in the middle, and images round it. There is no palace front ; and the permanent number of fifty in the chorus throughout the trilogy suggests the idea that the old round choir may have been still undivided. The Persa (472) was the second piece of a trilogy. The first had the name of Phtneus,* the blind prophet 2i8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE of the Argonaut legend, who probably prophesied some- thing about the greater conflict between Europe and Asia, of which that expedition was a type. The third was Glaucus ; * but there were two pieces of that name, and the plot is not certain. The Persce itself is modelled on the Ph&nissce* of Phrynichus : the opening words of the two are almost identical, and the scene in both is in the council-chamber of Susa, though in the Persa it afterwards changes to the tomb of Darius. The Persce has not much plot-interest in the ordinary sense ; but the heavy brooding of the first scenes, the awful flashes of truth, the evocation of the old blameless King Darius, who had made no Persians weep, and his stern prophecy of the whole disaster to come, all have the germ of high dramatic power : one feels the impression made by " the many arms and many ships, and the sweep of the chariots of Syria," both in the choir-songs and in the leaping splendour of the de- scriptions of battle. The external position of the Persce as the first account of a great piece of history by a great poet who had himself helped to make the history, renders it perhaps unique in literature ; and its beauty is worthy of its eminence. The Seven against Thebes came third in the trilogy after the Lams* and the (Edipus* One old version of the saga allowed CEdipus to put away locasta after the discovery of their relationship, and marry Eury- ganeia ; there was no self-blinding, and the children were Euryganeia's. But ^Eschylus takes the story in the more gruesome form that we all know. The .Seven gives the siege of Thebes by the exiled Polynelkes, the battle, and mutual slaying of the two brothers. It was greatly admired in antiquity "a play full of Ares, THE SEVEN. THE PROMETHEIA 219 that made every one who saw it wish forthwith to be a l fiery foe,'" as Aristophanes puts it (Ranee, 1002). The war atmosphere is convincing, the characters plain and strong. Yet, in spite of a certain brilliance and force, the Seven is perhaps among ^Eschylean plays the one that bears least the stamp of commanding genius. It is like the good work of a lesser man. Very different is the Prometheus, a work of the same period of transition as the Seven, and implying the use of three actors in the prologue, as the Seven probably does in the 'exodus.' The trilogy seems to have consisted of Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Freed* and Prometheus the Fire- Carrier.* The subject is Titanic; it needs a vast and 'winged' imagination. But it has produced in the hands of ^Eschylus and of Shelley two of the greatest of mankind's dramatic poems. Prometheus is the champion of man against the Tyrant Power that sways the world. He has saved man from the destruction Zeus meant for him, taught him the arts of civilisation, and, type of all else, given him fire, which was formerly a divine thing stored in heaven. For this rebellious love of mankind he is nailed to a storm-riven rock of the Caucasus ; but he is not conquered, for, in the first place, he is immortal, and besides he knows a secret on which the future of heaven and earth depends. Zeus tries by threats and tortures to break him, but Prometheus will not forsake mankind. And the daughters of Ocean, who have gathered to comfort him, will not forsake Prometheus. They face the same blasting fire, and sink with him into the abyss. There is action at the beginning and end of the play; the middle part, representing, apparently, centuries 220 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE rather than days, is taken up with long narratives of Prometheus to the Oceanides, with the fruitless inter- cession of Oceanus himself, and the strange entry of another victim of Zeus, the half-mad Moon-maiden lo, driven by the gadfly, and haunted by the ghost of the hundred-eyed Argos. The chorus of the Prometheus is perhaps in character and dramatic fitness the most beautiful and satisfying known to us on the Greek stage. The songs give an expression of Weltschmerz for which it would be hard to find a parallel before the present century. The whole earth is in travail as Prometheus suffers : " There is a cry in the waves of the sea as they fall together, and groaning in the deep ; a wail comes up from the cavern realms of Death, and the springs of the holy rivers sob with the anguish of pity" In another place the note is more personal : " Nay, thine was a hopeless sacrifice, O beloved; speak -what help shall there be, and where ? What succour from things of a day ? Didst thou not see the little-doing, strengthless, dream-like, wherein the blind race of man is fettered? Never, never shall mortal counsels outpass the great Harmony of Zeus !" Zeus is irresistible : those who obey him have peace and happiness such as the Ocean-Daughters once had themselves. Yet they feel that it is better to rebel. There is perhaps no piece of lost literature that has been more ardently longed for than the Prometheus Freed* What reconciliation was possible ? One can see that Zeus is ultimately justified in many things. For instance, the apparently aimless persecution of lo leads to great results, among them the birth of Heracles, who is another saviour of mankind and the actual deliverer of Prometheus. Again, it seems that Prometheus does not intend to overthrow the ' New Tyrant,' as Shelley's THE ORESTEIA 221 Prometheus does. He had deliberately helped him against the old blind forces, Kronos and the Titans ; but he means, so to speak, to wring a constitution out of him, and so save mankind. But it needs another ^Eschylus to loose that knot in a way worthy of the first. We have some external facts about the second play. It opened when Prometheus came back to the light after thirty thousand years ; the chorus was of Titans. The last play, the Fire-Carrier* seems to have explained the institution of the Festival of Prometheus at Athens. Such 'origins' formed a common motive