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 Cbautauqua IReaDing Circle Xtterature 
 
 A SURVEY 
 
 OF 
 
 GREEK CIVILIZATION 
 
 BY 
 
 J. P. MAHAFFY, D.D., D.C.L. (Oxon.) 
 
 Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin ; Hon. Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford; 
 
 Professor of Ancient History in the University of Dublin. 
 
 Author of " Social Life in Greece" "Prolegomena to Ancient History" 
 
 "Greek Life and Thought," " History of Greek Literature," 
 
 " The Greek World Under Roman Sway," etc. 
 
 MEADVILLE PENNA 
 
 FLOOD AND VINCENT 
 
 €be ($batitauqua--(3tentur)J prcstf 
 
 NEW YORK : CINCINNATI: CHICAGO: 
 
 150 Fifth Avenue. 222 W. Fourth St. 57 Washington St. 
 I8q6
 
 Copyright, 1896 
 By Flood & Vincent 
 
 The Chautauqua- Century Press, Meadville, Pa., U. S. A. 
 Electrotyped. Printed, and Bound by Flood & Vincent.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 There is, I think, a strong tendency in the present 
 day to pursue the threads of knowledge separately. It is 
 on the whole a wholesome tendency, though it sacrifices 
 breadth and variety of acquisition to thoroughness in 
 each department. A herd of specialists is rising up, 
 each master of his own subject, but absolutely ignorant 
 and careless of all that is going on around him in 
 kindred studies. The man who has turned his mind to 
 various pursuits, and has endeavored to embrace in his 
 view many fields of research, is even looked upon with 
 suspicion, instead of respect, and presumed to be inac- 
 curate in each of the particular fields which occupy 
 so many special students exclusively. 
 
 I fear that this separation is being carried out beyond 
 its legitimate or useful degree even in the separation 
 of secular and religious subjects, of intellectual and 
 moral studies. To take the most signal example : In 
 the Roman Catholic Church it is an avowed principle 
 that theology is the only necessary science for the edu- 
 cation of a priest, that this theology, far from being en- 
 lightened, is likely to be endangered by secular knowl- 
 edge. On the other hand, the scientist generally stands 
 aloof from theology, and too often expresses his con- 
 tempt for it as a non-progressive science, or if he be of 
 a better moral fiber, and acknowledges the weight and 
 importance of religion, he is ready to accept, as a mere 
 layman, what his pastor or other clerical adviser may 
 teach. 
 
 The result is a loss of breadth on the theological side, 
 
 2043410
 
 iv Preface. 
 
 a loss of seriousness (in the moral sense) on the scien- 
 tific side. In both there is the increasing tendency 
 to thrust aside or forget the great unifying principle 
 of all our life and knowledge — that all our thought, all 
 our science, all our history, all our speculation of every 
 kind, nay, even all the vast complex of worlds in which 
 myriads of other beings may be prosecuting similar in- 
 quiries — these are the product or the outcome of the de- 
 sign of one Almighty God, who has created the world 
 according to his infinite wisdom, and rules it according 
 to his infinite goodness. A recognition of this great fact 
 on our part is the proper link or common ground of all 
 the various and minute special researches we may make 
 into the laws of the universe, or the history of any part of 
 it. Nay, more, it is the proper defense, the only defense 
 we can make, if we are checked by the warning that in 
 the few years vouchsafed to us on this earth we have no 
 right to spend one moment of our precious time upon 
 things of no eternal import ; that the study of religion 
 and our future condition under the providence of God 
 is our only proper employment. We can reply in 
 the most thorough earnest that the exclusive study of 
 what we have separated and called moral or religious 
 science is not the best way to promote that very science. 
 The most remarkable illustrations, the most powerful 
 vindications of God's providence, are found in probing 
 the secrets of the laws of nature, the varieties in the 
 course of human history. Here we may see working in 
 practice what we learn from our theology in theory, and 
 if in our feebleness and blindness we are unable to 
 accommodate all the phenomena of science or of history 
 to these laws, surely the worst way out of the difficulty 
 is to ignore it, to shut our eyes to the facts, instead of 
 using them to correct or enlarge our theory.
 
 Preface. v 
 
 It is for these reasons that what may be called the 
 Chautauqua idea of starting from the knowledge and 
 love of God as a great first principle, and passing from it 
 into the broadest and most various survey of human 
 knowledge as such, is not only the highest, but the only 
 true method of general education. But it is part and 
 parcel of this method that the student need not perpetu- 
 ally be reminded of it. He must have his hours of 
 special and absorbing study when he is engrossed in the 
 special branch he has in hand, and when he need 
 not, and cannot, be constantly dwelling upon the great 
 idea which underlies all his life and work. Just as a dili- 
 gent man of business, whose faith and trust in God are 
 strong and clear, must nevertheless plunge into daily 
 affairs and do worldly work which absorbs him for hours 
 in the day, while the thought of God retires into 
 the depths of his soul— the silent influence which, 
 without being constantly recalled into consciousness, 
 nevertheless orders his thoughts and protects him from 
 temptations to fraud or selfishness — so the student 
 of this history or any other branch of knowledge ought 
 to pursue it with all his heart and search it out as such, 
 secure if he reverts to the first basis of all knowledge and 
 concludes that all the phenomena he has examined are 
 instances of laws established by the great Creator of the 
 world. For the God revealed to us is no oriental 
 despot, who is content to see his slaves perpetually 
 occupied in watching and praising their master, thus 
 neglecting all other duties. He has rather set them 
 to gain more knowledge with the talents intrusted to 
 them, to push their way into the secrets of his wisdom 
 with all the diligence, all the accuracy, all the devotion 
 to this work of which they are capable ; and if such a 
 servant, intent upon his lawful work, fails to look up and
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 see that the Master is present, may not such a fault be 
 pardoned by him who has ordained that labor is honor- 
 able and zeal a moral duty? " Whatsoever thine hand 
 rindeth to do, do it with all thy might." 
 
 These considerations justify a very common feeling 
 among literary men, who do not regard the question be- 
 fore us so seriously. Even in works of fiction, they say, 
 it is a defect and an injury to the intentions of the 
 teacher if his moral be drawn too plainly ; if he not only 
 shows his characters and their adventures to the reader, 
 but also tells him what lessons that reader is expected to 
 draw from the narrative. The greatest moral teachers 
 even in fiction are those who give us the truest and most 
 striking pictures of human life and have left all moral 
 inferences to work their own way with the reader. Such 
 is the subtle but powerful teaching in yEschylus, Shakes- 
 peare, Scott, in fiction, and in true history there is 
 no more signal example than the Gospel narratives of 
 our Lord's passion, where not a single reflection or ad- 
 vice from the writer mars the dignity and the pathos of 
 the narrative. 
 
 The same great principle may be applied in smaller 
 and less important work. It is on the whole better for 
 me to draw a picture of Greek civilization as it was, and 
 as it aspired to be, without laying stress, during our 
 progress, on the contrasts of the culture of intellect with- 
 out moral forces to balance it, to that which has received 
 the powerful support of Christianity. It is not easy even 
 to guess what changes this great moral force would have 
 made in Greek culture had it been applied during its 
 most brilliant days. Christianity has hitherto been 
 powerless to affect some brilliant societies, though it has 
 worked a great reformation in the world. The Italian 
 states in the Renaissance of the- fifteenth and sixteenth
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 centuries were torn by all the vices and crimes which 
 Thucydides describes as rife in the warring Greek 
 republics. Machiavelli's idea of politics seems to have 
 advanced in no way upon Aristotle's, from a moral 
 point of view. Nay, even in the present day, on the 
 very skirts of civilization and in countries once en- 
 dowed with humanity and culture, there are atrocities 
 committed such as we might only expect from the 
 savages of Central Africa. In the very center, in the 
 very forefront of civilization do we not see greed, 
 ambition, international jealousy urging neighbor nations 
 to cast aside every moral, every Christian consideration, 
 and to draw the sword in support of national objects, 
 which every honest man in either nation would disavow 
 as base and unworthy in any private transaction ? So 
 far one might be tempted to say that the teaching of 
 Christianity has made, alas ! but little difference. 
 
 On the other hand, it cannot be denied that, in this 
 century at least, there is a moderation in the practice 
 of war among Christian nations, which did not exist in 
 old Greek days. Not that there were then wanting men 
 quite modern in their humanity ; but the average has 
 been raised; the opinion of the majority, of common men 
 and women, is more humane since the preaching of the 
 Gospel. On the other hand, it is quite possible that an 
 earlier diffusion of Christianity might have stopped the 
 great artistic development which has left so many per- 
 manent traces upon our life. Polytheism, with Greeks 
 living under it, produced far finer results in art than 
 Christianity, with Italians striving to glorify it on canvas 
 and in stone. At all events, we should never have 
 learned what was possible for the human intellect apart 
 from revelation, and what flaws and faults adhere to the 
 highest manifestations of that intellect, had we not be-
 
 viii Preface. 
 
 fore us the example of both the greatness and the small- 
 ness of Greek civilization. 
 
 But it is indeed an idle speculation to consider what 
 would or would not have happened had God ordered 
 the world's history otherwise than he has done. One 
 weighty utterance is sufficient for us : " When the full- 
 ness of time li'as come God sent forth His Son." If, 
 therefore, the world required preparation for that cardi- 
 nal turning point, if a certain condition of ripeness 
 was required for the proper acceptance of the Gospel 
 by man, then the history which I have written in 
 this volume is probably a most vital and important 
 step in that preparation, perhaps hardly less important 
 than that Law "which was our schoolmaster to bring us 
 unto Christ." For that Law affected only the chosen 
 people, whereas Hellenic culture affected the world. 
 
 The reader will find this topic discussed in my final 
 chapter, so that I need not enlarge upon it here. It is 
 enough to remind him that he is not about to study 
 a work of mere secular import, and only of use or inter- 
 est to a worldly man ; the whole of these rich and varied 
 antecedents to the establishment of that Christian cul- 
 ture which is the highest ideal we possess of life upon 
 this earth are well worth the study of every intelligent 
 man and woman. To such it is not only a privilege, 
 but a duty, " to search all things, to try all things," in 
 order that they may " hold fast that which is good." 
 
 Trinity College, Dublin, 
 March, 1896.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. PAGE. 
 
 I. Introductory 13 
 
 II. The Homeric Age 41 
 
 III. The First Two Centuries of Histori- 
 
 cal Development in Greece, 700- 
 500 B. C 68 
 
 IV. The Passage from Sporadic to Sys- 
 
 tematic Culture. The Great 
 Struggle with the East .... 106 
 
 V. The Life of the Nation from the 
 Defeat of the Persians (479 B. C. ) 
 till the Fall of Imperial Athens 
 (404 B.C.) 133 
 
 VI. The Fourth Century B. C 165 
 
 VII. The Fourth Century B. C. (Conti?iucd) 205 
 
 VIII. The Time of Alexander the Great 
 
 and His Early Successors . . . 223 
 
 IX. The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 254 
 
 X. Greek Culture under the Romans . 292 
 
 Postscript 332
 
 The required books of the C. L. S. C are recommended by a 
 Council of six. It must, however, be understood that 
 recommendation does not involve an approval by the Coun- 
 cil, or by any member of it, of every priticiple or doctrine 
 contained in the book recommended.
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Lion Gate at Mycenae Frontispiece. 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 Bee-hive Tomb Excavated by Mrs. Schliemann . . 36 
 
 Temple at P/estum 85 
 
 Theseus with the Marathonian Bull 129 
 
 Tanagra Figurines 186 
 
 Sculpture of the Period of Phidias 207 
 
 Sculpture on the Sarcophagus of a Sidonian 
 
 King 2 3 8 
 
 Gold Cup from Mycenae 2S5 
 
 General View of Olympia 304 
 
 Olympia after Excavations 3 2 7
 
 A SURVEY OF GREEK CIVILIZATION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 It were quite idle now, in the closing nineteenth cen- Italian revival 
 
 n . . , . of interest in 
 
 tury, to waste many words in setting forth the impor- Greek 
 
 ...... civilization. 
 
 tance or interest of Greek history and civilization. 
 Since the days when Lascaris and his fellows brought 
 from Constantinople Greek books and Greek tastes, the 
 remnant of the sack of the Turks, fugitive and needy, 
 was the seed which grew up in one generation's sowing 
 into the magnificent early Renaissance of Italy. It 
 seduced popes from their piety, princes from their poli- 
 tics, and again made letters and art one of the first 
 considerations of civilized men. Raphael and Michael 
 Angelo steeped themselves in Greek art ; they searched 
 for it with eagerness under the ruins of Roman palaces, 
 and copied it with the faithfulness of genius. The 
 builders of the matchless Certosa (near Pavia) almost Art. 
 make us condone the ruffian Visconti's vices; the sol- 
 emn art of Borgognone seems almost incompatible with 
 the crimes of his patron. Then comes Machiavelli with Politics, 
 his reflex of Aristotle's intricacies in politics, Cellini 
 with his revival of the Alexandrian toreutic, not to speak 
 of the new creation of literary style by the long-for- 
 gotten masterpieces of Plato, Isocrates, and Demos- Letters, 
 thenes. 
 
 All these things are now commonplace, but what 
 never can be commonplace is to contemplate the perma- 
 nence of this revival. Waxing indeed and waning, 
 * 13
 
 n 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Mi idem appre- 
 
 i iation < 'i t In- 
 Greek K<-'nius. 
 
 No feudalism 
 in Greek 
 political life. 
 
 Difficulty of 
 giving a general 
 presentation. 
 
 misunderstood and travestied by the builders, the 
 sculptors, and the poets, of the seventeenth and eigh- 
 teenth centuries, it was reserved for us in the nineteenth 
 to turn from the muddy stream and seek again at the 
 pure source the real freshness and glory of what the 
 Greeks had produced. And so in our day we have not 
 only laid aside the patch and powder with which our 
 grandfathers had thought to improve the natural com- 
 plexion of Greek art, we have even advanced to new 
 discoveries in analyzing the subtleties of Greek genius. 
 The builders of the Madeleine in Paris thought it a 
 simple thing to copy the Parthenon. It was reserved 
 for the marvelous investigations of M. Penrose * to 
 show us that these builders had not the smallest inkling 
 of the recondite art by which Ictinus designed his 
 masterpiece. In like manner, it was not till yesterday 
 that the art of Demosthenes, the artifices of Theocritus 
 and his fellows, received their proper appreciation. It 
 was not till the immortal work of Grote that we came to 
 understand how Greek politics are not like the politics 
 of medieval Europe — the cunning of the priest, the 
 violence of the baron, the cunning violence of the king 
 —•but in theory at least the reasonable discussion of the 
 public, the final decision of the majority, the submission 
 of magistrates and rulers to the will of the sovereign 
 people. Modern inquiry has sought out along many 
 paths the myriad developments of Greek intellect, and 
 there is a great library of special researches in every 
 European language recording the results. To gather 
 up the sum of these researches into one broad view, 
 within the limits of one volume, is indeed a task of 
 great fascination, but is due rather to the publishers' 
 
 * In his " Principles of Athenian Architecture," written for the Society of 
 Dilettanti.
 
 Introductory. 
 
 15 
 
 boldness than to the author's ambition. In such a task 
 any man may fail. No one has a right to attempt it 
 who cannot conscientiously say that he has lived the 
 long summer of his life in daily contact with all in turn 
 of the many remains still extant of Greek art, politics, 
 letters, life, speculation. Such an one may even come 
 to regard it as an act of duty, in the autumn of his days, 
 to stand like Homer's royal husbandman at the head of 
 the furrows, resting on his staff, surveying with great 
 contentment the rich harvest gathered by a host of will- 
 ing toilers. 
 
 " With sweeping stroke the mowers strew the lands ; 
 The gatherers follow and collect in bands. 
 The rustic monarch of the field descries, 
 With thankful glee, the heaps around him rise." 
 
 Our own generation has seen a great revolution of 
 opinion regarding the epoch when the earliest civilized 
 life in Greece began. It used to be perfectly agreed 
 upon that Homer gave us the earliest picture. In him 
 certainly do we find all those distinctive excellencies 
 which are only found in Greek life and in Greek letters. 
 There was no subsequent generation of Greeks which 
 did not find Homer congenial, Homer natural, Homer 
 ancestral. The society which he described was indeed 
 in many respects different from the societies of historical 
 days ; but Grote and others took pains to show that the 
 changes arose from natural development ; that the 
 agora of free men and the voice of public opinion * 
 were already known and felt. Though Agamemnon Homeric 
 
 , . .. , a • . ^1 i_ • monarchy not 
 
 asserted in a line known to Aristotle, but since ex- absolute, 
 punged by offended editors, that he had the power of 
 life and death, his sovereignty was evidently not abso- 
 lute but, according to Thucydides's words, an hereditary 
 
 * Described as " some one said," when citing a general feeling. 
 
 Beginnings of 
 Greek civiliza- 
 tion ; date 
 uncertain.
 
 i6 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Date of Homer. 
 
 Early Greek 
 history 
 
 formerly taken 
 from Homer. 
 
 monarchy with defined privileges.* Accordingly both 
 ancients and moderns were agreed to accept Homer as 
 the commencement of Greek history. 
 
 But what age does this imply? It used to be the 
 fashion to put back Homer to a very early date. The 
 fall of Troy was set down according to the chronology 
 of Eratosthenes— the highest Greek authority — at 1104 
 B. C, and Homer was supposed to have been not far 
 removed in date from this event, for did he not know 
 all about it perfectly, and had he not a living conception 
 of all the heroes before him ? Besides, the whole 
 Homeric society went to pieces in consequence of the 
 war, and had not the poet lived close to the time, all the 
 intimate knowledge he shows would have been lost or 
 dissipated into fragments all over Greece. We may 
 add that the whole society described in the poems 
 differs so considerably from the earliest historical Greeks 
 shown us in the poems of Archilochus and the elder 
 Simonides, that a long gap must have intervened be- 
 tween the days of Agamemnon and the days of Gyges 
 the Lydian, with his Greek friends the lyric poets. 
 
 It used therefore to be maintained that we had at 
 least a semi-historical knowledge of Greek society and 
 Greek manners as far back as 1000 B. C. in the Iliad 
 and Odyssey. All the 'earlier histories, even down to 
 Thirlwall's and Grote's, began by giving a picture of 
 Homeric society from this point of view. Grote also 
 gave an explicit account of the mythology of the people, 
 all the histories and adventures of their gods, as evi- 
 dence of what the beliefs of the nation were, and what 
 their notions of things spiritual and things unseen". He 
 refused, indeed, to allow any historical value to these 
 stories. He would not even admit that we had in them 
 
 * This is the description given by Aristotle in his " Politics."
 
 Introductory. 1 7 
 
 a distorted account of early physical facts. If there were 
 physical or historical facts there, no man could separate 
 them from the fictions which surrounded them. They 
 were therefore merely evidences of the people's imagina- 
 tion. He might very well have added, what he did not 
 appreciate, that even the stories as we have them are 
 made up by later and artificial processes, and by later 
 and theoretical writers, who strove to harmonize legends 
 which were various and inconsistent in the hearts of the 
 isolated communities that made up the Hellenic nation. 
 Herodotus knew this so well that he asserted Homer 
 and Hesiod to be the originators of the theology of the Homer as a 
 
 . , theologist. 
 
 nation. They harmonized the legends, fixed the names 
 and attributes of the gods, and made some sort of sys- 
 tem out of the scattered beliefs of the people. But it 
 need hardly be stated that theology only as old as 
 Homer and Hesiod was no primitive faith, and could 
 give us no picture of really ancient Greece. Most of 
 our legends come from sources far later even than these. 
 And as regards what Homer and Hesiod had to say, 
 were they really as old as they had been represented ? Homer and 
 Had they really any direct or close knowledge of the longer taken as 
 society of the tenth century before Christ ? The gen- 
 eral drift of modern criticism has led us to deny to them 
 this position ; nay, even as regards Homer, we have 
 come to deny the unity of authorship of the Iliad and 
 Odyssey ; we have even come to deny the unity of . 
 
 authorship of the Iliad, and see in both poems the work sin s' e author. 
 of a school or succession of bards, enlarging, expanding, 
 adorning a nucleus originally short and simple, and so 
 gradually producing, under the heads of some master- 
 arranger, at the close of a long development, these two 
 great poems, whose unity is only artistic. For in the 
 Iliad especially, as can easily be shown, inconsistencies
 
 i8 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Traces of 
 combination 
 
 of earlier and 
 later lays. 
 
 The skeptical 
 school of 
 Homeric 
 critics. 
 
 are frequent, sutures obvious, and the traces of older 
 and shorter lays worked into a plot are not to be mis- 
 taken. 
 
 It follows at once that some parts at least of the 
 Homeric poems are the work of later hands, who had no 
 living knowledge even of the society which produced 
 the earliest and simplest lays. These later bards may 
 have written as antiquarians, drawing upon their imagi- 
 nations for their facts. They did not live at any very 
 remote age, for they must have known and used writing 
 in the composition of these long, elaborate epics ; and 
 they show not a few signs of artificiality. Thus modern 
 criticism has reduced the historical significance of the 
 Homeric poems even below the skeptical position 
 adopted by Grote. There arose also a school of think- 
 ers in Germany, of whom Professor Max M filler was the 
 most eminent representative in England, who were led 
 by their speculations on comparative mythology to deny 
 any historical basis whatever to the story of the siege 
 of Troy, or the adventures of Ulysses. The human 
 tragedies ascribed to the heroes were only travesties or 
 misunderstandings of something far older and more 
 universal, the phenomena of day and night, of the rising 
 and setting sun, or of tempest and clear weather. 
 Though this theory is now out of favor, it can hardly be 
 said to be yet extinct, so I may here quote the words in 
 which I criticised it more than twenty years ago, when 
 it threatened, like the rod of Aaron, to swallow up the 
 rods of the other magicians with whom it came in con- 
 flict : 
 
 There is a fallacy, called by Archbishop YVhately the thau- 
 Fanciful inter- matropc fallacy, in which the illusion is produced by rap- 
 
 iiretation of . ,, . ■ , r -j ' j 
 
 mythology-. idly presenting to our minds a series of separate ideas, and 
 
 ringing the changes on them till we are confused and believe
 
 Introductory. 
 
 19 
 
 them all identical or connected. A logical reader is strongly 
 reminded of this fallacy when he finds the sun, the dawn, the 
 storm-clouds, and the gloaming, kept going like a number of 
 balls in a juggler's hand. Any hero can play any part. If he 
 is spoken well of he must be the sun, if not, he is the night. 
 Whether he murders or marries or deserts a maiden or a 
 widow, she is the dawn. What is still more unscientific, if he 
 have two or three letters of his name identical with any other 
 mythical name, identity of character is asserted. This is a habit 
 which our comparative mythologers ought not to acquire, see- 
 ing that even the most advanced comparative mythologers of 
 Germany cannot forget the difficulties before them. Even 
 Professor Max Miiller cannot develop his theory without much 
 hesitation. Far from being satisfied with any random simi- 
 larity, he professedly requires complete identity of letters, a 
 knowledge of the etymology, and even an identity of accent, 
 before he is satisfied. Thus, he hesitates about Septemtriones* 
 He hesitates about Paris, as we have seen. He hesitates 
 (though little) about Hermes, because the form Herevieias 
 does not occur. He hesitates concerning Aditi having the 
 meaning of the Infinite. f 
 
 We pass to the psychological argument, which bases the 
 whole system of interpretation by the sun and dawn alone on 
 an analysis of the mental condition of savages, or of primitive 
 races ; and I would draw special attention to this side of the 
 theory, which has hitherto been very slightly examined by 
 careful critics. Comparative mythologers draw very poetical 
 and very detailed pictures of these historical infants, and give 
 us to understand that they have studied their habits closely. 
 "His mental condition J determined the character of his 
 language, and that condition exhibits in him, as in children 
 now, the working of a feeling which endows all outward 
 things with a life not unlike his own. Of the several objects 
 
 Theory of 
 identity of 
 character. 
 
 Psychological 
 interpretation of 
 myths. 
 
 Personification 
 by the primi- 
 tive mind. 
 
 * " Lectures," II., page 365. Though, in matters of the kind, it is impossible 
 to speak very positively, it seems not improbable that the name triones may be 
 an old name for star in general. 
 
 t Cf. ibid., II., 500, note. " This is doubtful, but I know no better etymol- 
 ogy." The reader will find similar caution used in "Chips," II., page 133. I 
 may add, however, that the greatest of Greek etymologists, G. Curtius, rejects 
 many of the derivations which even M. Max Miiller considers sound. So far 
 are we still removed from the judicial inquiry stage. 
 
 X That is, of the primitive Aryan. 
 Mythology," I., pages 42 so. 
 
 The quotation is from Cox's "Aryan
 
 20 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Primitive 
 attitude to 
 natural 
 phenomena. 
 
 Attributes life 
 to every aspect 
 of the material 
 world. 
 
 Imagery- 
 
 which met his eye he had no positive knowledge, whether of 
 their origin, their nature, or their properties. But he had life, 
 and therefore all things else must have life also. He was 
 under no necessity of personifying them, for he had for him- 
 self no distinctions between consciousness and personality. He 
 knew nothing of the conditions of his own life or of any other, 
 and therefore all things on the earth or in the heavens were in- 
 vested with the same vague idea of existence. The sun, the 
 moon, the stars, the ground on which he trod, the clouds, 
 storms, and lightnings were all living beings ; could he help 
 thinking that, like himself, they were conscious beings also ? 
 His very words would, by an inevitable necessity, express this 
 conviction. His language would admit no single expression 
 from which the attribute of life was excluded, while it would 
 vary the forms of that life with unerring instinct. Every object 
 would be a living reality, and every word a speaking picture. 
 For him there would be no bare recurrence of days and 
 seasons, but each morning the dawn would drive her bright 
 flocks to the blue pastures of heaven before the birth of the 
 lord of day from the toiling womb of night. Round the living 
 progress of the new-born sun there would be grouped a lavish 
 imagery, expressive of the most intense sympathy with what 
 we term the operation of material forces, and not less express- 
 ive of the utter absence of even the faintest knowledge. Life 
 would be an alternation of joy and sorrow, of terror and relief; 
 for every evening the dawn would return leading her bright 
 flocks, and the short-lived sun would die. Years might pass, 
 or ages, before his rising again would establish even the weak- 
 est analogy ; but in the meanwhile man would mourn for his 
 death, as for the loss of one who might never return. For 
 every aspect of the material world he would have ready some 
 life-giving expression ; and those aspects would be scarcely 
 less varied than his words. The same object would at different 
 times, or under different conditions, awaken the most opposite 
 or inconsistent conceptions. But these conceptions and the 
 words which expressed them would exist side by side without 
 producing the slightest consciousness of their incongruity ; nor 
 is it easy to determine the exact order in which they might 
 arise. The sun would awaken both mournful and inspiriting 
 ideas, ideas of victory and defeat, of toil and premature death. 
 He would be the Titan, strangling the serpents of the night
 
 Introductory. 
 
 2t 
 
 before he drove his chariot up the sky ; and he would also be 
 the being who, worn down by unwilling labor undergone for 
 men, sinks wearied into the arms of the mother who bare him 
 in the morning. Other images would not be wanting ; the 
 dawn and the dew and the violet clouds would be not less real 
 and living than the sun. In his rising from the east he would 
 quit the fair dawn, whom he should see no more till his labor 
 drew toward its close. And not less would he love and be 
 loved by the dew and by the morning herself, while to both his 
 life would be fatal as his fiery car rose higher in the sky. So 
 would man speak of all other things also ; of the thunder and 
 the earthquake and the storm, not less than of summer and 
 winter." 
 
 From what source is this picture drawn ? Certainly not from Contrast with 
 an investigation of the tribes that still live in their primitive attitude of 
 
 .... ,.,,,_,. . ., primitive man 
 
 condition in remote quarters of the globe. I nese tribes, as we know 
 whether they roam in the prairies of North America or inhabit him 
 the forests of India, whether crushed in their development by 
 the cold of Siberia or the heat of Africa, have many points in 
 common, so many that patient inquirers are beginning to form 
 some general idea of what all tribes or races must have been in 
 their earliest condition.* We may safely assert that there are 
 no cases at all parallel to the fancy picture of the mythologers. 
 There are plenty of savages that worship the sun and moon, 
 that personify moving objects, because they cannot conceive 
 motion without life,t and that have formed myths about physi- 
 cal phenomena. But we look in vain for all this wonderful riot 
 of imagination about the daily operations of nature, this terrible 
 anguish about an ordinary sunset, this outburst of joy in the 
 summer dawn, when their nightly grief had scarce lulled them 
 to sleep. 
 
 In this argument I had not perhaps given stress Appeal to 
 
 ° actual relics of 
 
 enough to the query which ought to be set to every civilization 
 such hypothesis to answer. Why were all the great 
 
 * If it be objected that these tribes belong to lower races, without answering 
 the assumption of an original difference of race, it may fairly be retorted that 
 there is no evidence of any higher intelligence in the original Aryans than in 
 the present New Zealanders. 
 
 i*So Schoolcraft says of the Red Indian totem (Vol. II., page 49), " It is 
 always some animated object, and seldom or never derived from the inani- 
 mate class of nature." The widely spread worship of sacred stones appears 
 to be symbolical, and not due to the attribution to them of life.
 
 22 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 I ii m i ".ate at 
 Mycenae. 
 
 Excavation 
 should have 
 prei eded 
 theory. 
 
 Prehistoric 
 evidence not 
 specially 
 significant. 
 
 legends grouped about a few sites — Troy, Mycenae, 
 Tiryns ? Were there no historical facts which made 
 such a localization not only likely but necessary ? It is 
 very strange indeed that this very natural question was 
 not answered by the learned who discussed the matter, 
 as it ought to have been, by an appeal to the spade. 
 The old Lion Gate at Mycenae was long and well 
 known, and it was quite plain that here at least was the 
 seat of some ancient grandee, who should have left be- 
 hind him some farther traces of his splendor. Could 
 we identify him with Agamemnon who had ruled there 
 according to the Iliad? What about Troy, the seat 
 of Priam's wealthy kingdom ? What about Tiryns and 
 Orchomenus, both well-identified sites, both showing 
 traces of massive and antique building ? That learned 
 men, discussing with zeal and even with passion the 
 possibilities of the question, should never have con- 
 descended to adjourn their disputes till they had investi- 
 gated the various sites to which the Iliad and Odyssey 
 are attached by their authors, shows how men of books 
 prefer victory in an argument to a conquest of new 
 facts and a superseding of threadbare discussions by real 
 discoveries. But at last "the time came, and the man." 
 I need not delay here upon the evidences of human 
 occupation of the Hellenic peninsula long before civiliza- 
 tion. Flint arrow-heads and rude hand-made pottery 
 are found all over Europe, and contain in them nothing 
 distinctive of a race. There were even found under the 
 lava of Santorin, a volcanic island in the Levant (beside 
 the ancient Thera) engulfed houses, a sort of prehistoric 
 Pompeii, with some skeletons, gold ornaments, axes, 
 and other remains of primitive industry.* But these 
 
 *Cf. Fouque\ " Santorin et ses Eruptions " (Paris, 1879) or Busolt's (German) 
 " History of Greece," Vol. I., page 51 sq. (2d edition, Gotha, 1893).
 
 Introductory. 
 
 23 
 
 and the other flint remains of Greece are not to be 
 compared in perfection with those discovered in the 
 terramare of Reggio di Emilia in north Italy, and 
 which the traveler now admires in the wonderful 
 museum of the Collegio Romano at Rome. If we 
 judged from mere flint-heads, the natives of northern 
 Italy ought to have easily outstripped the natives of the 
 Hellenic peninsula. 
 
 But these things need not here concern us. Let us 
 turn to the momentous discoveries made by the late Dr. 
 Schliemann on the sites of the cities marked out in the 
 Homeric poems, as the capitals or strongholds of 
 monarchs who controlled the people around them. 
 Here we ought to find, not mere savage tools and 
 ornaments, but the remains of the inventions and luxu- 
 ries of a more developed society. Schliemann under- 
 took much more than this. With the enthusiasm 
 which seldom dwells in the heart of the thoroughly 
 scientific investigator, he hoped to find the actual palace 
 of Agamemnon, the actual scenery of the city of Troy, 
 where Priam and Paris, Hector and ^Eneas, once 
 stalked through the echoing streets. It seemed for a 
 season that his wildest expectations were realized. He 
 found at Hissarlik, which his intuitive genius told him 
 to be the true site of Troy, the remains of a burnt 
 palace, the weapons of primitive warfare, the jewels 
 of queens, the worn querns of slaves. He found that 
 layer after layer had been piled upon the chosen site, as 
 if men could not tear themselves, in spite of the grim 
 associations of fire and sword, from the long-settled 
 spot, to which the temples of gods and the graves of 
 ancestors bound them with invisible, but indissoluble 
 fetters. His brilliant diagnosis revealed to recalcitrant 
 pedants, not only that he had found the true site of the 
 
 Schliemann's 
 excavations of 
 Homeric sites. 
 
 Hissarlik the 
 site of Trov.
 
 24 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Historical 
 liasis for the 
 Iliad. 
 
 Schliemann's 
 discoveries at 
 Mycenae. 
 
 Homer 
 
 confirmed. 
 
 renowned city, but that the Iliad of Homer had a dis- 
 tinct historical basis, apart from the superstructures of 
 fancy. Even if Achilles was, as some fancied, the sun, 
 and Helen the dawn, these primitive personifications 
 had been attached to a distinct local habitation, and 
 connected with a great conflict among real men. 
 
 If these general conclusions required the confirmation 
 of another instance, Schliemann supplied it by his 
 second and more brilliant discovery at Mycenae. Here 
 again, on the alleged site of Homeric grandeur, he 
 found the tombs of kings, the treasures of a rich 
 monarchy, the colossal building of countless human 
 hands. The Homeric epithets of very-golden Mycenae 
 and much-fortified Tiryns were confirmed by facts. 
 Kings' palaces were discovered with no mean remnants 
 of art, no mean control of the most massive materials. 
 Here then was the palace of Agamemnon, king of men ; 
 from hence he set out with the combined forces of 
 the Morea for the East. Thus again Homer seemed 
 perfectly justified, and the Iliad, etc., assumed an 
 aspect of freshness and reality, which it had lost amid 
 the rude handling of the men of books. But those who 
 had been trained to estimate evidence kept counselling 
 caution, and a postponement of our decision upon these 
 gigantic additions to our evidence. For while there 
 were on the one hand enthusiasts, who accepted the 
 whole discovery as a mere material confirmation of the 
 Homeric story, so there were other far more silly 
 people, fastidious skeptics, who would not believe that 
 even the site of Homeric Troy had been discovered, and 
 who ventured to affirm that the Mycenaean tombs were 
 of medieval construction. These fatuous judgments are 
 now well-nigh forgotten, especially by the men who 
 once held them, and the archaic character of the remains
 
 Introductory. 
 
 25 
 
 of both Troy and Mycenae is as well established as is the 
 certainty that at Hissarlik the Homeric poets knew of a 
 fortified city, and that that city was wasted by a victo- 
 rious enemy. 
 
 This historical sketch of the discovery is necessary be- 
 fore we approach the problems which it suggests, and 
 which are the proper subject of this book. What evi- 
 dence do the remains of Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns 
 afford us of the life and civilization of their early inhabi- 
 tants ? If these are indeed the places celebrated in 
 Homeric story, how do their contents agree with the 
 data of the Homeric poems ? Can we fit together the 
 palace of Mycenae, its walls, its treasures, its tombs, 
 with the portrait of Agamemnon in the Iliad ? Can we 
 do the same in the case of Priam and our newly dis- 
 covered Troy? If so we might indeed rewrite the first 
 chapter of ' ' Social Life in Greece, ' ' and fill up countless 
 gaps left in our literary evidence from the materials sup- 
 plied by the fortunate excavator. 
 
 But the longer the evidence was examined, the more 
 thoroughly it was sifted, the more clearly did we see the 
 astounding conclusion coming out of the mist, that in 
 Schliemann's Troy, his Mycenae, in Homer's Iliad, in 
 the Odyssey, we have four distinct strata of civiliza- 
 tion — the first three separated from each other by long 
 intervals of time and profound differences of character. 
 Instead, therefore, of filling up our Homeric picture 
 of Greek life, these discoveries reveal to us in hard facts 
 what we had long since inferred from literary argu- 
 ments,* that the society of the Iliad and the Odyssey 
 was not a primitive society, but the waning phase of 
 an older civilization, to which the poets looked back as 
 a greater and stronger age ; a time of retrospect and of 
 
 * Cf. my "Social Life in Greece,'' Chapters I. ami II. 
 
 Questions 
 suggested by 
 the excava- 
 tions. 
 
 Evidence from 
 excavations of 
 Troy, Mycenae, 
 and Tiryns. 
 
 Schliemann's 
 Troy not the 
 actual Troy of 
 Homer.
 
 26 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Inferiority of 
 remains at 
 Troy to those 
 at Mycenae. 
 
 regret, tainted even with traces of that Weltschmerz 
 which mars the simple faith of Herodotus, which em- 
 bitters the skepticism of Euripides. 
 
 From the very outset, all of us who examined dis- 
 passionately the remains of that layer of building which 
 Schliemann called the Homeric city were astonished 
 and disconcerted by two facts. In the first place, the 
 fortified enclosure was so much smaller than what Homer 
 had led us to expect, that it seemed rather a fortified 
 palace and fort than a city with streets and a consider- 
 able population. Secondly, the pottery, weapons, walls, 
 all appeared very rude and primitive for a place so rich 
 and long settled as the city of Priam. Those who com- 
 pared all that was said about Mycenae with what was said 
 about Troy in Homer, had inferred that the latter was 
 the richer and the more luxurious, the outcome of 
 longer growth and greater luxury. The remains told us 
 a very different story. The pottery especially was much 
 ruder at Hissarlik, most of it hand-made and not wheel- 
 made, nor was there that advanced or peculiar finish 
 which is now recognized in Mycenaean ware. A glance 
 through the many specimens in Schliemann' s " Ilios " 
 and a comparison with those in his "Mycenae" will 
 make this obvious to the student. So far, then, the 
 remains did not corroborate the Iliad. The whole as- 
 pect of the fort of Pergamum was older and ruder. Not 
 every antiquarian has the courage of his convictions, and 
 so the open assertion of this discrepancy was only made 
 here and there by those of us who were not afraid 
 or ashamed to retract a false move, or confess an error. 
 Within the last two years, however, we have had the 
 tions prove that satisfaction of a brilliant corroboration from the later re- 
 
 Schliemar.n 5 
 
 Troyisoider searches of Professor Dbrpfeld. He has now made it 
 
 than Mycenae. * 
 
 quite plain that we were right in holding Schliemann s 
 
 Latest excava-
 
 Introductory. 
 
 27 
 
 Troy to be older and ruder than the ruins of Mycenae 
 and Tiryns. For outside the "second city" at Hissar- 
 lik, with a larger area and far more advanced construc- 
 tion, he has found the stratum of building which corre- 
 sponds with the Greek palaces, and which held a similar 
 and synchronous population. Above all, he has found 
 here that Mycenaean pottery which is so distinctive a 
 feature in the prehistoric remains of Argolis and the 
 islands. Really rude and primitive pottery proves no 
 affinity ; all simple men in their first attempts at mak- 
 ing vessels of clay follow the same process. Rudeness 
 of this kind is not even by itself a clear proof of an- 
 tiquity, for there is nothing more common than neo- 
 barbarism, or such want of development that men 
 continue to make in the same fashion without alteration 
 or improvement for myriads of years. When I was in 
 Nubia in 1893 I used to buy from the native women 
 baskets of Haifa grass not differing in one feature of ma- 
 terial, design, or color from the baskets we find in the 
 tombs about the pyramids in Egypt, five thousand years 
 old. But when we come to exceptional color and dis- 
 tinctive pattern, the case alters immediately. The dif- 
 ference in pottery, therefore, between Schliemann's 
 interior city and Dbrpfeld's outer circle is in itself con- 
 clusive. 
 
 The general result, however, disposes of the claim of 
 Schliemann's city to any further place in this book. He 
 had found not the town of Priam and the Iliad, or even 
 of the age and development of Tiryns and Mycenae, per- 
 haps seven centuries anterior to Homer, but a far more 
 antique and primitive fort, dating at the most moderate 
 estimate not less than 2,500 years before the birth of 
 Christ ! To call such a city Greek, to assume that 
 its inhabitants spoke or thought like Greeks, or even 
 
 Primitive 
 pottery not 
 necessarily of 
 significance. 
 
 Proof from 
 difference of 
 pottery in case 
 of Troy. 
 
 Schliemann's 
 Troy much 
 older than the 
 Iliad.
 
 28 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Lesson to be 
 leai in il from 
 Schliemann's 
 Troy. 
 
 Great antiquity 
 of civilization 
 round the 
 /Egean Sea. 
 
 Importance of 
 this for the 
 generation that 
 followed. 
 
 Mvcenrv. 
 
 were the spiritual forefathers of Homer's Trojans, is 
 beyond the demands to be made upon any reasonable 
 imagination.* We may lay this piece of evidence aside, 
 with one lesson, however, deeply engraved upon our 
 minds. As civilization of some kind was vastly older 
 upon the Hill of Troy than any of us had imagined, 
 so the site of every historic city is likely to have been 
 the habitation of countless generations. When once 
 settled with local gods, and surrounded by the tombs of 
 ancestors, it is not likely to have been abandoned in 
 spite of siege and capture, of massacre and conflagration. 
 A remnant of the population always escapes from such 
 catastrophes and reoccupies the place, though the fire 
 and blood-stained ruins must be levelled for new founda- 
 tions. Thus we may assume that the great majority 
 of cities in Greece and Asia Minor, which were cele- 
 brated in history, were built upon layers and layers 
 of older debris, through which we may reach, in the 
 case of hill fortresses, to the original rock. The civiliza- 
 tion round the y£gean is therefore very old, older than 
 any of us had suspected thirty years ago, and the 
 sudden and marvelous bloom of Greek life came after 
 millenniums of obscure and forgotten effort. Obscure 
 and forgotten indeed, but not for that reason without its 
 effect. For if the race was not changed, there grew 
 up in these remote and unchronicled ages the habit 
 of work, the sense of striving after higher ends, the long- 
 ing for progress, which produced their secret effects 
 upon future generations. This is the mystery of atavism. 
 When we come to the remains of Mycenae, we are 
 nearer to our subject. No doubt there is at Troy a 
 stratum yet to be examined more minutely, which will 
 
 •This is the sort of anachronism perpetrated by Professor Ebers in his popu- 
 lar novel " Uarda." He makes the Greek adventurers of the time of Ramses 
 II. (1350 B. C.) as refined and advanced as the Greeks of the fifth century B. C.
 