for drama. The Oresteia represents the highest achievement of ^Eschylus, and probably of all Greek drama. It has all the splendour of language and the lyrical magic of the early plays, the old, almost superhuman grandeur of outline, while it is as sharp and deep in character- drawing, as keenly dramatic, as the finest work of Sophocles. The Cassandra scene in the Agamemnon, where the doomed prophetess, whom none may believe, sees the vision of her own death and the king's, await- ing her in the palace, is simply appalling on the stage, while in private study many a scholar will testify to its eternal freshness. The first play deals with the murder of Agamemnon on his triumphant return from Troy by a wife deeply sinned against and deeply sin- ning. The Choepkoroi (' Libation-Bearers ') gives the retribution. Orestes, a child at the time of his father's death, has grown up in exile ; he returns secretly to execute the blood-feud on ^gisthus, and, by special command of Apollo, to slay also his mother. The Choephoroi is in some ways the most complex of the dramas of /Eschylus. There is a recognition scene (see p. 259), impossible in detail, but grand and 222 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE moving ; there is a definite plot by which the ministers of vengeance enter the palace ; there is great boldness of drawing in all the characters down to the pathetic and ludicrous old nurse ; there is the haunting shadow of madness looming over Orestes from the outset, and deepening through the hours that the matricide is be- fore him and the awful voice of Apollo in his ears, and he struggles helplessly between two horrors, up to the moment when his mother's curses take visible form to him, and he flies from the grey snake-locked faces. The Eumenides is dramatic in its opening, merely spectacular in its close. There is a certain grandeur in the trial scene where Orestes is accused by the Curse-Spirits, defended by Apollo, and acquitted by the voice of Athena. The gods, however, are brought too close to us, and the foundation of the Areopagus has not for us the religious reality it had for ^schylus. But the thing that most disappoints us, the gradual slackening of the interest till the 'pity and terror' melt away in gentle artistic pleasure, was, as every choric ode and most tragedies testify, one of the essential principles of Greek art. Shakespeare was with the Greeks. He ends his tragedies by quiet scenes among minor characters, and his sonnets with a calm generalising couplet. We end our plays with a point, and our sonnets with the weightiest line. The general spirit of ^Eschylus has been much mis- understood, owing to the external circumstance that his life came at the beginning of an age of rapid progress. The pioneer of 490 is mistaken for a reactionary of 404. /Eschylus is in thought generally a precursor of the THE GENERAL SPIRIT OF AESCHYLUS 223 sophistic movement, as Euripides is the outcome of it. He is an enthusiastic democrat of the early type. Listen to the paeans about freedom in the Persa. That is the very spirit recorded by Herodotus as having made Athens rise from a commonplace Ionian state to be the model and the leader of Hellas. And the Persce is not isolated. The king in the Suppliants is almost grotesquely constitutional ; the Prometheus abounds in protests against despotism that breathe the true Athenian spirit ; a large part of the Agamemnon is a merciless condemnation of the ideal of the conquering monarch. In the Eumenides, it is true, ^Eschylus defi- nitely glorifies the Areopagus at a time when Ephi- altes and Pericles were removing most of its jurisdiction. He was no opponent of Pericles, who was his 'chorgus/ at least once ; * but he was one of the men of 490. To that generation, as Aristotle's Constitution has taught us, the Areopagus was the incarnation of free Athens in battle against Persia ; to the men of 460 it was an obso- lete and anomalous body. As to the religious orthodoxy of yEschylus, it appears certain that he was prosecuted for having divulged or otherwise offended against the mysteries, which suggests that he was obnoxious to the orthodox party. We may possibly accept the story, stated expressly by Clement, and implied by Aristotle (mi a), that he escaped by proving that he had not been initiated, and consequently had nothing to divulge. For a distinguished Eleusinian not to have been initiated if credible at all would imply something like an anti-sacerdotal bias. Certainly he seems to have held no priesthoods himself, as Sopho- cles and Pindar did ; and his historical position may 1 C. I. A. 971. 224 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE well have been that of those patriots who could not forgive or forget the poltroonery of Delphi before the war (see p. 138). However this may be, he is in religious thought generally the precursor of Euripides. He stands indeed at a stage where it still seems possible to reconcile the main scheme of traditional theology with morality and reason. Euripides has reached a further point, where the disagreement is seen to be beyond healing. Not to speak of the Prometheus, which is certainly sub- versive, though in detail hard to interpret, the man who speaks of the cry of the robbed birds being heard by " some Apollo, some Pan or Zeus " (Ag. 55) ; who prays to " Zeus, whoe'er he be " (160) ; who avows " there is no power I can find, though I sink my plummet through all being, except only Zeus, if I would in very truth cast off this aimless burden of my heart" is a long way from Pindaric polytheism. He tries more definitely to grope his way to Zeus as a Spirit of Reason, as opposed to the blind Titan forms of Hesiodic legend. " Lo, there was one great of yore, swollen with strength and lust of battle, yet it shall not even be said of him that once he was ! A nd he who came thereafter met his conqueror, and is gone. Call thou on Zeus by names of Victory. . . . Zeus, who made for Man the road to Thought, who stablished ' Learn by Suffering' to be an abiding Law!" That is not written in the revelations of Delphi or Eleusis ; it is true human thought grappling with mysteries. It involves a practi- cal discarding of polytheism in the ordinary sense, and a conception metaphorical, perhaps, but suggestive of real belief of a series of ruling spirits in the government of the world a long strife of diverse Natural Powers, culminating in a present universal order based on reason, like the political order which ^Eschylus had seen estab- RELIGIOUS AND MORAL IDEAS 225 lished by Athenian law. Compare it with the passage in Euripides ( Tro. 884) : " Base of the world and o'er the world enthroned, Whoe'er thou art, Unknown and hard of surmise, Cause-chain of Things or Man's own Reason, God, I give thee worship, who by noiseless paths Of justice leadest all that breathes and dies /" That is the same spirit in a further stage : further, first because it is clearer, and because of the upsetting alter- native in the third line ; but most, because in the actual drama the one rag of orthodoxy which the passage contains is convicted as an illusion ! The Justice for which thanks are given conspicuously fails : the ' noise- less paths ' lead to a very wilderness of wrong at least, as far as we mortals can see. The only orthodox Greek writer preserved to us is Pindar. Sophocles held a priesthood and built a chapel, but the temper of his age was touched with rationalism, and the sympathetic man was apt unconsciously to reflect it. About the positive ideas, religious and moral, implied in the plays of ^Eschylus, too much has been written already ; it is difficult to avoid overstatement in criti- cism of the kind, and the critics have generally been historians of philosophy rather than lovers of Greek poetry. One may perhaps make out rather more strongly in ^Eschylus than in other writers three characteristic ways of looking at life. His tragedies come, as perhaps all great tragedies do, from some ' Hubris,' some self-assertion of a strong will, in the way of intellect or emotion or passion, against stronger outside forces, circumstances or laws or gods. ^Eschylus was essentially the man to feel the impassable bars 226 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE against which human nature battles ; and the over- throw of the Great King was the one thought that was in every Greek mind at the time. Thus the peril of human 'Hubris' and the 'jealousy of God' i.e. the fact that man's will aims further than his power can reach is one rather conspicuous principle in ^Eschylus. Another is a conviction of the inevitableness of things ; not fatalism, nor any approach to it, in the vulgar sense, but a reflection that is borne in on most people in considering any grave calamity, that it is the natural consequence of many things that have happened before. The crimes in ^Eschylus are hereditary in two senses. In the great saga-houses of Thebes and Mycenae there was actually what we should call a taint of criminal madness it is brought out most explicitly in Euripides's Electra. Orestes was the son of a murderess and a man who had dealt much in blood (TTO^VKTOVO^. His ancestors had been proud and turbulent chieftains, whose passions led them easily into crime. But the crime is hereditary in itself also. The one wild blow brings and always has brought the blow back, "the ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong." This, most people will admit, is a plain fact ; of course the poet puts it in a mystical or symbolical form. The old blood remains fresh on the ground, crying for other blood to blot it out. The deed of wrong begets children in its own likeness. The first sin produces an 'Ara,' a Curse-Spirit, which broods over the scene of the wrong, or over the heart and perhaps the race of the sinner. How far this is meta- phor, how far actual belief, is a problem that we cannot at present answer. CHARACTERISTICS OF AESCHYLUS 227 This chain of thought leads inevitably to the question, What is the end of the wrong eternally avenged and regenerated ? There may of course be no end but the extinction of the race, as in the Theban Trilogy; but there may come a point where at last Law or Justice can come in and pronounce a final and satisfying word. Reconciliation is the end of the Oresteia, the Prometheia, the Danaid Trilogy. And here, too, we get a reflection of the age in which yEschylus lived, the assertion over lawless places of Athenian civilisation and justice. In looking over the plays and fragments as a whole, one notices various marks both of the age and of the individual. It is characteristic of both that ^schylus wrote satyr-plays so much, and, it would seem, so well. These Titanic minds ^Eschylus and Heraclitus among Greeks ; men like Victor Hugo and Carlyle among our- selves are apt to be self-pleasing and weird in their humour. One of the really elemental jokes of ^Eschylus is in the Prometheus Firekindler* a satyr-play, where fire is first brought into the world, and the wild satyrs go mad with love for its beauty, and burn their beards in kissing it ! The thing is made more commonplace, though of course more comic, in the Sophoclean satyr- play Helen's Marriage* where they go similarly mad about Helen. A definite mark of the age is the large number of dramas that take their names from the chorus, which was still the chief part of the play Bassara* Edoni* Danaides* &c. Another is the poet's fondness for geographical disquisitions. Herodotus had not yet written, and we know what a land of wonder the farther parts of the world still were in his time. To the Athens of ^Eschylus the geographical interest was partly of this imaginative sort ; in part it came from the impulse given 228 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE by the rise of Athens to voyages of discovery and trade adventure. Of our extant plays, the Prometheus is full of mere declamations on saga-geography ; the Persce comes next, then the Suppliants; and even the Agamemnon has the account of the beacon stations. Glaucus of the Sea* Niobe* and probably the Mysians* were full of the same thing. The impulse did not last in Greek tragedy. Sophocles has his well-known burst of Hero- dotean quotation, and he likes geographical epithets as a form of ornament, but he keeps his interest in ' historic ' within due limits. Euripides, so keenly alive to all other branches of knowledge, is quite indifferent to this. In the choice of subjects ^Eschylus has a certain pre- ference for something superhuman or unearthly, which combines curiously