 Introductory. 29 
 
 correspond with what we shall now discuss. But as yet 
 Dr. Dorpfeld has found too little to be of any use for 
 our purpose. The reader will wonder how we can 
 speak with any confidence about the manners of a 
 society so little known, so little suspected till the revela- 
 tions of Dr. Schliemann's spade. Let us take up the 
 evidence of pottery. Look at the few specimens of Evidence from 
 painted vases in Schliemann's book. You will see at 
 once the family likeness to the archaic pots found at 
 Athens and other places dating from the sixth century 
 before Christ. Not only are the costumes of the war- 
 riors analogous, but the drawing of the figures, the rude 
 attempts to represent violent action, the utter ignorance 
 and disregard of what we consider beauty of face and 
 figure. Look again at the carved reliefs upon the 
 sepulchral stones found over the graves at Mycenae. 
 You will see things not very dissimilar in the old reliefs 
 found at Sparta, and now preserved in the interesting 
 museum of that town. A strong family likeness is 
 there. A closer examination of the palace of Tiryns 
 showed likewise that the general arrangements of the paiaceat 
 
 . 1 • 1 tt -i • ._• Tirvns similar 
 
 rooms were such as agreed with Homeric descriptions, to Homeric 
 The one very distinctive feature of the house building pa ' 
 was the construction of the doorways. This was the 
 model of every early temple doorway in historical 
 Greece. These suggestions are enough for the moment 
 to show the reader what I mean by saying that we may 
 now fairly consider not Hissarlik, but the remains of 
 Tiryns and Mycenae, together with the tombs of Menidi, 
 Spata, etc., as belonging to the direct forerunners of 
 the Homeric heroes. 
 
 I say direct, not immediate, for in my opinion there Two stages of 
 was a long progress of culture in Greece during this pre- traceabie°at 
 historic time. There are two distinct stages at Mycenae. * >CI
 
 3o 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Evidence from 
 the tombs. 
 
 The " bee- 
 hive " tombs. 
 
 This is proved by the tombs. Those recently found by 
 Schliemann were deep shaft-graves, with inadequate 
 room to lay out the dead, which were huddled or 
 crushed into their resting place, though covered with 
 gold masks and piled about with precious cups and 
 ornaments of gold, silver, and bronze. Never was there 
 a more painful contrast between the treatment of the 
 actual body and the splendid gifts which were lavished 
 upon it. These people seem to have built their walls of 
 small rubble, without finish or elegance, though their 
 vessels of gold and silver, and their ornaments, were 
 both costly and highly finished. Those of the gold and 
 silver cups, the famous cow's head, and a vase of alabas- 
 ter, are as good as they would be in any age of Greek 
 history. Let us call these people for convenience' sake 
 the Dynasty of the Perseids or descendants of Perseus, 
 whom Greek legend makes the earliest occupant of 
 Mycenae. But these according to the legend were ousted 
 by the Pelopids, which name we may apply to the sec- 
 ond race of very superior builders, who made the great 
 ''bee-hive" tombs, known as the Treasury of Atreus 
 and its fellows. These tombs have all been rifled long 
 ago, so that we cannot tell what ornaments the Pelopids 
 laid beside the dead in their roomy and stately chambers. 
 But from the fact that they covered the inside surface 
 of the dome with plates of polished bronze, and from the 
 fact that analogous tombs at Orchomenus and at 
 Amyclae (south of Sparta) have shown us graceful 
 monuments, and at least one gold cup with designs 
 good enough for the Italian Renaissance, we may con- 
 clude that as in building they far exceeded the Perseids, 
 so in the elegance of their household vessels they were 
 at least their equals. To excel even the older cups 
 w< »uld not be easy.
 
 Introductory. 
 
 3i 
 
 In one respect both Perseids and Pelopids are silent 
 forever. They possessed neither the art of writing nor 
 the art of coining. Believing as I did that both Mycenae 
 and Tiryns were destroyed to consolidate Argos, and 
 that this happened in the eighth or early seventh century 
 B. C, I had predicted to Schliemann that he would 
 find neither inscriptions nor coins, and so it turned out. 
 Had the story told by late writers and copied into 
 modern books been true,* there must infallibly have 
 been both found in plenty at either place. There was 
 in fact a bag of late Tirynthian coins found by Schlie- 
 mann which dated from a poor little re-settlement in 
 Macedonian days. But alas ! so far as we can safely 
 infer, the splendor of both these royal abodes was 
 recorded in no written form. If ancient bards sang 
 their praises, they were only like the earliest Celtic 
 bards of medieval days, who could remember and recite, 
 but could not write. We are therefore left to imagine 
 what we can of the life of these earliest civilized occu- 
 pants of Hellenic soil from the material remains of their 
 architecture and their art, and from the far-off echoes 
 which this long past period carried onward into Homeric 
 song. For, as we already insisted, the loci around which 
 the later bards fixed their story were all the actual seats 
 of an ancient and splendid royalty. 
 
 Perhaps the first thing which strikes us when we 
 examine the designs and workmanship on the palaces, 
 or in the matchless Mycenaean room in the museum at 
 Athens, is that there are unmistakable evidences of 
 foreign influence. The occurrence of an ostrich egg, 
 probably adorned and used as a cup, in the remains of 
 Mycenae would in itself put the matter beyond doubt. 
 
 *I mean the citations from Diodorus and Strabo and the fact that so-called 
 Mycenaeans and Tirynthians (of course exiles) fought with the patriotic side in 
 the Persian wars. 
 
 Writing and 
 
 coinage 
 
 unknown. 
 
 Lack of 
 written records. 
 
 Echoes of this 
 earlier civiliza- 
 tion in Homer. 
 
 Ostrich egg at 
 Mycenae.
 
 3 2 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Evidence from 
 
 decorative 
 
 design. 
 
 Oriental influ- 
 ence. 
 
 Route of 
 traders de- 
 termined by 
 pottery in the 
 islands. 
 
 But there is a great deal more than this stray importa- 
 tion. One of the most notable designs for ornamenting 
 surfaces at Mycenae is what many call the repeated 
 spiral. This very pattern I found on the ceiling of a 
 rock temple or shrine at Kasr Ibrim, and again as the 
 pattern on a queen's dress in the Horus Temple at Wadi 
 Haifa (both in Nubia). These temples date from the 
 Eighteenth Dynasty of Pharaohs — from Amenophis II. 
 and Tothmes III. We may therefore safely ascribe 
 this widespread design to the fifteenth century B. C, 
 and as it is not reasonably to be assumed that the 
 builders of Mycenae carried it to Egypt, we may con- 
 clude that Egyptian workmen brought it to Greece. 
 Thus the ancient legend which tells us that Danaus 
 came with his daughters from Egypt to Argos finds its 
 unexpected support in fact, and we are taught not to 
 despise the general indications given us by popular 
 tradition. But as these stories also tell us of Cadmus 
 coming from Phenicia, so there are oriental — Assyrian 
 and Syrian — influences to be seen in the Mycenaean 
 designs, especially upon the seal rings which seem to 
 me simple importations. 
 
 Even the route by which merchandise came from the 
 East in those days can now be determined. Along a 
 particular row of islands, reaching from Argos to 
 Rhodes, are still found frequent specimens of that 
 special pottery called Mycenaean, which prove that this 
 was the track of an ancient commerce. But what is far 
 more remarkable, as showing the force of old traditions 
 in the Iliad, is the fact that this very series of islands, 
 which would naturally belong to the Trojan confederacy, 
 send their troops to fight under Agamemnon's banner. 
 We may therefore assume with certainty that whatever 
 refinement can be imported with delicate and expressive
 
 Introductory. 33 
 
 foreign luxuries, was brought by Phenician or Egyptian 
 ships to the coasts of Hellas. The Phenician traders Traders in the 
 who appear in the Iliad and Odyssey are mere pirates Odyssey. 
 and slave-dealers, who bring foreign wares with them as 
 a cloak to hide a bait to promote their real designs. 
 But when foreign kings ruled at Mycenae these traders 
 were probably of a higher class, and more respectable. 
 From them the natives learned the arts of making 
 delicate pottery, smelting metals, building with cut 
 stone — all of which require considerable skill ; and we 
 can still follow the development of a native art from 
 these beginnings. As regards their political and 
 spiritual condition, we can only tell from the gigantic 
 forts and palaces which they built, from the huge masses 
 of stone which they moved, and from the utter absence 
 of smaller dwellings of importance, around the king's 
 seat, that these people lived under a despotism, which Evidences of 
 made them perform heavy tasks, and which put their 
 lives and property into a master's hand. There was a 
 time of which Aristotle still read in his Iliad — the 
 Alexandrian critics since expunged it — "in my hand is 
 life and death," which is an echo of this earlier condi- 
 tion. The Agamemnon known in our Iliad could hardly 
 have dared to assert this right. But he does offer to 
 hand over cities with their inhabitants as a gift to 
 another chieftain — a state of things long after common 
 in the Persian Empire, then in the kingdoms of Alexan- 
 der's successors. This actual disposing of men's 
 allegiance with their property is another distinct echo of 
 the old absolute sovereignty. 
 
 Aristotle indeed thought that the earliest monarchies Earliest Greek 
 in Greece, bestowed on foreigners who had brought hereditary S 
 useful arts into Greece, were both hereditary and limited AristSief t0 
 in their privileges. To make a monarchy hereditary is
 
 34 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 the instinct of all early societies. Whether the limita- 
 tion of privileges was indeed an original feature, and not 
 a boon extorted by long agitation and by taking advan- 
 tage of foreign help, I greatly doubt. 
 
 It remains to say something about the religion of this 
 Mycenaean civilization. There are, so far as I know, 
 only two means of attaining to the slightest knowledge 
 on this point. How indeed can a people who had no 
 records, who have not left one word of writing, who 
 were observed by no external witness, tell us aught 
 concerning their inner life ? The only two possible 
 scraps of evidence are: (i) the idols which we find 
 among their household stuff, like the gods which Rachel 
 concealed from Laban (Genesis XXXI. 30, 35) ; (2) 
 the treatment of the dead. As regards the first we have 
 from Troy a large number of the rude owl-headed deity 
 whom Schliemann identified with Glankopis Athene. 
 He advanced to a new translation of Glaukopis, which we 
 had rendered gray-eyed, declaring it to be owl-headed* 
 
 But we already found that the Troy of Schliemann is 
 something long antecedent to the Troy of Homer, or 
 even of the Mycenaean period. In the remains of 
 Mycenae and of Tiryns I am not aware that little idols 
 are at all so frequent, but still there are not wanting 
 little images used probably as fetishes or amulets, which 
 would naturally imply a very low state of spiritual 
 development, did we not see even in modern times 
 amulets and charms of various kinds used in the same 
 way as the fetish of the savage. t If we had the re- 
 
 * As my readers are not supposed to understand Greek. I need not enter 
 upon an explanation of this difference in the rendering of a simple, undisputed 
 word. But they may believe me that it is so, and that the word may have 
 passed from the latter meaning to the former. 
 
 fAsan illustration of the fact that such superstition is not confined to the 
 ignorant and uneducated, I may state that I have quite recently known a 
 woman born of educated parents, and married to a member of the British Par- 
 liament, who put an amulet ol" this kind on the leg of her child, who had just 
 been bitten by a dog.
 
 Introductory 
 
 35 
 
 Evidence from 
 the tombs. 
 
 Significance of 
 treasures 
 buried with the 
 dead. 
 
 mainder of their worship, it might possibly be found on 
 a higher level than this very widespread superstition. 
 
 The evidence from the treatment of the dead is far 
 more important and suggestive. The precious tombs 
 discovered by Schliemann at Mycenee were deep under 
 the earth, at the bottom of shafts over which there were 
 gravestones with sculptures on them, and these again 
 inclosed by a circle of stones, to mark the sacred place. 
 At the bottom of these shafts, some of them twenty-six 
 feet deep, the dead were found, as I have already told, 
 crushed into resting places too narrow for them but 
 covered with gold masks, and with many precious cups 
 and ornaments of gold, silver, and bronze piled in upon 
 the bodies. The only meaning which such precious 
 offerings to the dead can have is to express the belief 
 that there is some continued existence for the dead ; 
 that the precious things which they had acquired during 
 their lives are still their property, and that it was not 
 only an outward mark of honor from the survivors, but 
 a cause of satisfaction to the dead, to have their most 
 valuable property buried with them. The very contents, Belief in a 
 
 , , • , i 1 i- c ■ i future life. 
 
 therefore, of Schliemann s tombs prove a belief in the 
 existence of man after death. But what is passing 
 strange in the discovery is the crushing of the bodies 
 into a narrow hole, while they covered them with 
 treasure. This treatment seems to be inconsistent, too, 
 with the worship of ancestors, an early form of religion 
 current among most Aryan races. We know of no 
 place for offerings, no altar or shrine to which survivors 
 could have come to honor the dead, unless it be that 
 within the circle of stones over the spot some ceremonies 
 were performed. Though there were traces of burning 
 about some of the bodies, there seems to have been 
 nothing found in the layers of soil over them sufficient
 
 
 
 c; 

 
 Introductory 
 
 37 
 
 to warrant such an inference. But it is possible that 
 Schliemann in throwing all the earth he excavated over 
 the great wall which here incloses the fort, has covered 
 up some evidences of an approach from the outside, 
 where the offerer could come close to the tombs from a 
 far lower level. This point is still unsettled. What is 
 however quite clear and not a little surprising is that the 
 second race who built there adopted a wholly different 
 mode of burial, and one specially adapted for the 
 worship of ancestors. 
 
 The famous "bee-hive" building, made of huge hewn 
 stones, known as the Treasure-house of Atreus (the 
 father of Agamemnon) and so often described,* was 
 of course no treasure-house in the direct sense, but the 
 spacious house of a deceased king, in which many 
 treasures were originally laid. The appearance of this 
 great construction leads us to believe that in an inner 
 rude chamber the actual bones were laid, while the large 
 dome-shaped hall, with a broad way leading to its mas- 
 sive portal, its walls adorned with shining plaques of 
 bronze, was intended for those services and offerings 
 whereby the living expressed their respect and affection 
 for the dead. There was probably no god worshiped 
 with such circumstance at Mycenae as this deceased 
 king, whoever he was ; but the discovery of several 
 other less splendid chambers of the same form by Schlie- 
 mann shows that it was no isolated labor, but a mere 
 instance of a well-established custom. The tomb of the 
 king has been long since rifled ; no trace of its splendor 
 but the massive and careful construction, some remains 
 of its bronze plating within, and of the careful carving of 
 its portal ornaments is left to us. But these are enough 
 
 *See illustration, on opposite page, for a similar " bee-hive " building ; and 
 for the ''Treasury of Atreus" see Professor Tarbell's "History of Greek 
 Art," Figs. 26 and 27. 
 
 Later change 
 in mode of 
 burial. 
 
 Treasure-house 
 of Atreus. 
 
 Splendor of its 
 construction.
 
 3$ A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Worshipof to show not only the worship of ancestors as part of the 
 religion of that day, but more generally that interest in 
 the past and in the future which distinguishes the civil- 
 ized man from the savage. The latter, like the beasts 
 that perish, thinks only of the present or at most of the 
 coming winter's store ; it is not till each generation 
 conies to regard itself as the mere life-holder of an en- 
 tailed estate that sordid material cares are postponed to 
 the interest in past, and the interest of future, genera- 
 tions. 
 Cremation It is a matter of great importance that in neither 
 
 pre-Homeric the so-called Perseid or the Pelopid tombs is there 
 any evidence of burning the dead. They are all buried, 
 some with partial embalming, some simply laid in the 
 earth. The Homeric habit of burning {incineration as 
 opposed to inhumation) seems quite foreign to these 
 pre-Homeric people. And this is what we might ex- 
 pect. So long as the dead were suffered to live in the 
 tomb and enjoy the pious offerings placed there periodi- 
 cally for their use, it was obvious that any destruction 
 of that body would seem not only cruel but impious. 
 The first desire of many early races, notably of the 
 Egyptian, has been not to destroy, but to perpetuate the 
 body, as the necessary condition of any, even the faintest 
 and vaguest, future life. 
 
 But in the Homeric epoch other notions seemed to 
 Change of view prevail. Man had learned to separate the soul, or 
 p n erio°d meriC shade, from the body, and to find for it an abode far 
 from the tomb, in another world, where all the gnat 
 company of dead meet together, and so could receive 
 the rewards and punishment that had not been meted 
 out to them justly in this life. This separation then 
 of soul and body was the necessary beginning of the 
 doctrine of future retribution. For so long as the dead
 
 Introductory. 
 
 39 
 
 Imitations of 
 eleventh book 
 of Odyssey. 
 
 lived only in his tomb he might indeed be punished 
 or rewarded by being deprived of, or amply supplied 
 with, food, his arms, ornaments, and slaves, but no 
 interference of higher powers was apprehended. The 
 earliest picture of the next world we know is in a late 
 book (the eleventh) of the Odyssey, and therein the 
 whole society of the dead is gathered into the dusky 
 realms of Pluto, and the "lamentable kingdom." Two 
 of the most magnificent poems in the world, the sixth 
 book of Virgil's ^Eneid, and Dante's Inferno, are de- 
 rived directly from this model. There is, however, 
 evidence that Mycenaean sentiment, which hid the dead 
 in a safe chamber and watched over their preservation 
 with affectionate care, was not ousted by Homer and the 
 epic poets, and was never replaced in the habits of 
 the nation by the funeral pyre and the cinerary urn. It 
 is even probable that this latter fashion was mainly that Burial re- 
 of princes and nobles, many of whom fell in war far from 
 their homes, and whose relations had the means to carry 
 out this costly ceremony. There are traces enough, 
 even in the Homeric poems, of the older fashion. But 
 in later and historical times, we still find the ordinary 
 practice to be burying the dead, and even still placing 
 beside them ornaments, toys, amulets, as if the belief in 
 the future life of the body was not extinct. 
 
 How, indeed, can we call it a belief? The evidences 
 of decay and destruction were but too obvious. It was 
 only a vague hope, a longing to soothe despair, an effort 
 to prolong at least for a time the influence and the mem- 
 ory of the departed. Dreams and ghosts gave color to 
 this hope, and the visits of the dead were even dreaded 
 as omens of evil. Some then may have felt that the 
 burning of the body protected them from this alarming 
 supervision. But this is not the sentiment of civilized 
 
 ordinary 
 practice. 
 
 Reasons for 
 burial rather 
 than cremation.
 
 40 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 mankind. Even now in civilized Europe, the care and 
 Care of tombs, decoration at stated intervals of tombs, the erection of 
 funeral monuments, point to more than a mere record- 
 ing of the place and time when a parent, a child, a 
 friend, was laid in the earth. It recalls those lower and 
 deeper strata of human sentiment lying at the very 
 foundation of our mental constitution and derived from 
 tne primitive beliefs of our long-forgotten ancestors.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE HOMERIC AGE. 
 
 It is a very strange phenomenon that early Greek Early theory ot 
 history appears to us in isolated moments or stages, foGreetf tages 
 each separated from the rest by an almost impenetrable hlstor y- 
 darkness. The palaces which Schliemann discovered 
 point to about the sixteenth century ; the Iliad and 
 Odyssey to the ninth ; the earliest lyric poetry and 
 the aristocratic society that produced it to the early 
 seventh. It used to be a very constant problem to fill 
 up the gaps, and learned men were ready to assume 
 what I hold to be impossible — that after the completion 
 of the epos poetic genius dried up for some centuries till 
 the days of Archilochus. 
 
 We are now in a position to modify considerably these Modem theory 
 cruder theories, and to put before the reader the theory gradual 
 of a more natural and therefore more rational develop- 
 ment. In the first place, we now know that the prehis- 
 toric remains do not come from a single epoch or 
 generation ; that from the rudest of them (Schliemann' s 
 Troy) to the latest, the tombs of Menidi, Spata, and 
 especially Vaphio,* there are centuries of progress. 
 Nor did this age of great stone buildings, of rich im- 
 ported merchandise, of rude native art die out long 
 before the conditions found in the earliest portions of 
 the Homeric poems. The traditions of a great and rich 
 Mycenae and Tiryns were yet fresh ; the voyages of 
 
 ♦The reader will find these tombs discussed either in Schuehhardt 's book or 
 Schliemann, or in the early chapters of Holm's or of Busolt's Greek histories.
 
 42 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Phenician pirate traders still current ; Egypt was still 
 
 known as the real home of enormous wealth and culture. 
 
 Gradual And when we come to the "Homeric Age," here too 
 
 growth of . . 
 
 Homeric Age. we have been taught to discriminate layers or strata 
 in the story ; we have learned to accept its gradual 
 growth, we are no longer obdurate as to the early date 
 of all the books of each poem. Nay, rather, there is 
 every reason to think that the close of the epic age, 
 represented by those cyclic poems that are now lost, 
 came very near the date when Archilochus broke with 
 old tradition, with precedent, with an artificial and effete 
 style, and drew from popular song a deep draught 
 of splendid inspiration. 
 
 What we now have before us is to discuss how far the 
 
 Evidence from Homeric poems, as we have them, with the help of 
 
 Homer and 1 ' 
 
 excavated sites. Hesiod and of material remains, can tell us of the 
 real life and thought of the Greeks now rapidly crystal- 
 lizing into a nationality distinct from Pelasgian, Thra- 
 cian, Macedonian, Illyrian, and though severed into 
 many conflicting societies, yet attaining some unity in 
 language, in religion, and in political ideas. We will 
 not attempt to enter upon the whole Homeric question, 
 one which properly belongs to the history of Greek 
 literature, but we must bring newer researches and con- 
 clusions to bear upon the question : How wide in time 
 is the epoch which these poems represent, and how nar- 
 row is their adherence to real facts ? These poems are 
 
 Homeric poems f , f , . . . -. ..... 
 
 are worksofthe or course works of the imagination. No one will think 
 
 imagination. r ... ...... 
 
 for one moment of seeking any scrap of truth, historical 
 or even physical, in the "Battle of the Gods" (Iliad, 
 Book XX.), nor can we believe that all the Iliad was 
 originally composed upon one short episode of the war, 
 while all its long years of chivalry were laid in oblivion. 
 Both Iliad and Odyssey are clearly a selection from a
 
 Structure of the 
 Iliad. 
 
 The Homeric Age. 43 
 
 great mass of poems about all the wars and adventures iiiad and 
 of a long period — the selection by a genius, and en- selections, 
 dowed with an artistic unity which did not lie in the 
 facts, but in the poet's mind, when he chose the Wrath 
 of Achilles or the Return of Ulysses as the warp which 
 he filled up with his precious and variegated woof. 
 
 This is the view of the question toward which scholars 
 whose minds are open have been gravitating for the 
 last twenty years, and now there is a sort of agreement 
 where there was formerly nothing but bitter and arid 
 controversy. The form in which I stated it some years 
 ago* does not differ in substance from the fuller and 
 clearer exposition of M. Croiset in his admirable treat- 
 ment of the problem, which I here give in abridgment. 
 
 The analysis of the Iliad shows us certain sections 
 of the poem possessing very striking common character- 
 istics. Some of them even form a chronological series, 
 in so far as the events which they describe are relatively 
 determined in time. If then these scenes were related in 
 their natural order, they formed not indeed a complete Iljad made 
 epic poem, but a group of lays resembling it, by bring- ^verfint'o'an 5 
 ing before the hearer the successive moments of the organic whole, 
 same series of actions. A few lines of transition would 
 easily explain, to such as were not intimate with the 
 story, the connection of each piece with the foregoing 
 lay. There are also, however, some scenes, such, for ex- 
 ample, as the parting of Hector and Andromache (Iliad, 
 Book VI.), which the poets were at liberty to insert at 
 any point they thought fit, and very possibly not always 
 at the same moment in the action. 
 
 Such then is the probable earliest condition of the 
 Iliad — isolated, but connected, lays, most of them find- 
 ing a fixed place according to the order of the events, 
 
 * Cf. my " Greek Literature," chapters on Homer in Vol. I.
 
 44 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 others floating among them without any such logical de- 
 termination. Hence those early lays, without producing 
 the Iliad, clearly laid the foundation of that poem. If 
 the actual plot was not bequeathed to those who came 
 after, still the outlines of the plot, or the suggestion of it ( 
 is there — several great scenes forming what Aristotle in 
 his "Poetics" calls an artistic whole, that which has 
 Not a single a beginning', a middle, and an end. This was the 
 
 author, but a ........ ., , , 
 
 series of auth- nucleus which families or guilds oi successive poets ex- 
 panded and completed upon the lines of the original, 
 though with freedom and variety. For it was not in- 
 tended for one long recitation ; each passage was likely, 
 therefore, to retain a certain independence, and might 
 even be inserted to please a particular audience. It is 
 then not the artifice of an arranger or of a committee 
 which has produced the Iliad, but rather the unfettered 
 work of many poets controlled by the greatness of an 
 early creation of genius which they desired to complete 
 and perfect by further developments. The unity was 
 
 Unity of the there from the outset, but only became clear when 
 
 accounted for. the original sketch was filled in. To use a metaphor : 
 The first poet had raised upon the great territory of 
 Greek legend three or four splendid towers to mark out 
 the domain which he claimed for himself ; his successors 
 joined these towers by new constructions, more richly 
 decorated, but not grander than the original work, then 
 the remaining gaps were stopped by a simple wall. So 
 in time the whole was inclosed to form a single castle 
 and city, which men called the Iliad.* 
 
 Such being the structure of the poems, what must we 
 
 Homeric poems expect from them as genuine evidences of civilization ? 
 
 oviSon^ I' 1 the oldest lays there will be the bard's opinion about 
 
 •Abridged from Croiset's " Histoire de !:i Litterature Grecque," I., Chapter 
 HI-. * 5-
 
 The Homeric Age. 
 
 45 
 
 the heroes whom he sings and the society in which they 
 lived, glorified more or less according as the voice 
 of tradition told him of bygone splendor, and his im- 
 agination led him to enhance the valor and the virtue of 
 the princes who were his patrons. But the spiritual 
 ground of it all, the principles he acknowledges, the 
 emotions which he respects, the fashions which he 
 pictures — all these are the reflex of his age, and give us 
 a deeper and truer view of the earliest Greek society 
 than any dry chronicle or genealogy. 
 
 In the days when men believed in a simple Homer, Necessary 
 author of both Iliad and Odyssey, not to say of lesser concfption°of r 
 poems, the whole narrative could be regarded in this [andt^ "" 
 light, and so we have many attractive pictures of the 
 age, gathered from all the four corners of these epics. 
 But now that we know of various layers and additions, 
 of later poets and arrangers, we must be more cautious ; 
 for in the last-born offspring of the epic poets, we must 
 presume a knowledge of the earlier parts, an adherence 
 to them as models, a conscious clothing of the heroes in 
 antique dress and manners — in fact, a certain amount of 
 antiquarianism, which cannot but take from the value of Antiquarianism 
 
 ^ in the poems. 
 
 the evidence, which is now artificially wrought, and not 
 spontaneous.* In no respect is this more manifest than in 
 the dialect, which is in many places clearly artificial, even 
 constructing words upon false analogies and so producing 
 strange forms which can never have been in real use. The 
 whole dialect is composite and artificial, for it is more than 
 likely that lays originally composed in the yEolic dialect Dialect. 
 
 * It is more than likely, as Holm has argued, that it was not till after the so- 
 called Ionic migration that the bards of Smyrna and Miletus began to put 
 together and enlarge primitive legends concerning the ancestors of the colo- 
 nists in their Greek homes. Hence the men of Asia Minor were seeking to 
 describe men and things of some generations earlier in Greece. Features of 
 the later age may often have crept into their descriptions, for what antiquarian, 
 least of all those of an early and unlearned age, has ever been proof against 
 such mistakes?
 
 4-6 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 were transformed into the more fashionable and wide- 
 spread Ionic, to meet the requirements or the taste of 
 Ionic courts. But where the meter resisted the change, 
 the older forms were left embedded in their new sur- 
 roundings, and so produced a language which was once 
 thought a deliberate selection from various local dialects, 
 but which is really an imperfect adaptation of the old to 
 the new, with archaisms, natural and artificial; as it were, 
 an old set of Drydens dealing with an older school of 
 spontaneity not Chaucers, and spoiling them not a little in the process. 
 
 admired by ' 
 
 the Greeks. But to say that even the oldest parts of the poems were 
 the natural song of any primitive bard is to ignore the 
 most vital feature in all Greek art. The spontaneous, 
 the natural as such, was always regarded, in every epoch 
 of Greek life, as merely the untutored and unrefined, 
 and no greater censure could be expressed by any 
 Greek critic than that the producer of a work was an 
 autodidact — a self-taught man.* 
 
 The whole structure of the stately hexameter, or 
 Homeric meter, shows it to be an artificial growth, 
 probably originating among the priests of Apollo at 
 Delphi. The very scansion by quantity instead of 
 accent (for then, as now, the Greek spoke according to 
 accent), marks a starting point of artificiality which 
 Greek poetry never laid aside. There are vestiges of 
 older and simpler meters in the songs of the people ; we 
 must assume that at some definite period not long 
 anterior to the earliest Homeric lays, hexameter verse 
 was adopted as the fittest medium for musical recita- 
 
 D ... tions. If, as I have intimated, this change came from a 
 
 Possible ' ' ° 
 
 !n"sts Ce ° f school of priests, and priests in the service of Apollo, we 
 
 Meter. 
 
 * I beg the reader to note this assertion particularly ; we shall have occasion 
 to return to it many times in the course of this book. It is quite opposed to 
 the vanity of modern life, which often professes to believe that natural genius 
 can produce great and finished results in art and literature.
 
 The Homeric Age. 47 
 
 can also understand the deliberate abstention of the 
 poets from mentioning old superstitions, ancient wor- 
 ships such as those of ancestors, and their eagerness to 
 bring the whole hierarchy of the newer Olympian gods "°"^' ^"oS" 
 before their hearers. In this sense the words of Herod- °g>- 
 otus would receive their fullest interpretation, when he 
 says that Homer and Hesiod made the theology of the 
 Greeks, and assigned to the several gods their styles 
 and attributes. Unless these gods were of recent 
 origin, such a task would be far beyond any poet or 
 even school of poets. But if the adventures of heroes 
 came to be intertwined with the influence of the gods of 
 Olympus, we can understand that the popularity of the 
 former would accrue to the latter, and so the epic poetry 
 would cause local gods and demons, local worships and 
 superstitions, to be forgotten for the new and fashionable 
 pantheon of Mount Olympus. 
 
 We might indeed suppose that the older and more General 
 primitive lays would show evidences of a ruder society Homeric ° f 
 than the later work with which they are now combined, P° ems - 
 and it might occur to some learned man to sever the 
 component parts, and examine them from this point of 
 view. But such labor would, I think, be lost. For the 
 man of genius, called Homer if you like, who welded 
 into unity the Iliad, or the Odyssey, was surely artist 
 enough to produce a general harmony among the parts, 
 and give them all that general character which has im- 
 posed upon many centuries as the work of a single mind. 
 We must therefore be content to take the poems as they 
 stand, and draw our earliest picture of really Greek Cautiontobe 
 civilization from the epic poems as we have them, with usf^hemas 
 the general warning that they are composed by men 
 who lived some generations later than the historical 
 basis of the story, or the patriarchal royalties which they 
 
 evidence.
 
 48 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 describe, and so many evidences of a late and even 
 decaying society may be surprised among the descrip- 
 tions of what the poet thought the morning of Greek 
 life. 
 
 In this respect the Odyssey has a flavor far different 
 Spirit of from the Iliad. Detailed descriptions of bloody wounds 
 
 e^fromlliadr cease to play a prominent part; the shock of battle is 
 merely stated as a fact — "All day we fought upon the 
 shore, but on the evening came, we were worsted and 
 were driven to our ships, losing many of our comrades." 
 This is told as in a narrative where the adventures of 
 travel afford the leading interest. It is easy to see that 
 now the spirit of trading adventure was rising among the 
 Rise of trade. nation ; the exploration of distant lands, the search for 
 wealth across the stormy seas amid romantic dangers, 
 fascinated the higher classes, who could not brook the 
 shabby and confined life of the peasant, as portrayed in 
 Hesiod. " Cette race, qui ont fait du commerce une 
 poesie," a French writer exclaims, are those who in- 
 spired, and who delighted in, the Odyssey. But then 
 the home virtues are also put forward ; the solid ad- 
 vantage of having an hereditary chief who is a father to 
 his people ; the dangers of aristocratic anarchy when the 
 king is from home ; the valuable check of public feeling 
 upon the lawless nobles, even though the poet will not 
 admit that it had any legal force. 
 
 With all these features, which lead us to the threshold 
 of aristocratic days, when monarchy was falling into old 
 age and democracy was not yet weaned, the suitors of 
 Penelope had their counterpart in many a state, till their 
 Antinous or Eurybates got the people to join him, and 
 massacred the rest as Ulysses had done, but as a 
 tica^dcoT 1 " 5 ' usurper, not as a legitimate king. But with these politi- 
 ceptionofhfe. ca | revo i ut i ons come also the bitter reflections upon the
 
 The Homeric Age. 
 
 49 
 
 pathos and the dolor of life — the thought that the age of 
 gold is gone by, that the gods no longer walk in the 
 garden in the cool of the evening ; that strength and 
 beauty are fading from among men, and that older and 
 better days are giving way to a stern and pitiless age, 
 when the struggle for life and survival of the fittest 
 replace the favor and the wrath of gods that can be 
 appeased by human prayer and sacrifice. These are the 
 considerations with which I now propose to introduce 
 the observations I made long ago in my ' ' Social Life in 
 Greece," in the hope that my readers will refer to that 
 book for details which must here be omitted owing to 
 the wider scope and consequent limitations of space 
 imposed upon me. 
 
 Homer introduces us to a very exclusive caste society, in 
 which the key to the comprehension of all the details depends 
 upon one leading principle — that consideration is due to the 
 members of the caste, and even to its dependents, but that 
 beyond its pale even the most deserving are of no account save 
 as objects of plunder. So the Homeric chieftain behaves even 
 in battle with some consideration to his fellow chieftain ; in 
 peace and in ordinary society he treats him with the most 
 delicate courtesy and consideration. To his wife and to the 
 wives of his friends he behaves with similar politeness, though 
 in a less degree, and with a strong sense of their inferiority. To 
 his own slaves, who are as it were dignified by being attached to 
 him, he conducts himself with consideration, as he does even 
 to his horses and his dogs for the same reason. But there is 
 evidence enough that the stranger who was not a guest friend, str a"gers and 
 and the free laborer who was unattached to his household — 
 these, as well as all women not belonging directly to the 
 governing classes, were treated with reckless brutality, and in 
 disregard of the laws of justice and mercy. A few illustrations 
 on each of these points will be sufficient to establish the prin- 
 ciple, and so give us a clue to gathering up details under its 
 special heads. 
 
 The Greeks and Romans always laid great stress on the 
 
 Exclusiveness 
 of Homeric 
 society. 
 
 Brutality to
 
 5° 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Manners at 
 table. 
 
 Simplicity. 
 
 Barbarous pro- 
 fusion and 
 sameness of 
 food. 
 
 Temperate use 
 of wine. 
 
 Bards at feasts. 
 
 habits of the table as indicative of civilization, and it was 
 specially noted of such mythical humanizers as Orpheus, that 
 they had induced men to improve the tone and manners of 
 their feasting. The Greeks of historic times not only con- 
 trasted themselves in this respect with their semi-barbarous 
 neighbors, but even (as we shall see) estimated the compara- 
 tive culture of the Greek cities by this sensitive social test. 
 From this aspect, then, the Greeks of Homer and of Hesiod 
 occupy a very definite position. The appointments of their 
 feasts seem simple, but not unrefined. Each guest generally 
 had a small table to himself well cleansed with sponges, and a 
 special supply of bread. The washing of hands before eating 
 was universal. With the exception of the large cup for mixing, 
 which was often embossed, and the work of a famous artist, 
 we hear of no plate or other valuables to ornament the room. 
 This neat simplicity, however, does not correspond with the 
 extraordinary quantity and rudeness of the food, and the 
 barbarous sameness in the victuals and their preparation. The 
 Achaean heroes seem always ready to join in a meal of great 
 roast joints, and they hardly ever meet on any important 
 occasion without forthwith proceeding to such a repast. Nor 
 do we see any refinement or variety in either cooking or 
 materials. We hear of no vegetables except among the 
 peculiar Lotos-eaters, or offish, except indeed that the latter is 
 mentioned by Menelaus as the wretched sustenance of his 
 starving comrades when wind-bound off the coast of Egypt ! 
 Here is indeed a contrast to the Attic banquet, where large 
 joints were thought coarse and Boeotian, while fish was the 
 greatest and most expensive of luxuries. 
 
 Yet withal the primitive and primitively cooked materials of 
 the banquet, in themselves no better than the "mutton and 
 damper "of the wild Australian squatter, were accompanied 
 by evidences of high refinement and culture. There was ruddy 
 sweet wine, mellowed by age, and esteemed for its bouquet as 
 well as its flavor. And yet, good as the Greeks thought it, 
 they tempered it with water, for drunkenness was in all ages 
 an offense against Greek taste ; it was even by the immoral 
 suitors considered fit for Centaurs, and by later Greeks for 
 Thracians : "to drink in decent measure" was a universal 
 rule of society. There was also present the reciting bard, who 
 aided and was aided by the generous wine in raising the
 
 The Homeric Age. 51 
 
 emotions of the guests to a warmer and loftier pitch, for he sang 
 the deeds of men of old renown, the ancestors and models 
 of the warriors who sat before him at their tables. This was 
 truly the intellectual side of the Homeric banquet, a fore- 
 taste of the ' ' Symposium ' ' of Plato. But the Homeric Greeks 
 were still far below the stage when intellectual conversation, 
 in which all took part, was considered essential to social enjoy- 
 ment ; for the most cultivated of the heroes, Ulysses, describes 
 it as his notion of the highest enjoyment to sit in a row of silent 
 guests and listen to a bard singing, with ample meat and drink 
 upon the table. There were sometimes ladies present also, as women in 
 we see in the case of Helen and Arete at their respective courts, JJjjjJgJ 
 and the strong intellect and high qualities of such ladies are 
 plainly seen in the leading part which they take in the con- 
 versation. 
 
 The current news of the day seems to have been the chief 
 topic, whenever strangers were present, and we can imagine 
 the eagerness with which men inquired concerning absent 
 friends, when they had no other means of hearing of their 
 welfare. So much was the want of regular communication felt 
 that wandering beggars evidently attained an importance 
 similar to that of the beggars and also of the pedlars in Scott's 
 novels, who combine with the trade of selling goods that of 
 carrying news, and were even at times employed as confidential 
 messengers. These vagrants, in Homer's day, either carried wandering 
 or invented news, and obtained their living in reward for it. beggars 3 " 
 Thus Ulysses, in this disguise, asks his swineherd what sort of 
 man his lost master was, perhaps he may have met him in his 
 wanderings. And the swineherd replies : 
 
 " It were vainly striven, 
 Old man, with news to cheer his wife and child, 
 Oft needy wandering men, to fraud much given, 
 Have for a lodging many lies compiled : 
 These far too much whileome have my dear queen beguiled. 
 
 " Such she treats tenderly, enquiring all, 
 And in heart-bitterness doth weep and wail, 
 As should a wife whose lord far off doth fall. 
 Thou too, old man, wouldst quickly forge some tale ; 
 But as for him, long since his life did fail ; 
 Dogs must have torn him, and wild birds of prey ;
 
 52 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Primitive hos- 
 pitality decay- 
 ing in Homeric 
 times. 
 
 Presents had 
 no sentimental 
 value. 
 
 ility of 
 Menelaus. 
 
 Or, as the dead form drifted with the gale, 
 Fishes devoured him, and his bones this day, 
 Wrapt in the cold sea-sand, lie moldering far away."* 
 
 In so similar a state of society to that of old Scotland, I fancy 
 that the Phenician traders may have corresponded somewhat 
 to the pedlars, as the beggars were so analogous. The 
 Homeric beggars do not, however, seem to have made so 
 much money as those of Scotland and Ireland in the last 
 century. 
 
 The great courtesy and hospitality shown to strangers, even 
 of the lowest type, nevertheless appear to me rather the 
 remains of a more primitive state of things than the natural 
 outburst of Homeric generosity, for even in the ideal society 
 depicted by the poets there are many passages where the close 
 shrewdness and calculating generosity of the Greek mind break 
 out naively enough through the curtain of nobler feeling which 
 only disguised them. I lay no stress on the absence of that 
 modern sentiment which values a gift as a keepsake, and will 
 not part with it even for greater value. The Homeric heroes 
 readily gave away the gifts of respected guest friends. But 
 this was probably because the absence of coined money had 
 not made the broad distinction now universally felt between the 
 market value and the sentimental value of a present. The 
 main Homeric personalities consisted of arms, cups, and 
 ornaments. These were obtained by barter, and taken in pay- 
 ment, and so even the gifts of friends were not considered in 
 any different light from a mere money present. 
 
 But in other points hospitality was, I think, decaying. 
 Though every chief was bound to receive a stranger, and 
 though the more noble of them did so readily, yet there are 
 hints of some compunctions in accepting hospitality, and some 
 merit claimed by the host for granting it. Mentor and Tele- 
 machus rise up from Nestor's feast, and intend to return to 
 their ship, when the old hero lays hold of them, and exclaims, 
 " Zeus and tin- other immortals forbid that you should leave me 
 and go to your ships as if I were a man short of clothing, or 
 poor, who had no wrappers and rugs for himself and his guests 
 to sleep in comfortably." And so when Telemachus arrives 
 at Sparta, Menelaus's confidential servant asks, "Tell me, 
 * Worsley's translation.
 
 The Homeric Age. 53 
 
 shall we take round the horses of these noble strangers, or 
 send them on to some one else, who may befriend them?" 
 But Menelaus answers in great anger : " You used not to be a 
 fool ; but now you are talking silly nonsense, like a child : as if 
 we ourselves had not before reaching home enjoyed the hospi- 
 tality of many ! " Both Nestor and Menelaus were gentlemen 
 of the old school ; so that when the question is raised, they 
 hesitate not in their answer. But another hero speaks out more 
 naively : "Of course you must receive a stranger, when he 
 comes ; but who would be so foolish as to invite a man of his 
 own accord, except it were a skilled artisan " — who of course 
 would more than repay his host by his services. 
 
 We hear too that the presents generously bestowed by the shrewdness 
 kings were recovered by them subsequently from their people, Greek?"' 
 and yet this homely arrangement seems fairer and more 
 satisfactory than the habit of modern times, when people give 
 their kings a large income beforehand, in the vain expectation 
 that they will spend part of it at least in hospitality. The 
 Homeric Greeks were too shrewd and wide-awake a people to 
 sow where they did not reap, and the increase of communica- 
 tion, and consequent frequency of visitors, were sure to close 
 quickly the open door, and bar the right of entering unasked. 
 The anxious precautions of Ulysses on entering the house of 
 Alcinous, so similar to the acts of the exile Themistocles at the 
 hearth of the Molossian king, show that there was risk, even in 
 peace, for travelers ; and it may be that the generous hospitality 
 of the nobler Homeric chiefs was even then not the general 
 rule, but the mark of a higher and more refined nature. So 
 we find the elder Miltiades, in historical times, sitting at his „ .. ... 
 