with this geographical interest. The Prometheus begins with the words : " Lo, we are come to the farthest verge of the world, to where the Scythians wander, an unearthly desolation'' That is the region where ^Eschylus is at home, and his ' large utterance ' natural and unhampered. Many of his lost plays move in that realm which Sophocles only speaks of, among " The last peaks of the world, beyond all seas, Well-springs of night and gleams of opened heaven, The old garden of the Sun" 1 It is the scene of the Daughters of the Sun* treating of the fall of Phaethon ; of the Soul- Weighing* where Zeus balances the fates of Hector and Achilles ; of the Ixton ; * of the Memnon ; * and the numerous plays on Dionysiac subjects show the same spirit. It is partly the infancy of the art and partly the in- tensity of ^Eschylus's genius that makes him often choose subjects that have apparently no plot at all, like our 1 Soph. frag. 8701 WHAT ^SCHYLUS THINKS ABOUT 229 Suppliants and Persce. He simply represents a situation, steeps himself in it, and lights it up with the splendour of his lyrics. Euripides tried that experiment too, in the Suppliants and Heracleidce, for instance. Sophocles seems never to have risked it, except perhaps in the Demanding of Helen* It is curious that ^Eschylus, unlike his successors, abstained entirely from the local legends. Perhaps it was that he felt the subjects to be poor, and that the realities of the Persian War had blotted out all less vivid things from the horizon of his patriotism. It is interesting to compare the fragments of the three tragedians : fragments are generally ' gnomic,' and tend to show the bent of a writer's mind. Sophocles used gnomes but little. Reflection and generalisation did not interest him, though he has something to say about the power of wealth (frag. 85) and of words (frag. 192) and of wicked women (frag. 187). Euripides notoriously generalises about everything in heaven and earth. He is mostly terse and very simple so simple that an un- sympathetic reader misses the point. "Love does not vex the man who begs his bread" (frag. 322). " The things that must be are so strangely great " (frag. 733). " Who knoweth if we quick be verily dead, And our death life to them that once have passed it?" (frag. 638). Sometimes, as in the opening speeches of Phaedra and Medea, he treats subtly a point in psychology. He has much to say about wealth and slavery and power of speech. ^Eschylus simply never thinks about such things. He has some great lines on love (frag. 44), but his typical gnome is like that in the Niobe : * " Lo, one god craves no gift. Thou shalt not bend him By much drink-offering and burnt sacrifice. He hath no altar, hearkeneth to no song^ And fair Persuasion standeth far from Death" 230 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE It does " somehow spoil one's taste for twitterings." And so, above all, do his great dramatic speeches, so ruggedly grand that at first sight one is often blind to the keen psychology of passion in them for instance, that in which Clytaemestra gives public welcome to her hus- band. She does not know whether he has been told of her unfaithfulness ; she does know that she is utterly friendless, that the man whom she dreaded in her dreams is returned, and that the last hour for one or other of them has come. She tries, like one near to death, to leave some statement of her case. She is near breaking down more than once ; but she gathers courage as she speaks, and ends in the recklessness of nervous exaltation : u Freemen of Argos, and ye gathered Elders ; I shall not hold it shame in the midst of you To outspeak the love ye well know burns within me. There comes a time when all fear fades and dies. Who else can speak ? Does any heart but mine Know the long burden of the life I bore While he was under Troy ? A lonely woman Set in a desolate house, no man's arm near To lean on Oh, 'tis a wrong to make one mad! Voices of wrath ring ever in her ears : Now, he is come ! Now, 'tis a messenger : And every tale worse tidings than the last, And men's cries loud against the walls that hold her I If all the wounds that channelled rumour bore Have reached this King's flesh why, 'tis all a net, A toil of riddled meshes / Died he there With all the deaths that crowded in men's mouths, Then is he not some Gtryon, triple-lived, Three-bodied, monstrous, to be slain and slain Till every life be quelled? . . . Belike ye have told him Of my death-thirst the rope above the lintel, And how they cut me down ? True : 'twas those voices ^ The wrath and hatred surging in mine ears. SPEECH OF CLYT^EMESTRA 231 Our child, sire, is not here : I would he were : Orestes, he who holds the hostages For thee and me. Yet nowise marvel at it. Our war-friend Strophios keeps him, who spoke muck Of blows nigh poised to fall, thy daily peril, And many plots a traitorous folk might weave, I once being weak, manlike, to spurn the fallen. But I the stormy rivers of my grief Are quenched now at the spring, and no drop left. My late-couched eyes are seared with many a blight, Weeping the beacon fires that burned for thee For ever answerless. And did sleep come, A gnat's thin song would shout me in my dreams, And start me up seeing thee all girt with terrors Close-crowded, and too long for one nights sleep ! And now 'tis all past / Now with heart at peace I hail my King, my watch-dog of the fold, My ship's one cable of hope, my pillar firm Where all else reels, my fathers one-born heir, My land scarce seen at sea when hope was dead, My happy sunrise after nights of storm, My living well-spring in the wilderness / Oh, it is joy, the waiting-time is past / Thus, King, 1 greet thee home. No god need grudge Sure we have suffered in time past enough This one day's triumph. Light thee, sweet my husband, From this high seat : yet set not on bare earth Thy foot, great King, the foot that trampled Troy I Ho, thralls, why tarry ye, whose task is set To carpet the King's way ? Bring priceless crimson : Let all his path be red, and Justice guide him, Who saw his deeds, at last, unhopedfor, home I" XI SOPHOCLES SOPHOCLES, SON OF SOPHILLOS, FROM COLONUS (496-406 B.C.) SOPHOCLES is formed by the legend into a figure of ideal serenity and success. His life lay through the period of his country's highest prosperity. He was too young to suffer much in the flight of 480, and he died just before Athens fell. He was rich, pious, good- looking, good-tempered, pleasure -loving, witty, "with such charm of character that he was loved by every- body wherever he went." He held almost the only two sources of income which did not suffer from the war the manufacture of weapons, and the state-paid drama. He won a prodigious number of first prizes twenty as against the five of Euripides. The fifteen of ^Eschylus were gained in times of less competition. He dabbled in public life, and, though of mediocre practi- cal ability, was elected to the highest offices of the state. He was always comfortable in Athens, and had no temptation to console himself in foreign courts as his colleagues did. We may add to this that he was an artist of the 'faultless' type, showing but few traces of the 'divine discontent.' His father was a rich armourer, and a full citizen not a ' Metoecus ' like Kephalus (p. 337). Sophocles learned music from Lam- 232 CAREER OF SOPHOCLES 233 pros, and we hear of him at the age of sixteen leading a choir as harper in the thanksgiving for Salamis. His first victory was in 468, when he was eight and twenty. The play was perhaps the Triptolemus*^ If so, it was a success to the patriotic drama on its first appearance ; for Triptolemus was a local hero with no real place in the Homeric legend. 2 Our account of the victory is embroidered by a strange anecdote : there were such hot factions in the theatre that the archon suddenly set aside the regular five judges, and called on the ten generals, who had just returned from campaigning, to provide a fresh board. The first defeat of ^Eschylus by a younger generation which knew not Marathon and Salamis, would produce the same bitterness as was felt in modern Greece and Italy against the first Prime Ministers who had not fought in the wars of independence. One of Sophocles's very earliest plays was probably the Women Washing* The scene, Nausicaa and her maidens on the sea-shore, seems meant for the old dancing -floor before the palace front had become a fixed tradition ; and the poet himself acted Nausicaa, which he can only have done in youth. His figure in middle life was far from girlish, as even the idealised statue shows. The earliest dated play is the Antigone; it was produced immediately before the author's ap- pointment as admiral in the Samian War of 440, and constituted in the opinion of wits his chief claim to that office. The poet Ion, who met him at Chios, describes him as "merry and clever over his cups," and charming in conversation ; of public affairs he 1 Plin. Hist. Nat, 18, 65. 1 The Hymn to Demetet is no evidence to the contrary. 234 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE "understood about as much as the average educated Athenian." In 443 he had been ' Hellenotamias ' (Treasurer of the Empire) with no bad results. His fame and popularity must have carried real weight, or he would not have been one of ten Commissioners (' Probouloi ') appointed after the defeat of the Sicilian Expedition in 413. And it is significant that, when he was prosecuted along with his colleagues for agreeing to the Oligarchical Constitution of 411, he was acquitted on the na'fve defence that he " had really no choice ! " An authorless anecdote speaks of some family diffi- culties at the end of his life, attributing them to his con- nection with an 'hetaira' named Theoris. His legitimate son lophon tried to get a warrant for' administering the family estate, on the ground of his father's inca- pacity. Sophocles read to the jury an ode from the (Edipus at Colonus, which he was then writing, and was held to have proved thereby his general sanity ! The story smacks of the comic stage ; and the references to the poet at the time of his death, especially by Aristophanes in the Frogs, and Phrynichus, son of Eunomides, in the Muses* preclude the likelihood of any serious trouble having occurred shortly before. He died in 406, a few months after his great colleague Euripides, in whose honour he introduced his last chorus in mourn- ing and without the usual garlands. 1 His tomb lay on the road to Dekeleia, and we hear that he was worshipped as a hero under the name of ' Dexidn ' (' Receiver '), on the curious ground that he had in some sense ' received ' the god Asclpius into his house. He was a priest of the Asclepian hero Alcon, and had built a chapel to 1 At the 'pro-agin' or introductory pageant. At the actual feast such conduct would probably have been ' impiety.' DEVELOPMENT OF SOPHOCLES'S GENIUS 235 'The Revealer' Menutes, identified with Heracles; but the real reason for his own worship becomes clear when we find in another connection that he had founded a 'Thiasos of the Muses/ a sort of theatrical club for the artists of Dionysus. He thus became technically a ' Hero - Founder/ like Plato and Epi- curus, and doubtless was honoured with incense and an ode on his birthday. He was ' Dexion ' perhaps as the original 'host.' Sophocles was writing pretty continuously for sixty years, and an interesting citation in Plutarch 1 purports to give his own account of his development. That the words are really his own is rather much to believe ; but the terms used show the criticism to be very ancient. Unfortunately the passage is corrupt. He began by having some relation is it ' imitation ' or is it ' revolt ' ? towards the ' magniloquence of ^Eschylus ' ; next came ' his own ' stern ' and artificial period of style ' ; 2 thirdly, he reached more ease and simplicity, and seems to have satisfied himself. Bergk finds a trace of the ' ^Eschylean period ' in some of the fragments ; and it is a curious fact that ancient critics found in the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus a ' Sophoclean character.' It is not like the Sophocles of our late plays, but does suggest a fourth- century imitation of ^Eschylus. One form of the 'arti- ficial ' tendency it might as well be translated ' technical ' or ' professional ' is expressed in the scenic changes with which Sophocles is particularly associated ; though, of course, it must be borne in mind that the actual ad- mission of 'three actors and scene-painting' 8 to the 1 De Prefect. Virt. 7. * TliKpbv KO.I Kardrexvov. Hucpim is early Greek for the later a.v. 1 Ar. Poet. 4. 