 ' ' & Hospitality not 
 
 open door, in contrast to the general selfishness of his universal. 
 
 neighbors. Homeric politeness seems, then, in this respect 
 
 also, a forerunner of the later Greek courtesy, that it consisted 
 
 rather in good taste and in tact than in reckless extravagance 
 
 or in self-denial for the sake of others. Thus we find Homeric 
 
 men avoiding to press an unwilling guest — a piece of good 
 
 taste unknown to many of our middle classes ; and evading all 
 
 unpleasant subjects— a piece of tact requiring subtlety of mind 
 
 and quickness of perception. The medieval baron or the old Tact of 
 
 Irish squire would readily fight a duel for a friend from mere Homeric men. 
 
 politeness, they would not have comprehended the points on 
 
 which the Greeks laid stress.
 
 54 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Fine feeling 
 and fairness. 
 
 Court of 
 
 Menelaus. 
 
 Influence of 
 women. 
 
 Freedom of 
 women. 
 
 Indeed, no one can read the account of the games in the Iliad 
 or that of the courts of Alcinous and of Menelaus in the 
 Odyssey, without being greatly struck with the gentleness and 
 grace of the ideal life portrayed by the Homeric poets. The 
 modern betting man will be surprised to see the open and 
 gentlemanly way in which the races and other contests were 
 conducted. Of course there was a little jostling and some 
 cheating, especially on the part of the gods who befriended 
 each competitor ; but then we find a man's word believed that 
 he had no unfair intention — a piece of open dealing which 
 would hardly answer among the habitues of our race-courses. 
 Above all, the conduct of Achilles is marked throughout by the 
 finest and kindliest feeling ; indeed, in no other part of the 
 poem does he appear to nearly such advantage. 
 
 The court of Menelaus is a worthy counterpart to this picture. 
 No doubt this hero is always represented in a very favorable 
 point of view socially, and Helen is acknowledged to have 
 charms not only of person, but of intellect, beyond all other 
 women, so that this court may be regarded as the poet's ideal 
 of refinement and politeness. But admitting this, we must also 
 admit that the ideal is very high. There is nothing inferior to the 
 tone of society in our best circles in this picture. The presence 
 of Helen among the company, her luxurious elegance, her quick 
 tact and ability — all these features show how fully the poets 
 appreciated the influence of female society in softening the rude 
 manners of the pugnacious heroes. So at the court of Alcin- 
 ous we are especially introduced to Queen Arete as a lady 
 honored by her husband above the honor given to other ladies 
 by their husbands, and greeted with kindly words by her peo- 
 ple whenever she went out through the city, "for she was not 
 wanting in good sense and discretion, and acted as a peace- 
 maker, allaying the quarrels of men." 
 
 We have thus been passing insensibly from the Homeric 
 hero's treatment of his fellows to his treatment of the ladies of 
 his family. The cases I have already cited show how high was 
 the position of married women in the royal houses. The 
 charming portrait of the Princess Nausicaa corresponds with it 
 perfectly — and in all these ladies' habits we find the greatest 
 liberty of demeanor, and all absence of silly jealousy on 
 the part of their relatives. Arete, as we have just seen, was 
 in the habit of going, apparently on foot, through her city.
 
 The Homeric Ape. 55 
 
 Nausicaa thinks that if her gossiping townsmen see her passing 
 through the streets with so handsome a stranger as Ulysses, 
 they will at once set him down as her intended husband, 
 and censure her behind backs for despising all her Phaeacian 
 suitors. And when Ulysses has apparently forgotten her, and 
 she feels somewhat heartsore about him, she does not think it 
 unmaidenly to lie in wait for him where he cannot pass her, and 
 gently cast up to him that though now honored and courted by 
 all the nation, yet to her he once owed his rescue from want 
 and hunger. These and many other passages show that 
 the Homeric ladies enjoyed a liberty unknown in good society 
 at Athens, though perhaps allowed in other parts of Greece ; 
 and it will be a question for special discussion hereafter, why 
 the Athenians, of all Greeks, retrograded most from the higher Later retro . 
 attitude of the epic age. More especially, the abduction of ^| s ^?^ n g f 
 Helen and the seduction of Clytemnestra seem to imply a very 
 free intercourse among the sexes, even to admit of such 
 attempts being made. From this point of view ^Eschylus felt 
 with a true instinct the independent and free attitude of a reign- 
 ing queen when her husband was from home. So Penelope 
 entertains even wandering strangers, and has long interviews 
 with them, in the hope of hearing of Ulysses, and there 
 was nothing unseemly in doing so. Sophocles, in his dialogues 
 between Clytemnestra and Electra, was misled by the customs 
 of his day, and did not feel the epic freedom of women 
 sufficiently. It is also important to note that this liberty was 
 not the privilege of the higher classes, as might possibly be 
 supposed ; for a remarkable simile says, "Why should we now 
 revile one another, like women who in some angry quarrel go 
 into the middle of the street and abuse each other with re- 
 proaches both true and false ? " We shall find the same license 
 implied in many of the lyric poets. 
 
 But I do not feel at all sure whether the very mild censure Leniencyshown 
 expressed against infidelity is to be regarded as a trustworthy to immorality, 
 reflex of the morals of the times. No doubt the painful facts 
 which I have noticed above must have blunted the moral sense 
 of men on these delicate relations. Though we nowadays rate 
 personal purity so highly that the loss of it by misfortune 
 is hardly less excused by society than its abandonment through 
 passion, yet in the Homeric times, when the compulsory in- 
 fidelity of a wife as a prisoner of war was openly recognized,
 
 56 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Poet's conces- 
 sions to women 
 in his audience. 
 
 Indulgent view 
 of Helen's con- 
 duct. 
 
 Clytemnestra. 
 
 and in no way reprehended, this callous attitude may have re- 
 flected its influence upon cases of voluntary sin, and so they 
 came to be regarded with much indulgence. All this is pos- 
 sible, and may be allowed, I think, some weight. So also the 
 open concubinage allowed to married men often afforded a 
 plea for retaliation and a justification in the case of crime. 
 
 But yet, after all these allowances, I think we must still 
 attribute the most important reason for the apparent leniency 
 with which the adultery of princesses is regarded to the poet's 
 own social position, and to the audience before whom he sang. 
 Doubtless noble ladies were present at his songs ; he owed 
 to their favor many precious gifts, and perhaps a comfortable 
 retreat in the precincts of the palace. It was necessary then to 
 treat them, as he does the kings, with peculiar leniency, and to 
 set down their delinquencies to the special temptations of the 
 gods, rather than to their own wickedness. 
 
 It was, I think, for this part of his audience that the poet in- 
 serted the list of celebrated ladies whom Ulysses met in the 
 lower regions. I hardly think the male part of the audience 
 felt sufficient interest in them. If they did, it would be an 
 additional proof of the prominence of noble ladies in their 
 society, and of the celebrity which a lady of exceptional beauty 
 and rank might attain. There can be no doubt that this passage 
 was very similar to the fuller catalogue of female worthies 
 usually ascribed to Hesiod. 
 
 Despite all that the advocates of Homeric morals may say, 
 we but seldom find throughout the poems a really strong repro- 
 bation of Helen's adultery, even in her own mind. She is 
 never spoken of by others as disgraced in the eyes of men, she 
 is never regarded as a castaway, or unfit to return to her posi- 
 tion in Menelaus's palace. If she had not caused bloodshed 
 and misery by the Trojan War, I see little reason to think 
 that her crime would have been regarded much more seriously 
 than that of Aphrodite in the lay of Demodocus. 
 
 The treatment of Clytemnestra is, I think, equally lenient, if 
 we consider her more violent character and that she added the 
 crime of murder to her adultery. She is specially said to have 
 been of a good disposition, and to have stood firm as long 
 as the old bard whom Agamemnon had left in charge of her 
 was there to advise her. The shade of Agamemnon of course 
 speaks more sharply ; but the advice put into his mouth shows
 
 The Homeric Age. 57 
 
 how strong was the influence and intimate the relation of 
 married women as regards their husbands : "Take care not to 
 speak your whole mind to your wife, but keep back some- 
 thing"— an advice which is sometimes given in the present 
 day by people who pretend to be practical men, and who have 
 never heard of Agamemnon. Noble ladies then came strictly 
 within the limits of the exclusive caste, they were treated with 
 courtesy, and even too great leniency, and occupied a very im- 
 portant position in aristocratic society. 
 
 The very same remark will hold good of the servants at- 
 tached to noble houses. They were often, as we are told, 
 children of good birth, brought up with the children of the 
 family, after they had been bought from the vagrant pirates 
 who had kidnapped them. In fact, there appears to have been Confi dential 
 no traffic such as afterwards existed, which brought slaves of servants, 
 inferior races, usually Thracians and Syrians, into Greek ports. 
 There was, in Homer's day, no feeling of shame at enslaving 
 other Greeks ; nor, indeed, had the Greeks separated them- 
 selves in idea from other nations under the title of Hellenes. 
 So the slave was, or at least might be, socially his master's 
 equal ; and I think the bards take pains to tell us that those 
 who distinguished themselves by fidelity to their masters were, 
 after all, of no common origin (like the wretched day-laborers 
 who worked for hire), but were really, though lowered by mis- 
 fortune, members of the same caste society of which I am now 
 speaking. 
 
 These confidential servants were, perhaps, exceptions ; for 
 we find the faithlessness of the mass of Ulysses's household 
 coupled with the general reflection " that Zeus takes away half 
 a man's virtue in the day that slavery comes upon him." If we 
 wish, however, to see the good side of the matter, we need 
 only read what is told of Euryclea and of Eumceus the swine- Thg swineherd 
 herd, to see how thoroughly they belonged to the family, in the Odyssey, 
 and felt with it against the lower domestics. Eumaeus tells the 
 disguised Ulysses the history of his life, and of his intimate re- 
 lations to Laertes and Anticlea. He speaks with gratitude 
 of the comfortable position which he holds, but nothing can 
 compensate for the exile in which his circumstances have 
 placed him. He longs to see his old patrons, to talk with 
 them, be entertained by them, and to carry back to his country 
 home some token of their affection in the shape of a present.
 
 58 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Euryclea, who plays a leading part through the poem, is clearly 
 one of the mainstays of the house, and so self-devoted in 
 her conduct that we feel hurt with Ulysses as we do nowhere 
 else in the whole poem, when he threatens her, should she 
 Ulysses. be wanting in discretion. There is a curious combination of 
 
 harshness and of high feeling in this passage, which is one 
 of the finest in either poem. The old nurse, recognizing him 
 suddenly by his scar, lets everything fall, and the bath pours 
 over the floor. Overcome by a burst of mingled joy and grief, 
 she cries out and looks round to Penelope, whose eyes are 
 darkened and her mind distracted by Athene that she may not 
 perceive it. Ulysses seizes her by the throat, and whispers ve- 
 hemently : "Nurse, why will you destroy me — you that 
 nursed me at your breast — now that I am come home a way- 
 worn sufferer after twenty years ? But since god has allowed 
 you to recognize me, silence ! and let no one in the house know 
 it, [for if you do] I solemnly declare that I shall not spare you, 
 though you are my nurse, when I am putting to death the 
 other women servants in my house." And she answers: 
 "Child, how could you say such a thing? You know how 
 stanch is my resolve, and that I shall keep the secret, like some 
 hard stone or mass of iron. But when the day of vengeance 
 comes I can tell you who are the women who are dishonoring 
 your house." He answers: "Nurse, why should you tell of 
 them ? 'tis not your business, I shall find them out for myself. 
 Keep you silent and leave it to the gods." Such slaves 
 differed in social standing but little from the free attendants 
 who held a very honorable position in the retinue of the chiefs, 
 just as well-bred gentlemen and men of respectability are now 
 not ashamed to perform menial duties at the courts of kings 
 and governors. 
 
 _ , , , What consideration those received who lived apart from the 
 
 Greek love of ,,,,.. 
 
 revenge. reigning caste, or made themselves obnoxious to it, appears 
 
 painfully enough in the Homeric poems and in Hesiod. If we 
 consider the punishment of his rebellious household by 
 Ulysses, or the fate threatened to Irus by the suitors, if he 
 declines to fight with Ulysses, we see what treatment rebellion 
 or disobedience met at their hands. The Greeks were always 
 a passionate people, and wreaked fierce vengeance to satisfy 
 their wrath. Thus men did not abstain altogether from mutila- 
 tion of the living ; thus Achilles keeps insulting the dead body
 
 The Homeric Age. 59 
 
 of his foe, and thus even queens desire to eat the raw flesh of 
 their enemies. 
 
 But the utterance of Achilles in the nether world is still more , ,., , 
 
 Wretched life of 
 
 remarkable on the position of the poor, who are unattached to hired laborers. 
 the houses of the great. "Talk not to me," says the hero, 
 " of honors among the dead ; I would rather be a hired servant 
 on earth, and that to a poor man, than rule as a king among 
 the shades." In other words, I had rather choose the most 
 wretched existence conceivable on earth than rule beneath. 
 Accordingly the hired servants of poor farmers are selected for 
 this distinction. Is not this hint thoroughly borne out by the 
 state of things we meet in Hesiod ? If the poor-farmer class, 
 though personally free, had such a hard life as he describes, 
 how wretched must have been the hired servant, whom the 
 poet recommends his hearers to turn out as soon as the press 
 of farm work was over. There must, then, have been an 
 abundance of such servants, since they could be again pro- 
 cured at pleasure, and we can conceive how miserable must 
 have been their pay and lodging on Hesiod's farm. 
 
 But the poet Hesiod himself had no enviable days. And of TT . ,, 
 
 ^ J Hesiod s testi- 
 
 all his griefs, undoubtedly the foremost was a patent fact mony to capac- 
 
 seldom alluded to by the polite Homeric bards — the gross cias°. rU mS 
 injustice of the chiefs in deciding lawsuits and their readiness 
 to devour bribes. The fable he adduces implies plainly enough 
 that they felt a supreme contempt for the lower classes and 
 their feelings ; they openly proclaimed the law of might, and 
 ridiculed the lamentations of the ill-used and injured husband- 
 man. The repeated reminder to the people of Ithaca that 
 Ulysses had not thus treated them, but had been considerate to 
 them as a father, almost implies that he was exceptional in his 
 justice. And indeed what could we expect from a society 
 which regarded the Pallas Athene of the Iliad and Odyssey as its 
 ideal of intellect and virtue ? But in Homer we see only the 
 good side (if we except the Ithacan suitors, who are described 
 as quite exceptional) ; in Hesiod we are shown only the bad 
 side. The wretched farmer looked on the whole class of 
 aristocrats as unjust and violent men, that cared not at all 
 about his rights and his interests. 
 
 Perhaps if we strike an average or balance, we shall obtain a 
 fair view of the real state of things in these old days. Possibly 
 the aristocrats who managed the states after the abolition of
 
 6o A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 monarchy in Boeotia were worse than the single kings; for we 
 know nowadays that boards and parliaments have neither 
 conscience nor human feeling, so that they commit injustices 
 almost impossible to individuals, and moreover they are deaf 
 to the appeal that touches a single heart. But it is surely a 
 certain proof of the antiquity of Hesiod's poems, and perhaps 
 the most hopeless feature in his difficulties, that there seems no 
 redress possible for the injustice of the nobles, except the inter- 
 ference of the gods whose duty it is to punish wrong among 
 men. The poet insists that the gods do see these things, and 
 that they will interfere ; but this very insisting, coupled with 
 the desponding tone of the whole book, lets us see plainly 
 Attitude of what was the general feeling of the lower classes. For as to 
 
 scrn'in Hesiod. obtaining help from public opinion of any sort, even from the 
 " harsh talk of the people " in Homer, or the grumbling in the 
 assembly to which Telemachus appeals — there is no trace of it. 
 The earnest and deeply outraged husbandman never dreams of 
 a revolution, of calling the assembly to declare its anger, or 
 even of enlisting some of the chiefs against the rest. It speaks 
 well for the sterner and sounder qualities of the Boeotian 
 farmers that such circumstances did not induce despair, but 
 rather a stern resolve to avoid the wicked judgment-seats of 
 the aristocrats, above all things to keep clear of litigation, and 
 to seek the comforts of hard-earned bread and of intelligent 
 husbandry. This, then, is the isolated position of the works of 
 Hesiod — the poet of the Helots — of which I have spoken 
 already. 
 
 And yet in the moral parts of his writings the Greeks of later 
 ii,t','',d V s y ° f a S es found much that was attractive. The " Works and I >ays " 
 poems. became even an ordinary hand-book of education. This fact 
 
 will not surprise us, when we consider that in one broad feature 
 the moral lessons of Hesiod run parallel with the pictures of 
 Homer, in this the exponent of the most permanent features in 
 Greek character — I mean that combination of religion and 
 shrewdness, that combination of the honorable and the expedi- 
 ent, which, though it often jars upon us, yet saved the Greeks, 
 one and all, from sentimentality, from bombast, and from 
 hypocrisy. The king Ulysses and the farmer Hesiod have 
 the same respect for the gods and the same "eye to busi- 
 ness," the same good nature and the same selfishness, the 
 same honor and the same meanness. Perhaps the king was
 
 The Homeric Age. 
 
 6t 
 
 Greed of wealth 
 characteristic 
 of early as of 
 
 laxer in his notions of truth than the husbandman ; just as the 
 Cavalier thought less of lying than the Roundhead. But 
 perhaps this arose from his greater proximity to the gods of 
 the epic poets, who had no difficulty at all in practicing false- 
 hood. 
 
 In another point, however, the king, owing to his manifold 
 pursuits and interests, escaped a grave danger. No ambition 
 whatever lay open to Hesiod and his fellows, save the making later Greeks, 
 of money and laying up stores of wealth, as he says, "to 
 wretched mortals money is dear as their souls." In those 
 depraved days, when a verdict could be bought under any 
 circumstances from the corrupt chiefs, money was power, even 
 to a greater extent than in more civilized conditions. Hence 
 the natural tendency among the lower classes must have been 
 to postpone everything to the amassing of wealth— nay, rather, 
 there was no other occupation open to them. So we find that 
 both Tyrtaeus and Solon, early poets and political reformers, 
 set down greed of wealth as the real cause of the disorders in 
 their respective states. The same tendency is plain enough in 
 king Ulysses, and shows itself even ludicrously in the midst of 
 the deepest melancholy and the greatest danger ; as, for ex- 
 ample, when he finds himself cast upon a desolate shore and 
 abandoned, and when he sees Penelope drawing gifts from the 
 suitors ; but his lofty and varied sphere of action forces it back 
 into a subordinate place. Yet I would have the reader note 
 this feature carefully, as we shall meet it again in many forms 
 throughout later Greek society. 
 
 There is another point on which Hesiod is vastly inferior 
 in social attitude to Homer ; I mean in his estimate of women. 
 But the plain-spoken bard was not singing at courts, where 
 queens sat by and longed to hear of worthies of their own sex ; 
 nor did he contemplate the important duties of the house- 
 mother in the absence of her husband in wars and on the 
 service of his state. Hence it was that ^Eschylus, though 
 living in a democracy where women fared badly enough, yet 
 found and felt in the epic poets such characters as his Clytem- 
 nestra, a reigning queen, invested with full powers in the king's 
 absence — free to discuss public affairs, to receive embassies, 
 and act as her judgment directed her. All these things were Hesiod's atti- 
 foreign to Hesiod's attitude ; yet surely it is strange that in ^taSted'SSi 
 describing farm life and farm duties he should not have Homers.
 
 62 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Scant notice of 
 women in 
 Hesiod. 
 
 Hesiod's 
 gloomy picture 
 of life, in con- 
 trast with 
 Homer's. 
 
 thought more of the important duties of the housewife — duties 
 which throughout all Greek and Roman history raised the posi- 
 tion of the countrywoman above that of the townswoman, 
 whose duties were less important, and whom the jealousy 
 of city life compelled to live in fear and darkness. Yet the 
 first allusion in the "Works and Days " is rude enough : "You 
 must start with a house, a wife, and an ox to plough, and have 
 your farming implements ready in the house." There is, I 
 believe, no farther notice of the woman till the short advice 
 concerning marriage ; and here too nothing is stranger than 
 the brevity with which the subject is noticed, and the total 
 silence concerning the all-important duties which even Homer's 
 princesses performed, and which were certainly in the hands of 
 the women of Hesiod's acquaintance. We might almost imagine 
 that some sour Attic editor had expunged the advice which 
 Hesiod owes us on the point, and had justified himself with 
 the famous apophthegm of Pericles (or rather of Thucydides), 
 that " that woman is best who is least spoken of among men, 
 either for good or for evil." Hesiod implies, indeed, that 
 a man may know something of the young women in the neigh- 
 borhood, and this supposes some freedom of intercourse ; yet 
 he seems to consider the worst feature of a bad wife her desire 
 to sit at meals with her husband, an opinion which in his age, 
 and his plain and poor society, seems very harsh indeed. 
 
 However, then, I may be accused of having drawn Homeric 
 society in darker colors than it deserves, though I have given 
 authority for every charge, yet on the Hesiodic society all intel- 
 ligent students of the "Works and Days " are pretty well agreed. 
 It pictures a hopeless and miserable existence, in which care 
 and the despair of better things tended to make men hard and 
 selfish, and to blot out those fairer features which cannot 
 be denied to the courts and palaces of the Iliad and Odyssey. 
 So great, indeed, is the contrast, that most critics have assumed 
 a change of things between the states described in Homer and 
 in I ksiod ; they have imagined that the gaiety and splendor of 
 the epic bard could not have coexisted with the sorrows 
 and the meanness of the moral teacher. But both tradition 
 and internal evidence should convince us that these poems, if 
 not strictly contemporaneous, are yet proximate enough in 
 date to be considered socially pictures of the same times, differ- 
 ing, as I have explained, in the attitude of the poets, but not in
 
 The Homeric Age. 
 
 63 
 
 the men and the manners which gave them birth. If so, Hesiod 
 has told us what the poor man thought and felt, while the 
 Homeric poet pictured how kings and ladies ought, in his 
 opinion, to have lived and loved. And with all the contrasts, 
 I think we can see conclusively that the fundamental features 
 were the same, and that they were the legitimate seed from 
 which sprang the Greeks of historic times. 
 
 But far more striking than the sorrows and hardships 
 of Hesiod's life, described in the foregoing pages, is the 
 conception of sorrow as a friend that keeps company 
 with man, and in some sort assumes the garb of a friend. 
 We have it in the poet Shelley : 
 
 " Come, be happy, sit by me, shadow-vested Misery." 
 We have it in Shakespeare's : 
 
 " Grief fills the room up of my absent child, . . . 
 Puts on his pretty looks " — 
 
 but who should expect such a mental attitude in Homer? 
 Yet it is there, in the Odyssey, plainly enough in the 
 famous scene when Penelope will not recognize her hus- 
 band because she is now so wedded to her grief that it 
 has made his presence a perplexity, and the disappointed 
 hero finds himself in his home, but no longer at home, 
 with the wife whom he had longed for through twenty 
 years. This is indeed the most modern of the many 
 modern features of the Odyssey, and one which had es- 
 caped notice till I called attention to it in my " History 
 of Greek Literature. ' ' 
 
 We may conclude our sketch by a summary of the 
 advances in culture which we can fairly attribute to the 
 Homeric Age, meaning by that term Greece, the coast 
 of Asia Minor, and the intervening islands from the pre- 
 historic Mycenaean age down to about the year 700 B.C. 
 
 The greatest gain which we can see in the Homeric 
 society over that revealed to us by the old Mycenaean 
 
 Homeric con- 
 ception of 
 sorrow. 
 
 Modern touches 
 in the Odyssey.
 
 6 4 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Advances in 
 culture in the 
 Homeric Age. 
 
 Native-born 
 kings and 
 aristocracy. 
 
 Growth of 
 public opinion. 
 
 Decay of trade 
 and decline 
 of luxury. 
 
 ruins, and the bee-hive tombs, is the substitution of 
 home or native princes for foreigners. If the Homeric 
 chiefs were lineally descended from the old invaders, 
 they had at all events become indigenous. It is no 
 longer Cadmus or Danaus that brings civilization to the 
 astonished natives, and so imposes upon them his sway, 
 but a native king, speaking their language, and recog- 
 nized as one of themselves. Round the principal chief 
 there has sprung up a native aristocracy, each member 
 of which has his own court and possessions, and is 
 readv to take the leading place, whenever his own prow- 
 ess and the circumstances of his rule permit him to do 
 so. Amid this rivalry of isolated rulers, oftener at feud 
 than at peace, the masses of the free population are 
 gaining in importance, for their favor must be sought by 
 every ambitious leader. There are as yet no Greek 
 polities, where the majority enact laws and frame an in- 
 dependent constitution ; but the germs of it are there — 
 the growth of public opinion, the decay of absolutism, 
 the recognition of precedent as a binding obligation, the 
 claim of every sentient being, even the slave and the 
 beast of burden, to some consideration. 
 
 But with this home development there seems to have 
 been a decay in commerce, certainly in the importation 
 of foreign luxuries. The old foreigner, an absolute king 
 commanding unlimited forced labor, and keeping in di- 
 rect contact with his Phenician or Egyptian home, had 
 both wealth to buy and a recognized ship service to 
 convey the ivory, the gold, the silver, the bronze, 
 wrought by cunning artists in their old homes. With 
 the rise of home rulers and the multiplication of courts 
 this concentrated power and the close connection with 
 older art centers seem to have decayed, and the chiefs 
 of Greece, as contrasted with those of the Asiatic coast,
 
 The Homeric Age. 65 
 
 were probably not so splendidly appointed as the old 
 foreign kings of " much-golden " Mycenae. The traders 
 were no longer in the pay or under the control of the 
 chiefs, but isolated Phenician and Carian speculators, 
 combining the pedlar, the pirate, and the kidnapper 
 with the tradesman, and trusting to the speed of their 
 boats and their skill in sailing to escape the vengeance 
 of those whom they had cheated and plundered. But 
 of course the day was not far distant when the clever Greek art. 
 Greeks began to emulate those enterprising harvesters 
 of the sea. The effect of these things upon the material 
 arts is obvious enough. With a decay of importation 
 came at first the rudeness of relapse, then the develop- 
 ment of home industry to replace what they could not 
 obtain from abroad. 
 
 As regards society, we have only the manners of the Refinement 
 court and those of the country boor depicted to us. w,th sava s er y- 
 What may be called the life of the middle classes, both 
 in town and country, is still to us a blank. I have 
 shown elsewhere the curious contrasts of refinement and 
 barbarism which characterize the Homeric heroes. Re- 
 finement certainly predominates, but there is a back- 
 ground of savagery, very like what observers tell us 
 about the Samoan Pacific islanders, who combine the 
 most graceful and courtly manners with great freedom 
 in morals and even survivals of cannibalism. The re- 
 spect and attention paid to Homeric princesses, so dif- 
 ferent from the later fashion at Athens and in Ionia, also 
 suggest to us the great importance attached to the Sa- 
 moan princesses, who are, sentimentally at least, reign . 
 ing queens in the native villages. 
 
 There is a code of morals, mostly traditional, but also ., , 
 
 J ' Moral standaid 
 
 based upon certain laws supposed to be established by external and 
 the gods, and these gods sanction and support truth
 
 66 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Independent 
 excellence in 
 
 art and litera- 
 ture 
 
 Development 
 of Homeric 
 
 and honesty in men, though according to the legends 
 they regarded their own actions as perfectly free from 
 all moral considerations. In this they were comparable 
 to those medieval sovereigns, who, while insisting upon 
 obedience to the moral law from their subjects, asserted 
 themselves in their passions and their pleasures as above 
 all law. On the whole, therefore, while there was a be- 
 lief in the government of the world by the gods, there 
 were so many exceptions and excuses, so many ways of 
 evading the wrath and buying the favor of these gods, 
 that we do not wonder at the low standard of truth and 
 honor which is found in the nation, as we know it his- 
 torically.* 
 
 But the high intelligence of the people was sure to see 
 its way through these difficulties, and this high intelli- 
 gence was shown not only in the adoption of foreign 
 handicrafts and the production of new work on inde- 
 pendent lines, but in the extraordinary excellence of 
 their literature. 
 
 The Homeric poems show clear traces of a long liter- 
 ary development, in which the oldest parts are to all 
 appearance equal, if not superior, to the rest. They 
 seem even to have had a long history, if they were trans- 
 formed from the ruder yEolic dialect into that composite 
 and artificial speech which is now known as the Epic 
 dialect. All this presupposes not only great poetical 
 faculty on the part of the earliest bards, but an almost 
 equal power of appreciation, assimilation, and coordina- 
 tion in those who transformed these lays and ordered 
 them into dramatic unities, which satisfied for centuries 
 the critical faculty of the most critical of people. It is, 
 indeed, not till the last twenty years that we may say 
 
 * The dishonesty of the Greeks was proverhial anions: the nations that 
 came in contact with them ; cf. " Social Life in Greece," pages 122 sqg.
 
 The Homer'ic Age. 67 
 
 that the bold skepticism of Wolf * has found a modified 
 
 acceptance, and that we may expect in any new book on 
 
 Greek literature to find the old belief in the unity of 
 
 plan and of authorship in Iliad and Odyssey laid aside wolf's theory. 
 
 for some compromise with the skeptical school. 
 
 * I refer to Wolfs famous " Prolegomena to the Iliad," published in the 
 end of the last century, where was first broached the theory that this poem 
 was not the work of a single poet, composing according to a fixed plan, but 
 the conglomerate of many short lays of various hands.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Precise date of 
 earliest his- 
 torical records 
 impossible t'> 
 define. 
 
 The fraud of 
 Hippias of Elis. 
 
 THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES OF HISTORICAL DE- 
 VELOPMENT IN GREECE, 7OO-5OO B. C. 
 
 The greatest of Greek historians, Grote, acting under 
 one of those sudden attacks of credulity to which every 
 skeptic is liable, fixed not 700 roundly, but 776 B. C. 
 precisely, as the moment when we could declare that 
 historical records commenced in Greece. It was the 
 received date for the celebration of the first Olympic 
 festival, and from that day onward he held that every 
 four years Greeks had met at that holy assembly and 
 commemorated the event by naming the victor publicly 
 in a permanent record, most likely upon stone. Proba- 
 bly the most important contribution I have made to the 
 better understanding of early Greek history was the ex- 
 ploding of this superstition. The learned world in 
 Germany at all events, and I suppose consequently in 
 England, has accepted the proof I offered, that this list, 
 like the genealogies of kings and priests which went 
 back to the gods, was not a genuine record coming 
 down from early times, but the deliberate concoction of 
 a clever man, Hippias of Elis, who did not flourish till 
 after 400 B. C. He used what ancient dedications and 
 inscribed offerings he could find at Olympia, and so 
 obtained some dates far back in the seventh century ; 
 the earlier part he supplied from various legends, and 
 from his own imagination.* 
 
 * Cf. the appendix of my " Problems in Greek History." 
 
 68
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 69 
 
 The earliest firm ground we reach after wandering 
 through land of mist and legend, of comparative my- Reign of Gyges. 
 thology and epic poetry, is the reign of Gyges of Lydia, 
 whose career is sketched by Herodotus, and with whom 
 we know from an extant fragment that the great poet 
 Archilochus was acquainted, probably as a contem- 
 porary. The date of Archilochus was formerly placed 
 somewhat before 700. We now know from astronomi- 
 cal data — an eclipse mentioned in this reign — that he 
 lived in the first thirty years of the following century. 
 There are indeed many other precise dates far earlier 
 than this to be found in cur Greek histories. There 
 is Pheidon of Argos, one of the earliest despots, who pheidonof 
 coined money, who humbled Sparta, who celebrated 
 the eighth Olympiad, who figures therefore under the 
 year 747 B. C. There is the foundation of many cities 
 in Sicily from 736 onward, as reported by Thucydides, 
 who is to most Greek scholars far more inspired than 
 their Bible. 
 
 All these dates are to be rejected, as being the fabri- Reckoningby 
 cations of a later age, when men began to count down- ^u™^^!' 01 
 ward from the demigod Heracles, the divine forefather 
 of the early rulers of Sparta and Argos and Corinth, and 
 the tenth generation was fixed upon for Pheidon, the 
 founder of trade, and Archias, the founder of colonies. 
 Commerce there was, and colonies there were, of 
 course, not only in the eighth century, but far earlier. 
 The Phenicians had shown the way to the Greeks, and 
 this versatile people was not slow in rivaling their 
 teachers. But the fixing of these things by Olympiads 
 or precise years seems to me wholly chimerical. In all 
 our excavations we have never found one scrap of 
 writing on stone (no doubt the earliest material used) 
 which leads us to believe that the Greeks had records
 
 7o 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Greece of the 
 Lyric Age. 
 
 Dorian in- 
 vasion. 
 
 in that century. It is most probable that Mycenae and 
 Tiryns were overthrown and their population embodied 
 with Argos during this epoch, and yet, as I have above 
 observed, no trace of writing appears, amid other handi- 
 work so developed and artistic, as would cause us to 
 assume it as certain. All we can therefore say, and 
 happily it is enough for our purpose, is that Greece 
 about the year 700 B. C. shows a considerable progress, 
 or at least change, from the condition in which the 
 Homeric bards knew or imagined it. Their works 
 were in common use, and recited daily even then, but 
 the hearers had adopted other fashions in politics, other 
 tastes than war, other ideals in morals and religion. 
 This is what I have called the Greece of the Lyric Age,* 
 because our principal knowledge of it comes from the 
 fragments of the great lyric poets, who were then re- 
 placing the epic in esteem and in popularity. 
 
 The historical causes of this change in the state of 
 Greek lands (I include of course the islands of the 
 ^gean and the coast settlements of Asia Minor) are 
 not far to seek. With the decay or abolition of foreign 
 sovereignties, the home chiefs broke up more and more 
 into small and isolated powers, busy with border feuds, 
 and hardly able to sustain any large policy of coalition 
 or of commerce. Hence it appears that an invasion of 
 hardy Doric mountaineers brought new masters into the 
 Peloponnesus, and replaced the older royalties. That 
 these were a small body of conquerors, who found it 
 necessary to make a compromise with the vanquished, 
 appears clearly enough from the fiction that the leading 
 houses, the kings of Sparta, Messene, Argos, Corinth, 
 were not Dorian invaders, but Achaean descendants of 
 the hero Heracles. We have not evidence enough 
 
 * Cf. my " Social Life in Greece," 6th edition, Chap. IV.
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 7 1 
 
 to state as certain, what seems very probable, that it 
 was by an infantry armed with iron or steel weapons 
 that the Dorians overthrew the Achaean nobles, who 
 fought chiefly from chariots, as we may infer not only 
 from Homer, but from the oldest tomb-reliefs and 
 figured vases. If so, it was the oldest occurrence on 
 Greek soil of that struggle between horse and foot in 
 battle of which the last decisive instance was the over- struggle of 
 
 ^c»ll v, ^ Dorians and 
 
 throw and slaughter of the Frankish chivalry of the Achaeans. 
 Morea by the Grand Catalan Company on the field of 
 Orchomenus in 1310 A. D.* 
 
 In consequence, however, of this invasion, there .. Return wave . 
 seems to have been a return wave, or an outward wavef to Asia Minor, 
 to the coasts of Asia Minor, and there, in richer soil, in 
 contact with richer nations, and by the addition of land 
 to sea commerce, the ^Eolians and Ionians of the coast 
 attained to a wealth and comfort far superior to those 
 enjoyed by the hardy mountaineers, or even the stirring 
 islanders in and about the Hellenic peninsula. 
 
 Moreover, about the beginning of the seventh century Influenceof 
 B. C. the Asiatic Greeks came into permanent contact Egyptians 
 
 r on Greeks. 
 
 with two monarchies, from which they learned all the 
 luxuries of ages of development. In the first place, the 
 concession of a Greek mart at Naucratis in Egypt, 
 though under many jealous restrictions, % established 
 relations between the Greeks and Egypt, relations 
 rapidly increasing when Psammetichus established him- 
 
 * Cf. Finlay's " History of Greece," IV., 150. 
 
 t It is not certain, but probable, that the Greek race came through Asia 
 Minor into Greece, and that they may have left settlements on their way, or 
 otherwise preserved the tradition of an old occupation of that country. Thus 
 the Trojans and Lycians, especially their leaders, are assumed in Homer to be 
 of the same race, descended from the same gods, and speaking the same 
 language as their Argive invaders. It is the theory advocated in E. Curtius's 
 history, to which I refer in speaking of a return wave. It is probable theory, 
 but by no means proved. 
 
 JThe early Naucratis corresponded in its own day to the English mart at 
 Hong Kong in ours, where a foreign nation was allowed to settle and trade in 
 spite of great jealousies on the part of a bigoted and exclusive government.
 
 72 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Effect on the 
 fine arts. 
 
 The Lydian 
 monarchy. 
 
 Greeks as 
 mercenary 
 soldiers. 
 
 self on the throne by the aid of Greek and Carian mer- 
 cenaries (668 B. C.). Here then the Greeks came to 
 know a people far older, wealthier, and more civilized 
 than themselves, and learned all manner of inventions, 
 and of better methods in arts and crafts. They seem to 
 have imported, and even produced at Naucratis, pottery 
 of a finer quality and better design than the Egyptian. 
 But in other arts they must have been very inferior. 
 Who could imagine, for example, that Greeks of that 
 date could produce anything like the magnificent jewelry 
 found upon the body of the Princess Aahotep of the 
 Eighteenth Dynasty or upon those of Eknoumit and 
 Merit, recently discovered by Mr. de Morgan and dating 
 from the Twelfth Dynasty, that is to say from about 
 2500 B. C. ! * 
 
 Secondly, the rise of the Lydian monarchy and its 
 opposition to the Median created a great eastern court 
 at Sardis within easy reach of the coast settlements. 
 This monarchy, copying of course the splendors and 
 habits of the older oriental monarchies, was another 
 example to the Asiatic Greeks of material prosperity, 
 and probably of courtly manners. The particular chan- 
 nel through which the Greeks not only of Ionia, but of 
 the mother-land, learned most both from Egypt and 
 from Lydia was that mercenary service, which seems 
 the natural outcome of Greek energy, and which became 
 a leading profession, if not the leading profession of 
 Hellenes, until the extinction of their liberty and the 
 pax Romano, abolished local wars throughout the basin 
 of the Mediterranean. To fight for the pay of wealthier 
 states, without any regard to patriotism or justice, was a 
 Greek practice from the days of the poet Alcaus, whose 
 
 * Cf. the interesting article on these discoveries by M. Amelineau in the 
 Revue des Deux Mondes for July 15. 1895.
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 73 
 
 brother served under Nebuchadnezzar, to those of 
 Scopas, who led the forces of Egypt against Antiochus 
 the Great, and even the kings of Sparta were not 
 ashamed to undertake such work.* More particularly 
 in the conflicts of Medians and Lydians, the Greeks were 
 frequently employed on the side of the remoter powers Greeks fight 
 aeainst the Lydian monarchs, whom the Ionian cities against 
 
 o J Lydians. 
 
 found proximate, and therefore more exacting, masters. 
 So constant indeed were the offers of the Ionians to help 
 the Medes against the Lydians, that the word to Medise 
 became a technical term, used by Herodotus even after 
 the Medes had been absorbed under the Persian 
 monarchy of Cyrus and his heirs. In these quarrels and 
 serving in these armies, many Greek soldiers entered 
 not only Sardis but Ecbatarm and Babylon, Tyre and 
 Sidon, Memphis and Thebes, and we may be sure that 
 the Greek inscription cut by them on the leg of the 
 colossus at Abu Simbel (about 600 B. C. ) was by no 
 means a record of their earliest visit to these far distant 
 lands. f It is to be noted also that these mercenaries 
 were not mere paupers, or adventurers such as those 
 who now accept " the queen's shilling " for want of hope 
 or sustenance, but often exiled aristocrats, ambitious 
 marauders like the followers of Cortes and Pizarro, or of 
 Drake or Frobisher, who combined love of strange 
 experiences with the chance of making a rapid and 
 amazing fortune. 
 
 Thus the Hellenic people not only came to cover a spread of Greek 
 
 , r i- .1/^1 1 ,1 civilization and 
 
 larger area of diverse country, the Greek peninsula, the enterprise east 
 whole coast of Asia Minor from the Hellespont to 
 Mount Taurus, and all the intervening islands down to 
 
 * This was in Syria and Palestine in 200 B. C. " Greek Life and Thought," 
 page 494. 
 
 fl have mvself found traces of very old Greek writing on a temple over 
 against Wadi Haifa in Nubia, higher up the Nile than Abu Simbel.
 
 74 -A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Crete, but individuals of the race, chiefly as mercenary 
 soldiers, but also as pirates and buccaneers, scattered 
 into a far wider region, and learned the products and 
 ways of divers men. These were the pioneers of those 
 later colonies, long after the Ionic migration, which 
 carried Greek civilization and Greek enterprise as far as 
 Sicily, Cumae in Italy, and even Massilia (Marseilles) 
 in the West, while it reached at least to Phaselis 
 (Pamphylia) in the East, and was only stayed by- 
 stringent restrictions from reaching up the Nile to 
 Memphis. But Naucratis was there, and presently 
 Cyrene, from which the oasis of Jupiter Ammon was 
 reached by Greeks before Pindar's time. It was 
 sought as an oracle, but the Greeks would not have 
 been Greeks if they had not combined their religion 
 Preservation of with a bit of trading. The most surprising feature in 
 individuality.' this so widely-spread and parcelled-out race was the 
 distinctness with which its nationality was preserved. 
 There seems to have been no difficulty whatever in 
 distinguishing a Greek from a non-Greek population, 
 and in spite of all the many colonies, and the necessary 
 intermarriages of the colonists with the natives, we do 
 not hear of mongrel populations, about whose Hellene- 
 dom there was any doubt, except perhaps the coast 
 cities in Pamphylia, at the easternmost extreme of the 
 Greek world, Selge and Phaselis, or whatever they may 
 have been called, and some cities of Cyprus, which 
 showed so strong an infusion of Samnites as to make 
 their nationality doubtful. But these are only few and 
 unimportant exceptions, very obscure in history ; the 
 main fact remains as I have stated it. 
 variety of Within Hellenedom, however, the uniformity we 
 
 ligion, etc., in should consequently have expected was not to be found. 
 There were all manner of traditions, from those of the
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 75 
 
 Spartan noble, who was considered by every Hellene the 
 aristocrat of the race, down to the obscure islander who 
 lived on the rocks of Seriphos or Pholegandros by labo- 
 rious fishing. These were Dorians, yEolians, Ionians, 
 Boeotians, Thessalians, all speaking their various dialects; 
 all worshiping local gods, which were only externally 
 harmonized by the poets and priests who sought a 
 union of religious sentiment ; all developing many differ- 
 ences of custom into distinct and even contrasted codes 
 of law. This is the variety in unity, the harmony 
 in discord, which produced that extraordinary many- Many-sidedness 
 
 ..... - . r . . of the Greeks. 
 
 sidedness that is one 01 the secrets of the permanence of 
 Greek culture. It fits every phase of modern civilized 
 life in some respect, in some department of art, in some 
 development of politics. 
 