236 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE sacred precinct must have been due to a public enact- ment, and not to the private innovation of a poet. Perhaps the most important change due to Sophocles himself took place in what the Greeks called the 'economy' of the drama. He used up all his myth material in one well-constructed and complex play, and consequently produced three separate plays at a time instead of a continuous trilogy. 1 But, in general, Sopho- cles worked as a conscious artist improving details, demanding more and smoother tools, and making up, by skilful construction, tactful scenic arrangement, and entire avoidance of exaggeration or grotesqueness, for his inability to walk quite so near the heavens as his great predecessor. The ' stern and artificial ' period is best represented by the Electra. The Electra is 'arti- ficial' in a good sense, through its skill of plot, its clear characterisation, its uniform good writing. It is also artificial in a bad sense. For instance, in the messenger's speech, where all that is wanted is a false report of Orestes's death, the poet chooses to insert a brilliant, lengthy, and quite undramatic description of the Pythian Games. It is also ' stern.' ^schylus in the Choephoroi had felt vividly the horror of his plot : he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of confused, torturing, half - religious emotion ; the climax is, of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after it. In the Electra this element is practically ignored. Electra has no qualms ; Orestes shows no sign of madness ; the climax is formed, not by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of ^Egisthus ! ^schylus 1 It was his contemporary Aristarchus of Tegea who first " made plays of their present length " (Suidas). THE ELECTRA 237 had kept Electra and Clytaemestra apart : here we see them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles. Above all, in place of the cry of bewilder- ment that closes the Choe'phoroi " What is the end of all this spilling of blood for blood?" the Electra closes with an expression of entire satisfaction. It is this spirit that makes the Electra^ brilliant as it is, so typi- cally uncharming. The explanation may partly lie in some natural taste for severity and dislike of sentiment in Sophocles ; it seems certainly also to be connected with his archaism. His language is archaistic through and through ; and it seems as if his conceptions were. All three tragedians have treated the Electra-saga, and treated it in characteristically different ways. The realistic spirit of Euripides's Electra is obvious to every one the wolfish Pelopidae, the noble peasant, the harrow- ing scene of remorse and mutual reproach between the murderers. But the truth is that yEschylus has tried to realise his subject too. He takes the old bloody saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, though quite as grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as ^Eschylus himself would. It is only Sophocles who takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences : they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to make them real to himself at the cost of making them false to the spirit of the epos. The same objectiveness of treatment appears in another characteristic of Sophocles the stress he lays on mere physical horror in the OSdipus, on physical pain in the Trachinice and the Philoctttes. It is the spirit of the oldest, most savage epos. 1 1 Cf. p. 41 on the Niptra* 238 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE Something of the same sort keeps him safe in the limits of convention. A poet who is uncompromisingly earnest in his realism, or unreserved in his imagination, is apt to jar upon his audience or to make them laugh. Sophocles avoids these dangers. He accepts throughout the traditional conception of heroes and saga-people. The various bits of criticism ascribed to him " I draw men as they ought to be drawn ; Euripides draws them as they are " ; " ^Eschylus did the right thing, but with- out knowing it" all imply the ' academic' standpoint. Sophocles is the one Greek writer who is ' classical ' in the vulgar sense almost in the same sense as Vergil and Milton. Even his exquisite diction, which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his pre- decessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist, ^schylus's superhuman speech seems like natural super- human speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in their great moments. But neither Prometheus nor CEdipus nor Electra, nor any one but an Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes them. It is this characteristic which has established Sophocles as the perfect model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and grammarians ; while the poets have been left to admire ^Eschylus, who " wrote in a state of intoxication," and Euripides, who broke himself against the bars both of life and of poetry. The same limitation comes out curiously in points where his plays touch on speculation. For one thing, his piety makes him, as the scholiast quaintly puts it, 1 "quite helpless in representing blasphemy." Contrast, for instance, the similar passages in the Antigone (1. 1043) 1 Electro., 831. LIMITATIONS OF SOPHOCLES 239 and the Heracles of Euripides (I. 1232). In the Heracles, the hero rebukes Theseus for lifting him from his despair and unveiling his face ; he will pollute the sunlight 1 That is not a metaphor, but a real piece of superstition. Theseus replies that a mortal cannot pollute the eter- nally pure element. Later he asks Heracles for his hand. " It is bloody" cries Heracles; " it will infect you with my crime ! " " Let me clasp it" answers Theseus, " and fear not" Now, Sophocles knew of these ideas that the belief in a physical pollution of blood is a de- lusion, and that a man cannot, if he tries, make the sun impure ; but to him they reeked of scepticism or else of prosiness. He uses them as blasphemy in the mouth of the offending Creon ! No impulse to reason or analyse was allowed to disturb his solemn emotional effects. Another typical difference between the two poets is in their treatment of the incest of GEdipus. Sophocles is always harping on it and ringing the changes on the hero's relationships, but never thinks it out. Contrast with his horrified rhetoric, the treatment of the same subject at the end of Euripides's Pkcenissa, the beautiful affection retained by the blind man for locasta, his con- fidence that she at any rate would have gone into exile at his side uncomplaining, his tender farewell to her dead body. What was the respectable burgher to say to such a thing ? It was defrauding him of his right to condemn and abominate locasta. No wonder Sophocles won four times as many prizes as Euripides ! A natural concomitant of this lack of speculative freedom is a certain bluntness of moral imagination whicli leads, for instance, to one structural defect in the (Edipus Tyrannus. That piece is a marvel of construction : every detail follows naturally, and yet every detail depends on the 240 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE characters being exactly what they were, and makes us understand them. The one flaw, perhaps, is in Teiresias. That aged prophet comes to the king absolutely deter- mined not to tell the secret which he has kept for sixteen years, and then tells it why ? From uncontrollable anger, because the king insults him. An aged prophet who does that is a disgrace to his profession ; but Sophocles does not seem to feel it. Sophocles is thus subject to a certain conventional idealism. He lacks the elemental fire of ^Eschylus, the speculative courage and subtle sympathy of Euripides. All else that can be said of him must be unmixed admiration. Plot, characters, atmosphere are all digni- fied and ' Homeric ' ; his analysis, as far as it goes, is wonderfully sure and true ; his language is a marvel of subtle power ; the music he gets from the iambic trimeter by his weak endings and varied pauses is incomparable j 1 his lyrics are uniformly skilful and fine, though they sometimes leave an impression of laboured workman- ship ; if they have not the irresistible songfulness of ^Eschylus and Euripides, they are safe from the rho- domontade of the one, and the inapposite garrulity of the other. And it is true that Sophocles shows at times one high power which but few of the world's poets share with him. He feels, as Wordsworth does, the majesty of order and well-being ; sees the greatness of God, as it were, in the untroubled things of life. Few hands but his could have shaped the great ode in the Antigone upon the Rise of Man, or the description in the Ajax of the 'Give and Take' in nature. And even in the 1 W. M. Heracles, L p. 21. It is Ionic style : weak endings, elisions at the end of the verse (like Achaios of Eretria), i)pb> for iifuf, shortening of a long vowel or diphthong before another vowel. THE OEDIPUS TYRANNUS 241 famous verdict of despair which he pronounces upon Life in the second CEdipus^ there is a certain depth of calm feeling, unfretted by any movement of mere intellect, which at times makes the subtlest and boldest work of Euripides seem ' young man's poetry ' by comparison. Utterly dissimilar as the two dramatists are, the con- struction of the CEdipus Tyrannus reminds one strongly of Ibsen's later plays. From the very first scene the action moves straight and undistracted towards the catastrophe. The interest turns, not on what the char- acters do, but on their finding out what they have done. And one of the strongest scenes is made by the hus- band and wife deliberately and painfully confessing to one another certain dark passages of their lives, which they had hitherto kept concealed. The plot has the immense advantage of providing a deed in the past the involuntary parricide and incest which explains the hero's self -horror without making him lose our sympa- thies. And, as a matter of fact, the character of CEdipus, his determination to have truth at any cost, his utter disregard of his own sufferings, is heroic in itself, and comes naturally from the plot. locasta was difficult to treat : the mere fact of her being twice as old as her husband was an awkwardness ; but there is a stately sadness, a power of quiet authority, and a certain stern grey outlook on life, which seem to belong to a woman of hard experiences. Of course there are gross im- probabilities about the original saga, but, as Aristotle observes, they fall outside the action of the play. In the action everything is natural except the very end. Why did CEdipus put out his eyes ? locasta realised 1 Antigone, 332 ff. Ajax, 669 ff. CEdipus Co/., 1211 ff. Q 242 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE that she must die, and hanged herself. (Edipus him- self meant to slay her if she had not anticipated him. Why did he not follow her ? Any free composition would have made him do so ; but Sophocles was bound to the saga, and the saga was perfectly certain that CEdipus was alive and blind a long time after- wards. Euripides avoided the awkwardness in an ingenious way. In his CEdipus*'*- the hero is over- powered and blinded by the retainers when he has murdered locasta and is seeking to murder his children and himself. As a mere piece of technique, the (Edipus of Sophocles deserves the position given to it by Aristotle, as the typical example of the highest Greek tragedy. There is deep truth of emotion and high thought ; there is wonderful power of language, grasp of character, and imagination ; and for pure dramatic strength and skill, there are few things in any drama so inexpressibly tragic as the silent exit of locasta, when she alone sees the end that is coming. The Ajax called by the grammarians Ajax the Scourge-Bearer, in distinction to another Ajax the Loc- rian * is a stiff and very early play. It is only in the prologue and in the last scene that it has three actors, and it does not really know how to use them, as they are used, for instance, in the Electro, and the Antigone. Ajax, being defeated by Odysseus in the contest for the arms of Achilles, nursed his wrath till Athena sent him mad. He tried to attack Odysseus and the Atridae in their tents, and, like Don Quixote, fell on some sheep and oxen instead. He comes to his mind again, goes out to a solitary place by the sea, and falls upon his sword. All the last five