 I know not that I can better illustrate this Hellenic 
 unity, shown (as Grote expounded long ago) by a 
 common language, a common religion, and common 
 festivals, than by imagining the United States with the 
 central control so weakened and laid asleep that each 
 state followed its own bent, and worked out its own 
 problems, without check from Washington, even in the 
 case of local quarrels and civil wars. There would Hellenic unity; 
 
 .1 • r • 1 r 1 • t analogy of 
 
 remain that community of sentiment, the feeling of a United states. 
 
 common origin, a common development, language, and 
 
 general likeness in religion and laws, which would make 
 
 the members of all the states still feel the common bond, 
 
 and still unite occasionally in a common effort against 
 
 an invader, or an enemy of foreign race. But the 
 
 many varieties of the states in dialect, in mixture with 
 
 other populations, in conditions of climate and hence of 
 
 produce, would make the contrasts between Maine and 
 
 Texas far more obvious than the deeper similarities. 
 
 The discovery of steam reduces the enormous differ-
 
 76 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Details of early 
 Greek history 
 not extant. 
 
 Greek world 
 of seventh and 
 sixth centuries 
 B.C. 
 
 ences otherwise inevitable from the territorial vastness of 
 North America, tor the members of the conglomerate of 
 independent states could pass from one to the other as 
 easily as the Greek in his sailing boat from coast to 
 coast. 
 
 Hence the history of Greece in these early centuries, 
 if we possessed it, would be the history of a great num- 
 ber of independent states, each with its own interests, 
 quarrels, legislations, literature, traditions. These de- 
 tails are nearly all lost, and perhaps it is so far well, 
 as no single mind and no single pen could compass 
 the subject, any more than any one man could write the 
 history of the counties of England, which are merely 
 handled from the antiquarian aspect.* But in the frag- 
 ments of the literature and in the occasional glimpses of 
 the doings of the most important centers, there is 
 enough to explain to us the course which Greek history 
 as a whole was taking, and the influences which were al- 
 ready producing wonders in literature, to be followed by 
 wonders in art, and then by the solution (on a small 
 scale) of every political problem the world has since en- 
 countered. 
 
 Before we enter upon that inquiry, we may best review 
 quite briefly the condition of the Greek world in the 
 seventh and early sixth centuries, in order to show 
 the reader what we mean by the great contrasts which 
 gave design and richness to the Hellenic unity. Begin- 
 ning with the Peloponnesus (Morea) as the center, both 
 geographically and politically, of the Greek world, 
 we have there the Dorian race dominant in the aris- 
 tocracies of Corinth, Argos, Sparta, Messene. Elis, 
 
 ♦The recently discovered "Constitution of Athens." which is ascribed to 
 Aristotle, anil which has made such a stir in the literary world, was one of a 
 set of 15S tracts, each of which described a distinct Hellenic polity, with the 
 growth of its laws and institutions.
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 77 
 
 according to the legend, was occupied by /Etolians who 
 crossed the narrow strait in company with the invading 
 Dorians, but here also we find in old inscriptions a 
 dialect akin to the Doric, and far removed from the 
 Ionic speech. Each of these Dorian settlements except 
 Corinth, which reaped the harvest of her two seas, was 
 situate in a rich valley, which the Doric aristocracy par- 
 celled out into lots for themselves, making the older 
 population till the ground for them. At Sparta and 
 Argos these invaders succeeded to the traditions of 
 older and richer kingdoms. Argos swallowed up My- 
 cenae, Tiryns, and other ancient fortresses in the upper 
 valley, and its early success in doing so, probably under 
 the despot Pheidon, made a united power, for some time 
 the strongest in the Peloponnesus.* We can see plainly 
 enough in the Iliad that Argos was an important but 
 new power, when that poem assumed its present shape. 
 The whole kingdom of Diomede, his acts, his valor, are 
 so to speak carved out of the possessions of Agamem- 
 non of Mycenae. Diomede is the young, enterprising, 
 valorous chief who stands grievously in the light of the 
 older and more widely recognized "king of men." But 
 both the fifth and tenth books, which narrate Diomede' s 
 wonderful achievements, may be taken out without 
 affecting the plot of the poem, the tenth being notori- 
 ously a later and independent lay. This old supremacy 
 of Argos is expressed in the legend of the "Return 
 of the Heracleidae ' ' by the assignment of Argos to 
 the eldest son of Heracles, Temenus, from whom the 
 ruling clan was called Temenid. But although there 
 was a moment when Pheidon bid fair to assert this 
 
 Dorian 
 settlements. 
 
 Temporary 
 supremacy of 
 Argos. 
 
 * The early distinction of Mycenae and Tiryns I have inferred from internal 
 evidence, though it does not agree with the reports of late Greek historians. 
 The date of Pheidon I place, with E. Curtius, about 660 B. C, not 743, as usual 
 in Greek histories.
 
 78 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 supremacy over the whole peninsula, the power of Argos 
 waned before the better organization of Sparta. 
 
 Here too, as the Iliad and Odyssey testify, there was 
 an old and famous royalty, and the splendid "bee-hive" 
 tomb found at Amyclae (Vaphio) seems to show that its 
 seat was somewhat south of the five villages afterwards 
 so famous in history. Nor is this barrow an isolated 
 Wealth and testimony. The tomb-reliefs to be seen in the museum 
 
 luxurv of earlv J . 
 
 spartan nobii- at Sparta, and the poetry of Alcman, composed tor 
 the Spartan nobility, show an early wealth and luxury 
 widely different from the "black bread and broth" 
 of Lycurgus. The site of their capital shows clearly 
 enough what the conquerors had in view. In ordinary 
 histories, indeed, the harsh training of their lawgivers 
 and the rude plainness of their manners has somewhat 
 reflected itself into their supposed home, and made men 
 of books talk of the wild mountain home, the rugged 
 glens of Taygetus, the stony and poor soil, as conditions 
 fuggldnfss of d of Spartan national character. This whole conception is 
 Sparta a myth. false> &g j i earne d w hen I went to look at the place. 
 
 The town was in holiday, and athletic sports were going on 
 in commemoration of the establishment of Greek liberty. 
 Crowds of fine tall men were in the very wide regular streets, 
 and in the evening this new town vindicated its ancient title of 
 "spacious." But the very first glance at the surroundings of 
 , . .. the place was sufficient to correct in my mind a very wide- 
 
 A visit to the ^ J J 
 
 fertile vale of spread error, which we all obtain from reading the books of 
 people who have never studied history on the spot. We 
 imagine to ourselves the Spartans as hardy mountaineers, 
 living in a rude alpine country, with sterile soil, the rude nurse 
 of liberty. They may have been such when they arrived in 
 prehistoric times from the mountains of Phocis, but a very 
 short residence in Laconia must have changed them very 
 much. The vale of Sparta is the richest and most fertile in 
 Peloponnesus. The bounding chains of mountains are sepa- 
 rated by a stretch, some twenty miles wide, of undulating hills
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 79 
 
 and slopes, all now covered with vineyards, orange and lemon 
 orchards, and comfortable homesteads or villages. The great 
 chain on the west limits the vale by a definite line, but toward 
 the east the hills that run toward Malea rise very gradually and 
 with many delays beyond the arable grounds. The old 
 Spartans therefore settled in the richest and best country 
 available, and must from the very outset of their career have 
 had better food, better climate, and hence much more luxury 
 than their neighbors. 
 
 We are led to the same conclusion by the art-remains which Evidence from 
 are now coming to light, and which are being collected in the ar t- remains - 
 well-built local museum of the town. They show us that there 
 was an archaic school of sculpture, which produced votive and 
 funeral reliefs, and therefore that the old Spartans were by no 
 means so opposed to art as they have been represented in the 
 histories. The poetry of Alcman, with its social and moral 
 freedom, its suggestions of luxury and good living, shows 
 what kind of literature the Spartan rulers thought fit to 
 import and encourage in the city of Lycurgus. The whole 
 sketch of Spartan society which we read in Plutarch's " Life " 
 and other late authorities seems rather to smack of imaginary 
 reconstruction on Doric principles than of historical reality. 
 Contrasts there were, no doubt, between Dorians and Ionians, 
 nay even between Spartan and Tarentine or Argive Dorians ; 
 but still Sparta was a rich and luxurious society, as is confessed 
 on all hands where there is any mention of the ladies and their 
 homes. We might as well infer from the rudeness of the 
 dormitories in the College at Winchester or from the simplicity 
 of an English man-of-war's mess, that our nation consisted of 
 rude mountaineers living in the sternest simplicity.* 
 
 It is strange that no less a mistake, but in precisely The pastoral 
 the opposite direction, has been made about the neigh- dia alible. " 
 boring Arcadia. Here a land of real mountain rugged- 
 ness, of harsh climate and ungrateful soil — the home of 
 bears and wolves — has been translated into a scene of 
 perpetual spring, peopled with piping shepherds and 
 scarce-clad nymphs. Both the Laconia of the book- 
 
 * " Rambles and Studies in Greece," Mahaffy, pages 381-3 (3d edition).
 
 8o 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Conservative 
 aristocracy 
 of Sparta. 
 
 worm and the Arcadia of the euphuist are to be expelled 
 from real history. 
 
 It seems indeed that most of the Dorian invaders 
 found it a comparatively easy task either by conquest or 
 accommodation to silence the older population and 
 establish themselves as a ruling caste. In Messene 
 there were even traditions that the invaders and natives 
 became friends, and coalesced without difficulty. But 
 in Sparta either the Achaeans were stronger, or the 
 invaders were themselves at variance, or there was 
 some older stratum of population more difficult to deal 
 with — in short, the conquest of Laconia was not only 
 very gradual, but was not really effected till a great 
 individual genius, known as Lycurgus, extended the 
 discipline of war and the camp to the city, abolished the 
 greater part of home education, and turned the whole 
 dominant caste into a garrison which did nothing during 
 peace but prepare for war. The higher branches of 
 culture were deliberately neglected ; the sentimental re- 
 lations of the sexes were postponed to the mere practical 
 production of strong youths to serve the state ; the 
 amusements of athletics (without competition for prizes) 
 and of field sports filled up the moments of leisure from 
 training ; so that we have in the Spartans, as they 
 emerge into history, the very model of an aristocracy 
 which despises all occupations but war and sport, which 
 looks with contempt upon trade and handicraft, which 
 scorns the improvements of the age and the novelties of 
 discovery, and hugs with pride old traditions, rude 
 ways of life, primitive fashions. 
 
 It has been recently the fashion to diminish the credit 
 which older historians, and which indeed the universal 
 feeling of the Greeks, ascribed to Lycurgus. Grote 
 in particular was never weary of carping at the Spartan,
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 81 
 
 in comparison with the Athenian, and it may be assumed 
 that American readers will rather sympathize with 
 the great radical historian than with the exponents of 
 conservative feeling. Yet as even now the American 
 citizen, with all his bold independence and his republican 
 traditions, can seldom divest himself of the veneration 
 which every civilized man must feel for the splendor 
 of ancient nobility, so every sort and condition of Greek 
 radical, though he took care not to imitate the severities 
 of Spartan discipline in his own state, yet looked with 
 undisguised pride at Sparta, as the example which he Pride of Greeks 
 could pit against the Persian noble or the Roman aristocracy 
 patrician, as a pure specimen of high and exclusive 
 aristocracy. It was not Dorian in type ; not another 
 Dorian state, among the many that existed in Sicilv, 
 Magna Graecia, the Peloponnesus, and the Carian coast, 
 shows the least similarity to it in its life. The only 
 parallels were the very doubtful one of Crete, which 
 failed in all the higher points of comparison, and the 
 schemes, actual or theoretical, of such men as Pytha- 
 goras or Plato, whose attempts were plainly copies of 
 the great ideas of Lycurgus. 
 
 This very wonderful result I cannot, with many 
 German theorists, refer to a gradual growth, and to the " Life of Lycur- 
 shaping of circumstances only. A great individual faniawjverf r " 
 must have used these conditions to carry out the in- 
 spiration of his genius. And yet all we know of him is 
 so confused and uncertain that he would certainly have 
 been relegated to the region of myth,* had not Plu- 
 tarch's "Life" of him given us a distinct picture 
 wherein ages of men have become familiar with the 
 Greek conception of their greatest lawgiver. As 
 
 * This has indeed been done by more than one skeptical German inquirer, 
 but without attaining any large following.
 
 82 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Singularities of 
 Spartan consti- 
 tution, etc. 
 
 Description of 
 Spartan 
 funeral 
 ceremonies. 
 
 Plutarch's " Lives" are accessible to all, I need not 
 cite from his description. Modern criticism has noth- 
 ing to add and very little to take away from his charm- 
 ing sketch. To furnish it throughout with notes of 
 interrogation, to question each and every statement, is 
 of course the cheapest of criticism. But hitherto we 
 have made no discovery which can explain to us its 
 strange anomalies. 
 
 Why, for example, were there two kings, not one? 
 And yet there is no hint in legend that the German 
 theory of an early compromise is true, and that these 
 kings represent the invaders and the older race respec- 
 tively. They are uniformly stated to be of the same 
 origin, and their genealogy was even traced back from 
 son to father till they reached the hero Heracles. 
 Why were the ceremonies which followed upon the 
 death of either king so strange and unlike Hellenic 
 customs that Herodotus turns aside to describe them 
 and compare them to the funeral ceremonies of Asiatic 
 barbarians ?* Why, in spite of all this dignity of tra- 
 dition, do we find these kings dominated by the five 
 ephors, plain men chosen with no circumstance from 
 among the average Spartans to control the whole state 
 and even bring the kings to trial ? Why did the luxury 
 and refinement which we can find in the old tombs, and 
 
 * Herodotus VI., Chap. LVIII.: "Such are the honors paid by the Spartans 
 to their princes whilst alive ; they have others after their decease. Messengers 
 are sent to everv part of Sparta to relate the event, whilst through the city the 
 women beat on a caldron. At this signal one free-born person of each sex is 
 compelled under very heavv penalties to disfigure themselves. The same 
 ceremonies which the Lacedaemonians observe on the death of their kings 
 are practiced also by the barbarians of Asia ; the greater part of whom, on a 
 similar occasion, use these rites. When a king ofLacedaemon dies, a certain 
 number of Lacedaemonians, independent of the Spartans, are obliged from all 
 parts of Lacedaemon to attend his funeral. When these together with the 
 Helots and Spartans, to the amount of several thousands, are assembled in one 
 place they begin, men and women, to beat their breasts; to make loud and 
 dismal lain. stations ; always exclaiming of their last prince that he was 
 of all preceding ones the best. If one of their kings dies in battle they 
 make a representation of his person, and carry it to the place of interment on 
 a bier richly adorned. When it is buried there is an interval of ten days from 
 all business and amusement, with every Dublic testimony of sorrow."
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 83 
 
 in the allusions of Alcman and other lyric poets, give 
 way to the stern simplicity which became the ostentation 
 of historical Sparta ? Why did their love and patron- 
 age of art and literature give way to ignorance and rude- 
 ness? Why were their women free from the strict dis- 
 cipline of the men, free from the restraints of Attic 
 or Ionian life, and yet for centuries not the worse for 
 the wealth and unrestrained liberty in which they lived. 
 Why in a society where sexual relations were as unsenti- 
 mental as possible were the purity and dignity of the 
 female sex so long and so honorably maintained ? 
 
 For all these problems the reader must seek his 
 answer from the historian. The writer upon Greek 
 civilization has only to state these contrasts to the rest of 
 Hellenic life, as one of the elements of a culture richer 
 and more various than any other in the Old World. 
 
 And what were the ideas which were peculiarly 
 derived from this aristocratic society, and spread abroad 
 through the Greek world ? First of all, that dignity did 
 not mean luxury, that aristocracy did not mean wealth, 
 that upon black bread and broth could live a man whom 
 even the tyrant, who added unlimited power to his 
 luxury, looked upon with respect, if not with envy. 
 Secondly, that the very point in which this tyrant, who 
 put himself above all law, missed the mark, was that in 
 which real nobility consisted — an unswerving obedience 
 to the law, and loyal acceptance of its decrees, even 
 were they harsh. Thirdly, all this conduct was based 
 upon the postponement of each man's interest and 
 pleasure to those of the state, of the common weal, 
 of the greatness of his country. In almost every Greek 
 state the theory prevailed that the individual had no 
 rights against the state ; in none was this theory so 
 loyally and unreservedly carried out as among the Spar- 
 
 spartan prog 
 
 ress toward 
 simplicity. 
 
 Spartan 
 women. 
 
 Spartan high 
 ideal of conduct 
 and patriotism.
 
 84 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Conditions of 
 culture in rest 
 of Greece. 
 
 Athens. 
 
 Early Attic art. 
 
 t;ins, who gloried in sacrificing everything — property, 
 wife, children, comfort — for the greatness and glory 
 of their state. This is that ideal of patriotism which has 
 led indeed to not a few grave consequences, to not a few 
 signal injustices, to many terrible mistakes, but still it is 
 a noble feeling, and one which raises men from the level 
 of the savage or the cynic to something loftier and 
 purer, to something deserving of immortality. 
 
 What were the conditions of culture in the other states 
 of Greece and Asia Minor, whose material advance was 
 far greater than that of Sparta ? We know very little 
 indeed of social Athens till we come to Solon and 
 Pisistratus, but we can infer something from the politi- 
 cal changes which are chronicled in Plutarch's "Life 
 of Theseus," in Aristotle's "Constitution of Athens," 
 and in the allusions of other authors. We know that 
 there, too, there was a landed aristocracy, but that the 
 poor people were not of a different or conquered race. 
 For the Attic people always boasted that they were 
 autochthonous, that is, native to the soil, which proves at 
 all events that all recollection of their advent, or of the 
 displacement of an older population, was gone. The 
 landed aristocracy seem to have lived hospitably, like 
 feudal lords, in the country, as is told of the elder 
 Miltiades, and not without luxury. Thucydides says 
 that it was only recently, that is in the fifth century, that 
 they had given up wearing the flowing Ionian robes, 
 and the tettix (cicada) of gold in their hair. The seven- 
 teen mutilated goddesses, or perhaps rather princesses, 
 found under the rubble gathered from the Persian fury 
 on the Acropolis, are all dressed most elaborately, and 
 in divers colors, with their hair carefully plaited ; and 
 the rich effects which still remain show how elaborate 
 was the taste of that early day. The deep expression
 
 86 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 which more perfect artists put into the face and form 
 was still wanting to these stiff and ungainly figures, with 
 their stereotyped smile, but the taste for luxury and the 
 splendor of the outward appointments are unmistakably 
 there. We know the same thing of the early Attic 
 architecture. Whether the material of a temple was 
 marble or not, it was covered with rich colors, and if 
 possible with gilded ornaments, so that the whole 
 modern notion of the purity of white marble, and its 
 perfection as a material for sculpture and for architec- 
 ture, was almost foreign to the Greeks. The Attic 
 ideal of splendor in a statue was to have it chryselephan- 
 tine, gilded, with the exposed parts of the figure in 
 ivory. 
 
 We have unfortunately no closer knowledge of their 
 No material home life as to its material aspect, as we have, from 
 
 evidence extant . , 
 
 for Athenian the excavated palaces, of the Mvcenaean age. The 
 
 home life. . - & . . 
 
 houses of the Attic nobles, nay, even of Solon and Pisis- 
 tratus, have wholly vanished, nor do I suppose that even 
 if the latter dwelt in the Acropolis, as some tyrants did 
 for safety's sake in other cities, his residence was of any 
 real splendor. All we can say about the Pisistratids is 
 that they carried out great works for the public adorn- 
 Pubiic works, meiit of their city. It is but yesterday that Dr. Dorp- 
 feld discovered how they had led great underground 
 conduits from some miles higher up the Ilissus round the 
 Acropolis to the spot where they made the great public 
 fountain with its nine mouths, the Enneakrounus, which 
 was still used for all solemn purposes in Thucydides's 
 day. We know too that very similar work was carried 
 out by their contemporary Polykrates of Samos, whereby 
 an engineer called Eupalinos pierced a mountain to 
 supply the city with water. This conduit has also been 
 overed (by Dr. Fabricius), and so ample was the
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 87 
 
 supply of labor that over the actual water conduit was 
 set a second to enable the water course to be inspected 
 and cleaned. 
 
 These isolated cases prove what I have long held and Tyrants the 
 argued in opposition to the too political Grote, that the Greec a e Ct froni° f 
 so-called tyrants were materially the benefactors of "f^iew! P ° mt 
 Hellenedom. They commanded the whole means of 
 their respective cities ; they could employ adequate 
 slave labor ; they were united through Greece, Italy, 
 and Asia Minor in a certain brotherhood of irrespon- 
 sibility, and kept in such correspondence with each 
 other that artists and poets passed from one to the 
 other, and so spread the knowledge of luxuries and 
 letters among people highly susceptible to all progress, 
 but as yet far behind Egyptians and Babylonians and 
 Assyrians in the comforts of life. Yet in two respects 
 they were already superior : first, they had already Athenians in 
 
 ■' j 1 j j advance of 
 
 obtained a wholly different view of politics ; they had Egyptians, etc. 
 
 J r J in politics. 
 
 learned to assert the rights of the free men ; they had 
 learned to settle things by public discussion ; and if the 
 rich were still the masters of the poor, and claimed 
 the privileges of ancient descent or wealth, it only 
 required the brief domination of a single tyrant who set 
 himself over the whole population and ruled by force of 
 arms to depress these aristocrats to the same level and 
 to the same rights as the rest of the people. Hence the 
 intense hatred of the aristocratic classes to the tyrants ; 
 hence, through aristocratic influences, the perpetual 
 tirades we find against tyrants in Greek literature. For 
 when the tyrant was assassinated his tyranny still lived ; 
 the upper classes had lost their advantage and never 
 regained it. Their sentimental influence was shaken or 
 abolished ; they had served the despot like the rest of 
 the citizens ; they had suffered violence or wrong at his
 
 88 . / Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 hands without redress like the meanest peasant ; the 
 great lord had lost his droits de seigneur, and with them 
 his prestige, forever. This was the political gain. 
 
 Advance in Secondly, we have a wonderful advance in letters ; we 
 have even in the few fragments now extant clear 
 evidence that the poets of that early day were as 
 accomplished artists, aye and as keen thinkers, as Words- 
 worth and Tennyson. No elaboration of style, no 
 subtlety of form was unknown to them. The wonderful 
 
 Archiiochus the thing is that the earliest of these lyric poets, Archilo- 
 " tlyric chus, is as perfectly developed as any of them in meter 
 and in trenchant style, as developed, indeed, as Hein- 
 rich Heine in our own century. We have remaining of 
 him only isolated lines, and in them the aptness of the 
 meter and the trenchant vigor of the expression cannot 
 survive in any translation. The American public who 
 want to appreciate such things must sit down and learn 
 Greek, and that will cost them time. But though we 
 have of Archiiochus such scanty remains, they enable us 
 perfectly to accept the unanimous verdict of the later 
 Greek critics, who still possessed him, and who agreed 
 to class him second to Homer only. 
 
 Yet it was indeed difficult to say who was greate>t in 
 
 G Jlts kl>Tic tnat wondrous galaxy of poets that filled the seventh 
 and sixth centuries, and sang in all Greek lands from 
 Sicily to Sardis, from Corcyra to Cyrene — Alcaeus, Sap- 
 pho, Anacreon, Ibycus, Stesichorus, Simonides, Pindar, 
 not to mention the lower forms, the satires of the elder 
 Simonides and of Hipponax, and hosts of lesser names 
 that have left but a trace upon the stream of time. The 
 distinctions and difference of these men's work are the 
 affair of the historian of Greek literature. I need only 
 here remind the reader that if some of them devoted 
 themselves to choral hymns and odes to the gods, most
 
 First Two Cenhtries of Historical Development. 89 
 
 of them had stripped off theology as too abstract and un- 
 real, and spoke the passion of their souls, love, hatred, 
 revenge, despair, triumph, jealousy, grief, all the joys 
 and sorrows of a stormy life. 
 
 Of these Alcasus and Sappho, imitated afar off by Aicaeusand 
 Horace, the Roman Tom Moore, are most familiar to Sa PP ho - 
 us. The twenty or thirty lines surviving of each, which 
 show us the method of the imitation, are indeed of 
 the first quality, but what are they compared to what 
 we have lost ? Would that the sands of Egypt might 
 yet deliver up to us some further remnants of this price- 
 less literature ! These lyric poets were indeed almost all 
 aristocrats, meaning by that term men of the privileged 
 classes, who despised the mob, but they were exiled in 
 political troubles, invited abroad to courts, tempted to 
 embark in traffic, and so attained a wide knowledge of 
 the world, and an acquaintance with men and manners. 
 
 As I have already saiid repeatedly, these poems are no 
 more translatable into English than Gray or Burns are 
 into French. But perhaps the American reader will 
 nevertheless insist that he should have some far-off ink- 
 ling of their nature, so I add here a specimen or two. 
 The best notion, however, he can now get of Sappho Translation of 
 
 ' ' & l l Sappho. 
 
 or Alcaeus is from the finest lyrics of Horace, who had 
 these poets before him, and copied not only the meters, 
 but often the very expressions in the Greek originals. 
 
 SAPPHO. 
 I. 
 Venus, bright goddess of the skies, 
 To whom unnumber'd temples rise, 
 Jove's daughter fair, whose wily arts 
 Delude fond lovers of their hearts ; 
 O ! listen gracious to my prayer, 
 And free my mind from anxious care.
 
 90 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 If e'er you heard my ardent vow, 
 Propitious goddess, hear me now ! 
 And oft my ardent vow you've heard, 
 By Cupid's friendly aid preferr'd, 
 Oft left the golden courts of Jove, 
 To listen to my tales of love. 
 
 The radiant car your sparrows drew ; 
 You gave the word, and swift they flew, 
 Through liquid air they wing'd their way, 
 I saw their quivering pinions play ; 
 To my plain roof they bore their queen. 
 Of aspect mild, and look serene. 
 
 Soon as you came, by your command, 
 Back flew the wanton feathered band, 
 Then, with a sweet enchanting look, 
 Divinely smiling, thus you spoke : 
 " Why didst thou call me to thy cell ? 
 Tell me, my gentle Sappho, tell. 
 
 " What healing medicine shall I find 
 To cure thy love-distemper'd mind? 
 Say, shall I lend thee all my charms, 
 To win young Phaon to thy arms ? 
 Or does some other swain subdue 
 Thy heart ? my Sappho, tell me, who ? 
 
 "Though now, averse, thy charms he slight, 
 He soon shall view thee with delight ; 
 Though now he scorns thy gifts to take, 
 He soon to thee shall offerings make ; 
 Though now thy beauties fail to move, 
 He soon shall melt with equal love." 
 
 Once more, O Venus, hear my prayer, 
 And ease my mind of anxious care ; 
 Again vouchsafe to be my guest, 
 And calm this tempest in my breast ! 
 To thee, bright queen, my vows aspire : 
 O grant me all my heart's desire:
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 91 
 
 II. 
 
 More happy than the gods is he 
 Who, soft reclining, sits by thee ; 
 His ears thy pleasing talk beguiles, 
 His eyes thy sweetly-dimpled smiles. 
 
 This, this, alas ! alarm'd my breast, 
 And robb'd me of my golden rest : 
 While gazing on thy charms I hung, 
 My voice died faltering on my tongue. 
 
 With subtle flames my bosom glows, 
 Quick through each vein the poison flows : 
 Dark dimming mists my eyes surround ; 
 My ears with hollow murmurs sound. 
 
 My limbs with dewy chillness freeze, 
 On my whole frame pale tremblings seize, 
 And losing color, sense, and breath, 
 I seem quite languishing in death.* 
 
 The last of the series is to us the best known, because 
 large portions of his works have survived. But he lived Pindar, 
 on the threshold of a new epoch ; he even lived to see 
 the great national struggle which remodeled all Greek 
 politics and Greek society, yet he was of the old, and 
 belonged to the past ; not only the city (Thebes) to 
 which he belonged, but the man himself was unable to 
 appreciate the new era. The modern reader finds him 
 now, as the Roman reader did, so elaborate and artificial 
 that his true merits are not easily to be estimated. No 
 great poet is bound to be obvious or even easy ; but he ^ artificOiiit^ 
 is only condoned his obscurity because the ideas he 
 grasps, or endeavors to grasp, are vast and beyond our 
 clear vision. His case is without excuse, if, as Mr. 
 
 * These versions lose all the transcendent beauty of expression in the original. 
 But one thing they cannot change. I will call it the modern flavor of this 
 poetry. In no respect has the version changed or modified this striking 
 feature. Let it be remembered that Sappho lived more than five centuries be- 
 fore the Christian era.
 
 92 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 George Meredith does nowadays, he labors to envelop 
 every-day platitudes in the contorted grammar or the 
 inverted diction which demands careful analysis, and 
 seeks to cheat the reader into a belief that what is made 
 difficult of comprehension is therefore well worth being 
 understood. Pindar, to my mind, is often guilty of 
 this fault. His elaborate meter and rich vocabulary 
 Pindar's often conceal ideas obvious and tame enough when 
 
 obscurity. . . , . 
 
 stated in simple words. But his duty was to be stately, 
 to produce an effect by the music and the march of his 
 processional hymns, to affect men's minds by great 
 words, set in a noble framework of rhythm and of song, 
 and so we may lay aside our criticism and take him as a 
 man not only successful in doing what he attempted, but 
 even in delighting modern schoolmasters with the 
 difficulties of his interpretation, and the satisfaction of 
 thinking that his perfections are only known to those 
 who have mastered all the technicalities of his art. 
 
 We are rather concerned with hearing from him what 
 Pindars giori- we can concerning the society in which he lived. He 
 past.' " ° f the does not say much about the present. He is concerned 
 chiefly in glorifying the present by means of the past. 
 The city that he praises is great because of its ancient 
 splendors, and because it was the home of old gods and 
 heroes. The individual that he praises is splendid 
 because he has shown by his prowess the value of high 
 descent, and the glorious side of atavism. Therefore, 
 His idealism. as com pared with the realism of many of the lyric poets 
 such as Archilochus, he represents the ideal side, the 
 glories of legend and tradition, the greatness and value 
 of the past. The one fact that a poet with this dominant 
 feature should have been employed by all manner of 
 Greeks to compose triumphal odes, shows not only that 
 there was a solidarity of tastes and interests among the
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 93 
 
 Greeks, but also that the better classes already stood on 
 a very high level of culture. The poems are all difficult, 
 elaborate, to some extent unreal ; the other great poet 
 of this day, Simonides, was, so far as we can tell, easy 
 and clear ; yet there was room for both in the affections 
 of the public. But then Pindar celebrated Olympic 
 victories at solemn feasts, when the pomp of a proces- 
 sion suggested splendor and gorgeous imagery. Simon- Pindar co „_ 
 ides is best known by his epitaphs, where such qualities simonk^s!' 1 
 were out of place. However pompous even the threnoi 
 of Pindar, when the rich man's burial was conducted 
 with ceremony, the words that marked the resting place 
 of the warrior, the maiden, and the sage needed but 
 terseness and the pathos of simplicity. So it is that 
 while Pindar is now intensely ancient — I feel sure he 
 seemed so to the men of the next century* — Simonides Modernness 
 might have written to-day. Take, for example, his 
 famous lament of Danse, when shut up with her infant 
 and sent adrift upon the sea : 
 
 When rude around the high-wrought ark 
 The tempests raged, the waters dark 
 Around the mother tossed and swelled ; 
 With not unmoistened cheek, she held 
 Her Perseus in her arms, and said : 
 "What sorrows bow this hapless head ! 
 Thou sleep 'st the while, thy gentle breast 
 Is heaving in unbroken rest ; 
 In this our dark unjoyous home, 
 Clamped with the rugged brass, the gloom 
 Scarce broken by the doubtful light 
 That gleams from yon dim fires of night. 
 But thou, unwet thy clustering hair, 
 
 Heed 'st not the billows raging wild, 
 
 of Simonides. 
 
 * The poet Cratinus, living sixty years later, says in an extant fragment that 
 Pindar was already consigned to silence, owing to the want of taste of the 
 public. Had he been great enough, such a result would not have ensued. 
 But he wrote for a special society, not for all time.
 
 94 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The moanings of the bitter air, 
 
 Wrapt in thy purple robe, my beauteous child ! 
 Oh, seemed this peril perilous to thee 
 How sadly to my words of fear 
 Wouldst thou bend down thy listening ear ! 
 But now, sleep on, my child ! Sleep thou, wide sea ! 
 Sleep, my unutterable agony ! 
 Or if my rash intemperate zeal offend, 
 For my child's sake, my father, pardon me ! " * 
 
 Or this ode to the vine : 
 
 Ode to the Mother of purple grapes, soul-soothing vine, 
 
 v '"e- Whose verdant boughs their graceful tendrils twine ; 
 
 Still round this urn, with youth unfailing, bloom, 
 The gentle slope of old Anacreon's tomb. 
 For so the unmixed-goblet-loving sire, 
 Touching the live-long night his amorous lyre 
 Even low in earth, upon his brows shall wear 
 The ruddy clustering crowns thy branches bear. 
 Where, though still fall the sweetest dews, the song 
 Distilled more sweetly from that old man's tongue, t 
 
 I don't know that it would be fair to present Pindar 
 similarly in an English dress. Those who cannot read 
 him in the original must imagine him the Gray of Greek 
 poetry, but more complex and elaborate than Gray. 
 Pindar the He spoke of course only to the upper classes, but 
 
 adstocracy. yet rather to the wealthy upper classes than those of 
 the purest blood. For Sparta he wrote nothing, for 
 Athens almost nothing. Rich Sicilian tyrants, and the 
 rich mercantile men of /Egina, Cyrene, and other such 
 places, possessed more ambition to shine as the purest of 
 the race, and more means to pay the costly artist. We 
 may then infer that at the Olympic and other public 
 games, these politically inferior states claimed their 
 full share of importance, and took their places among 
 
 * Mi'.man, page 1Q3. 
 t Milman, page 194.
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 95 
 
 the democracy of Greek polities. We know that at 
 Olympia and at Delphi cities insignificant in history had 
 the most splendid of those treasure-houses, in which the 
 offerings of the state and its citizens were displayed. It 
 is but recently, for example, that the French archaeolo- 
 gists have discovered the treasury of the Siphnians* 
 at Delphi, which was more splendid than any of the rest. 
 But then there had been gold mines at Siphnos, and 
 while they lasted the island was very wealthy. 
 
 Pindar dwelt in Thebes, which was rather despised 
 among' its neighbors for want of culture, and noted The reputation 
 
 o » of Bceotia for 
 
 for rich living- • vet, as is always the case with great stupidity un- 
 
 o > J ' . . . , deserved. 
 
 Greek poets, we can trace no inferiority, no want of 
 training, in this Boeotian bard. We begin to doubt 
 whether the land which produced Hesiod, Pindar, 
 Corinna, Epaminondas, Pelopidas, and Plutarch, was 
 not maligned by the rest of Greece, just as the ass 
 and the goose, which are among the most intelligent of 
 domesticated creatures, have been universally, and yet 
 most falsely, set down as embodiments of stupidity. But 
 in a profession such as his, which brought him into con- 
 nection with every city in Greece, his home was really of 
 little importance. He was the poet laureate of all 
 Hellenic lands, replacing with his peculiar art, and with 
 those choral processions and dances accompanied by 
 music and poetry, the old Homeric bard, who wandered 
 from court to court, alone, and depending upon his 
 simple cithara to aid his declamation. But Pindar was 
 nothing if not gorgeous. In complexity of meter, in the gorgeousness. 
 elaborate stateliness of the performance, possibly in the 
 composition of the music, which was as essentially part 
 of his work as the text, this lyrical symphonist, like 
 Wagner in our own day, combined many arts in such a 
 
 ♦Siphnos was an obscure little island in the ..Egean.
 
 96 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 way as to produce a wonderful effect, and one which could 
 not be imitated by better men, or with lesser means. 
 In great contrast to this climax of choric composition 
 The philosophic are t ) ie simple iambics and elegiacs of the more philo- 
 
 and reflective * ° * 
 
 poetry of Solon, sophical and reflective poets, of whom the wise Solon, 
 living nearly a century earlier than Pindar, is the most 
 prominent example. We shall come presently to his 
 political side, but his poetry is not less remarkable than 
 that of Pindar, and for the very opposite qualities, 
 simplicity and directness, an utter absence of splendor, 
 but a great depth and breadth of good sense, and of 
 that wisdom which raised him to rank among the Seven 
 Sages of early Greece. It is again to the inestimable 
 Plutarch, whose "Lives" should be under the hand 
 of every one that reads this book, that we owe a lively 
 picture of Solon and his times. But his many quotations 
 from the poet-statesman we now know to have been 
 taken from Aristotle's "Constitution of Athens," where 
 we have recently found them in somewhat fuller form. 
 These fragments, taken from what we may call his 
 " Soliloquies," the volume by which he was best known, 
 
 Translation of are most striking from their modern tone, their plain and 
 clear way of looking at men and things. 
 
 SOLON. 
 
 Ne'er shall our city foil by doom of Jove, 
 
 Or sentence of the immortal powers above. 
 
 So strong the high-born ruler of the land, 
 
 Pallas Athene, lifts her guardian hand, 
 
 But thine own sons, O Athens, are thy fate, 
 
 And, slaves to gain, destroy the unconquered state. 
 
 Fierce demagogues unjust, o'er whom shall flow, 
 
 For their dark crimes, a bitter tale of woe ; 
 
 Whose pampered wills brook no restraint, nor rest, 
 
 Enjoying, with calm hearts, good fortune's feast* 
 
 * Milman, page 197.
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 97 
 
 Very probably the wisdom which seems to us in 
 the nineteenth century tolerably obvious, was not quite 
 so much so six hundred years before Christ ; but such 
 reflections have their weight at all times, when uttered 
 by a mind which has put them into practical execution. 
 The reform of the laws of Athens by Solon was not Political re- 
 
 t r 1 • 1 • >-r«i • < > forms at Athens 
 
 the nrst such attempt in that city. I he constitution had previous to 
 been already undergoing wise modifications, first appar- 
 ent when Theseus had gathered most of Attica into one 
 state at Athens ; then when the royalty had given way to 
 temporary magistrates (687 B. C.) ; then when the crimi- 
 nal code of Draco had shown that manslaughter was an 
 offense not only against the clan of the victim but against 
 the community. But these changes were not without 
 many counterbalancing disturbances, and so it was cer- 
 tainly the intolerable state of internal discord at Athens 
 which induced the majority to call upon the popular poet 
 who had done at Athens for the war against Megara 
 what Tyrtseus had done at Sparta for that against Mes- 
 sene, to put an end to the confusion, and save the state. 
 I may mention in passing that one of the oldest frag- 
 ments of actual legislation extant is the broken slab 
 which tells of the arrangements for the settlers sent 
 to Salamis after Solon's victory.* 
 
 The obvious part for Solon to play was that of tyrant, 
 that is to say of irresponsible ruler, who got a body- fob" a tyrant 1 
 guard from his fellow-citizens to protect him, and then 
 turned it into a permanent means of coercing his rivals 
 and opponents. Such things had been done a hundred 
 times in Greece, and we still read in Solon's confessions 
 how his friends sneered at him as an unambitious fool for 
 
 *This was found three or four years ago, during the excavations on the 
 Acropolis, where the rubbish which had been used to make a new and larger 
 platform for building, and which consisted of the ruins left by the Persians, has 
 yielded many valuable relics to modern research.
 
 9 8 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 I j t.iiiny of 
 
 Pisistratus. 
 
 Solon not a 
 democrat. 
 
 Solon the type 
 of the moderate 
 reformer ol 
 
 to-<lav. 
 
 not seizing the opportunity. But Solon was too morally 
 pure, too politically simple, to adopt this unscrupulous, 
 but practical course. He made his laws, and left them 
 without adequate sanction. There was no power in the 
 hands of the majority to secure their enforcement. So 
 it required the moderate and wise tyranny of Pisistratus 
 (560-510 B. C.) to carry out, if not all, at least the ma- 
 jority of Solon's laws, and in any case to put down 
 the most crying abuse of that day — the oppression 
 of the poor by the rich, of the peasant by the noble. 
 
 Solon, and indeed Pisistratus also, was far removed 
 from the vain notion of universal suffrage, or from 
 putting the life and property of the propertied classes 
 into the power of the hungry masses. The whole of 
 Solon's arrangements were based on the principle that 
 wealth was not only a respectable thing in an individual 
 but a guarantee of his conduct to the state. Democracy 
 in one sense was not only unknown to him, but he 
 would have turned from it in horror. For no Greek that 
 ever lived believed in the masses, in the worth of slaves 
 and barbarians, in the wisdom of any but educated men. 
 
 But as the remedying of injustice was the main feature 
 of Solon's policy, so also he shows the reasonable 
 moderation of a philosopher, not sweeping away what 
 was old and respectable, not breaking with tradition like 
 a vulgar radical, but endeavoring to make evil out of 
 good, history out of change, progress out of the great 
 fermentation which threatened to explode the state. 
 The poems of Solon as we have them express all these 
 moderate and wise principles, nor do I know that there 
 are any fragments of the period which prove more 
 thoroughly what I always insist on as the modernness of 
 Greek civilization. If Solon were to rise from the dead 
 now. he would accommodate himself in a few days to the
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 99 
 
 material changes in civilized life ; the method of think- 
 ing, the logic employed in arguments, he would not find 
 in any way strange. A baron or a monk from the 
 Middle Ages would be at far greater loss to find his foot- 
 ing or to follow the thoughts of men. 
 
 But if there be still a touch of antiquity about Solon, 
 we shall find it completely gone among those most de- 
 veloped of literary men, the Attic historians and orators. 
 
 As Solon and Lycurgus are our greatest specimens of 
 early lawgivers, so Periander and Pisistratus are of Greek tyrants. 
 the early despots or tyrants, who contributed so much to 
 breaking down the boundaries between nobles and peas- 
 ants in their respective states, and who also disseminated 
 art and literature by their enlightened patronage. We 
 hear terrible things about these tyrants from Greek 
 prose writers. Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, and many 
 others paint the horrors of their acts, and the hideous 
 vices that poison their souls and ruin their own happi- 
 ness. And yet from the earliest to the latest epochs of 
 Greek history, tyrants are a well-known class, ruling 
 many cities all through the Greek world and individually 
 respected and esteemed, though they belong to this 
 abominable order. The fact is that the awful pictures of picture of 
 the tyrant's soul * and of his doings are either theoretical literature not to 
 sketches of what happens to ambitious men when all 
 restraints are removed, or else aristocratic lamentations 
 over the fall of the nobility and the protection which 
 these men accorded to the masses. For to the tyrant 
 the support of the people was necessary against the 
 revenge, the plots, the slander, of the aristocracy which 
 he had coerced and subdued, and from whose outrages 
 he protected many a humble home. The whole of the 
 
 he trusted. 
 
 *The most celebrated is probably that in the ninth book of Plato's " Repub- 
 lic," which can be read in Mr. Jowett's excellent translation.
 
 roo 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The function 
 of the tyrant 
 in Greece. 
 
 Modern par- 
 allel of 
 Mehemet Ali. 
 
 anti-despotic literature comes from aristocrats, from the 
 men who told Solon what a fool he was to refrain 
 from seizing this sort of power, and gives us pictures of 
 the worst sort of despot, avoiding all citation of the 
 better instances. Such men as Periander and Pisistratus 
 were certainly capable of high-handed proceedings ; 
 they did not scruple to take the life of an opponent ; 
 they raised money when they wanted it by requisitions 
 which may have been often oppressive. But the com- 
 merce of Corinth first developed into greatness under 
 Periander ; the art of Athens grew under Pisistratus, and 
 if we seek a parallel case to illustrate their motives in our 
 own century, we shall choose Mehemet Ali, the first great 
 viceroy of Egypt, who rose from the ranks by his cour- 
 age and his astuteness, got rid of a turbulent, unjust, 
 violent military aristocracy (the Mamelukes) by a great 
 massacre, and then brought his country out of the 
 savagery of Turkish medievalism into the path of Euro- 
 pean progress.* But for Mehemet Ali, Egypt would 
 now be in the condition of Armenia or Syria, without 
 proper laws or roads, or trade or contact with the west- 
 ern world. This great man had indeed schemes of con- 
 quest which were only checked by the interference of all 
 Europe, but his internal management of Egypt was 
 a wonderful advance upon the Mamelukes. Life and 
 property were safe ; travelers could wander at their 
 ease from Cairo to Khartoum ; agriculture and trade in- 
 creased tenfold, and the occasional acts of high-handed 
 justice which swept away a detected criminal, or dis- 
 graced a corrupt official, were probably far more efficient 
 in teaching morals to such a people than the more cum- 
 brous proceedings of constitutional authorities. 
 
 * Cf. an article on this remarkable man and his policy by the well-known 
 diplomatist, Count Benedelti, in Rrvue des Deux Mondes for August I, 1895.
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 101 
 
 The early Greek tyrants were indeed very seldom up- 
 starts like Mehemet Ali, Polykrates of Samos, or like Encouragement 
 
 J by the tyrants 
 
 Agathocles of Syracuse, so prominent in the days of the of art an . t ' 
 
 J r J country life. 
 
 early successors of Alexander. They were mostly nobles 
 who saw a new career in becoming the champions of the 
 people. It is for this cause that most of them had not only 
 a desire to promote art, but good taste in doing so. A 
 credible though not accredited tradition ascribes to Pisis- 
 tratus the very wise official steps to save and propagate 
 the text of the Homeric poems, by appointing a literary 
 commission to do it. Another tradition tells us that he 
 sought to revive in the Athenians, who were deserting- influence of 
 
 ... . Pisistratus on 
 
 the country to pursue party politics in the capital, Athenians. 
 the taste for country life, by promoting the feasts of 
 Dionysus, and with them the commencement of that 
 tragedy which soon became the peerless glory of Attic 
 literature. For it was not the grandiloquence of Pindar 
 and the athletic feasts that tyrants loved, seeing that en- 
 emies and malcontents could use them as a cloak for 
 dangerous plots, but the laughter and gaiety of those 
 rude village festivities, which associated with the harvest 
 and the vintage the worship of rustic deities, and the 
 dancing of choruses very different from the stately pomp 
 of the Olympic festival. 
 
 As if to show us the ineradicable variety which marks 
 every epoch of early Greek life, we have at the same of AsiaMfnw. 5 
 period a wholly different society and a wholly different 
 literature in those rich and brilliant cities of Asia Minor, 
 of which the west coast was for many a day more Greek 
 than the Greeks themselves. It is from this focus of 
 culture that come the lyric poets, whom we understand, 
 seeing that they were capable of imitation by Romans 
 and moderns and that they expressed individual pas- 
 sion, which is like in all ages, as opposed to public or
 
 102 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 religious interests, which vary with the society and the 
 creed of every century. Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon, 
 and their rivals dwelt both in free cities and at the courts 
 of tyrants. They were engaged in political strife at 
 home, often in adventures abroad, and these lyric out- 
 bursts tell us of the wild pleasures and poignant griefs 
 of high, stormy, sensitive minds, trained to a perfect 
 power of expression, and with the most perfect canons 
 of taste. We may well wonder how these brilliant 
 Their startling poets, without any models outside their own language, 
 
 perfection of 
 
 literary form. or in any century antecedent to Homer, should have 
 developed such perfect literary form. It is perhaps only 
 approached by the literary excellence of much of the 
 Old Testament, which even in pale translation maintains 
 its preeminence above most literary developments of 
 that kind among men. So that if we can deliberately 
 maintain that the extant fragments of Alcaeus and 
 Sappho are as perfect as the poems of Tennyson — the 
 greatest master of poetical form in our own generation — 
 we are stating a strange fact, but one not without 
 analogies, or incredible to any student of history. 
 
 The recognition of this extraordinary perfection in the 
 cat. e ce S of'this Greek lyric poetry of the sixth century B. C. is, how- 
 fecYio.M 1 " ever, of great importance beyond the history of litera- 
 
 ture. It makes us infer, perhaps not over safely, that in 
 the sister arts men could not tolerate ugliness and 
 absence of clear design. The fine arts do not submit to 
 any such law of regularity, and as there is no doubt that 
 contemporary statues of these poets, if such there were, 
 would be as stiff, awkward, and conventional as the 
 archaic statues of gods found at the ancient Temple of 
 Miletus, so we may be sure that the music to which they 
 sang their hymns and secular poems would seem to us 
 akin to the music of barbaric orientals, if not of savages. 
 
 other arts.
 
 First Tzvo Centuries of Historical Development. 103 
 
 But we may, I think, conclude reasonably that in two 
 branches of human improvement this perfection of 
 expression must have given great help, or perhaps been 
 the symptom of a great advance. 
 
 It is certain that what we call politics, or diplomacy, 
 the settlement of questions of public interest by discus- influence of the 
 
 poets on Greek 
 
 sion, the endeavor to persuade by argument and not to thought and 
 
 ■ 1 • • politics. 
 
 coerce by force, the satisfaction at being convinced and 
 not bullied in a dispute — all this rational procedure is 
 not possible without a power of language in the speaker, 
 a power of comprehension in the hearer, which imply a 
 long and considerable training. It was through their 
 poets that the Greeks got this training, and we know 
 that the power of expression, originally developed by 
 the power of thinking, reacts upon it, and that the rising 
 generation is educated by learning the language which 
 its ancestors have labored out by slow degrees. So, 
 therefore, the active and various political movements 
 which took place in Hellenic lands in the following 
 century could hardly have arisen so soon, were it not for 
 the intellectual training of the race through their poets. 
 The same conclusion may be drawn regarding phi- 
 losophy. Deeper thinking concerning the origin of 
 things, the creation of the world, its purpose and its 
 destiny, cannot be carried on without a mastery of 
 abstract terms, and a power of making careful distinc- 
 tions. There is wanting too, for any reasonable cosmic 
 philosophy, a lofty imagination, which can grasp spiritual 
 conceptions and deal with the unseen. The first steps in 
 this direction were taken by the so-called Seven Wise 
 Men of Greece, who were all philosophical poets, cloth- 
 ing their speculation in that form of writing which had 
 then attained perfection. How important philosophy 
 was in the texture of Hellenic culture will be obvious to 
 
 Close relation 
 of early Greek 
 poetry and 
 philosophy.
 
 io4 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Philosophy a 
 
 spiritual neces- 
 sitj t" the 
 Greeks. 
 
 Physical 
 speculations 
 preceded moral. 
 
 Truths 
 attained by 
 Ionic philoso- 
 phers. 
 
 the modern reader if he reflects that this was the only 
 avenue open to the Greeks whereby the gross and 
 primitive conceptions of their popular creeds could be 
 purified and refined into a reasonable and spiritual faith. 
 They had no inspired teacher to tell them of a revelation 
 from God, they had no sacred book dictated by the 
 Spirit of God. They were therefore compelled to find 
 their way into moral and spiritual truth by "the light 
 that lighteth every man that cometh into the world," 
 examining the mythical accounts of the world's origin 
 by their reason, examining the Homeric accounts of the 
 powers that rule the world by the test of their own 
 moral sense. 
 
 It is not a little remarkable that in the century of 
 which we are speaking mora/ speculations had not yet 
 commenced. Socrates had not yet arisen to bring down 
 philosophy from the skies into the life of man. The 
 earliest Ionic philosophers sought to discover the unity 
 that underlies the many phenomena of nature, the com- 
 mon substance from which all had arisen, the universal 
 laws of proportion which changed Chaos into Cosmos — 
 the world ' ' that was without form and void ' ' into ' ' the 
 heavens that declare the glory of God, and the firma- 
 ment that showeth his handiwork." And as they all 
 felt that the universe was really of uniform substance, 
 though appearing in myriad variety, so they soon 
 reached the philosophic truth that the phenomenal is not 
 the real, that all things are not as they seem, that Being 
 or essence is distinct from its qualities ; eternal and 
 immutable as opposed to the fleeting and the change- 
 able. Nor were they far from the greater discovery that 
 the unseen is greater than the visible, that a secret 
 Power dominates the order of the world, if not that this 
 Power is the real world.
 
 First Two Centuries of Historical Development. 1 05 
 
 So we come within sight of that pantheism which so 
 constantly recurs in all Greek philosophy, and which, pa^lismand 
 whatever its weakness, is surely a far nobler and purer polytheism, 
 creed than the vulgar polytheism preached by Homer 
 and Hesiod. Both, however, coexisted for a long 
 while, the deeper and more difficult dogma fascinating 
 keen minds by its very difficulty and obscurity, the 
 more trivial suiting itself in many respects to the require- 
 ments of art and the recreations of the people. The 
 popular creed, in spite of its often wicked and immoral 
 gods, was a happy religion, not dealing much in super- 
 natural terrors, but identifying feasts and their pleasures 
 with the worship of the deities. Our religion tends so „ . 
 
 1 _ ° rhejoyousness 
 
 strongly to dissociate us from worldly pleasures that we °. f Greek re- 
 have some difficulty in grasping the position of the 
 Greeks, even the serious Greeks, on this point. When 
 we hear that exuberant joy, even including dissolute 
 pleasures, was included in the religious celebrations of 
 these people, we are disposed to deny to them all proper 
 sense of spiritual things. But this is only our Semitic 
 seriousness, which has come in with the Jewish teachers Semitic 
 
 J seriousness 
 
 of the Christian religion. We admit and even extol the of religion 
 
 of to-day. 
 
 joys of religion, though we but rarely feel them. In the 
 infancy of European civilization it was far different ; 
 the joys of Greek religion were many and intense, its 
 sadness and solemnity were long kept in the back- 
 ground.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Danger to 
 Greeks from 
 lack of concen- 
 tration and 
 naval power. 
 
 Greek mercan- 
 tile cities at 
 the mi • 
 natives of the 
 interior. 
 
 THE PASSAGE FROM SPORADIC TO SYSTEMATIC CUL- 
 TURE. THE GREAT STRUGGLE WITH THE EAST. 
 
 The philosophic observer who examined the nature 
 and extent of the civilization which we have sketched so 
 far, in the middle of the sixth century, might have noted 
 the following peculiarities and consequent dangers in its 
 brilliant life. Its expansiveness was wonderful. During 
 the previous one hundred and fifty years it had thrown 
 out offshoots westward to the coasts of Italy and Sicily, 
 even to Marseilles and the now Provencal coast, south- 
 ward to the rich upland about Cyrene ; eastward both 
 on the south and the north coasts of Asia Minor into the 
 recesses of the Syrian and Pontic seas, northward 
 through the Hellespont to the Crimea. But the whole 
 of this vast dissemination was no empire ; for it pos- 
 sessed no combined naval power ; it made no attempt to 
 conquer the adjoining continents. On islands, therefore, 
 and peninsulas the Greek settlers in their cities were 
 only safe until a naval power arose which could com- 
 mand the sea ; on coasts the Greeks must trust to con- 
 ventions with the inland nations, or the strength of their 
 fortifications, to defend them from raid or conquest by 
 the barbarians of the interior. 
 
 The case of Byzantium was typical of the whole 
 question. The people of Megara chose the matchless 
 site now occupied by Constantinople, from which they 
 commanded the trade of the Black Sea, as well as that 
 which came from the yEgean ; but all their gifts, their 
 
 1 06
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 107 
 
 conventions, their arms, were unable to save them from 
 
 the constant raids of their Thracian neighbors, who Precarious 
 
 ° existence of 
 
 pounced upon their crops, levied blackmail upon their Byzantium, 
 citizens, and so impeded their peace and security for 
 centuries that it was not till a continental power arose 
 which could subdue and civilize the whole population of 
 the interior, that the city attained the importance to 
 which it was entitled from its wonderful position. 
 Polybius explains all this to us at length in the second 
 century before Christ ; the same things were true for 
 centuries before, whenever the barbarians combined 
 under a capable leader, or the Greek cities were 
 weakened by internal discord. The wealth of maritime 
 cities which have a great carrying trade is indeed 
 sufficient to obtain for them armies of mercenaries ; but 
 it is a matter of consistent human experience that forces 
 of natives, it may be pastoral savages, it may be agricul- 
 tural yeomen, will in the long run defeat all the resources 
 of mercantile cities. The fact then that the outlying 
 Greeks only occupied coasts, and did not attempt any 
 other than trade relations with the natives of foreign 
 lands, made it certain that they would fall a prey to the 
 continental powers which might arise in these lands. 
 
 The only safety against such a result would have lain Confederation 
 in the close confederation of the Hellenic cities and an prevented by 
 
 commercial 
 
 honest effort to help each member, according as it was jealousies, 
 subject to attack. How could this be expected from 
 these cities founded by jealous rivals, each profiting at 
 once from the troubles or the downfall of a neighbor 
 and hating its prosperity? It was much more likely 
 that Byzantium, for example, would connive at, or even 
 encourage the Asiatic Thracians attacking Chalcedon 
 over against them on the Bosphorus, than send that city 
 its aid when hard pressed by its barbaric neighbors.
 
 io8 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Loss of Greek 
 liberty the in- 
 evitable result. 
 
 The case of 
 
 Sicily. 
 
 Relation of 
 
 ities of 
 Asia M inoi to 
 
 eastern ; 
 
 and civilization. 
 
 Commercial jealousies always show the mean side of 
 human nature, and jealousy, generally speaking, was an 
 ingrained vice of the Greeks from the earliest to the 
 present day. 
 
 The future might therefore almost have been foretold. 
 As the land was widest and deepest behind the eastern 
 Greeks, they were the first to lose their liberties ; then 
 came the turn of the Italiot cities, crushed by the 
 Lucanians and Samnites of the Calabrian Mountains, and 
 then by the Romans. Ultimately came the turn of 
 Greece itself. After it had been shown by intestine 
 wars that even within this area the yeoman was superior 
 to the sailor, however sustained by his commercial 
 resources, the whole of Greece fell under the first great 
 organization of the northern mainland, when Philip II. 
 of Macedon combined the infantry of his mountaineers 
 with the cavalry of Thessaly to subdue the coasts and 
 islands and small territories of the primary Greek cities. 
 
 The various causes that accelerated or retarded this 
 consummation are generally obvious enough, and will 
 appear in the sequel. The most favorable area for such 
 a spreading of colonies as the Greek was undoubtedly 
 Sicily, an island large enough to hold a great popula- 
 tion, and yet not too vast for the coast cities to 
 dominate it. But here also the jealousies between the 
 various cities, which seldom permitted the Greek popu- 
 lation to put forth its strength, were supported by the 
 dangerous interference of Carthage, whose consistent 
 policy it was to prevent any united power in the island. 
 
 We now revert to the first and most signal case, that 
 of the Greek cities on the Asiatic coast, lying upon the 
 borders of a great continent, with a large population 
 open to their trade, but also the seat of great civilized 
 powers, at first too far away east to cause alarm,
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture, iog 
 
 gradually extending their sway over the western out- 
 work of Asia. The same causes which made these 
 eastern powers a danger made the prosperity of the 
 Asiatic Greeks ; they also caused the coming servitude 
 to be more tolerable, and not utterly destructive of 
 Greek culture. For the kingdoms of Mesopotamia were 
 from a very early age highly civilized ; their require- 
 ments were therefore many ; their luxuries varied ; the 
 Lydians and the Hittites had borrowed from them their 
 culture, and so Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, had a market 
 vastly wider and greater than those of any other Greeks. 
 Hence the early prominence and true greatness of these 
 settlements. 
 
 Nor was it the policy either of Lydians or Persians to Persian domi . 
 destroy the wealth of these cities ; they only demanded "f/j^" Greek 1 ' 
 obedience and tribute ; yet however moderate their genius- 
 demands, the loss of independence and of political 
 liberty seems to have marred the bloom and blighted 
 the growth of Greek genius. The whole greatness of 
 these cities is before the Persian domination ; they then 
 took the lead of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta. After 
 that time, they remained indeed populous, at times very 
 wealthy, in Roman days more civilized and important 
 than most cities in Hellas, but never higher than the 
 second rank in the estimation of men. 
 
 A political difference often produces social and intel- 
 
 1 _ l Modern parallel 
 
 lectual differences far greater than one could expect, of Canada. 
 Thus the continued control of England over Canada, 
 while the States attained their complete liberty in the 
 War of Independence, produced such a stay in the 
 energy of that country that competent observers in 
 former years have noticed along the immense frontier 
 the most striking contrasts : to the south activity, busi- 
 ness, development ; to the north dulness, inactivity, list-
 
 I IO 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Influence of 
 the East oti 
 Greek art 
 and life. 
 
 Superior 
 refinement 
 of Lydian and 
 Persian 
 grandees. 
 
 lessness, as if the very practice of political liberties had 
 stimulated the population on the one side to industry 
 and enterprise, while a very moderate and humane con- 
 trol, but from a distance and by strangers, had taken 
 the heart out of the subjects of the English crown.* 
 
 While, however, the political effects on the cities 
 of Asia Minor were such that they never regained inde- 
 pendence, but only exchanged the nominal servitude to 
 the Medes or the Persians for a far more real slavery to 
 the Athenian or to the Spartan Empire, it had not been 
 admitted by the historians that other effects followed 
 which cannot but be regarded as beneficial. The arts 
 and crafts of the East, in precious metals, in chain 
 armor, in rich carpets, in delicate ware, far richer 
 and better than Greek products, exercised a powerful 
 effect upon the manufactures of the Greeks. The style 
 of living among eastern nobles was vastly more refined 
 than that of the wealthiest king or tyrant in Greece ; 
 even the ancestral dignity and loyalty of the great 
 Persian nobles were something different from, and 
 superior to, the somewhat mercantile refinement of the 
 Greeks. The only thorough aristocrats in Greece, the 
 Spartans, sustained their pride by rudeness and exclu- 
 siveness, whereas the Lydian or Persian grandee lived in 
 splendor, with a great retinue, and with the field sports 
 of our modern gentleman. The elder or younger Cyrus 
 did not hunt with less zeal than the Spartan youth, 
 but kept in their preserves far nobler and more danger- 
 ous game. 
 
 Thus the Greeks were brought very early into contact 
 with a distinct type of human excellence not democratic, 
 just as they came in Polybius's day to wonder at the 
 
 * I need hardly say that this remark does not apply to the present Dominion 
 of Canada, nor in any case to the province of (Quebec, whose backwardness, 
 itent enough, is due t<> totally different causes.
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 1 1 1 
 
 Roman patrician, who was a great gentleman, also of a 
 distinct type. So clever and assimilating a people could 
 not but admire, and perhaps envy, this splendid life. 
 Individuals like the older Miltiades and like the Athe- 
 nian Iphicrates * were able to attain to some semblance 
 of it by connections with Thracian chieftains and wealth 
 derived from the gold mines of that country. But, 
 generally speaking, the "Great King" was a sort Opportunity 
 of figure of gold, living in a glorious residence, of t v h e e n ^ a r s e t rs in 
 which the occasional mercenaries who reached Babylon 
 or Ecbatana brought back reports that sounded like 
 fairy tales. Hence there was to open to adventurous 
 young men the chance of service in the far East or 
 in Egypt, from which they must have brought back con- 
 siderable wealth. Yet we never in this early time hear 
 of mercenaries as a class, but only of individuals, nor do 
 we know of any important accounts which they pre- 
 served of their adventures, until we come to the days of 
 Xenophon. We may assume that the great satraps and 
 nobles looked with contempt upon the clever self- 
 seeking adventurers whom they employed, whom at 
 times they enslaved, and again at whose hands they 
 suffered defeat. But no contact with the West ever 
 destroyed their high qualities. From the times of the 
 Persian wars, when Herodotus describes them with sym- 
 pathy in their home life — or else jumping overboard Highciviii- 
 when asked by their king to lighten his ship in a danger- ernnob°ies. aS ' 
 ous storm — we feel ourselves in the society like that of 
 the old French noblesse ; so that down to the barons 
 who fought against Alexander and whose splendor in 
 war and sport may be seen perpetuated on the great 
 sarcophagus of the king of Sidon, the eastern (Aryan) 
 
 ♦The marriage of the general Iphicrates to a Thracian princess, and the 
 luxury of the feast, was the subject of popular comment on the stage at Athens.
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The rise of 
 Sicily through 
 its tvrants. 
 
 Joint suprem- 
 acy of Sparta 
 aucl Athens. 
 
 nobles were not barbarians in any reasonable sense, but 
 civilized and probably cultivated men. 
 
 The peoples who kept pressing on the great Italiot 
 cities were very far different — rude Samnites and Lu- 
 canians, who, like the Thracians, thought only of raids 
 and plunder. The Sikels or aborigines of Sicily were 
 not numerous or powerful enough for this aggressive 
 policy, unless backed by the Carthaginians, and were 
 kept in check, and even greatly civilized, by the chain 
 of cities reaching round their coasts. But here too the 
 jealous isolation of Dorian from Ionian, of merchant from 
 merchant, would have caused the ruin of these cities 
 in detail but for the rise of the great tyrants, of whom 
 Gelon was the foremost, who consolidated the Greek 
 power in capable hands and fought the battle of Hel- 
 lenedom as well in their way as did the democracy of 
 Athens. The fame of Gelon became so great that when 
 appealed to by Sparta and Athens for help in the great 
 Persian wars, he offered a great contribution of ships and 
 men, provided he were given the chief command. He 
 claimed therefore the primacy in Hellenedom. But the 
 events of the previous hundred years had determined 
 that the center of gravity in this brilliant civilization lay 
 not in Sicily, Italy, or Asia Minor, but, in spite of its 
 comparative poverty, in the central peninsula of the race. 
 
 For here, after many struggles, in war and in politics, 
 it was becoming more and more clear that in Peloponne- 
 sus Sparta must lead ; in continental Greece, Athens. 
 Sparta had had long struggles with her neighbors since 
 she had attained internal peace and stability from the 
 wisdom of Lycurgus. First came the great wars against 
 Messene and Arcadia — the latter so picturesquely 
 .sketched (in his first book) by Herodotus, the former 
 only known to us from the fragments of Tyrtavus and
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 1 1 3 
 
 the reports, centuries later, drawn from the literature of 
 the restored Messene. Then there was the danger from 
 Pheidon of Argos and other tyrants, who seem to have 
 led the Achaean or Ionian element in the Peloponnesus 
 against their Dorian masters.* 
 
 But neither at Sicyon, Corinth, or Argos were the Spartan supe . 
 tyrants, however respectable or however brilliant, able p'Soponnesus. 
 to make any large combination against the tough valor 
 and consistent policy of Sparta. Had she been disposed 
 for conquest, she could probably have divided the 
 rest of Peloponnesus as she had done Messene, among 
 Dorian aristocrats. But her policy was anything but 
 ambitious. From the description of Xenophon ( l ' De 
 Republica Lacedaemoniorum " ), from the speeches of 
 Athenian opponents in the history of Thucydides, and 
 from the treatises of Plutarch, are derived the current 
 views of Spartan life, which we should never have in- 
 ferred from the fragments of Alcman or of Tyrtaeus, the 
 poets who flourished and sang in Sparta. 
 
 It may have been not only the laws of Lycurgus Respect of 
 but the long hardships and dangers of the Messenian sparun type. 
 wars as well as the growth in power of the ephors and 
 the constant fear of Helot insurrections, which conspired 
 to form that peculiar type which all Greece admired, and 
 could not rival down to her latest days. This Greek ad- 
 miration was expressed not only in countless anecdotes 
 and passages in history, but in the theories of the philos- 
 ophers. There was hardly one of them who framed an 
 ideal polity that did not borrow his prime ideas of 
 the framework of such a society from that of Sparta. 
 On this I have already commented. 
 
 * This is the theory set forth with much great ability by E. Curtius in his 
 " Greek History." But whether the Achaean population was in league with 
 the tyrants because it was Achaean, or because it was oppressed by the Dorian 
 aristocracies, is not clear.
 
 "4 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Spartan mili- 
 tary discipline 
 superior to 
 their strategy. 
 
 Sparta, though 
 without an im- 
 perial policy, 
 is a match for 
 Athens. 
 
 But however admirable the silence and modesty of the 
 youth, the terse and pithy utterance of age, the simple 
 dress and habits, the absence of money and trade, may 
 have been within Spartan society, this education unfitted 
 the citizens for an imperial policy, and generally failed 
 to keep its hold on those who came within the reach of 
 luxuries abroad. The Spartans were the first to discover 
 and insist upon drill and discipline as the necessary 
 means of securing their military superiority. But to 
 this development of tactics they never added good 
 strategy. They did not pursue vigorously after a battle ; 
 they had no notion of planning a campaign. Neverthe- 
 less they attained to such prestige as a disciplined 
 infantry that no Greeks ever withstood them in fair 
 fight on the open field, till the Thebans at Coronea and 
 afterward most signally at Leuctra showed that they had 
 solved the problem of defeating them. The Spartan 
 was not without vanity ; the youth showed it in their 
 military dress and the polishing of their arms ; the 
 elders in the polishing of their epigrams ; for the pointed 
 retorts wherewith they answered flowery eloquence were 
 cited and were collected throughout Greece. 
 
 To sum up then, the Spartans though not an advanc- 
 ing or conquering power, aiming at the subjection of 
 Greece, were still the great resisting power, which any 
 assailant would find most formidable. They were in this 
 sense the backbone of Hellas ; and, as a matter of fact, 
 in spite of successful invasions and great reverses in sub- 
 sequent centuries, Sparta was not subdued till the very 
 end of Greek history. 
 
 But when we speak of the backbone of Greece, we 
 must not forget that there were also some large reserve 
 forces of primitive folk, which had not yet entered upon 
 the path of civilization, and were hidden in their moun-
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 1 15 
 
 tains till the day came when the Greater States became 
 weary and exhausted, and these others in their turn took ^G^t/'inTts 
 up the torch — such were the inhabitants of Arcadia, and [rib e " vlhzed 
 of the inland Achaea, which, after the old coast cities had 
 sent out colonists to Ionia (in semi-mythical times), fall 
 into obscurity till the days of the Achaean and the 
 Arcadian Leagues, three hundred years later. Such too 
 in central Greece were all the mountaineers dwelling 
 north and west of Delphi — ^tolians and Acarnanians, 
 who spoke indeed Greek, and who had Greek blood in 
 their veins, but whose dialect and manners were rude 
 and barbarous to their more brilliant neighbors. Never- 
 theless these were, as I have said, a large reserve force 
 of purity and vigor, which was ever imperceptibly sus- 
 taining its more advanced neighbors with its labor and 
 its blood, and maintaining that variety which is so 
 essential a feature in Greek civilization. 
 
 From these latter the Boeotians and Athenians were Importance 
 long since differentiated by greater wealth and better ofBceotia - 
 organization. Orchomenus and Thebes were famous 
 old Greek cities of the highest type. The Minyae, or 
 old nobility of Orchomenus, had long since shown by 
 their palaces, and still more by those tunnels wherewith 
 they drained Lake Copais through the northern hills, 
 into the Euripus, that they had profited like Mycenae 
 and Tiryns by the culture of earlier races. But of early 
 historical Bceotia we know curiously little. From 
 Hesiod we have a vivid picture of the hard life of the 
 poorer people and their oppression by the rich, say 
 about 700 B. C. From Pindar we have no definite 
 account of his native country ; but we can infer with 
 certainty that the city which held such a poet by no 
 means deserved the Attic jibes, nor was the school that 
 formed about Pindar — every early Greek poet was the
 
 i [6 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Agricultural 
 disadvantages 
 of Attica stim- 
 ulate a hardv 
 
 Trade subordi- 
 nated by Pisis- 
 tratids to 
 
 public works. 
 
 center of some such school — composed of men that 
 deserved to be called " Boeotian swine." Details, how- 
 ever, we have almost none. Hesiod spoke of his dis- 
 trict as one of poor soil and bad climate, in comparison 
 with his father's Asiatic home. But in historical days, 
 Bceotia is known indeed for a foggy and comparatively 
 damp climate, caused by the plentiful watering of the 
 country, but this also secured the fertility of the alluvial 
 soil, carried down by many rivers from the surrounding 
 mountains. 
 
 It is in contrast to these rich lowlands that Thucydi- 
 des speaks of the light soil of Attica, and says that in 
 early days it was little subject to invasions, to which its 
 natural features afforded but little inducement. A 
 struggle with the soil has often been the education for 
 future greatness. Human beings who find everything 
 ready to their hand seldom rise above their material 
 comforts. Those that are born to hard labor acquire 
 the qualities that make them first masters of their 
 circumstances, then of other men. Thus if all Greece, 
 as compared with neighboring lands, was a rugged 
 mother training up a vigorous offspring, so within 
 Greece itself it was not the rich Thessaly, Bceotia, or 
 Messene that brought up the finest population. Attica, 
 however, had another signal advantage over Bceotia. 
 The latter is circled by mountains which forbid easy 
 access of commerce to the sea, and which afford no 
 harbors ; whereas Attica, a long peninsula, afforded on 
 either side a coast for ships and other inducements for 
 commerce. 
 
 It is somewhat surprising that though Solon showed a 
 distinct sympathy for this adventurous life, though trad- 
 ing was in no respect derogatory to the Ionian or Attic 
 grandee, though it should have been the policy of Pisis-
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 117 
 
 tratus and his family to encourage this spirit, and the 
 gaining of material wealth, as an outlet for the energy 
 which was dangerous when turned to politics, yet we do 
 not hear of the trade or shipping of Athens during 
 this period. Great works were carried out by the 
 tyrants. They commenced the Olympieion, of which ™ e mpieion 
 the remains, as rebuilt by Antiochus Epiphanes and 
 by Hadrian, are still one of the most wonderful monu- 
 ments of Athens. They took water from the stream 
 Ilissus, some miles above Athens, and led it under- 
 ground to where we have now learned to place the stately 
 fountain called the " Nine Wells," of which the water 
 was used for sacred purposes by the Attic maidens.* 
 This great work of usefulness and beauty — dor we can 
 infer that there was often a scarcity of water at the spot 
 sacred to the god Dionysus in Limnar\ — shows that the 
 tyrants labored to show their care and interest in the citi- 
 zen's comfort. We are also led to infer from stray hints 
 that they not only authorized and regulated the recita- 
 tion of the old epic poetry, but encouraged the village 
 and vintage feasts of the god Dionysus, which soon 
 developed into the magnificent Attic tragedy. These Encouragement 
 
 . ^ t->- • of poets and 
 
 literary tastes are not perhaps so much those 01 risistra- artists, 
 tus, a plain man of action, who had lived a checkered 
 life of adventure, but of his second son, Hipparchus, 
 who gathered about him poets and artists, and whose 
 vices, to which most historians popularly ascribed the 
 fall of the dynasty, were mere false imputations, trans- 
 
 * I have already mentioned (page 86) this novelty, but desire to insist upon it 
 more fully. Dr. Dorpfeld, the distinguished head of the German school at 
 Athens, showed me in person the results of his research, and explained to me 
 his conclusions. Though I see that the English scholars are, as usual, skepti- 
 cal of such a novelty, and anxious to hold to the old theory which places the 
 fountain at the Ilissus, nearly a mile away from the city, I presume that they 
 will in course of time adopt what the evidence demands, and what most Ger- 
 man philologists, who have seen the sites, are ready to admit. 
 
 t Viz., the marsh, or perhaps the washing pits in which Greek women now, 
 as then, do the washing for their households.
 
 1 1 8 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 ferred to him from his younger and dissolute brother, 
 Thessalus.* 
 
 The actual expulsion of the remaining tyrant Hippias 
 Expulsion of j s ascribed by Herodotus to the machinations of the 
 
 Hippias. J 110 
 
 exiled Alcma^onidse, who brought round the Spartans to 
 interfere. It is undesirable that in this book I should 
 rehearse again the facts, which are found in every history 
 of Greece. The remarkable point is that prominently 
 brought out by Herodotus (V. 58). "It is manifest 
 that not in one but in every respect the right of free 
 speech is a good thing, if indeed the Athenians so long 
 as they were under tyrants were no better in war than 
 any of their neighbors, whereas as soon as they had 
 got rid of the tyrants they became a long way the best. 
 This makes it plain that when subjects they were slack 
 Athenian de- because they were only working for a master, but when 
 
 velopment .., , , , . . r i • 
 
 under rule of liberated each became eager to achieve success tor him- 
 self." The historian forgets or ignores what I have 
 already set down as an important cause of this change : 
 the unification of classes and interests in opposition to 
 the tyrants, growing with the increased intelligence of 
 the people, owing to their education by these very 
 tyrants. It is the mild and concessive absolute ruler 
 who generally feeds up the opposition which his more 
 ruthless predecessors had crushed with a violent hand. 
 It is quite certain that the Athenians of 510 B. C. were 
 far more fit for liberty than those of 590. Solon was 
 probably a far greater man than Clisthenes, yet Solon's 
 constitution was almost abortive, whereas Clisthenes was 
 the real father of the Athenian democracy. 
 
 Hut though Athens, Sparta, and Syracuse had got so 
 far that they asserted, and maintained by arms, a 
 
 * This is what the newly discovered " Constitution of Athens " has to say on 
 the subject. The author, be he Aristotle or not, seems desirous to correct 
 Thutvdides. 
 
 Pisistratids.
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 1 19 
 
 superiority over their neighbors about the year 500 B. 
 C. , this superiority was but new at Athens ; new and 
 doubtful, and depending upon a clever despot, at Syra- 
 cuse ; the only traditional and stable primacy, the 
 Spartan, was not suitable for an active or improving 
 policy. In other words, the love of independence in 
 each organized city, the jealousy of its neighbors' inter- 
 ference, nay even of their success, kept Greece from 
 coalescing, and so from subduing the peoples of the 
 Levant by her arms and her arts. On the other hand, 
 we must not forget that this political individualism which 
 left her a prey to a strong invader had its compensating 
 features. The brilliancy of Greek civilization is to a 
 great extent the consequence of its variety, as that of a 
 diamond is of its many facets, and we may be sure that 
 neither literature nor art would have reached its match- 
 less height had it not been for the competition of many 
 centers and schools. The same thing may be said (in a 
 far less degree) of the Germany which I remember, 
 ruled by sixty-six independent dukelets and princelets, 
 all with the courts, embassies, coinage, customs, of 
 separate kingdoms. Politically they were impotent ; in 
 art and literature, in science and philosophy, these many 
 courts, these many universities, have done an inestimable 
 work for mankind. The Greek world up to the year 
 500 B. C. only showed its so-called unity by a com- 
 munity of language, one general complexion in its many 
 creeds, and the festivals or games to which only mem- 
 bers of the race were admitted. So long as no conquer- 
 ing race occupied the neighboring lands this state of 
 things might last ; but when that contemporary arose, 
 Greece must either go to pieces and fall piecemeal into 
 the enemy's power, or she must consolidate herself and 
 offer a national resistance to the invader. The former 
 
 Reasons for 
 instability of 
 newly acquired 
 power of 
 Athens, Sparta, 
 and Syracuse. 
 
 Modern par- 
 allel of Ger- 
 
 Political dan- 
 gers to Greece 
 from lack of 
 unity.
 
 I 20 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Struggle be- 
 tween Greece 
 and Persia. 
 
 Delphic oracle 
 advises sub- 
 mission to the 
 Persians. 
 
 catastrophe happened in Ionia, on the coast of Asia 
 Minor, where the many Greek cities would not loyally 
 combine ; the latter in Greece proper, where the great 
 struggle commenced under the presidency of Sparta, 
 but passed, for want of enterprise, out of their hands 
 into those of the Athenians. There is no struggle in all 
 history more famous, or more picturesquely told, than 
 the conflict which lasted from the Ionian revolt to the 
 battle of Plataea. 
 
 But the last twelve years (491-79 B. C. ) are especially 
 and permanently interesting. How much they owe to 
 the genius of the historian Herodotus it is hard to over- 
 estimate. With the fairness of real genius he has given 
 the Persians credit for their good points, for the valor of 
 their aristocracy, for that self-sacrificing loyalty to their 
 sovereign which was impossible to a Greek. So also he 
 has not failed to chronicle the shortcomings and mean- 
 nesses of the Greeks, their squabbles and jealousies, 
 their frequent disloyalty to the great national cause. It 
 seemed indeed that this cause was hopeless. The 
 priests of the Delphic oracle, who based their responses 
 on the best and widest information received from all 
 parts of the Hellenic world, made up their minds that 
 resistance was vain. They prophesied ruin, and advised 
 submission. Nor can we say that their forecast was 
 unreasonable. They were bound to maintain their 
 reputation for infallibility, so that in doubtful cases they 
 fell back on studied ambiguity. But now their decision 
 was quite clear, and by it they must have lost much of 
 their reputation and influence. Herodotus leads us 
 indeed to believe that with the least more diplomacy or 
 obstinacy or delay, the Persians must have succeeded. 
 Their opponents were always on the point of making 
 terms separately and dispersing. But the hand of
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 1 2 1 
 
 providence, as he declares with strong faith, had decreed 
 it otherwise. ' ' The horse is prepared for the day of 
 battle, but victory is of the Lord. 
 
 Putting aside the battle of Marathon, which was only Causes of 
 a very unimportant skirmish,* wherein Miltiades first ^Marathon? 
 showed the superiority of Greek to oriental armor, we 
 may enumerate the natural causes employed by that 
 providence whom Herodotus regards as "putting down 
 the mighty from their seat, and exalting the humble and 
 meek" as follows: first, the superior armor just men- 
 tioned, which made the hoplite, as we comically call the 
 heavy-armed soldier, far more than a match of a Persian 
 or Sakan at close quarters ; secondly, the great activity 
 and patriotism of the Athenians, whose city was in 
 ashes, whose all was at stake, yet who fought without 
 losing their heads or giving way to despair ; thirdly, the 
 sturdy valor and honesty of the Spartans, who though 
 stupid and without any intelligent policy, yet when once 
 persuaded stood like men and behaved like gentlemen. 
 
 To these larger causes were added two personal ones Genius of 
 of no little weight — the genius and resource of the and"ncompe S - 
 Athenian Themistocles, and the folly and incompetence 
 of the Persian king Xerxes. Had Cyrus or Darius, 
 or even Ochus, the contemporary of Demosthenes, been 
 on the throne, the result could hardly have been doubt- 
 ful. But Xerxes, that flogged the Hellespont, that 
 gathered an army so unwieldy as to threaten its own 
 destruction every week from famine, that took no 
 precautions, that made no trial of his gold, which had 
 been far more effectual than his sword, was the very 
 man to wreck his expedition. We know what his home 
 
 * There is a whole literature on this battle, the most recent in English being 
 Mr. Reginald Macan's careful commentary on the central three books of 
 Herodotus. The vaunting exaggeration of the Athenians has obscured the 
 real facts so much that the truth is hardly now to be attained. 
 
 tence of Xerxes.
 
 122 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Themistocles a 
 typical Greek. 
 
 Main result or" 
 struggle with 
 Persia was 
 Hellenic unity. 
 
 life was from the book of Esther, of which he is the 
 Ahasuerus. We have, besides the history of Herodo- 
 tus, an inestimable relic of the time in the " Persae " of 
 ^schylus. For that poet was a partaker in the war, 
 and fought at Marathon and at Salamis. In his poetical 
 version of the events, which dwells rather upon the 
 tragic results at the Persian court than the Greek 
 exultation, the ghost of Darius rises, a noble and calm 
 figure — to emphasize the wretched weakness, and re- 
 buke the weak lamentations, of his degenerate son. 
 
 On the other side we have that extraordinary and 
 typical figure of a Greek, Themistocles ; a man of ready 
 wit, of endless resource, not hampered by moral scruples, 
 in some respects a scoundrel, in many more a patriot, a 
 diplomatist rather than a tactician, a debater rather than 
 a warrior. Such were in our own century the Greek 
 patriot-bandits that freed their country, Odysseus, Kolo- 
 kotronis, and others, combining dishonesty, greed, and 
 cruelty with a keen love of liberty and a high resolve to 
 risk their lives for their country's emancipation. So the 
 Spartan infantry and the Athenian fleet were held to- 
 gether by argument, by fraud, by threats, till Greece 
 was saved. The defeat was probably not so crushing to 
 the Persians as the Greeks pretended. Artabazus, the 
 king's uncle, carried his forty thousand men home after 
 Platsea, just as Grouchy carried his division to Paris 
 after Waterloo. But there was no pursuit of Artabazus. 
 Persian gold was still able to buy dissensions and obtain 
 treachery among the Greeks. 
 