hundred lines 1 Frag. 541, which seems misplaced in Nauck. THE AJAX. THE ANTIGONE 243 are occupied with the question of his burial, his great enemy Odysseus being eventually the man who pre- vails on the angry generals to do him honour. The finest things in the play are the hero's speeches in his disgrace, and the portraiture of his concubine, the enslaved princess Tecmessa, whom he despises, and who is really superior to him in courage and strength of character, as well as in, unselfishness. It is difficult to believe that the Ajax is uniform as we have it. Not only does the metrical technique vary in different parts, but both the subtly -drawn Tecmessa and the fiendish Athena seem to come from the influence of Euripides ; while other points of late style, such as the abuse of heralds, and the representation of Mene- laus as the wicked Spartan, combine with the dis- proportionate length of the burial discussion to suggest that there has been some late retouching of this very old play. The Antigone is perhaps the most celebrated drama in Greek literature. The plot is built on the eternally- interesting idea of martyrdom, the devotion to a higher unseen law, resulting in revolt against and destruction by the lower visible law. Polyneikes has been slain fighting against his usurping brother Eteocles and against his country ; and Creon the name merely means 'ruler,' which accounts for its commonness for the official kings of the saga commands that he be cast out to the dogs and birds as a traitor. Any one who attempts to bury him shall suffer instant death. His sister Antigone determines to bury him ; the other sister, Ismene, hesitates and shrinks. Antigone is dis- covered, refuses to make any kind of submission, and is condemned. Ismen tries to share her suffering ; her 244 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE lover Haemon, son of Creon, intercedes for her : both in vain. Haemon forces his way into the tomb where she has been immured alive, finds her dead, and slays himself. Apart from the beauty of detail, especially in the language, one of the marks of daring genius in this play is Antigone's vagueness about the motive or prin- ciple of her action : it is because her guilty brother's cause was just; because death is enough to wipe away all offences ; because it is not her nature to join in hating, though she is ready to join in loving (1. 523) ; because an unburied corpse offends the gods ; because her own heart is really with the dead, and she wishes to go to her own. In one passage she explains, in a helpless and pathetically false way, that she only buries him because he is her brother ; she would not have buried her husband or son ! It is absolutely true to life in a high sense ; like Beatrice Cenci, she " cannot argue : she can only feel." And another wonderful touch is Antigone's inability to see the glory of her death : she is only a weak girl cruelly punished for a thing which she was bound to do. She thinks the almost re- ligious admiration of the elders is mockery (1. 839). Creon also is subtly drawn. He is not a monster, though he has to act as one. He has staked his whole authority upon his edict. Finding it disobeyed, he has taken a position from which it is almost impossible to retreat. Then it appears that his niece is the culprit. It is hard for him to eat up his words forthwith ; and she gives him no faintest excuse for doing so. She defies him openly with a deep dispassionate contempt. Ismene, bold in the face of a real crisis, joins her sister ; his own son Haemon, at first moderate, becomes pre- THE ANTIGONE 245 sently violent and insubordinate. Creon seems to be searching for a loophole to escape, subject only to the determination of an obstinate autocrat not to unsay what he has said. After Hsemon leaves him, he cries desperately that he sticks to his decision. Both the maidens must die ! " Both" say the chorus "you never spoke of Ism$ne~ !" "Did I not?" he answers, with visible relief "no, no; it was only Antigone!" And even on her he will not do the irreparable. With the obvious wish to leave himself breathing time, he orders her to be shut in a cave without food or water "till she learns wisdom" When he repents, of course, it is too late. There are several similarities between this, perhaps the sublimest, and the Electra, perhaps the least sub- lime, of Sophocles's plays. The strong and the weak sister stand in exactly similar contrast ; indeed in the passages where Antigone defies Creon and where she rejects Ismene's claim to share her martyrdom, we seem to have a ring of the old { harshness.' There are marks of early date also. The question Ttovia, a ' craft-murder/ is not a beautiful thing after all." It is at this last period of his life at Athens that we really have in some part the Euripides of the legend the man at variance with his kind, utterly sceptical, but opposed to most of the philosophers, contemptuous of the rich, furious against the extreme democracy, 1 hating 1 Or. .70 9JO. NOTES OF EURIPIDES'S LAST PERIOD 255 all the ways of men, commanding attention by sheer force of brain-power. He was baited incessantly by a rabble of comic writers, and of course by the great pack of the orthodox and the vulgar. He was beaten. After producing the Orestes in 408, he left Athens for the court of Archelaus of Macedon. We hear that he went " be- cause of the malicious exultation of almost everybody," though we have no knowledge of what the exultation was grounded on. In Macedon he found peace, and probably some congenial society. Agathon the tragedian and Timotheus the musician were there, both old friends of his, and the painter Zeuxis, and probably Thucydides. Doubtless the barbarism underneath the smooth surface of the Macedonian court, must sometimes have let itself appear. The story of Euripides being killed by the king's hounds is disproved by the silence of Aristo- phanes ; but it must have produced a curious effect on the Athenian when one of the courtiers, who had addressed him rudely, was promptly delivered up to him to be scourged ! He died about eighteen months after reaching Macedon; but the peace and comfort of his new surroundings had already left their mark upon his work. There is a singular freshness and beauty in the two plays, Bacch