 But the great struggle had one indelible effect. It 
 made the Greeks for the first time feel themselves one 
 nation as opposed to the Persian Empire. The dedica- 
 tions and votive offerings commemorated Mycenaean and 
 Tirynthian exiles from long-destroyed cities as it did
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 123 
 
 Spartans and Athenians — all members of the great Hel- 
 lenic unity, now asserting itself against the world of bar- 
 barians. The bronze pedestal of the tripod offered by 
 the king of Sparta at Delphi, to the dumbfounded 
 oracle, still stands in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, 
 and upon it when first it was excavated the names of the 
 tribes were verified.* 
 
 Would that we had more material relics of this glori- 
 ous time ! We can hardly venture to draw a picture of 
 the life of the men that saved Greece. ^Eschylus we Athenian 
 know, but he is so engrossed with the ideal in his august f^ldTin 
 tragedies that the mere human Athenian is lost in 
 the world-poet. Yet merely to have understood his 
 thoughts shows what was to be expected from his Athe- 
 nian audience. He shows to us the great strides with 
 which Athenian culture was progressing, and that it was 
 progressing in depth as well as breadth. Nothing 
 will better illustrate this than to compare him with 
 his elder contemporary, Pindar, a lyric poet of the 
 first order, well versed in all the richness and the splen- 
 dor of lyrical diction and of stately performance, f Yet 
 if we put the lyrical portions of ^schylus into compari- 
 son with Pindar, we seem to be contemplating not 
 contemporaries but men a century apart. It is as great 
 as the contrast between the old-fashioned, simple, be- 
 lieving Herodotus and the advanced, crabbed, skeptical 
 Thucydides. In Pindar the richness of the words, the 
 elaborateness of the meters, seem a vehicle far too great Contrast be _ 
 for his ideas. In iEschylus the huge conceptions, the }* e |£ d ^j£ 
 deep speculations, seem far too great for the words. 
 
 * This was in 1851 ; now, though the monument is surrounded by a railing and 
 saved from harm, the names which are on the lower portion, which stands in a 
 deep inclosed pit, are no longer to be deciphered, till the surface is again 
 cleared. This observation I made after a personal examination of the monu- 
 ment in 1893. 
 
 t Cf. page 96, where I have compared this poet with his older eontempo-
 
 124 -"4 Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 And yet the words are mighty words — " /Eschylus' 
 bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood," as Browning has 
 described them, borrowing his metaphors from yEschy- 
 lus himself. 
 
 It were exceedingly instructive to demonstrate this 
 contrast by printing passages in parallel columns to illus- 
 trate my assertion. But how can this be done without 
 printing them in the original ? and this book is intended 
 for readers who would not understand it. It is hard 
 enough to translate any real stylist, in prose or poetry, 
 from his own into any other tongue. With a poet like 
 impossibility of Pindar it is perfectly impossible, for the music of the 
 
 translating . . . . ..... . , 
 
 ^schyius. original is most of its merit, and his ideas without 
 
 this music are but second-rate literature. It is not quite 
 impossible with yEschylus, for even in bald prose 
 his ideas cannot lose their splendor. But how difficult 
 
 The "Agamem- it is may be seen from the translation of the " Agamem- 
 non " by the most learned of the great English poets of 
 this century, Robert Browning, who knew the Greek 
 poets, as I can testify from many discussions with him, 
 with an accuracy hardly equalled by any professor of 
 Greek in England. His versions from Euripides, his 
 studies on Aristophanes, show this erudition very plainly. 
 But his " Agamemnon " is only intelligible to those who 
 know the original ; to the rest of the world it is well- 
 nigh a sealed book. 
 
 Yet what can better prove the greatness of the "Aga- 
 
 iiii'itv'a"i'r'"o'" memnon " of rEschylus than the fact that it is one of the 
 three or four books which scholars and poets are always 
 endeavoring to translate, and yet no version, however 
 well received, is final. The "Iliad" of Homer, the 
 "Inferno" of Dante, the "Faust" of Goethe, share 
 with the "Agamemnon" of /Eschylus this eternal 
 tribute to their excellence, and of these five there can be 
 
 noil 
 
 This impossi-
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 1 25 
 
 little doubt that it offers far the hardest problems to 
 the English translator. 
 
 Can there be any more cogent proof that the Atheni- 
 ans who produced and who appreciated such a poet 
 were indeed far advanced in the path of culture ? 
 
 Nor is this play the only proof of his excellence. The splendid 
 Each of the seven left us by the jealous hand of time 'JEtc^us!" 
 has its splendor, none perhaps more than the " Prome- 
 theus," where the structure is simple and the difficul- 
 ties of the text not considerable. The very extrava- 
 gances of the commentators prove the extraordinary 
 suggestiveness of this early foreshadowing in the pro- 
 phetic visions of the poet, of a Messiah suffering for his 
 compassion, and enduring crucifixion for his redemption 
 of men from misery. 
 
 The question of the poet's intention is far more difficult, and geven interpre 
 will probably never be satisfactorily answered. The number of tations of the 
 interpretations put upon the myth by commentators is astonish- rome 
 ing, and yet it is possible that the poet had none of them 
 consciously before his mind's eye. They have been well 
 summed up by Patin* under six heads. They are first the 
 historical theories, such as that of Diodorus Siculus, a scholiast Historical, 
 of Apollonius Rhodius, and others, that make Prometheus 
 a ruler of Egypt or of Scythia, who suffered in his struggles to 
 reclaim his country and its people. Secondly, the philosophical, philosophical, 
 which hold it to be the image of the struggles and trials of hu- 
 manity against natural obstacles. This seems the view of 
 Welcker, and is certainly that of M. Guignaut. Thirdly, the 
 moral, which place the struggle within the breast of the in- Moral, 
 dividual, and against his passions, as was done by Bacon, 
 by Calderon, and also by Schlegel, as well as by several older 
 French critics. Fourthly, the Christian, much favored by Christian. 
 Catholic divines in France, supported by Jos. de Maistre, Edgar 
 Quinet, Ch. Maquin, and others, who see in the story either the 
 redemption of man, the fall of Satan, or the fall of man, dimly 
 echoed by some tradition from the sacred Scriptures. Gar- 
 * "Etudes," I., page 254. I have added Mr. Lloyd's, from his "Age of Pericles."
 
 126 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Scientific. 
 
 Political. 
 
 Moral problem 
 nf tin- "Aga- 
 memnon." 
 
 bitius, a Basle editor of the "Prometheus" in 1559, seems 
 to have led the way in this direction. But as Lord Lytton 
 justly observes, " whatever theological system it shadows forth 
 was rather the gigantic conception of the poet himself than the 
 imperfect revival of any forgotten creed, or the poetical dis- 
 guise of any existing philosophy." Yet there is certainly some- 
 thing of disbelief or defiance of the creed of the populace. 
 Fifthly, the scientific, which regard it as a mere personification 
 of astronomical facts, as is the fashion with comparative my- 
 thologies. Similar attempts seem to have been made of old by 
 the alchemists. Sixthly, there is the political interpretation of 
 Mr. Watkiss Lloyd, who thinks the genius of Themistocles and 
 the ingratitude of Athens were the real object of the poet's 
 teaching, though disguised in a myth. There is lastly to 
 be noticed a unique theory, which may be called the romantic, 
 propounded by Desmaretz in 1648, when he published a ration- 
 alistic imitation of Euemerus, entitled La verite des fables on 
 l' histoire des dieux de V 'antiquite. He explains how Prome- 
 theus betrays his sovereign, Jupiter, for the love of his mistress 
 Pandora, a lady as exacting as any princess of chivalry. He 
 retires in despair to the wastes of the Caucasus, where remorse 
 daily gnaws his heart, and he suffers agonies more dreadful 
 than if an eagle were continually devouring his entrails. 
 Prometheus at the French court of the seventeenth century 
 was sure to cut a strange figure.* 
 
 But I return from this superhuman, supernatural crea- 
 tion, the scene of which is laid in the grim mountains of 
 the Caucasus, to consider the problem treated in the 
 "Agamemnon" and its connected plays. It is the 
 problem of the duty imposed upon the son of an adulter- 
 ous mother, who has slain his father, and lives in the 
 palace and upon the throne of her murdered husband in 
 company with her paramour. Both deserve death at 
 the hands of the natural avenger of blood, but one 
 is bound to him by the holiest ties of affection ; she 
 is his mother. What then is the path of duty before 
 him ? And, what to /Eschylus is vastly more important, 
 
 I .reck Literature," MahatTy, Vol. II., pages 261-2.
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 1 27 
 
 what is the world-law which decides the question? Are 
 the bonds of blood which bind a son to his father, 
 and which command him to avenge that father, holier 
 than those which bind him to his mother, and command 
 him to protect her, and to save her life ? With JEschy- 
 lus the guilt of the original murder is too great ; the 
 odious crime of the queen must have its punishment ; 
 but no sooner is she dead than the avenging Furies, that 
 punish matricide as such, and will allow no palliation, 
 rise upon the scene, and persecute the matricide to mad- 
 ness. Each of these great moral obligations has its 
 sanction ; each is determined by a divine law ; the 
 wretched mortal who is entangled in so terrible a posi- 
 tion cannot escape from woe, for the laws of the 
 gods are not to be set aside, and they show us a con- 
 flict which no human mind can solve.* 
 
 The reader will already have anticipated the reason 
 why I dwell upon this play. It is the very problem •• Hamlet "pre- 
 
 , . , _,, , . 1 11 1 • 1 [ 11 sents the same 
 
 which Shakespeare has rehandled in the greatest of all problem, 
 his plays. Hamlet has before him the very same prob- 
 lem. Its solution is so terrible a strain upon him that it 
 unhinges his mind, and if he is forbidden by the ethics 
 of a Christian age to lay hands upon his mother, never- 
 theless her death is required to satisfy justice, and his to 
 remove him from a house polluted beyond cure with the 
 stains of lust and violence. 
 
 The fact that yEschylus two thousand years before 
 Shakespeare felt out the same great controversy, and 
 handled it with no less grandeur and depth, shows 
 perhaps, better than a thousand analogies in material 
 
 * The final escape of Orestes by the casting vote of Athena, when the Areo- 
 pagus at Athens was equally divided on the ground that the child is really 
 derived from its father and not its mother, is a poor and lame conclusion, in a 
 scene intended for a political purpose, and very damaging to the dignity of 
 tragedy. But such inequalities are met with among other great poets also. 
 No human genius is without its flaws.
 
 128 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Highly intelli- 
 gent audience 
 necessary for 
 appreciation of 
 Aschvlus. 
 
 Greek music far 
 behind poetry. 
 
 comforts, how completely modern, in the truest sense, 
 was the culture of the Greeks. We are at a loss to 
 know how so difficult and novel a drama could possibly 
 have been followed by any audience. There is certainly 
 no modern audience who could do so without previous 
 study of the words. Yet it is very doubtful whether 
 such previous study was possible to the hearers of 
 ^schylus. Novelty was an essential feature in the 
 plays acted for competition, and though copies certainly 
 became accessible after the performance, it seems likely 
 that these extraordinary dramas were played to a very 
 imperfectly prepared audience. 
 
 It seems to me that no problem in the history of civi- 
 lization is more deeply interesting than to fathom if 
 possible the life and other occupations of the people who 
 were fed upon such intellectual diet. We know that the 
 poet himself composed the music of his dramas, which 
 were almost like our operas in the prominence of the 
 melic and orchestic side,* as the Greeks would call 
 the adjuncts to stage poetry. 
 
 But there is every reason to think that, transcendent 
 as is the poetry, and fit for, nay, too good for, any 
 modern stage, the music would appear to us simply 
 barbarous. Sister arts, as I said already, do not 
 advance along parallel lines abreast ; one may be far in 
 advance of the rest, and in this case the relics we have 
 of later Greek music give us no suggestion that we 
 should appreciate its earlier forms. 
 
 Regarding sculpture we are better informed, and here 
 the case is all the more interesting, as that art, before 
 another century had passed over, had become so perfect 
 that all the efforts of all our present civilization have never 
 
 * That is to say, the musical and dancing side. The orchestra in a Greek 
 theater was so called because it was a dancing-place.
 
 Theseus with the Marathontan Bull
 
 130 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Sculpture not 
 yet abreast of 
 poetry. 
 
 Architecture 
 probably not 
 more advanced 
 than sculpture. 
 
 attained, or even approached to it. Fortunately we 
 have a few specimens of the plastic art of the earlier 
 time — two or three tomb-reliefs, the figure of Theseus 
 carrying the Marathonian bull, and, best of all, the very 
 remarkable series of goddesses or priestesses found 
 recently on the Acropolis and undoubtedly part of the 
 ornaments of the older temples then, which were burnt, 
 and their statues overthrown, by the Persians. Thus 
 the strange series of ladies with their rich though con- 
 ventional dressing of the hair, their very gaudy but 
 elegant dresses, their stereotyped smile, tell us what the 
 hearers of great poetry could admire as representations 
 of the human figure. There seems in them but a some- 
 what improved representation, in stone, of the grotesque 
 figures common on the archaic vases ; there is that dis- 
 regard of life and adherence to a conventional type 
 which characterizes art in its infancy. Who could 
 imagine that in fifty years more Phidias would be at 
 work in his studio ? 
 
 We are not informed about the architecture of these 
 days. We know that the wooden pillars, supporting 
 a wooden architrave with brick walls and terra-cotta 
 facing, had made way for stone temples built on the same 
 model. The original wooden structure may be plainly 
 felt by any one who studies any Greek temple. There 
 are some drums of pillars of an older Parthenon built 
 into the great circuit wall, which was raised around the 
 huge platform, made of all the older ruins and rubbish, 
 whereon Pericles and his friends set up the perfect 
 buildings whose remains are still there. These drums 
 look rude and clumsy beside the finer work which is 
 near them. A huge terra-cotta composition represent- 
 ing a monster of the serpent kind, used no doubt to 
 ornament the pediment (gable end) of one of the older
 
 Passage from Sporadic to Systematic Culture. 131 
 
 is 
 
 tem- 
 
 temples, is now to be seen on the Acropolis, and 
 rather grotesque and ugly than grand. It is therefore, 
 on the whole, likely that the architecture of this people 
 kept pace with their sculpture, and did not attain to 
 dignity and harmony till the next generation. But this 
 is not certain. Most critics seem to place the great 
 temple at Paestum in the sixth century B. C. If this be 
 so, even outlying Greeks, who had settled beyond the £°| t s ^ e e f *_ 
 borders of Magna Graecia, could then erect a splendid pleat Paestum. 
 building, massive, dignified, and perfect in its pro- 
 portions. But I gravely doubt its age. We have no 
 record or mention of it in any ancient author. Such 
 splendor was so common in Greek cities that but a very 
 small number of our extant ruins could have been 
 discovered by following the indications of the historians 
 or antiquaries. In its proportions it seems analogous 
 enough to the great temple at Olympia for us to place it 
 in the same century — that is to say, after the Persian 
 wars were over. The few gaunt pillars standing at 
 Corinth may possibly be older ; but the building to 
 which they belonged is too ruined to form any judgment 
 of its general effect. 
 
 As regards the private architecture of the day, it is all 
 
 • 1 1 1 • 1 N° evidence 
 
 eone ; probably the cheap materials and the simple from domestic 
 
 o > r J . , architecture. 
 
 construction of men who desired to lodge their gods 
 splendidly, but were careless of themselves, would not 
 have lasted, even through quiet times, very long. The 
 life of these people was in the open air, in the fields and 
 the market-place, and they only retired into their houses 
 to eat or to sleep. Their houses were of little value to 
 them. The gods and the state occupied all their 
 interests. The tragedies of ^schylus as contrasted 
 with the odes of Pindar show how deeply they thought 
 about their gods, how moral theology was displacing
 
 132 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Rise of moral 
 theology. 
 
 Greek talent 
 for expression. 
 
 Its effect on 
 politics. 
 
 stories about the gods, so that their alleged adventures 
 were now far less interesting than their moral qualities. 
 This deeper view was derived, I think, from their 
 completer studies in politics — a science in which they 
 already showed the same mastery that they showed in 
 their poetry. It is perhaps a special talent for expres- 
 sion, for language as distinguished from other human 
 products, which specially marks the Greeks. In poetry 
 we know the result. But in prose long before the 
 development of forensic oratory as a studied art, there 
 must have been a great development of natural elo- 
 quence, of animated discussion, of that free speech 
 which the Greeks regarded as their dearest liberty. It 
 is certain that this talent would react upon their think- 
 ing, and produce that clearness of insight, that general 
 appreciation of sound argument, which is perfectly 
 necessary to any sober democratic government. For 
 there, it is by persuading the majority that the actions 
 of the state are determined. Themistocles and Aristides 
 carried on their controversies before the people ; the one 
 persuaded the people to become a naval force, and to 
 fortify their city with impregnable defenses ; the other 
 persuaded the Greeks of the islands and coast cities of 
 the ^Egean, not more by his upright character than by 
 his arguments, to look away from Sparta as a useless 
 and lazy president of Greece, and put themselves under 
 the energetic guidance of Athens. But now we are 
 passing into a new stage of Greek civilization, which will 
 require a separate chapter.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE LIFE OF THE NATION FROM THE DEFEAT OF 
 
 THE PERSIANS (479 B. C. ) TILL THE FALL 
 
 OF IMPERIAL ATHENS (404 B. C.). 
 
 It is very strange that the period following upon the 
 decisive defeat of the "eastern barbarians" is so little Lack of detailed 
 prominent in Greek history. We should have thought ha1fTen°ury Xt 
 that with this great outburst of national energy, the 
 forces employed and matured in the great war would 
 forthwith have turned into other lines, and made their 
 country splendid in art and in literature as well as in 
 science and in commerce. Yet such is not the case. 
 The Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars are separated 
 by a half century, in which we can trace the rise and 
 waning of the Athenian Empire over the sea, and in the 
 latter part of which arises a great galaxy of writers, both 
 in poetry and prose. But though these works tell us 
 much, the history is only before us in outline, and when 
 we seek to penetrate the mist that covers the rest of 
 Greece, we have of Sparta, Argos, Thebes only vague 
 or brief information. It is no doubt an accident ; it is 
 the loss of the historians who treated of these matters, P. ue to loss of 
 
 historians. 
 
 with the exception of Thucydides, whose subject only 
 permitted him to give a short retrospect. Plutarch's 
 " Life of Pericles," drawn from good and early sources, 
 which have not yet been identified by the Germans who 
 seek after them, shows what might have been the case 
 had the memoirs of the day, those of Ion and Stesim- 
 
 133
 
 134 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Our conception 
 of Greek poli- 
 tics enlarged 
 and modified bj 
 
 the new Aristo- 
 telian treatise. 
 
 Injurious effects 
 of Persian War 
 on Asiatic 
 Greeks. 
 
 Effect on 
 commerce. 
 
 brotos and the rest, been preserved. But there is very 
 little to guide us now. 
 
 Our best information is concerning politics, concern- 
 ing the successive steps by which the Athenians waxed 
 great, and this side of the period has received great 
 additional light from the "Polity of the Athenians," 
 found in Egypt not long since. But, as if our difficulties 
 were not already great enough, their author, long since 
 received as Aristotle by Plutarch and the grammarians 
 who quoted from him, differs in material points from 
 Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon. This work, 
 however, is not intended to discuss or display our 
 difficulties. 
 
 We can still see reasons, however, why the epoch 
 before us should not have been an epoch generally great 
 in literature or generally brilliant in art, however great 
 the exception in Athens and a few art centers. In the 
 first place, the Asiatic Greeks were considerably dam- 
 aged in wealth and importance. Though the cities on 
 headlands and on the adjacent islands could be protected 
 by the Athenian navy, the inland cities were well nigh 
 lost to the nationality, being subject to the dominion, 
 and probably the harsher dominion, of the Persians. 
 Commerce too, and intercourse in general, with the rich 
 and populous interior of Asia Minor must have been 
 much impeded, since the Greeks were now open and 
 vigorous enemies of the Persians, and disposed to carry 
 on a permanent war between the East and the West. 
 
 In this way, therefore, Hellenedom was somewhat 
 curtailed, and the example of courtly luxury formerly 
 often seen at the Persian court and at those of the 
 satraps, must have been rarer and less influential. The 
 luxurious life of the old Ionians had passed away, and 
 with it perhaps many of the refinements of an earlier
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 135 
 
 age. For democracy had become fashionable, and with 
 
 democracy ruder manners and simpler fare, while the ^f^" 1 -* 
 
 energies formerly directed to art and to commerce favor of polities. 
 
 merged in politics. We know in our own time how 
 
 absorbing politics are, and how a nation that lives in 
 
 them may come to think of nothing else. It is not every 
 
 city, it is not one in a thousand, that can find genius 
 
 and energy for all paths of life, as did the Athenians. I 
 
 think, therefore, that the predominance of politics had 
 
 much to say to the apparent neglect, or want of advance, 
 
 in material life in many parts of Greece. The Spartans 
 
 of the Peloponnesian War appear rather inferior to those 
 
 of the Persian. The rest of Greece does not seem 
 
 advancing, except in architecture and sculpture. There 
 
 are no new discoveries to make the life of men easier. 
 
 There is no such advance as we have made in our 
 
 century since the great wars ceased. But silently there 
 
 1 1 <-™ 1 r 1 -jji r Steady progress 
 
 must have been progress. I he temples 01 the middle of of art and 
 this century, notably the great temple at Olympia, the 
 Parthenon and Theseum at Athens, and the best of 
 what we call the archaic school of sculpture, are derived 
 from this time. 
 
 The stimulus of Athens accounts for a great deal. 
 Many pupils must have gone out from the school of 
 Phidias and spread abroad the great and subtle princi- 
 ples of his art. Ictinus, the builder of the Parthenon, 
 wrote a book describing it. Such a book must have 
 been a precious handbook of architecture to all that 
 acquired it. And acquire it they could, for now that 
 intercourse with Egypt, during its revolt from the 
 Persians, was easy, the use of papyrus must have spread s ad of 
 rapidly to all parts of ALgean, and so books must have 
 been easily multiplied. The great poets from Pindar 
 downward could not possibly compose their elaborate 
 
 literature.
 
 1 3 6 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Peculiarities of 
 Athenian naval 
 warfare. 
 
 Perfection of 
 marine tactics. 
 
 choral systems without writing. The plays of yEschylus 
 and Sophocles were not laid by after the first per- 
 formance, but read and quoted among the crowd at 
 Athens. In this way knowledge must have increased, 
 and life must have become, if not more luxurious and 
 comfortable, at least more modern. 
 
 The development of the Attic navy was perhaps the 
 most singular thing of that time. For two centuries 
 back, the so-called trireme, a narrow decked ship 
 worked with three banks of oars, had been known and 
 used for war. No modern naval constructor has been 
 able to explain to us how rows of oars, one higher than 
 the other, could possibly be managed without fouling or 
 hopeless awkwardness. None of us has ever succeeded 
 in producing a possible model of such a ship. Yet this 
 was the usual ship of war, and, as the Athenians 
 developed it, went long journeys at eight or ten miles an 
 hour, a pace not inferior to the ordinary coasting 
 steamers now in those waters. It was not detained by 
 calm, and was in this way better than our sailing ships. 
 But so completely did the Athenians make these ships 
 a matter of naval tactics, of evolutions with the actual 
 boat, that in their palmy days they carried only ten 
 armed men as marine soldiers, while there were two 
 hundred to manage the oars. They won their battles 
 not by boarding and fighting, but by so maneuvering 
 that they rammed their opponents' ships, and sank 
 them, dealing with the crews when they lay helpless in 
 their disabled and sinking ship. A very small battle 
 fought by their Admiral Phormion at the mouth of the 
 Gulf of Corinth, described by Thucydides, has become 
 more famous than many great and decisive sea fights, 
 because it shows us clearly the great perfection to which 
 the Attic navy had brought its marine tactics. Each
 
 The Life of the Nation, 4.JQ-J.04. B. C. 137 
 
 captain must have had his men under the same training, 
 the same control, that the captain of a British ship has 
 his crew.* 
 
 Turning back to literature, which is, after all, far our 
 clearest evidence of Attic civilization in its perfection, we 
 find quite a new and peculiar character imprinted upon 
 it by the Attic spirit. It is remarkable that the perfec- 
 tion of prose writing was so late- — -not till the very end 
 of the term before us. In any case prose is always ' 
 a product of the maturity of literature. The imagination Reasons why 
 
 . -in- i- • perfection in 
 
 produces poetry ; it is rational reflection, discussion, poetry precedes 
 
 .... . , perfection in 
 
 practical use that produce prose, and this is not required prose, 
 till a nation has arrived at the fulness of its vigor 
 and the maturity of its life. There is indeed much sim- 
 plicity and good sense even in such early poets as Solon, 
 but it was not till Athens came victoriously out of 
 the Persian wars, and acquired a great empire, not 
 till poetry and religion were separated from the language 
 of history and of politics, that the severance of the 
 two great branches of letters permitted the later of 
 the two to attain perfection. 
 
 Yet it cannot by any means be said that Attic prose 
 summed up in itself all the perfections of the Greek 
 intellect. No Attic book ever replaced, indeed ever 
 equalled in its way, the fascinating history of Herodotus; 
 and this work was well known at Athens, and very 
 probably read out to the wits and literary men of 
 that city. Yet the broad sympathies of the great 
 master were foreign to the Attic school ; it was the poli- „ 
 
 _ 1 Narrow 
 
 tics of their empire, the peculiarities of their own city sympathies 
 and its adversaries, which filled their minds. These they Athenians. 
 
 *Such actions as that of Phormion do not depend upon their size for their 
 importance. The first action in which Captain Abney Hastings brought steam 
 to bear upon the Turkish fleet, and destroyed a squadron with his single ship, 
 the Karterio, working one gun, was also an epoch in naval warfare. Cf. 
 Finlay's " History of Greece," VII., 14 sq.
 
 us 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Effect of arti- 
 ficiality pro- 
 duced by over- 
 subtlety of 
 language. 
 
 High standard 
 of intellectual 
 culture shown 
 hv Attic prose. 
 
 analyzed with precision and with depth. But they 
 are strictly men of the present ; the orators especially, 
 also the historians, and still more the philosophers. 
 Everywhere, even in the imagination of Plato (who 
 comes later), reason holds its sway, and there is a strict- 
 ness and chastity in all Attic style which permit only 
 a little ornament, and that of the most carefully chosen 
 kind. These writers all presuppose an exceedingly in- 
 telligent public, catching the writer's meaning at every 
 hint, guessing the point of every faint allusion, despising 
 dulness and hating mediocrity. This deep-seated ambi- 
 tion to be clever, which soon became a necessity for suc- 
 cess, tended to produce an over-subtlety of language, 
 not conducive to real dignity ; the whole effect, intended 
 to be artistic, and in most cases really so, is often, even 
 in the greatest of them, in the prose of Thucydides, 
 in the poetry of Sophocles, distinctly artificial. Antithe- 
 sis, balancing of epithets, a play of words rather than the 
 labor of thought, sometimes disappoint the reader, even 
 though the grace and purity of the language, both in its 
 strict and simple vocabulary, and in the rich variety of 
 its particles, are the despair of any translator. 
 
 It is this prose, reaching from Thucydides to Demos- 
 thenes in its golden age, in its silver down to Plutarch 
 and Dio Chrysostom, or even Lucian, which must ever 
 demonstrate to any intelligent man who learns to under- 
 stand it, that no society ever was, or ever will be, more 
 intellectually cultivated than these Greeks. No audience 
 has arisen ever since which could follow or appreciate 
 such delicate perfection as is the standard of good Attic 
 prose. Future nations may be infinitely more learned 
 in material things ; they may have myriad facts of 
 history and facts of science put into their heads ; they 
 may have the full experiences of two thousand more
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 139 
 
 years boiled down into an essence, and administered to 
 them from youth up, so that they may enter life carry- 
 ing with them a mental storehouse of which every shelf 
 is labelled and laden with knowledge. But this very 
 process will probably diminish rather than increase that 
 appreciation of excellence which the perfection of good 
 sense, good taste, and rational training produced in the 
 Athens of Pericles and Plato. What is perhaps more Its permanence . 
 wonderful is that this great result did not die out when 
 the few generations passed away whose genius created 
 this wonderful condition of things. The Greek intellect 
 was so permanently raised by the education of this 
 perfect prose that even down to the age of decadence, 
 among slaves and foreigners who learned its use, the 
 audiences of St. Paul understood arguments and appre- 
 ciated subtleties which no practical teacher would 
 venture to set undiluted before any modern collection of 
 men. 
 
 But it must not be for one moment imagined that this 
 result was attained by flashes of heaven-born genius ; it JheresuUo" 
 was the result of genius doing what real genius always 
 does, taking an infinity of trouble. Though the early 
 writers, such as Thucydides, had ample models of clear 
 and simple diction before them, not only in the Ionic 
 prose of older men, but also in the grace and clearness 
 of Euripides' s dialogue, it is plain that they plume them- 
 selves not upon the narrative, which is simple and clear 
 enough, but on those subtle and contorted lucubrations 
 which assume a rhetorical form, and are efforts at highly 
 artistic composition. We have remains of Thucydides' s 
 master, Antiphon, a strong and dangerous spirit, who 
 helped the aristocratic party at Athens with his intellect 
 and with his pen more than with a sword, and whose 
 forensic talents, long used to the criminal courts at 
 
 art.
 
 140 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Intricacy of 
 style of Thu- 
 cvdides. 
 
 Translation 
 
 from 
 
 Thucvdides. 
 
 Athens, were last used in his great personal defense of 
 his own life and policy, when accused and convicted of 
 political murders and of treason against the democracy. 
 We have some half dozen of his earlier speeches, but 
 how dry and harsh they are, like a fine wine that has 
 not yet ripened, full of close reasoning, of strong sense, 
 but devoid of all the grace and perfume of the mature 
 vintage. 
 
 In the same manner, when Thucydides turns to reflec- 
 tions in his history, reflections which usually take the 
 form of debates, he makes his speakers deliver periods 
 so contorted and obscure that they could only delight an 
 audience enamored of subtleties, and longing to exercise 
 their acuteness upon enigmas of diction. The thoughts 
 of these contorted sentences are seldom deep ; they are 
 not, as many commentators pretend, crowded too 
 closely together for clear expression ; the same idea, in 
 itself obvious enough, is taken up and tossed about like 
 a shuttlecock between battledores of antithesis. The 
 reader who expects a new truth in each sentence is 
 deceived ; he is only chewing the cud of the last clause, 
 but he is so puzzled and interested with these ingenui- 
 ties that he feels himself performing a high intellectual 
 process. If I here give a specimen from Jowett's trans- 
 lation, it is necessary to warn the reader that his pellucid 
 English is no representative of the weaknesses, but only 
 of the strength of his original. He could no more have 
 allowed a sentence such as those in which Thucydides 
 delighted to issue from his hand, than Racine would 
 have allowed the Greek tragic poet to speak his realities 
 upon the French stage. 
 
 They pretend that they first offered to have the matter 
 decided by arbitration. The appeal to justice might have some 
 meaning in the mouth of cue who before he had recourse to
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 141 
 
 arms acted honorably, as he now talks fairly, but not when it 
 is made from a position of security and advantage. Whereas 
 these men began by laying siege to Epidamnus, and not until 
 they feared our vengeance did they put forward their specious 
 offer of arbitration. And as if the wrong which they have 
 themselves done at Epidamnus were not enough, they now 
 come hither and ask you to be, not their allies, but their 
 accomplices in crime, and would have you receive them when 
 they are at enmity with us. But they ought to have come when 
 they were out of all danger, not at a time when we are smart- 
 ing under an injury and they have good reason to be afraid. 
 You have never derived any benefit from their power, but they 
 will now be benefited by yours, and, although innocent of their 
 crimes, you will equally be held responsible by us. If you 
 were to have shared the consequences with them they ought 
 long ago to have shared the power with you. We have shown 
 that our complaints are justified and that our adversaries are 
 tyrannical and dishonest ; we will now prove to you that you 
 have no right to receive them. Admitting that the treaty 
 allows any unenrolled cities to join either league, this provision 
 does not apply to those who have in view the injury of others, 
 but only to him who is in need of protection — certainly not to 
 one who forsakes his allegiance and who will bring war instead 
 of peace to those who receive him, or rather, if they are wise, 
 will not receive him on such terms. And war the Corcyrseans 
 will bring to you if you listen to them and not to us. For if 
 you become the allies of the Corcyraeans you will be no longer 
 at peace with us, but will be converted into enemies ; and we 
 must, if you take their part, in defending ourselves against 
 them, defend ourselves against you. But you ought in common 
 justice to stand aloof from both ; or, if you must join either, 
 you should join us and go to war with them ; to Corinth you 
 are at all events bound by treaty, but with Corcyra you never 
 even entered into a temporary negotiation. And do not set the 
 precedent of receiving the rebellious subjects of others. At 
 the revolt of Samos, when the other Peloponnesians were 
 divided upon the question of giving aid to the rebels, we 
 voted in your favor and expressly maintained "that every one 
 should be allowed to chastise his own allies." If you mean to 
 receive and assist evil-doers, we shall assuredly gain as many 
 allies of yours as you will of ours ; and you will establish a prin-
 
 142 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The funeral 
 oration of 
 Pericles. 
 
 The style of 
 Sophocles. 
 
 It reflects the 
 current taste 
 for subtlety. 
 
 ciple which will tell against yourselves more than against us.* 
 
 Here there is but one idea, with a few appendages. 
 The same criticism applies to most chapters in these 
 speeches, and if we take up the most famous of them, 
 the "Epitaphios" or funeral laudation put into the 
 mouth of Pericles.f we shall be surprised at the cranki- 
 ness, the vagueness, and even the want of tact which 
 it frequently displays. Nevertheless it is not without 
 a certain grave dignity, and this quality it is which 
 has obtained for Thucydides a permanent hearing and a 
 high respect in all literary ages. The high standard of 
 political self-denial, of self-sacrifice for the glory of 
 his country, which he sets forth, has something splendid 
 about it, and there are occasional flashes of felicitous 
 phrase, as there are even in Mr. Meredith's novels. \ 
 
 Much of this criticism, mutatis mutandis, applies 
 to the historian's greatest contemporary, Sophocles. 
 For we can hardly consider ^schylus's literary activity 
 as coinciding with his younger rivals. Sophocles is 
 a very great poet ; he has many of the highest qualities; 
 his tragedies will never cease to be quoted as the noblest 
 bloom of Periclean Athens ; but there can be no doubt 
 whatever that his style reflects the current taste for sub- 
 tlety and obscurity, that his vocabulary was anything but 
 pure, and that his earlier works at least retained much of 
 the harshness of the new vintage. || Here again we have 
 an author quite beyond translation, even though the 
 reader will find that Mr. Whitelaw's version, among 
 many good ones, is a wonderful attempt to transfer the 
 
 * Thucydides I., Chaps. XXXIX. -XL. Jowett's translation. 
 
 tBook II., Chaps. XXXV.-XLYI. 
 
 \ Indeed, if Mr. Meredith were set himself to translate the speeches of Thu- 
 cydides we might expect a remarkably faithful version in the higher sense, not 
 word for word, but spirit for spirit. 
 
 II The reader will find the facts which support these views in the chapter on 
 Sophocles in my " Greek Literature."
 
 The Life of the Nation, 4.7 9-404 B. C. 143 
 
 Attic bee into a foreign land. The reason why Euripi- 
 des, an inferior poet, though a greater thinker, was 
 so frequently successful in his day, and presently ousted 
 both yEschylus and Sophocles from public favor, is that 
 he made his diction pure and his style clear, and 
 so spoke to the larger public that had not been trained 
 in all the subtleties and the cleverness of the over- 
 refined Attic public. 
 
 There is reason to think that the strain upon the social 
 life at Athens must have been very great, during the 
 period of its brilliance. A large imperial policy, an ex- 
 tended commercial activity, the training of a navy 
 to sweep the seas, the practice of an oratory to astonish 
 the audience, and last, but not least, the rebuilding of 
 the city to appear worthy of its greatness — all this must 
 have kept things going at a fever heat, and Plutarch, 
 our only informant concerning the art side, notices 
 specially the extraordinary expedition with which the 
 great buildings of the time were erected. Yet so far as 
 we know them, they seem erected to last forever. Dr. 
 Dorpfeld, walking with me about the Parthenon, re- 
 marked that in his mind — he was a professional archi- 
 tect — such a building could never again, and ought 
 never again, be created. The beauty and perfection of 
 all the invisible parts are such that the cost of labor and 
 money must be enormous. There is no show whatever 
 for much of this extraordinary finish, which can only be 
 seen by going up on the roof, or by opening a wall. It 
 is a building like that very religious building of the 
 twelfth century, when artists worked absolutely for 
 the glory of God and for the salvation of their souls, 
 without regarding whether their work was ever to be 
 seen of men. Yet, in both cases, the religiousness 
 of the unseen work has secured that what is seen shall 
 
 Sophocles con- 
 trasted with 
 Euripides. 
 
 Feverish 
 activity of 
 Athenian life at 
 this period. 
 
 The costly 
 perfection of 
 the Parthenon.
 
 144 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 be perfect with no ordinary perfection. It is well worth 
 quoting the remarkable passage in Plutarch's " Peri- 
 cles," Chapters XII. -XIII., which gives us a vivid pic- 
 ture of the art policy of the great statesman. 
 That which was the chief delight of the Athenians and the 
 
 Pericfes? y ° f wonder of strangers, and which alone serves for a proof that 
 the boasted power and opulence of ancient Greece is not 
 an idle tale, was the magnificence of the temples and public 
 edifices. Yet no part of the conduct of Pericles moved the 
 spleen of his enemies more than this. In their accusations 
 of him to the people they insisted, "That he had brought the 
 greatest disgrace on the Athenians by removing the public 
 treasures of Greece from Delos, and taking them into his own 
 custody ; that he had not left himself even the specious apology 
 of having caused the money to be brought to Athens for 
 its greater security, and to keep it from being seized by the bar- 
 barians ; that Greece must needs consider it as the highest 
 insult, and an act of open tyranny, when she saw the money 
 She had been obliged to contribute toward the war lavished by 
 the Athenians in gilding their city, and ornamenting it with 
 statues and temples that cost a thousand talents, as a proud 
 and vain woman decks herself out with jewels." Pericles 
 answered this charge by observing, "That they were not 
 
 Pericles's obliged to eive the allies anv account of the sums they had re- 
 
 ceived, since they had kept the barbarians at a distance, 
 and effectually defended the allies, who had not furnished 
 either horses, ships, or men, but only contributed money, 
 which is no longer the property of the giver, but of the 
 receiver, if he performs the conditions on which it is received. 
 That as the state was provided with all the necessaries of war, 
 its superfluous wealth should be laid out on such works as, 
 when executed, would be eternal monuments of its glory, and 
 which, during their execution, would diffuse a universal plenty; 
 for as so many kinds of labor and such a variety of instru- 
 ments and materials were requisite to these undertakings, 
 every art would be exerted, every hand employed, almost 
 the whole city would be in pay, and be at the same time 
 both adorned and supported by itself." Indeed, such as were 
 of a proper age and strength, were wanted for the wars, 
 and well rewarded for their services ; and as for the mechanics 
 
 answer to his 
 enemies.
 
 Tfie Life of the Nation, 4.79-4.04 B. C. 145 
 
 and meaner sort of people, they went not without their share of 
 the public money nor yet had they it to support them in 
 idleness. By the constructing of great edifices, which required 
 many arts and a long time to finish them, they had equal 
 pretensions to be considered out of the treasury (though they 
 stirred not out of the city) with the mariners and soldiers, Encouragement 
 guards and garrisons ; for the different materials, such as stone, [, ^uildin^ 6 " 
 brass, ivory, gold, ebony, and cypress, furnished employment 
 to carpenters, masons, brasiers, goldsmiths, painters, turners, 
 and other artificers ; the conveyance of them by sea employed 
 merchants and sailors, and by land wheelwrights, waggoners, 
 carriers, rope-makers, leather-cutters, paviors, and iron-found- 
 ers ; and every art had a number of the lower people ranged in 
 proper subordination to execute it like soldiers under the com- 
 mand of a general. Thus by the exercise of these different 
 trades, plenty was diffused among persons of every rank 
 and condition. Thus works were raised of an astonishing 
 magnitude and inimitable beauty and perfection, every architect 
 striving to surpass the magnificence of the design with the 
 elegance of the execution ; yet still the most wonderful cir- 
 cumstance was the expedition with which they were com- 
 pleted. Many edifices, each of which seems to have required 
 the labor of several successive ages, were finished during the 
 administration of one prosperous man. It is said that when 
 Agatharchus, the painter, valued himself on the celerity and 
 ease with which he despatched his pieces, Zeuxis replied : " If 
 I boast, it shall be of the slowness with which I finish mine " ; of Zeuxis. 
 for ease and speed in the execution seldom give a work 
 any lasting importance, or exquisite beauty ; while, on the 
 other hand, the time which is expended in labor, is recovered 
 and repaid in the duration of the performance. Hence we 
 have the more reason to wonder that the structures raised 
 by Pericles should be built in so short a time, and yet built for 
 ages ; for as each of them, as soon as finished, had the vener- 
 able air of antiquity ; so, now they are old, they have the 
 freshness of a modern building. A bloom is diffused over 
 them, which preserves their aspect untarnished by time, as 
 if they were animate with a spirit of perpetual youth and 
 unfading elegance. Phidias was appointed by Pericles superin- 
 tendent of all the public edifices, though the Athenians had 
 then other eminent architects and excellent workmen. The
 
 146 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The Parthenon. Parthenon, or Temple of Pallas, whose dimensions had been a 
 hundred feet square, was rebuilt by Callicrates and Ictinus. . . 
 
 The long wall. The long wall, the building of which Socrates says he heard 
 Pericles propose to the people, was undertaken by Callicrates. 
 Cratinus ridicules this work as proceeding very slowly : 
 
 " Stones upon stones the orator has piled, 
 With swelling words, but words will build no walls." 
 
 The Odeum. The Odeum or music theater, which was likewise built by the 
 
 direction of Pericles, had within it many rows of seats and of 
 pillars ; the roof was of a conic figure, after the model, 
 we are told, of the king of Persia's pavilion. Cratinus there- 
 fore rallies him again in his play called " Thrattae " : 
 
 " As Jove, an onion on his head he wears ; 
 As Pericles, a whole orchestra bears ; 
 Afraid of broils and banishment no more, 
 He tunes the shell he trembled at before." 
 
 Pericles at this time exerted all his interest to have a decree 
 made, appointing a prize for the best performer in music 
 during the Panathenaea ; and, as he himself was appointed 
 judge and distributor of the prizes, he gave the contending 
 artists directions in what manner to proceed, whether their per- 
 formance was vocal or on the flute or lyre. From that time 
 the prizes in music were always contended for in the Odeum. 
 The vestibule of the citadel was finished in five years by 
 Mnesicles the architect.* 
 
 Encouragement 
 of music Dy 
 Pericles. 
 
 Perfect pro- 
 portion of the 
 Parthenon. 
 
 The group of buildings on the Acropolis of Athens, 
 which all date from this golden epoch, is certainly the 
 most perfect and beautiful in the world. They are not 
 very large ; hugeness was no object to the builders ; and 
 how well these men understood the permanent laws of 
 art is manifest from this fact, that no hugeness dwarfs 
 their buildings by comparison ; no vastness makes them 
 look smaller than is required for perfect beauty. Come 
 if you like fresh from St. Peter's at Rome, or from the 
 Pont-du-Gard at Nimes, or from the colossal halls of the 
 
 * Plutarch, " Pericles," Langhorne's translation.
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 147 
 
 great temple at Luxor, and tell me if you feel the Par- 
 thenon small or insignificant . So it is with the question 
 of richness. No display of ornament will make it look 
 poor, even now in its ruin, when its colors are long since 
 faded and gone. Come fresh from St. Mark's at Venice 
 or from the Pavian Certosa, and tell me whether the re- 
 maining ornament seems to you inadequate. 
 
 We now know that the marvelous symmetry of the Effect of g m _ 
 Parthenon is not attained by setting up a four-square ™ et c r u y r P™ duced 
 building of very precious stone, with carved decorations 
 of great beauty. Far from being what ignorant ob- 
 servers imagine, an affair of straight lines, there is not, 
 so far as I know, a single straight line in the whole 
 structure. The floor is slightly arched up, very slightly, 
 and not merely to cause rain to run off, for all the other 
 surfaces are also curved. The pillars are not set at equal 
 intervals, but closer together near the corner of the 
 building. The shafts swell toward the middle, none of 
 them stand perpendicular, but slightly inclined inwards. 
 We know from comparing modern buildings in that 
 style, which do not observe this law, that a row of per- 
 pendicular pillars seems to splay outward at either end 
 of the row. This was what Ictinus chose to avoid. The 
 upper horizontal lines of the architrave are likewise 
 curved, to avoid a similar unpleasant illusion of the eye, 
 and all these delicate variations from the right line are 
 constructed as the arcs of vast circles standing in fixed 
 relations. The ornament consisted of carving done by use of color on 
 the school of Phidias, and coloring of this and all the the carving - 
 building ; for the Athenians had no esteem for white 
 marble as a surface ; in a statue its coldness would have 
 been most repulsive to them. But the color is gone, or 
 rather all the various colors have given place to that 
 beautiful gold brown with which the Attic dust of ages
 
 148 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Erechtheum. 
 
 Material diffi- 
 culties over- 
 come. 
 
 has stained the once painted marble. When new frag- 
 ments are dug up in modern excavations, the traces of 
 bright color, green, blue, gold, red, are usually there. 
 As regards the sculpture, which consist of pediments 
 (gable groups), the frieze (cornice) along the main 
 wall, and metopes (originally plaques to stop the holes 
 between the ends of the roof beams), they are so well 
 known that they need not here be described, especially 
 as they fill the principal chapter in every work on Greek 
 art. 
 
 Not less perfect than the Parthenon is the far smaller, 
 but even richer Erechtheum, where the pillars with their 
 inward trend are most gracefully replaced by Caryatides, 
 women with sacred baskets upon their heads, who rest 
 each upon the foot nearest the center, thus producing 
 the effect intended by a mere natural pose. 
 
 We should willingly give away all the speeches in 
 Thucydides to have some account of the studios in which 
 Phidias the sculptor and Ictinus the architect devised 
 and executed these marvelous plans. The stone was 
 brought from the marble quarries of Mount Pentelicus — 
 we can still trace the road, and we can wonder at the 
 huge cuttings in the mountain, some ten miles north of 
 Athens. They had no explosive to separate the blocks, 
 they had no instruments comparable to ours. But with 
 simple tools and unlimited slave labor they carried down 
 beams and blocks of marble often thirty feet long and 
 hundreds of tons in weight ; they carried them up the 
 steep incline to the plateau of the rock ; there they 
 carved them, and then lifted them thirty or forty feet 
 into the air into their places. In a few years, Plutarch 
 tells us, the Parthenon was completed by these proc- 
 esses, and even now the joinings and fittings of the 
 stones, the accuracy of their placement, the beams of
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 149 
 
 twenty-five feet long spanning the top of a doorway over 
 the supporting pillars, the drums of pillars set upon 
 drums, with the fluting so fitted that the joining is often 
 not even visible, the figures more perfect than any mod- 
 ern can design, grouped as no modern can group them, 
 set by way of mere ornament so high on a wall that their 
 subtle refinement only produces a general effect — all this 
 wealth of knowledge, this lavishing of wealth, this 
 mutual perfection of material design and execution, is 
 such that the longer and better we study it, the greater 
 and more superhuman it appears. 
 
 In art, therefore, we may maintain without the preeminence of 
 smallest fear of contradiction that the modern world p^od ?" an 
 with all its inventions has not even approached the per- and llterature - 
 fection of this golden age. In literature also, and 
 perhaps in international politics and diplomacy, we may 
 hold that our present state is a new growth from the 
 barbarism of the dark ages, which has exceeded in 
 quantity, but not in quality, what the Athenians had 
 attained. 
 
 The great problem how far those who have voluntarily 
 entered into a confederacy, and prospered as members 
 of it, are entitled in future time to withdraw from it, and 
 so break up a league from which not only they but the 
 other members are deriving great benefit, is a question 
 constantly before the Greek politicians in this and the 
 next century. The instinct of the predominant partner 
 was to hold such a league together by force, and to 
 refuse to allow allies or subjects who had agreed to 
 certain terms any liberty in rejecting them. This is 
 asserted over and over again by Athenians and others 
 in the discussions which Thucydides composes for them. 
 On the other hand, there was a strong and indelible gjjJgFjy* 
 instinct of autonomy, or the claim to manage their own tor autonomy.
 
 150 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Slavery main 
 cause of low 
 standard of 
 morality. 
 
 Callous and 
 brutal attitude 
 to slaves and 
 prisoners. 
 
 affairs, in all the Hellenic polities, however small ; and 
 this was the feeling which made an attack upon any- 
 such empire, or more properly, hegemony, of Athenians, 
 Spartans, or Thebans, popular in Greece. It was the 
 very same problem as that which agitated America at 
 the opening of the great Civil War thirty years ago. 
 Were the states which were the mothers of the Union 
 bound forever to remain in that Union, even if what they 
 held to be their state liberties were violated ? What- 
 ever might have been the rights of those states which 
 were daughters of the Union, the original partners 
 seemed to have an indefeasible right of withdrawing, if 
 the terms of the original contract were violated. 
 
 Our real superiority lies in our moral ideals, in our 
 philanthropy, our care of the poor and the sick, very 
 probably in our developed notions of humanity. I do 
 not know whether the existence and justification of 
 slavery as a national institution are not the main cause 
 of this difference. In all slave-holding societies the 
 feelings of the slave are violated by the will or the 
 caprice of the master. Even as nowadays men will not 
 hesitate to sacrifice domestic animals to their con- 
 venience, so will they sacrifice their slaves. As far as 
 securing leisure to the free, as far as saving them from 
 drudgery, slavery generally conduces to refinement of 
 manners and elegance of life in the dominating class. 
 But if any pressing need occurs, the lives of slaves will 
 be sacrificed without scruple, and the habit of so doing 
 cannot but react upon the morals of the masters, and 
 make them callous in other cases where humanity is 
 involved. This we see in the best and foremost Greek 
 society of this period. How many slaves were sacrificed 
 to the hurry of building the Parthenon we shall never 
 know. In the silver mines of Laurium it would seem
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-4.04 B. C. 151 
 
 that two years was the average life of a workman. But 
 
 the treatment of prisoners is constantly stated to us. Frequent mas- 
 
 1 J sacres of male 
 
 Very frequently the adult male prisoners, especially if prisoners, 
 they belonged to a hated rival city, were massacred in 
 cold blood, nor did the refinement manifested by the 
 companions of Pericles and Phidias revolt from these 
 butcheries. The women and children were made slaves, 
 and if not ransomed, became the chattels of the victors. 
 The honor of a woman who was even a temporary 
 prisoner was no more respected than her purse, nor was 
 such a misfortune, which often happened, considered as 
 in any way ruining her reputation. We have this 
 indeed explicitly from Xenophon, a generation later 
 than that now under consideration. But if it was true 
 then, it must have been true ten times more in the 
 colder, harsher, and more selfish society of Antiphon, 
 Thucydides, Alcibiades, and Lysander. The milk of 
 human kindness seems to have run dry among them. 
 Even in the Attic comedy of the day, the brilliant and 
 genial Aristophanes seldom paints this feature. 
 
 So far, then, the association of the good with the _. , .., , 
 
 & The beautiful 
 
 beautiful and the true seems incomplete. The latter pot necessarily 
 
 1 identical with 
 
 two are attained in no ordinary degree. The former, the s° od or 
 which is to us the most divine of the three, was but 
 poorly represented. 
 
 The whole policy of Athens as drawn by its great 
 historian Thucydides is as repulsive as the figures of the 
 Olympian gods drawn by Homer.* He tells us in a 
 singular passage that it was the great Peloponnesian 
 War which ruined the public morals of the nation, and 
 though this statement is untrue, for we know of the same 
 vices rampant at earlier epochs, the picture he draws 
 offers sc curious and dark a shadow to the brilliancy of 
 
 * This subject is treated in the early chapters of my " Social Life in Greece."
 
 152 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Disastrous 
 effect of Pelo- 
 ponnesian War 
 tm Athenian 
 morals. 
 
 Description 
 from Thucydi- 
 des of Greek 
 avarice and 
 ambition. 
 
 the art side of this life that we shall do well to quote it. 
 
 For not long afterwards the whole Hellenic world was in 
 commotion, in every city the chiefs of the democracy and of 
 the oligarchy were struggling, the one to bring in the Athenians, 
 the other the Lacedaemonians. Now, in time of peace, men 
 would have had no excuse for introducing either, and no 
 desire to do so, but when they were at war and both sides 
 could easily obtain allies to the hurt of their enemies and the 
 advantage of themselves, the dissatisfied party were only too 
 ready to invoke foreign aid. And revolution brought upon the 
 cities of Hellas many terrible calamities, such as have been and 
 always will be while human nature remains the same, but which 
 are more or less aggravated and differ in character with every 
 new combination of circumstances. In peace and prosperity 
 both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, 
 because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious 
 necessities ; but war, which takes away the comfortable pro- 
 vision of daily life, is a hard master, and tends to assimilate 
 men's characters to their conditions. 
 
 When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who 
 followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, 
 and determined to outdo the report of all who had preceded 
 them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of 
 their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the 
 same relation to things, but was changed by them as they 
 thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage ; 
 prudent delay was the excuse of a coward ; moderation was 
 the disguise of unmanly weakness ; to know everything was 
 to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. 
 A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. 
 The lover of violence was always trusted, and his opponent 
 suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, 
 but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one. 
 On the other hand, he who plotted from the first to have 
 nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties and a 
 poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who 
 could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and so 
 was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The 
 tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood, because a 
 partisan was more ready to dare without asking why. (For
 
 The Life of the Nation, 4J9-4.04. B. C. 153 
 
 party associations are not based upon any established law, nor 
 do they seek the public good ; they are formed in defiance of 
 the laws and from self-interest.) The seal of good faith was 
 not divine law, but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when he 
 was in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party 
 received them not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watch- 
 fulness of his actions. Revenge was dearer than self-preserva- 
 tion. Any agreements sworn to by either party, when they 
 could do nothing else, were binding as long as both were 
 powerless. But he who on a favorable opportunity first took 
 courage and struck at his enemy when he saw him off his 
 guard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious than he would have 
 had in an open act of revenge ; he congratulated himself that 
 he had taken the safer course, and also that he had over- 
 reached his enemy and gained the prize of superior ability. 
 In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness 
 than the simple for goodness — men take a pride in the one, but 
 are ashamed of the other. 
 
 The cause of all these evils was the love of power, origina- The evils of 
 ting in avarice and ambition, and the party spirit which is P artv spirit, 
 engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a con- 
 test. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the 
 one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality of 
 the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they 
 made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, 
 in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each 
 other, they committed the most monstrous crimes ; yet even 
 these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges, 
 which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing 
 any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but 
 both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. 
 Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping 
 power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the 
 impatience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for religion ; 
 but any fair pretense which succeeded in effecting some 
 odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who 
 were of neither party fell a prey to both ; either they were dis- 
 liked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their 
 surviving. 
 
 Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Revolution the 
 ... . cause of degen- 
 
 Hellas. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble eration.
 
 i54 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The brutal 
 and selfish 
 foreign policy 
 of Athens. 
 
 Dialogue from 
 Thucydides. 
 
 nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of 
 perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed ; for there was no 
 word binding enough nor oath terrible enough to reconcile 
 enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction that 
 nothing was secure ; he must look to his own safety, and could 
 not afford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally suc- 
 ceeded best. For, aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing 
 the capacity of their opponents, for whom they were no match 
 in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits were likely to 
 anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly and at 
 once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance that 
 they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act when they 
 could think, were taken off their guard and easily destroyed.* 
 
 All these evils are, however, set forth in connection 
 with the hideous massacres at Corcyra, an outlying 
 and not very respectable part of the Greek world. 
 Thucydides in due time lets us know that as far as prin- 
 ciples went the Athenians were no better. He has put 
 into their mouths a dialogue with the Melians, whose 
 island they desired to take, which may indeed not 
 be historically accurate — there was no reporter present 
 to take it down and bring it to the historian — but which 
 expresses his opinion of the motives which led to the 
 cruel treatment of these islanders. There is no more 
 shocking instance of cold-blooded cynicism in all Greek 
 history. 
 
 Athenians. Well then, we Athenians will use no fine words ; 
 we will not go out of our way to prove at length that we have 
 a right to rule, because we overthrew the Persians ; or that we 
 attack you now because we are suffering any injury at your 
 hands. We should not convince you if we did ; nor must you 
 expect to convince us by arguing that, although a colony of the 
 Lacedaemonians, you have taken no part in their expeditions, 
 or that you have never done us any wrong. But you and we 
 should say what we really think, and aim only at what is 
 possible, for we both alike know that into the discussion 
 
 'Thucydides III., Chaps. LXXXH -I. XXXIII. Jowett.
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 155 
 
 Might is right. 
 
 of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the 
 pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what 
 they can, and the weak grant what they must. 
 
 Melians. Well then, since you set aside justice and invite 
 us to speak of expediency, in our judgment it is certainly 
 expedient that you should respect a principle which is for 
 the common good ; and that to every man when in peril a 
 reasonable claim should be accounted a claim of right, and any 
 plea which he is disposed to urge, even if failing of the point a 
 little, should help his cause. Your interest in this principle 
 is quite as great as ours, inasmuch as you, if you fall, will incur 
 the heaviest vengeance, and will be the most terrible example 
 to mankind. 
 
 Ath. The fall of our empire, if it should fall, is not 
 an event to which we look forward with dismay ; for ruling 
 states such as Lacedcemon are not cruel to their vanquished 
 enemies. And we are fighting not so much against the Lac- 
 edaemonians, as against our own subjects who may some day 
 rise up and overcome their former masters. But this is a 
 danger which you may leave to us. And we will now endeavor 
 to show that we have come in the interests of our empire, and 
 that in what we are about to say we are only seeking the 
 preservation of your city. For we want to make you ours with 
 the least trouble to ourselves, and it is for the interests of 
 us both that you should not be destroyed. 
 
 Mel. It may be your interest to be our masters, but 
 how can it be ours to be your slaves ? 
 
 Ath. To you the gain will be that by submission you will 
 avert the worst ; and we shall be all the richer for your preser- 
 vation. 
 
 Mel. But must we be your enemies ? Will you not receive 
 
 , .,- 11 • •.! -, Selfish argu- 
 
 us as friends if we are neutral and remain at peace with you ? me ntsofthe 
 
 Ath. No, your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as 
 your friendship ; for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an 
 argument of our power, the other of our weakness. 
 
 Mel. But are your subjects really unable to distinguish be- 
 tween states in which you have no concern, and those which 
 are chiefly your own colonies, and in some cases have revolted 
 and been subdued by you ? 
 
 Ath. Why, they do not doubt that both of them have 
 a good deal to say for themselves on the score of justice, 
 
 Athenians.
 
 156 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 but they think that states like yours are left free because 
 they are able to defend themselves and that we do not attack 
 them because we dare not. So that your subjection will give 
 us an increase of security, as well as an extension of empire. 
 For we are masters of the sea, and you who are islanders, and 
 insignificant islanders too, must not be allowed to escape us. 
 
 Mel. But do you not recognize another danger? For, 
 once more, since you drive us from the plea of justice and 
 press upon us your doctrine of expediency, we must show 
 you what is for our interest, and, if it be for yours also, 
 may hope to convince you : Will you not be making enemies of 
 all who are now neutrals ? When they see how you are treat- 
 ing us they will expect you some day to turn against them ; and 
 if so, are you not strengthening the enemies whom you already 
 have, and bringing upon you others who, if they could help, 
 would never dream of being your enemies at all ? 
 
 Ath. We do not consider our really dangerous enemies to 
 The real ^ e any Q f ^g p eo pl es inhabiting the mainland who, secure 
 
 enemies of ■> r r |» 
 
 Athens are the in their freedom, may defer indefinitely any measures of 
 precaution which they take against us, but islanders who, like 
 you, happen to be under no control, and all who may be 
 already irritated by the necessity of submission to our empire — 
 these are our real enemies, for they are the most reckless and 
 most likely to bring themselves as well as us into a danger 
 which they cannot but foresee. 
 
 Mel. Surely then, if you and your subjects will brave 
 all this risk, you to preserve your empire and they to be quit of 
 it, how base and cowardly would it be in us, who retain our 
 freedom, not to do and suffer anything rather than be your 
 slaves. 
 
 Ath. Not so, if you calmly reflect ; for you are not fight- 
 ing against equals to whom you cannot yield without disgrace, 
 but you are taking counsel whether or no you shall resist 
 an overwhelming force. The question is not one of honor but 
 of prudence. * 
 
 Historians tell us that Thucydides was a tragedian in 
 view of 'tne S S prose, that he desired to expose the cruelty and selfish- 
 Athen S ian lhe ness of Athens as the moral cause of the great disaster 
 
 downfall. 
 
 •Thucydides V., Chaps. LXXXIX-CI. Jowett.
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 157 
 
 in Sicily, which occupies his succeeding books. There 
 is no satisfactory evidence of any such conception. He 
 seems rather to hold that with the death of Pericles all 
 sound imperial policy departed from Athens, that dema- ™roira1ion S for 
 gogues either incompetent or corrupt, or both, led the Pericles as a 
 people, and made those grave mistakes which caused 
 the really superior power of Athens, based on money 
 and ships, to be overthrown by Sparta. As misfortune 
 would have it, Sparta did not win under the chivalrous 
 Brasidas, or the noble Callicratidas, but under the cruel 
 and selfish Lysander, whose massacre of several thou- 
 sand prisoners on the shore of the Hellespont after the 
 battle of ^Egospotami is one of the most horrible facts 
 in Hellenic life. Even the Syracusans, when they had 
 conquered with great difficulty a wanton invasion from 
 Athens, at least kept their many prisoners alive, with a 
 possibility of ransom. They are said to have released 
 those who were able to recite portions of the plays 
 of Euripides* the rising star before which that of Popularity 
 
 1 o of Euripides. 
 
 ^Eschylus had set, and even that of Sophocles had 
 declined. 
 
 In the middle of this harsh and bitter age, when 
 a long and bloody war, which might well be called 
 a civil war in character, had made men's tempers as 
 hard as their circumstances, when all the finer and more 
 delicate feelings seemed to be swallowed up by lust of 
 power, revenge for wrongs, ambition, greed, selfishness, 
 there were at least two men standing aloof from the all- 
 absorbing politics of the day, and teaching each in their 
 way a larger faith and purer morals. These were Eurip- 
 ides and Socrates. Both found it necessary to break 
 with the established beliefs in religion, because they andsocmes as 
 
 , 11-1 1 r> i.L moral teachers. 
 
 were inspired to preach higher morals. Both were 
 
 * This is the frame of the story of Browning's " Balaustion's Adventure."
 
 158 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Euripides and 
 Socrates are 
 attacked as 
 rationalists. 
 
 Fragments of 
 Euripides 
 in Egypt. 
 
 Reasons for his 
 popularity. 
 
 attacked as rationalists who undermined faith, and with 
 faith morals. Both protested that they only criticised 
 faith so far as it was absolutely necessary to uphold 
 morals. The poet upon his stage, painting the vices of 
 men and the virtues of women, the passion of both, 
 preached a larger and kindlier estimate of human nature 
 than the hard politicians would admit. Humanity 
 indeed in all its better phases, especially the loyalty 
 and nobility of the poor and the slave, is in Euripides a 
 new and blessed conception amid the cruelties and the 
 beauties of Attic life. His many innovations were 
 regarded by the stricter school as decadences, his 
 philosophy as out of place, his rehandling of sacred 
 stories as irreligious ; but Euripides knew better than 
 his critics ; he stood at the close of an epoch brilliant 
 indeed, but not destined to last, living upon an energy 
 impossible to sustain, and when the crash came he sur- 
 vived, the poet and teacher of succeeding centuries. 
 
 When we now rake the sands of Egypt, and find 
 fragments of the school-books, or the popular books 
 which the Greeks under Alexander carried with them to 
 their new homes, we find fragments of Euripides almost 
 as common as fragments of Homer, which was then the 
 Greek Bible, whereas those of ^Eschylus or Sophocles 
 are most rare. It was doubtless on account of his cos- 
 mopolitanism, his greater clearness, his simple language, 
 his rather Hellenic than Attic spirit, that he satisfied 
 men who could not brook the pomp of ^Eschylus or the 
 subtlety of Sophocles. His philosophy, too, a gentle 
 pessimism, was more confined to the days of Greek 
 decadence, when the extravagant hopes and splendid 
 performance of Periclean Athens were things of the 
 past. Many of his lyrical passages, too, were capable of 
 quite general application, and could be sung, as modern
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 159 
 
 lyrics are, apart from the stage and its accessories. 
 
 Here, for example, is an ode translated for me by fj^Snof: 
 Robert Browning, and which I gladly repeat in this ^ d u e dpidean 
 place : 
 
 I. 
 
 Oh Love, Love, thou that from the eyes diffusest 
 
 Yearning, and on the soul sweet grace inducest — 
 
 Souls against whom thy hostile march is made— 
 
 Never to me be manifest in ire, 
 
 Nor, out of time and tune, my peace invade ! 
 
 Since neither from the fire — 
 
 No, nor the stars— is launched a bolt more mighty 
 
 Than that of Aphrodite' 
 
 Hurled from the hands of Love, the boy with Zeus for sire. 
 
 Idly, how idly, by the Alpheian river 
 
 And in the Pythian shrines of Phoebus, quiver 
 
 Blood-offerings from the bull, which Hellas heaps : 
 
 While Love we worship not — the Lord of men ! 
 
 Worship not him, the very key who keeps 
 
 Of Aphrodite^ when 
 
 She closes up her dearest chamber-portals : 
 
 Love, when he comes to mortals, 
 
 Wide-wasting, through those deeps of woes beyond the deep ! 
 
 This great poet has had in our time the good fortune Browning > s 
 to fall into Browning's hands, and two plays at least, Srijidls's 
 with many fragments, can be studied better than other P la >' s - 
 Greek masterpieces in his " Balaustion's Adventure" 
 (the " Alcestis") and Aristophanes' s " Apology" (the 
 " Mad Heracles "). The latter version is far the more 
 perfect, for he has here rendered the lyrical odes in 
 lyrical meters, whereas in the ' ' Alcestis ' ' he has given 
 them all in his halting blank verse, which does not repre- 
 sent the variety and beauty of the original meters. But 
 both are the work of a poet appreciating a poet, and as
 
 i6o 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Socrates as a 
 teacher of 
 morality. 
 
 His doctrine of 
 the beauty of 
 goodness. 
 
 such have but few rivals among our Anglo-Greek books. 
 
 We pass on to the other capital figure in Periclean 
 Athens, who lived, like Euripides, to see the debacle, but 
 was the second great force which led to a brilliant 
 regeneration in the succeeding century. If Euripides 
 was a rationalist, how much more was Socrates a 
 rationalist ; if Euripides, amid the skepticism which 
 follows upon the criticism of a false and absurd religion, 
 was still a serious and pious man, how much more so 
 was Socrates. He set himself to work against the bril- 
 liant superficial teachers of practical politics, called 
 "Sophists," who trained men in argument but not in 
 principles, and sought in debate only victory, not truth. 
 But to Socrates principle was everything. He knew no 
 fear, he recoiled from no hardship, he was tainted with 
 no ambition ; he lived and died for his convictions, 
 preaching that truth, and the clear knowing of it, was 
 the only fit occupation of men. 
 
 But in him the beautiful which had been the glory of 
 the Periclean age gave way utterly to another beauty, 
 the beauty of goodness. He found, as he believed, the 
 real nexus between those great ideas, and it is from his 
 time onward that every noble thinker has essayed to 
 attain them in his conception of the Deity. It was said 
 that he brought down philosophy from heaven to dwell 
 among men. Perhaps it would be truer to say that he 
 raised man from the earth to dwell in heaven. Still 
 more true was it that he brought philosophy from Ionia, 
 from Sicily, and from Magna Graecia, to dwell at 
 Athens. He was himself no ascetic ; he did not eschew 
 the pleasures of the body, but every pleasure and every 
 relaxation he subordinated to the one great object, to 
 maintain his own moral dignity and purity, and to 
 promote these same virtues among others.
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B.C. 161 
 
 It wearies the modern reader, often enough, to read 
 how he endeavored to preach his great doctrine. He s J^™af method 
 cross-examined those whom he met, beginning from 
 simple and perfectly obvious questions, and leading up 
 gradually to perplexities, from which he did not always 
 show an escape. The reason of this curious and often 
 tedious method was that moral obligations in his day 
 were by no means so clearly defined as they now are. 
 There was nothing comparable to the teaching of Christ, 
 upon which our laws and our religion are now based. 
 Concerning many vital points men were still hesitating 
 as regards their moral duty. If a man's father 
 murdered a slave, thus exhibiting; the vice of cruelty, M° ral problems 
 
 J discussed by 
 
 was the son bound to use every effort to bring the Socrates. 
 murderer under the cognizance of the law, or was he 
 bound to refrain on the ground of filial piety — in other 
 words, was the duty of a son to his father, or the duty 
 of a citizen to the state the more paramount ? Here is 
 one of the many problems which Socrates raised and 
 discussed.* He desired to clear the moral air, to re- 
 move prejudices, misconceptions, vagueness, and make 
 men understand clearly that the highest and only sure 
 happiness was the practice of virtue, the only wisdom to 
 walk according to the direction of conscience. He left 
 no writings behind him; he was put to death by the The alleged 
 
 r J skepticism of 
 
 verdict of a jury of his countrymen, who believed him Socrates, 
 to have raised skeptical doubts in the minds of men. 
 No doubt he had. So did Jesus Christ ; so did Martin 
 Luther ; so did John Huss. But skeptical doubts about 
 what ? about errors and superstitions which had laid 
 firm hold on the minds of men, and required a mighty 
 wizard to break the chain of their enchantment. 
 
 * In the dialogue called " Euthyphroti," which proper name means "the 
 right-minded." This is the prose analogon to the problem of Orestes and of 
 Hamlet already discussed in connection with yEschylus.
 
 162 
 
 A Stirvey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Lesson taught 
 in Soi i ates's 
 life and death, 
 
 Athenian atti- 
 tude to death. 
 
 Evidence from 
 tombstones. 
 
 The effect of this upon the culture of Athens, and 
 through his pupils upon the culture of many Greek 
 cities, must have been immense. It was now felt that 
 enlightenment meant not cheap skepticism, but deeper 
 knowledge ; that there was a human nature deeper and 
 more permanent than the types perpetuated as ideal in 
 the poetry and mythology of the ancients. Not Apollo, 
 not Athene, had the dignity and the strength of the 
 human sage. His very death was a greater lesson than 
 his life. For both before his judges and before his 
 friends he maintained clearly that after this life a good 
 man will receive either the reward of greater happiness, 
 or the eternal sleep of annihilation. In no case will his 
 pains and imperfections be perpetuated. And if there 
 be indeed a divine spark in the soul of man, we may 
 hope for a return of this higher element to its home, and 
 a future blessedness in the purity of eternal light. 
 
 The deep consolations of this noble teaching cannot 
 be fully appreciated till we understand the popular atti- 
 tude toward death among the Athenians of his day. 
 We have not indeed the complaints, the despair, the 
 gloom of the average people recorded in any book. 
 But there still remains to us very curious evidence in the 
 many tombstones with sculptured reliefs which are 
 found in the Ceramicus at the west end of Athens 
 during recent years, and are now the ornament of the 
 Great Museum. 
 
 I cannot do better than repeat here what I wrote 
 years ago, when first I was brought face to face with 
 these curious and very affecting memorials of a nation's 
 grief. 
 
 It seems to me that the tombs before us are remarkable as 
 exemplifying, with the tact of genius, this true and perfect 
 reserve. They are simple pictures of the grief of parting — of
 
 The Life of the Nation, 479-404 B. C. 163 
 
 the recollection of pleasant days of love and friendship— of the 
 
 gloom of the unknown future. But there is no exaggeration, The idealism 
 
 nor speciality— no individuality, I had almost said— in the sepukhral art. 
 
 picture. I feel no curiosity to inquire who these people are— 
 
 what were their names — even what was the relationship of the 
 
 deceased. For I am perfectly satisfied with an ideal portrait of 
 
 the grief of parting — a grief that comes to us all, and lays 
 
 bitter hold of us at some season of life ; and it is this universal 
 
 sorrow — this great common plan in our lives — which the Greek 
 
 artist has brought before us, and which calls forth our deepest 
 
 sympathy. There will be further occasion to come back upon 
 
 this all-important feature in connection with the action in Greek 
 
 sculpture, and even with the draping of their statues — in all 
 
 of which the calm and chaste reserve of the better Greek art 
 
 contrasts strangely with the Michael Angelos and Berninis and 
 
 Canovas of other days ; nay, even with the Greek sculpture of 
 
 a no less brilliant but less refined age. 
 
 But in concluding this digression I will call attention to a 
 modern parallel in the portraiture of grief, and of grief at final pa ° a i7e" font's 
 parting. This parallel is not a piece of sculpture, but a poem, universality, 
 perhaps the most remarkable poem of our generation — the " In 
 Memoriam " of Lord Tennyson Though written from per- 
 sonal feeling, and to commemorate a special person — Arthur 
 Hallam — whom some of us even knew, has this poem laid hold 
 of the imagination of men strongly and lastingly owing to the 
 poet's special loss ? Certainly not. I do not even think that 
 this great dirge — this magnificent funeral poem — has excited in 
 most of us any strong interest in Arthur Hallam. In fact, any Ti" n ^ s e °"^ 
 other friend of the poet's would have suited the general reader riam." 
 equally well as the exciting cause of a poem, which we delight 
 in, because it puts into great words the ever-recurring and 
 permanent features in such grief— those dark longings about 
 the future ; those suggestions of despair, of discontent with the 
 providence of the world, of wild speculation about its laws ; 
 those struggles to reconcile our own loss, and that of the 
 human race, with some larger law of wisdom and of benevo- 
 lence. To the poet, of course, his own particular friend was 
 the great center point of the whole. But to us, in reading it, 
 there is a wide distinction between the personal passages — I 
 mean those which give family details and special circumstances 
 in Hallam's life, or his intimacy with the poet — and the purely
 
 164 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The "In 
 Memoriam 
 deals with 
 universal 
 world- 
 problems. 
 
 Socrates's 
 teaching 
 thai death 
 has no terrors 
 for the good. 
 
 poetical or artistic passages, which soar away into a region far 
 above all special detail, and sing of the great gloom which 
 hangs over the future, and of the vehement beating of the 
 human soul against the bars of its prison house, when one is 
 taken, and another left, not merely at apparent random, but 
 with apparent injustice and damage to mankind. Hence every 
 man in grief for a lost friend will read the poem to his great 
 comfort, and will then only see clearly what it means ; and he 
 will find it speak to him specially and particularly, not in its 
 personal passages, but in its general features ; in its hard meta- 
 physics ; in its mystical theology ; in its angry and uncertain 
 ethics. For even the commonest mind is forced by grief out 
 of its commonness, and attacks the world-problems, which at 
 other times it has no power or taste to approach.* 
 
 It is indeed certain that many of them date from the 
 succeeding generations ; but the type was created at 
 the moment when sculptors had vanquished all their 
 difficulties, and felt themselves perfectly able to give 
 expression to the emotions in unfeeling marble. When 
 once established, the type of this work continued 
 unvaried in sentiment, while the higher minds were find- 
 ing higher consolations and better memorials to record 
 their impressions of death and of bereavement. It was 
 the utter sadness of men without hope, the dreary future 
 in the meadow of asphodel, which Socrates and his 
 followers combated, showing that while a good life was 
 an end in itself, not cut short but completed by a death 
 of calmness and resignation, the future life could bring 
 no terrors to the righteous, even if it were not a crown 
 and culmination to their yet imperfect happiness. 
 
 *" Rambles and Studies in Greece," pages 74-5 (4th edition).
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE FOURTH CENTURY B. C. 
 
 We pass to the culture of the succeeding century, 
 when, with the fall of Athenian pride, the age of poetry 
 was gone, the chain of great tragic poets was broken, 
 the piety of the choral ode antiquated ; when philosophy 
 and oratory aided history to establish new models in 
 literature, and create in Greek prose a standard not less 
 perfect and many-sided than that attained in earlier 
 days by Greek poetry. At the very opening of this . 
 
 J J r j r o Literature after 
 
 century, the moment of the Restoration (of the democ- the fail of 
 
 J ... the Athenian 
 
 racy) at Athens, we have the pupils of Socrates in phi- Empire, 
 losophy, the pupils of Antiphon in oratory, the pupils, 
 or successors, of Thucydides in history, all vying with 
 each other to make each branch of their art perfect 
 in its way. No doubt the failure of the Athenian Em- 
 pire and the consequent greater equality among Greek 
 cities also gave a more cosmopolitan tone to this 
 prose epoch. Xenophon is a regular man of the world, 
 living, from choice or necessity, most of his life abroad. 
 Plato was not like Socrates, addicted to Athens ; it is 
 the orators only who preserve the strict traditions of 
 Attic life, and write for the Attic public. But let us 
 turn for a moment to the only form of poetry that 
 still flourished — comedy. 
 
 The comedy of Aristophanes and his rivals shows the L ic poetry of 
 jocose and ribald side of the most brilliant Periclean life. Aristophanes. 
 Beautiful hymns or odes, perfect in grace and refined in 
 
 165
 
 1 66 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 diction, alternate with scurrilous lampoons and violent 
 Translation of political attacks. The following ode will illustrate his 
 
 an ode of r 
 
 Aristophanes. lyric poetry \ 
 
 ODE OF THE HOOPOE TO THE NIGHTINGALE.* 
 
 Sister warbler, cease from slumber, 
 Pour thy holiest sweetest number ; 
 With thy heavenly voice bewail 
 Thy own sad Itys' tearful tale ; 
 Gushing forth the liquid note 
 Copious through thy yellow throat. 
 Clear and full the holy sound 
 Through the full-leaved ivy round 
 Soars away to Jove's high hall ; 
 Gold-haired Phcebus hears the call, 
 Hears and answers back again, 
 Mournful to the mournful strain. 
 He with ivory-gleaming lyre 
 Wakens all the immortal choir. 
 All the everlasting throng 
 Take up the song ; 
 The voices of the blest the full accord prolong. 
 
 What has been already said about the rest of Peri- 
 "pJridean clean life is here also exemplified. Goodness as such 
 plays but a small part in the poet's scenes. If he 
 preaches honesty and truth against chicanery and self- 
 ishness, it is for the good of the state, for the political 
 salvation of Athens, not because these qualities are 
 in themselves honorable and of good report. His 
 famous attack on Socrates (in the "Clouds") is a mis- 
 conservatismof representation as gross as any ever perpetrated in 
 Anstophanes. American politics. He could only have defended it by 
 its political expediency. He belonged to the old Con- 
 servative party, to whom this shaking of received truths, 
 of traditional dogmas, was connected with radical poli- 
 
 * A translation of one of Aristophanes's lyrics. Milman, page 222.
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 
 
 167 
 
 tics, and with the rise of new ideas in morals and 
 religion. Most of the dangerous young men at Athens, 
 notably the ringleader of the Thirty Tyrants, Critias, 
 were followers of the sage. This feature was enough in 
 Aristophanes' s mind to justify a wicked and false satire 
 upon a great and good man. 
 
 It was this want of moral earnestness, as well as 
 the local flavor of his plays, which made them distasteful Reasons for the 
 
 . change of spirit 
 
 to the public, as soon as the circumstances which ex- of comedy after 
 plained their allusions and the political struggles which 
 palliated their injustices had been forgotten. The tamer 
 and better age of the Restoration required milder spirit- 
 ual food, greater moral earnestness, and so, while the 
 teaching of the virtues passed into the hands of philoso- 
 phers and rhetoricians, the so-called Middle Comedy, to 
 which Aristophanes' s latest play, the "Plutus," ap- 
 proximates, adopted a very different, and a more culti- 
 vated tone. Classes of men and not individuals were 
 criticised, literary and social ideals, not practical politics, 
 were discussed ; and although it may be seen that now 
 and then, even in the hands of the very latest of the 
 comic poets, personal lampoons were launched at the 
 audience from the stage, the whole tone and temper 
 show that license and scurrility were no longer thought 
 amusing or in good taste. This is what we should 
 expect from the age of Xenophon and Plato, Lysias and 
 I socrates. 
 
 The Spartans were now masters of the political world, 
 and though all the theorists, as well as practical men 
 like Xenophon, were dazzled with the tenacious and 
 consistent method of life, which had attained the suprem- 
 acy over brilliant Athens, the Spartans as a domi- 
 nating society bore the test of prosperity and power 
 very badly. 
 
 Sparta fails to 
 bear the test 
 of prosperity.
 
 1 68 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 tan Xenophon. 
 
 His sketch 
 
 of Socrates. 
 
 Of Cvrus. 
 
 The only writer who went about all over the Greek 
 
 [he writings. of w orld and saw the ways and manners of men, the Ulys- 
 the 1 1 ismopoli- •' ■* 
 
 ses of the fourth century B. C, was Xenophon, who has 
 given us in his various writings his various ideals, such 
 as they were successively presented to him. First 
 comes Socrates the Athenian, whose "Memoirs" give 
 us a picture of the man more realistic and possibly more 
 true* than the dialogues of Plato. Then he comes into 
 contact with the younger Cyrus, a great Persian prince, 
 whose splendor and dignity, vastly beyond that of any 
 Greek, so dazzle him that he paints the ideal monarch 
 in his " Education of Cyrus." He removes his picture 
 into the days of the older and greater king of the name ; 
 but it is quite certain that it was the brilliant, chivalrous 
 prince under whom he fought at Cunaxa that suggested 
 the work. Later in life he came within reach of the 
 Spartan king Agesilaus, a man of considerable ability 
 and long experience, but rather representing the aver- 
 age Spartan virtues than possessing any genius of 
 his own. This man also becomes an ideal figure to 
 Xenophon, who gives us through him a glance at 
 the best sort of life in the leading city of Greece. These 
 three figures, with their strong contrasts, their wide 
 difference of surroundings, their totally distinct ideals of 
 life and of morals, are the most remarkable legacy which 
 this great writer has left us. His greatest blot is to have 
 obscured for us, so far as he could, the majestic per- 
 sonality of the Theban Epaminondas, his greatest foible 
 to have exaggerated his own importance as a military 
 commander and a man of action. But here too lies his 
 most brilliant literary success. His account of the ex- 
 
 Of Agesilaus. 
 
 His failure to 
 
 appreciate 
 
 Epaminondas 
 
 ♦The Socrates who appeared in the streets, and was known to the public 
 as a quaint figure with peculiar views — this outside Socrates is what we find 
 in Xenophon. The ideal man, with his deep suggestions, even with the seed 
 of his doctrine sown and bearing fruit, is what we find in Plato.
 
 The Fotirth Century B. C. 
 
 169 
 
 pedition to Babylonia, with the much more famous " Re- 
 treat of the Ten Thousand ' ' narrated in the third per- 
 son, has taken in the learned as well as the unlearned, 
 and caused them to place this condottiere* who never 
 attained a high reputation in Greece, among the great 
 commanders whose talents were not mistaken for a 
 moment. 
 
 But this is not the place to discuss such questions, f I 
 would rather seek from the confessions of this remark- 
 able man what he at least had attained in culture, 
 and what he thought praiseworthy in the life of others. 
 
 It is very remarkable how little his early intercourse 
 with Socrates affected him. He was an ambitious young 
 man, seeking distinction and not finding scope for it 
 in the now humbled and impoverished Athens. More- 
 over, he was not a good citizen, and very soon broke al- 
 together with Athens, from which he was ultimately 
 banished. So, like his ancestors and successors, he 
 took to the profession of mercenary soldier. If Cyrus 
 had not been killed at Cunaxa, Xenophon would have 
 attained to high office in the East, and might have 
 given us most curious knowledge concerning the life and 
 manners of the Persian notables. But even as it was, he 
 found that the so-called barbarians were in their nobler 
 specimens not a whit inferior to the most polished 
 Greeks, nay, rather, in splendor of ideas and richness of 
 life far superior to anything that Greece could produce. 
 The portrait of Cyrus in the "Anabasis," and that of 
 his ancestor in the Educational Romance, show us that 
 Xenophon found among the Persians his ideal of a great 
 sovereign, nor can there be any more curious compari- 
 
 The "Retreat 
 of the Ten 
 Thousand." 
 
 The checkered 
 career of 
 Xenophon. 
 
 Xenophon's 
 ideal of a great 
 sovereign de- 
 rived from the 
 Persians. 
 
 * I use this word as familiar to us from medieval Italian history. 
 
 1 1 have done so in the chapter on Xenophon in my " History of Greek Lit- 
 erature."
 
 l 7° 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Nobility of 
 Persian life and 
 character. 
 
 The style of 
 Xenophon. 
 
 His dislike of 
 Thebes. 
 
 son than that of Aristotle's picture of the " great-souled 
 man' ' or ideal Greek, in the fourth book of his ' ' Ethics, ' ' 
 with the picture of the elder Cyrus in " Cyropaedia. " 
 Greatness seems to sit artificially on Aristotle's man ; 
 "his voice must be deep, and his step slow," as if 
 he were posing as a hero to his valet ; greatness is 
 traditional and natural to the Persian, with a chivalry 
 and a generosity quite foreign to Greek ideas. It was 
 not till Macedonian feudalism was combined with Greek 
 culture that we have such a figure as that of Alexander, 
 who at once feels that in Persia is the ideal of a 
 sovereign and who treated the great oriental barons 
 as we see depicted on the matchless sarcophagus of 
 Sidon. In sport, in war, in courtesy, they are the full 
 equals of Macedonians and Hellenes. 
 
 By these experiences Xenophon became cosmopolitan, 
 and shook off the narrowness and the conceit which still 
 hung about Attic life. His very style proves it. He 
 admits many words foreign to Attic use, and approaches 
 the "common dialect," which in the next century 
 leavened all the Hellenistic world. But as far as his 
 own century was concerned, he seems to have thought 
 that nothing was so noble as Spartan simplicity, nothing 
 so expedient as Spartan discipline. 
 
 The upstart power of Thebes he evidently regarded 
 with a strong dislike — Athens I know, and Sparta I 
 know, but who are ye ? And yet, in the midst of the 
 rudeness and revelry attributed to the Boeotians sprang 
 up a small society of men, led by the greatest genius of 
 his century, and moreover a man as great in his refine- 
 ment as in his military science. Before this personage 
 the star of Agesilaus, Xenophon' s hero, paled its 
 ineffectual fire ; the hope of the Spartan to follow the 
 footsteps of Xenophon' s mercenaries, and conquer a
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 171 
 
 kingdom in Asia, gave way to a hopeless effort to hold 
 
 the control of Greece against the power of Epami- xlnopWs 
 
 nondas ; and so Xenophon, whose great hopes must retirement. 
 
 always have lain in the direction of campaigns in Asia, 
 
 was balked by the home complications, in which he 
 
 could take no leading part. It remained for him to 
 
 retire to his hunting-box in the wilds of Elis, not far 
 
 from the Epsom of Greece, where he could meet all his 
 
 scattered friends at the Olympic festival, and here he 
 
 devoted himself to the amusements he had learned to 
 
 love in Asia — hunting, training of horses and dogs, 
 
 farming, and with these a prolonged and eminent 
 
 literary activity. 
 
 But are the ideals in these books those derived from 
 Socrates? Far from it. Xenophon' s religion is dis- 
 tinctly a bargain, a compact with the gods, as received 
 by the vulgar public. If he offers them liberal sacrifices, 
 they are bound on their side to secure him prosperity. 
 Piety for its own sake seems strange to him. It is the 
 same thing with domestic virtues. The young wife, 
 whose education after her marriage is so graphically 
 described in his " Giconomicus," is trained that she may xenophon's 
 be useful, and conduce to the peace and happiness of icus?"" 
 her husband, not that she may become in herself a 
 nobler and better soul. Even then, as now, the fashion- 
 able young woman thought that yellow hair, rouge upon 
 the face, and high-heeled shoes were requisite for the 
 attainment of beauty — a theory which this model 
 husband combats with arguments which seem ineffectual 
 in the present day. Very sympathetic to us is his love 
 of horses and of sport. He felt in his day the impor- 
 tance of cavalry, which the Greeks had neglected for 
 want of means and for want of open country. But now 
 that wars might any day be transferred to Asia, the
 
 172 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 importance of cavalry was increased, and in the brilliant 
 campaign of Agesilaus, nothing had been more decisive 
 than his creation of a cavalry force, to meet the Persian 
 His love of satraps in the plains of Lydia. Xenophon's hunting 
 was his great amusement, and he throws into it that 
 seriousness and zeal which every sportsman from that 
 day to this has manifested. He writes his tract on hunt- 
 ing the hare— a sport which he thinks more delightful 
 than anything else in the world. When a man sees the 
 dogs tracking, finding, coursing the animal, "he will 
 forget that he ever loved anything else." How like the 
 fox hunter of to-day ! And as regards seriousness, he 
 brought his practical piety into this important pursuit. 
 When the hare's track is found, "having prayed to 
 Apollo and to Artemis, let loose your best dog." This 
 was the kind of life impossible in the thickly populated 
 Attica ; it had been one great cause of the vigor and the 
 health of the Spartan youth. Xenophon felt as we do, 
 that it produces not only physically, but morally, a type 
 of man vastly superior to the athlete or the runner in 
 competitive encounters. The Greeks were, on the 
 whole, worse off than the English for field sports and 
 Lack of field exercises. Rowing, which is so prominent among us, 
 Greece'" was chiefly the work of slaves, and though in the 
 
 Athenian navy the upper row of the trireme seems to 
 have been worked by citizens, it was never the occupa- 
 tion of a gentleman, and the competitions of this kind 
 which they had were rather between the rich men who 
 manned and equipped ships for the state than for the 
 crew. Fishing was always the occupation of the poor, 
 nor do I suppose that Pelopidas or Epaminondas ever 
 dreamt of going out in a boat to sport on the lake 
 Copais, which occupies a large part of Bceotia, and was 
 alwavs celebrated for its fish. Training for athletic
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 173 
 
 the Boeotian. 
 
 sports is a different kind of thing, and military leaders 
 seem to have decided from early times that it was not 
 serviceable for good soldiering. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, Xenophon, starting, with an xenophon's 
 
 . , . .1 appreciation of 
 
 experience of Athens, seems to have come to the con- spartan ideals, 
 elusion that the Spartan ideal of manhood, tempered 
 with some additional education, was better than the 
 exclusively town life of his native country. And so he 
 approaches more nearly to the modern idea of a gentle- 
 man than the greatest of the Athenians. 
 
 We wish we could speak in this connection of Epam- Epaminondas 
 inondas and the Theban society which he led during 
 his brilliant life, for here were combined some of the con- 
 ditions of both Attic and Spartan life. The Boeotians 
 belie, by the series of great men they produced from 
 Hesiod to Plutarch, that they were the heavy and stupid 
 population at whom the Attic peasant jeered as Boeotian 
 swine. The culture of Pindar, of Pelopidas, of Plutarch 
 is beyond question. But in Epaminondas we have be- 
 sides this a splendid moral nature, and a genius for war 
 such as had never yet been known in Greece. Both in 
 strategy and in tactics he was unequalled. His first His genius 
 great victory, at Leuctra, was won by bringing a deep 
 column to bear upon a point of the enemy's line, while 
 the rest of it was kept in check by a demonstration 
 rather than an attack. He solved, therefore, the great 
 secret of winning a battle by bringing a superior force to 
 bear upon an inferior, though the armies were equal in 
 number. His strategy he showed over and over again 
 by taking his army with perfect ease through the diffi- 
 cult passes near the Isthmus of Corinth into the Pelo- 
 ponnesus, though his enemies knew his intention and 
 did all they could to block and defend these passes. 
 Moreover, it was he that restored Messene to life, and 
 
 for war.
 
 '74 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Description 
 of Arcadia. 
 
 first brought Arcadia as a political force into Greek 
 history. 
 
 The configuration of Arcadia is so interesting, and the 
 genius of Epaminondas in founding Megalopolis so often 
 misunderstood, that I shall quote what I wrote about it, 
 after carefully exploring the whole province. 
 
 But let us turn from this poetical and imaginary country to 
 the real land — from Arcadia to Arcadia, as it is called by the 
 real inhabitants. As everybody knows, this Arcadia is the al- 
 pine center of the Morea, bristling with mountain chains, which 
 reach their highest points in the great bar of Erymanthus, to 
 the northwest, in the lonely peak of " Cyllene hoar" to the 
 northeast, in the less conspicuous, but far more sacred Lykaeon 
 to the southwest, and finally, in the serrated Taygetus to the 
 southeast. These four are the angles, as it were, of a quadri- 
 lateral enclosing Arcadia. Yet these are but the greatest 
 among chains of great mountains, which seem to traverse the 
 country in all directions, and are not easily distinguished, or 
 separated into any connected system. They are nevertheless 
 interrupted, as we found, by two fine oval plains — both stretch- 
 ing north and south, both surrounded with a beautiful pano- 
 rama of mountains, and both, of course, the seats of the old 
 culture, such as it was, in Arcadia. That which is southerly 
 and westerly, and from which the rivers still flow into the 
 Alpheus and the western sea, is guarded at its south end by- 
 Megalopolis. That which is more east, which is higher in level, 
 and separated from the former by the bleak bar of Maenalus, is 
 the plain of Mantinea and Tegea, now represented by the im- 
 portant town of Tripolitza. These two parallel plains give 
 some plan and system to the confusion of mountains which 
 cover the ordinary maps of Arcadia.* 
 
 The general effect of the collapse of the Spartan 
 on Athens of the domination, of the rise of Thebes, and consequently 
 
 rise of Thebes. , . . . , , . . . 
 
 of the partial recovery of Athens, must have been most 
 beneficial in bringing these separate civilizations into 
 contact, far more than had been hitherto the case, and 
 
 * " Rambles and Studies in Greece." pages 317-1S (4th edition).
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 175 
 
 so creating a broader and more universal type of Hel- 
 lenic culture. States learned to pass from one alliance 
 to another, according as the balance of power required 
 it, and became friends of their previous enemies. Em- 
 bassies went to and fro from city to city, and learned to 
 know that their neighbors were better at home than 
 they had imagined. The treatment of resident aliens 
 was sure to be modified by this more constant communi- 
 cation, for many strangers came and went, and they fre- 
 quently saw their own countrymen, who could report 
 concerning their welfare. 
 
 And yet it is wonderful how distinct all the cities 
 remained. Thebes rose and fell, Sparta rose and fell in Greece do not 
 
 . . . . . . . . . , assimilate. 
 
 this century, and yet to its very end we can distinguish 
 no large approximation, no attempt at fusion in their 
 respective characteristics. Athens recovered, and learned 
 the lesson that a democracy with a sea power is not 
 a match for an army of yeomen, but though every 
 Athenian philosopher makes his ideal state more like 
 the Spartan than his own, there is neither desire nor at- 
 tempt to assimilate the habits of Athens to those of 
 Sparta. 
 
 In philosophy, indeed, and in oratory, Athens still 
 kept far in the van, and though her great literary men Athens still 
 were seldom her great citizens, she gave in this century philosophy 
 two figures to the world that will keep her glory alive 
 forever. And each of them was only the best of a 
 galaxy of able and brilliant rivals. But in this general 
 sketch I can only deal with the most prominent figures ; 
 to attempt more would be so to crowd the canvas 
 that nothing but confusion would result. The first 
 of these figures is Plato, the second is Demosthenes. 
 
 There is no Greek figure better known to the world 
 than that of Plato, though he conceals himself behind 
 
 and oratory.
 
 176 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 his master Socrates, and gives us his views not in philo- 
 sophical essays but in dramatic dialogue ; and if any 
 Greek author ever received adequate treatment in a 
 Plato's foreign tongue, Plato has received it in the magnificent 
 
 translation of Jowett, who has prefaced each dialogue 
 with a masterly essay, gathering up the points scattered 
 through a sometimes too expanded conversation. If 
 the reader desires a closer and deeper acquaintance 
 with the philosophy preached in these dialogues, he can 
 find it in many learned books, notably in that famous 
 book of Grote, "Plato and the Other Companions of 
 Socrates," wherein the great historian has shown the 
 absolute fairness and thoroughness with which he could 
 discuss a system totally opposed to his own thinking. 
 ^ One thing he was the first to prove. Each of these dia- 
 logues stands independent of the rest ; it is not written as 
 part of a harmonious system ; it often arrives at conclu- 
 sions apparently, or even really, inconsistent with other 
 dialogues; it represents a search after a special truth, con- 
 ducted with earnestness, and not careful whether the 
 conclusion harmonizes with the rest, or even whether 
 there be any positive conclusion at all. There is this 
 inconsistency in all serious human philosophy ; necessity 
 and free will, election and virtue, law and the violation 
 of law, all appear in their turn complete explanations of 
 His method of ^ e - an ^ attempts at a theoretical compromise only lead to 
 argument. inconsistency and confusion. Plato preferred to carry 
 
 out each discussion to its natural conclusion, taking up 
 different lines of argument at different times, and show- 
 ing how earlier teachers, Gorgias, Protagoras, Parmeni- 
 des, had defended their tenets, and how far each of 
 them had constructed a reasonable, though perhaps not 
 an adequate theory. 
 
 What concerns us here, however, is not the deeper
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 177 
 
 side, but the kind of society which meets us in his Attic 
 
 scenes of life. It may fairly be said that though there Reflection in 
 
 .. ., , Plato of Athe- 
 
 are not wanting ribald scenes, or expressions of a pas- »>an refinement 
 
 . _. . . . and intellectu- 
 
 sion foreign to Christian morals, no society is more aiity. 
 refined, perhaps none so intellectual, as that which 
 occupies his canvas. There are indeed some forward 
 men, who urge brutal arguments. Thrasymachus at the 
 opening of the " Republic " is such a character ; in the 
 "Symposium" Alcibiades comes in as a drunken 
 reveller, telling experiences which had far better be 
 cloaked in silence. 
 
 But all this is to show the power of the great moral 
 teaching of Socrates, who either by irony, by acuteness, influence of 
 or by self-control, subdues or silences these inferior audience, 
 exhibitions of human passion or human selfishness. 
 The young men of his dialogues have a maidenly charm 
 about them, which makes them most attractive ; the 
 elder men, not including the great master, have the high 
 qualities of truthfulness and the keen desire of knowl- 
 edge. Very few women appear ; that is still the weak — 
 point in Attic society. Aspasia is represented as an 
 intellectual and interesting person, the wife of Socrates 
 as merely a person who is in the way when the real crisis 
 of his life arrives. There is, moreover, a large public 
 that takes no interest in this select circle, nay, rather, is 
 opposed to it, as aristocratic and devoting to abstract 
 studies the time which others devote to daily work or 
 advancement in politics. 
 
 The society in which Plato moved reminds one of that pa?aUe" to the 
 now existing in America, which is too aristocratic and Ifoofoeisof 
 too dignified to enter the turmoil and the fever of public Frielfds"' 1 h ' s 
 life, and which so abhors dishonesty and selfishness in 
 the democratic politician that it prefers to abandon its 
 legitimate influence rather than contribute what it might
 
 178 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 and political 
 ideals 
 
 to make the public character of its nation more honest 
 and more respected. These people, like the Socratic 
 set, are in some sense bad citizens, but they are never- 
 theless socially the best and most interesting of their 
 day, and in private life at least their influence radiates to 
 their neighbors and keeps up an ideal of honor and 
 refinement. 
 Plato's public ^ e see m P^ ato a gradually increasing alienation 
 
 with his 'TociaP' ^ rom ms a £ e > n ^ s theories were no doubt visionary and 
 distasteful to the vulgar public ; we can imagine how his 
 theory of state selection of husbands and wives, and as a 
 consequence temporary marriages, must have jarred 
 upon the respectable Athenian householder. 
 
 His views upon the emancipation of women, wherein 
 he was as modern as the most advanced nineteenth- 
 century American, had already been ridiculed with 
 relentless severity by Aristophanes in two of his plays, 
 which are now hardly fit to quote. There must there- 
 fore have been a movement in this direction too in the 
 early part of Plato's life, and the rights of women were 
 being advocated by others besides this great authority. 
 But unfortunately Aristophanes' s satire stands alone on 
 the other side ; and we do not know who the earlier 
 advocates of the equalization of the sexes may have 
 been. Plato led the way for other ' ' ideal ' ' systems, in 
 which the sentimentalities of marriage were cast aside as 
 unworthy, in comparison with the duty of producing a 
 healthier race, and of bringing up children free from the 
 indulgences and partialities of inefficient parents.* But 
 
 * I would not have it thought that I stand in this matter with the vulgar pub- 
 lic, or that I do not think the proposed reform of Plato with regard to 
 marriage of the greatest importance. The human race will never improve as 
 it ought till the physical conditions of the production of children are made a 
 matter of scientific inquiry, till diseased or morally worthless persons, if 
 shown to be unsuitable parents, are forbidden to undertake this all-important 
 function ; till the march of public opinion makes it less repugnant to have the 
 conditions of parentage analyzed, and the secrets of domestic life scrutinized, 
 than to allow the breeding of the most important of all animals to be carried 
 
 His views of 
 women and 
 marriage.
 
 The Fourth Century B.C. 179 
 
 all these schemes foundered against the rocks of tradi- 
 tion, perhaps against even that of common sense. And 
 so we have a sad picture of the " Attic Moses," as he 
 was called in subsequent centuries, sinking into a des- His sense of 
 pondent and even querulous old age. 
 
 But with all this strange modernness, Plato is a Hellene of 
 the Hellenes. His prospect does not include any non-Hellenic 
 races. Though he acknowledges the culture and the learning 
 of the Egyptians, and borrows, or effects to borrow, splendid 
 myths from other barbarians, the fusion of the Jew and Greek, 
 of bond and free — the Hellenism of a later age — is far beyond 
 his vision. He shares with Isocrates the old — I had well nigh 
 said the vulgar — Greek admiration for the most retrograde and 
 narrow of the Hellenes, the Spartans ; nay, he is so exclusive 
 and aristocratic in spirit that he will hardly condescend to con- 
 sider the lower classes, and conceives, like every other Greek 
 of that day, even his ideal society to be a select body of equals 
 amid a crowd of unprivileged inferiors and of slaves. This it 
 is which gives to Plato's communism a character so radically 
 distinct from all the modern dreams known by the same name, 
 or from the early Christian society described in the Acts of the piato's exclu- 
 Apostles. It was essentially an aristocratic communism, and slve Hel,enism ' 
 was based not on the equality of men, but upon their inherent 
 and radical disparity. It was really the republic of the select 
 few, exercising a strict and even intolerable despotism over the 
 masses. Here again, in spite of the modernness of the Socratic 
 conception of the philosopher as a privileged dissentient, of 
 the rights and the dignity of the individual and his conscience 
 — here again Plato falls into the purest fourth-century Hellene- 
 dom, when he constructs an ideal state, or a code of laws, in 
 which this dissentient can be allowed no place. To protect 
 such an individual, with all his nobility, and his inestimable 
 good effects on those around him, the actual Athens of Plato's 
 
 on at mere random, while that of the rest, which are as nothing compared to 
 it, is carefully guarded and directed. It will no doubt be necessary to 
 run counter to much of the present sentiment on these matters, but surely if 
 the most sensitive people nowadays will undergo the most extreme violations 
 of delicacy in order to have children, is it not absurd that they should refuse 
 to undergo any sacrifice of sentiment in order to have healthy or talented 
 children? Genius now appears sporadically, and apparently from ordinary 
 parents. If we once knew the law of its production, even approximately, 
 what strides in advance the human race might make 1
 
 i8o 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The gloom of 
 his later years. 
 
 Plato's poetical 
 style suited to 
 the form of his 
 writings. 
 
 Influence of 
 Homer on 
 Plato. 
 
 day, as Mr. Grote says, was a far safer, happier, and better 
 abode. There democratic habits and common sense had 
 modified and softened those theories of state interference, 
 which no individual thinker of that age seems able to shake off. 
 
 All these profound contradictions were doubtless the cause of 
 that increasing gloom and morbidness which seem to have 
 clouded Plato's later years. He did not believe in the perfecti- 
 bility of the human race. Even his ideal polity, if carried into 
 practice, is declared by him to contain the seeds of a necessary 
 decay. The human race was not advancing, but decaying. 
 Dialectic and free thought led to skepticism ; acquiescence in 
 received ideas to ignorance and mental apathy. We may 
 almost infer from the silence of contemporary history- concern- 
 ing his later years that, beyond his immediate disciples, he was 
 neglected and regarded as an idle dreamer. Yet if this was so 
 he but verified his own prophecies on the social position of the 
 true philosopher. 
 
 In his style he is as modern as in his thinking. He employed 
 that mixture of sober prose argument and of poetical metaphor 
 which is usual in the ornate prose of modern Europe, but 
 foreign to the character and stricter art of the Greeks. This 
 style, which is freely censured by Greek critics as a hybrid or 
 bastard prose, was admirably suited to a lively conversation, 
 where a sustained and equable tone would have been a 
 mistake. But when Plato attempts formal rhetoric, as in the 
 reply to Lysias in the " Phaedrus," or in the " Menexenus," we 
 find how true was the artistic feeling of the Greek schools, and 
 how this greater genius, with its irregularities, falls below the 
 more chastened and strictly formal essays of professional orators. 
 He is said in his youth to have inclined to dramatic poetry, but 
 his aversion to dramatizing passion was so ingrained, and his 
 love of analyzing the play of intellect so intense, that we may 
 imagine him producing very dry and unpopular tragedies. Yet 
 his appreciation of the great poets, though his criticisms of 
 them are always moral, and never cesthetic, was certainly 
 thorough, and told upon his style. Above all, he shows a 
 stronger Homeric flavor than all those who professed to wor- 
 ship the epics which he censured. His language everywhere 
 bears the influence of Homer, just as some of our greatest and 
 purest writers use, unconsciously, biblical phrases and meta- 
 phors. It is also very r -markable that he is not only the first
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 181 
 
 Greek author who confines the name of Homer to the Iliad 
 and Odyssey, but that the text he used was apparently that 
 established afterwards by Aristarchus against the inferior and 
 faulty copies used by Aristotle and later critics. The effects 
 of the rhetoric of his rival Isocrates are also to be remarked in 
 him, though he seems never to have adopted with any strict- 
 ness that avoidance of hiatus which is a distinctive mark of 
 Isocratic prose. Hence we see in Plato the child of his age 
 and yet its leader, the most Attic of Athenians and yet a 
 disaffected citizen, a profound skeptic and yet a lofty preacher, 
 an enemy of the poets and yet a rhapsodist himself, a thinker 
 that despaired of his own people and yet, aloft on his Pisgah 
 of speculation, looking out with prophetic eye upon a far future 
 of better laws, purer religion, and nobler life.* 
 
 The outlook in politics was indeed gloomy enough. Political dan- 
 Though culture was spreading through a larger area, Ifiltuaij^aious- 
 though the kings of Cyprus and the dwellers in the cities cities an? 
 of the Crimea were now cultivated Greeks, and though eagues - 
 various disciples of Socrates had carried philosophy to 
 various centers, where there may have been hitherto but 
 little higher speculation ; it was very plain that the 
 mutual jealousies of Sparta, Thebes, Argos, Athens, and 
 the nascent leagues of smaller cities presented no other 
 prospect but one of continual and exhausting hostilities. 
 What could be done to bring the Hellenic race together 
 and cause them to forget their petty quarrels and jeal- 
 ousies in the face of some grander and nobler prospect ? 
 
 This was the political mission of Isocrates, whom I Isocrates . 
 may here put between the two prime figures of the cen- 
 tury at Athens, and who sought, as Epaminondas did 
 by his strategy, so by his eloquence to bring the Greeks 
 to their senses, and make them unite under some recog- 
 nized leader to conquer the East and its enormous ma- 
 terial resources. This writer felt clearly enough that it 
 was only under the pressure or the excitement of a for- 
 
 * " Historv of Greek Literature," Mahaffy, pages 438-9.
 
 1 82 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 eign war that the Greeks had even approximately 
 united. He felt most strongly the superiority of Hel- 
 lenic over barbaric civilization — a superiority which he 
 The political attributed rather to culture than to race. He hoped at 
 
 mission of . . 
 
 isocrates. one time that he could induce Sparta and Athens to join 
 
 together as in the days of Xerxes, and lead the com- 
 bined nation. But he had no nobler object before him 
 than to humble the barbarians, now profiting by Greek 
 dissension, and to provide for the unceasing discontent 
 and poverty of Hellas a great material increase of 
 wealth. In those days conquest was regarded a per- 
 fectly legitimate way of obtaining power. It never oc- 
 curred to him that the Persian king had as good a right 
 to his kingdom as Sparta had to its supremacy in 
 Greece. He hoped to combine his countrymen under 
 that easiest of all bonds to forge, but the easiest also to 
 break, that of common greed and common plunder. 
 This policy and various essays upon the refinement 
 
 literary style. f Attic civilization were set forth in periods which for 
 perfect rhythm and easy flow had never been equalled 
 hitherto. The most perfect master of prose as prose 
 had arisen, the master whom our Milton in vain at- 
 tempted to rival in his ponderous and clumsy ' ' Areopa- 
 gitica." But the smooth flow of Isocrates' s periods, the 
 long roll of his sentences, were to him a greater object 
 than his policy. It was felt that, like the rhetorical his- 
 torians whom he fashioned, the way of saying things was 
 to him far more important than the things said, to be 
 convicted of a solecism worse than to be charged with a 
 crime. Hence this famous man's fame rests upon his 
 style alone, and we may dismiss him with the mere note 
 that he attained to the utmost perfection of literary elo- 
 quence. 
 
 But even he saw, toward the close of his life, that the
 
 The Fourth Ceutu/y B. C. 183 
 
 mutual jealousies of two nearly equal powers would never 
 permit them to be joint leaders in the great enterprise of 
 regenerating the Greeks by foreign conquest, and he 
 saw rising in the North a new and fresh power, near 
 enough to Hellenic life for the purpose, which might 
 undertake the task. His open letter to Philip of Mace- Letter of isoc- 
 
 rates to Philip 
 
 don abandons his former scheme, and calls upon this ofMacedon. 
 able and ambitious monarch to stay further oppression 
 and conquest of the Greeks, and turn to lead them 
 against their hereditary enemy in the East. He had 
 gradually come to feel that the rule of one man promised 
 better results than democracy ; he had been ready to 
 advise the tyrant of Cyprus how he might consolidate 
 and secure his kingdom by justice and moderation. 
 This very exhortation proves how much the horror of 
 
 . . . c 1 tt 11 • 1 The horror of 
 
 monarchy was dying out of the Hellenic race ; how monarchy 
 often has that been the case, when people feel weary of the Hellenic 
 discussion, of changes of policy, of uncertainty ? Politi- 
 cal discussion had become less interesting in many ways, 
 literary and social questions obtained predominance in 
 many minds ; and both art and elegance of life seemed 
 to have increased with poverty and the decrease of the 
 means to satisfy them. If we turn to the indications 
 which remain to us of art, we may say that from the do- 
 mestic point of view it was developing, while from the 
 public and religious point of view it was rather verging 
 to decline. There was not only art on a smaller scale, Development 
 but the skilled mechanic was working in clay figures to smaner n scaie. 
 adorn the private house as the sculptor adorned the 
 public building. Painters also had become many and 
 celebrated, not only Zeuxis and Parrhasius, who painted 
 for king and state, but lesser men, who painted little 
 pictures for the pleasure of small people.* 
 
 * This is what Isocrates implies in his speech on " Exchange of Property," §2.
 
 1 84 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Rotundas 
 at end of this 
 period. 
 
 Scopas and 
 Praxiteles. 
 
 Tlie " Hermes 
 of Olympia." 
 
 Personification 
 in the art of 
 Si opas and 
 Praxiteles. 
 
 From the end of the period before us, just at the end of 
 Philip's reign, date at Athens and at Olympia those grace- 
 ful rotundas, meant to celebrate victories, which show- 
 how the taste for the grandeur of the Periclean age had 
 gone by, or else the means to satisfy it no longer existed. 
 
 But we know that in Scopas and Praxiteles this cen- 
 tury could show artists not to be equalled in any but the 
 previous century. We only know of Scopas through 
 some fragments of the great Temple of Athena Alca, 
 near Tegea in Arcadia, which has recently been found, 
 and through Roman copies of his sea gods. Praxiteles 
 we long knew only from copies of his Niobe and his 
 fauns, till the excavations at Olympia brought to light 
 the marvelous Hermes, in the very spot where the 
 traveler Pausanias had seen and mentioned it (150 
 A. D. ), which may now be called the most perfect relic - 
 of sculpture in the world. What is most intensely 
 Greek about these sculptors is their idea of personifying 
 nature, and not only representing a mountain or a river 
 by its tributary god, but even the emotions suggested 
 by nature, in the expression of these figures. 
 
 To Scopas was due the fixing of the general type for the 
 great company of gods and nymphs which inhabited seas and 
 rivers — matted locks of dripping hair, and a longing melan- 
 choly of expression, in which the restless moaning of the 
 troubled sea finds its plastic utterance. To Praxiteles was due 
 the analogous type for the forest gods — the fauns and satyrs, 
 which, with their gnarled and knotty joints, and roughness of 
 skin, image even more clearly the sylvan forms which the 
 superstitious traveler saw with terror in the fantastic stems of 
 aged trees. Nay, even in his ideal Faun — a creature of perfect 
 beauty — the listening attitude, the Pandean pipe, the indefinable 
 suggestion of wantonness, and of mystery, speak a deeper feel- 
 ing for the beauty of forest life than could be conveyed by any 
 ordinary landscape painting.* 
 
 * " Social Life in Greece," page 483 (7th edition I.
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 185 
 
 While I am speaking on the question of art at this 
 period, it may be well to add something more concern- J|J™-™tta 
 ing the graceful and delicate art of the coroplathos, or 
 maker of terra-cotta figures, many of which have been 
 found in many parts of Greece, and though the actual 
 figures we possess are undated, and possibly of a later 
 generation, there is no doubt that from Plato's allusions 
 the craft existed in his day. 
 
 Nothing we have yet found is more important than 
 these figurines in showing us the difference between the 
 ideal and the real in Greek life. We were accustomed 
 to imagine the Hellenes of the last epoch something like 
 the fascinating youths and maidens, the hale old men on 
 the frieze of the Parthenon. But now we know that 
 though full of erace and refinement, both the costume Their modern 
 
 o o ; air. 
 
 and style of men and women in ordinary life were very 
 different. The head-dress, the muffling of the figure, 
 the gay colors, are all so modern in their air, that 
 we feel a strange approachment to them, they seem 
 to us possibly of our own flesh and blood, we might ex- 
 pect them to open their mouths and speak to us. 
 
 For what purpose were all these figurines, hailing from 
 Tanagra, Myrina, Tralles, Ialysos, Cyrene, put into the 
 cemeteries, where we have found them ? Many of them 
 were children's toys, put with their owners by mourning 
 parents into their bitter tomb. One series from Myrina 
 seems to imitate the pediment of a temple, and can Our ignorance 
 
 ,,.,,, of their use. 
 
 hardly have been a set of children s toys ; some were 
 perhaps intended as charms, or as ornaments of the 
 house. Strange to say, though we know of the craft, 
 we have not, so far as I know, a single ancient descrip- 
 tion of their use ; there is never a name to tell us 
 whom they represent ; there is nothing for us but con- 
 jecture upon so important and widespread a feature
 
 The Fourth Century D. C. 187 
 
 in the ordinary Greek house. This is a warning to us, 
 how little we know about the trifles of their life, and how 
 cautious we must be in drawing conclusions from the 
 silence of our authorities upon other points. 
 
 The private life, therefore, of this epoch, so far as we 
 know it, was more comfortable and elegant than that increase of 
 
 ° , mercenary 
 
 which preceded it, while it was on the whole less bril- Greek soldiers, 
 liant in literature and in politics. It also appears from 
 the rapid increase of the profession of mercenary sol- 
 diers, specially noted by Isocrates, that there was an in- 
 creasing class of adventurous paupers, ready to put their 
 swords at anybody's service, and also an increasing 
 class of comfortable citizens, devoted to business of vari- 
 ous kinds, who would not take the field in person with- 
 out the direst necessity, and were satisfied to employ not 
 only mercenary soldiers, but a mercenary general, to 
 fight their battles for them. 
 
 When this state of things was once recognized, it was 
 
 .... Consequent 
 
 perfectly plain that the power of the purse was likely to danger from 
 make any state supreme. If the Persian king could pay 
 Greeks to fight against other mercenary Greeks, instead 
 of the old citizen armies which had resisted him at 
 Thermopylae and Plataea, how easy was his problem 
 to solve ! Had the younger Cyrus not been killed at 
 Cunaxa, it is more than probable that he would have ac- 
 complished what his ancestors failed to do, unless indeed 
 the combined Greeks had done what they never did be- 
 fore, put the Theban Epaminondas at the head of the 
 whole nation. The jealousies of Athens and Sparta col- 
 lectively, and of their prominent leaders individually, 
 could not have tolerated such a policy for an instant. 
 
 Hence the danger from Persia was now an increasing 
 one, and when Darius Ochus, the ablest of the later Darius Ochus. 
 Persian kings, succeeded, and threatened invasion not
 
 1 88 . / Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 only of Syria and Egypt, which had revolted, but of 
 Asia Minor, we cannot but feel that patriotic Greek 
 politicians like Demosthenes felt the prospect very 
 gloomy and uncertain. But while they were looking 
 eastward, the same danger arose in the North — that 
 of an able king, with resources to pay an efficient mer- 
 cenary army, and ambition to rule over Greece. It had 
 been preached by Xenophon that the great power of 
 Persia was at the mercy of an able invasion from 
 the West. He did not say, what perhaps he and 
 Isocrates both felt, that the danger of a Persian invasion 
 was equally great to Greece. It was in fact a case 
 The necessity of where each country was weak in defense, strong in 
 foreign policy, attack, and even the internal cohesion of each depended 
 upon a vigorous foreign policy. 
 
 So we come to the days of Philip of Macedon, and of 
 his great opponent Demosthenes, a period which we 
 know, politically speaking, better than most periods of 
 ancient or medieval history. Would that we could 
 pierce the veil, and learn the social and artistic life with 
 even a tithe of the political details ! As is well known 
 to those who have read my earlier books, I think 
 Demosthenes Demosthenes as a politician overrated. He had indeed 
 overrated Cian one g reat idea - to maintain the power and prestige 
 of Athens as a leading power in Hellenedom. But the 
 means he took to promote this end seem to me to have 
 been neither the most moral or the most expedient. 
 At the close of his life, at all events, his conduct was 
 more than doubtful, and it requires all the special plead- 
 ing of the most learned of advocates — Arnold Schafer — 
 starting, too, with a preconceived conviction of his 
 absolute honesty, to shake the evidence which the 
 public censure of his conduct by his countrymen af- 
 fords us.
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 189 
 
 This remarkable person has less of Attic grace about 
 him than any other Athenian. He alone of them all is » f™° s ^f 
 no aristocrat. His father was a respectable tradesman ; people. 
 he had no training in athletics ; he was no soldier, like 
 Xenophon, and therefore in contact with kings and gen- 
 erals; he was no fastidious member of the leisure classes, 
 like Plato. This is the reason that with all his greatness 
 no one would think of using the word gentleman as a 
 distinctive epithet for him. He was trained to fight his 
 way by dire necessity, his guardians having embezzled 
 his property. He then lived by writing speeches for 
 litigants, it being the fashion at Athens for the clients to 
 speak for themselves in court, but to learn by heart the 
 harangue written for them by a trained advocate. He 
 was accused, and I believe justly, of having taken briefs 
 on both sides in successive branches of the same case. 
 There was none of the elegance of the school of Plato or 
 of Socrates about him, nor would any one have at- 
 tributed to him the political epigrams which are found in 
 the "Anthology" under the philosopher's name. 
 
 But, on the other hand, when he once enters into 
 
 His earnest- 
 politics, we feel inspired by his red-hot earnestness, in a "ess. 
 
 society which he felt to be idle and dilatory, seeking to 
 evade responsibilities by paying mercenary troops and 
 passing resolutions, while they devoted their real atten- 
 tion to the intellectual and artistic pleasures of Athenian 
 life. The great financial reform which occupies him, Radical finan- 
 
 , . c • ii- cial reforms. 
 
 when money is wanting for pressing public purposes, is 
 to make the people surrender their Theoric Fund, which 
 consisted in an allowance of a day's wage for every poor 
 citizen when plays were being performed at the Diony- 
 siac theater. This money paid for his entrance ; but he 
 might stay at home and spend it as he chose, so that we 
 have here an early specimen of that habit of supporting
 
 190 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The Theoric 
 Fund. 
 
 Sources for the 
 history of the 
 struggle be- 
 tween Demos- 
 thenes and 
 Philip of 
 Macedon. 
 
 Early life of 
 Philip. 
 
 a dominant city population in idleness by money or corn 
 drawn from the taxes of their subjects. The same thing 
 was apparently done by the Ptolemies in Alexandria ; it 
 was done afterward on a larger scale and with more fatal 
 effects at Rome. Any straightforward proposal to allo- 
 cate this fund to war purposes would have brought 
 on the proposer a prosecution under the "Bill of Illegal- 
 ity," and a heavy fine for the offense of attempting to 
 alter the law. This was the safeguard adopted by 
 the Athenians to prevent innovations in legislation. It 
 was not till the utmost extremity, and when it was really 
 far too late, that the citizens were brought to make this 
 sacrifice. 
 
 The details of the long struggles by which Philip 
 of Macedon gradually sapped and overthrew the resist- 
 ance of the Greek states to his encroachments, and 
 became what we might call Emperor of the Greeks, 
 as well as King of Macedon, may be read in any Greek 
 history. The speeches of Demosthenes and his oppo- 
 nent yEschines, Plutarch's " Life of Demosthenes " and 
 Diodorus's history (Book XVI.) make the situation 
 perfectly clear. Philip was a man like Peter the Great 
 of Russia, born in a partly civilized but young and 
 vigorous nation. He came early to the centers of civili- 
 zation and was even a hostage at Thebes in her great 
 days, when he could study the new methods of Epami- 
 nondas and the success of the Theban infantry under his 
 training. He learned to speak and write Greek per- 
 fectly, and could claim that heroic Greek descent which 
 his ancestor Alexander I. had established in the time of 
 the Persian wars.* His court had officially the manners 
 and the elegance of Greek life. There were professional 
 artists and poets whom large pay would easily attract 
 
 *Cf. Herodotus V.. Chap. XXII.
 
 The Fourth Century B.C. 191 
 
 from the poor republics. When envoys came from 
 Athens and Sparta, they were received with perfect 
 courtesy. But it was freely said that when business was 
 over, and le roi s amuse, the varnish of culture dis- Philip's 
 
 excesses. 
 
 appeared; there were drunkenness and roistering, and 
 men were often compelled to appeal from Philip drunk 
 to Philip sober. The Macedonian nobles were great 
 people in their way ; most of them seem to have been 
 brought up as royal pages about the court, and so they 
 would shake off at least the rudeness of their mountain 
 homes, and learn Greek and manners with the royal 
 princes. But in many respects even these suffered from 
 the imperfect refinement of the kingdom. Polygamy po) r am of 
 seems always to have been permitted to the king ; if not ^g d ° f n 
 polygamy, that license which was so disgraceful among 
 the European princes of the last century. By means of 
 marrying Illyrian or Thracian princesses the kings 
 of Macedon thought to cement new alliances with power- 
 ful or threatening neighbors. But they lost far more by 
 the disintegration of their home-life than they gained by 
 securing their frontiers. There were frequent family its evils. 
 tragedies, in which these semi-barbarous princesses en- 
 deavored to sweep away their rivals ; there were rela- 
 tives exiled, who revived the dangers from without ; 
 there were doubts about the succession, and all the 
 attendant evils which this uncertainty entails. 
 
 It was in spite of these difficulties, which caused every 
 accession of a new king to be a crisis in Macedonian af- 
 fairs, that Philip by ability, pertinacity, diplomacy, and P hiijp' S talents 
 strategy combined, made himself in twenty years master a ° r d s 1 t ? a < tegy. y 
 of northern Greece. Demosthenes, who had no weapon 
 but his tongue, and Athens, a democracy where every- 
 thing was publicly discussed before it was undertaken, 
 were no match for Philip, a man with a sword, with
 
 192 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Energy and 
 resources of 
 
 Philip. 
 
 Encroachment 
 of Locrians on 
 the sacred 
 plain. 
 
 a mine of gold in Mount Pangaeus, and with the power 
 to carry out his secret plans by a mere command. He 
 kept, moreover, paid agents in most Greek cities, who 
 not only thwarted and delayed any action against him, 
 but kept him fully informed of all the proposals and 
 possibilities discussed in the Greek assemblies. The 
 wonder is that northern Greece resisted so long. It was 
 not till Philip had excited through his agent yEschines 
 two religious wars, that he made the confusion so great 
 as to require his assistance to be invited by the dis- 
 tracted religious synod at Delphi.* The graphic story 
 is as fresh, when we read it now, as ever. How the 
 orator yEschines, attending a feast at the shrine of Del- 
 phi, looked down from his lofty position into the plain 
 far beneath, a plain devoted to the god in a long- 
 forgotten act of the Greeks under Solon, when those 
 that murdered or plundered the pilgrims coming from 
 the nearest port (Kirrha) were humbled and banished, 
 and the cultivation of this plain forbidden. Gradually, 
 as years and generations went on, the neighboring 
 Locrians, after the defeat and humiliation of the Pho- 
 cians, had encroached upon the sacred plain, and 
 covered it with crops and cattle. Nobody apparently 
 objected ; it was an accomplished sacrilege of consider- 
 able standing. Upon the unsuspecting occupiers of the 
 sacred plain yEschines suddenly turned his mighty elo- 
 quence, in well-feigned horror at so outrageous and 
 barefaced a sacrilege. His audience at Delphi were not 
 
 * I pass over, as requiring too long a discussion, Philip's wars with the Pho- 
 cian mercenar v leaders who had seized the Temple of Delphi and plundered it of 
 something like eleven millions of dollars in treasure. Thus many historic 
 jewels ami precious ornaments went U> the melting-pot. The mistresses ol the 
 Phocian chiefs, who were mere leaders of mercenaries, wore necklaces that 
 had helonged to ancient and semi-mythical queens. All the sentiments of 
 holiness and of veneration for a noble past were shocked by these proceedings, 
 but it was not till Philip was called in that the mercenary forces fed by the 
 treasures of the temple were dispersed and Philip came into Greece as the ad- 
 vocate of religion and of the authority of the Amphictyonic Synod.
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 
 
 193 
 
 accustomed to the artistic eloquence habitual in the 
 
 Attic assemblies. They simply went off their heads with ^^sti^ted" 
 
 excitement, and rushing down with what arms they had b >' ^schines. 
 
 ready, raided the plain, committing murder and violence 
 
 upon the innocent and astonished descendants of the 
 
 forgotten criminals. The punishment for this outrage 
 
 in the name of religion was not long delayed. The 
 
 Locrians (of Amphissa) not only retaliated with success, 
 
 but even made prisoners of many of the aggressors. 
 
 The whole story is worth telling in order to show how 
 in these remote but truly modern days, religion was 
 used as a political engine, and people who cared but 
 little for the gods could excite themselves into a pious 
 frenzy, if it was shown that the upholding of their creed 
 coincided with the furtherance of their material interests. 
 
 "The Amphiktyons being assembled (I here give the main re- 
 cital, though not the exact words, of yEschines), a friendly per- Recital of 
 son came to acquaint us that the Amphissians were bringing ^ schines - 
 on their accusation against Athens. My sick colleagues re- 
 quested me immediately to enter the assembly and undertake 
 her defense. I made haste to comply, and was just beginning 
 to speak when an Amphissian— of extreme rudeness and bru- 
 tality — perhaps even under the impulse of some misguiding 
 divine impulse — interrupted me and exclaimed — ' Do not hear 
 him, men of Hellas ! Do not present the name of the Athe- 
 nian people to be pronounced among you at this holy season ! 
 Turn them out of the sacred ground like men under a curse.' 
 With that he denounced us for our alliance with the Phocians, 
 and poured out many other outrageous invectives against the 
 city. To me (continues ^Eschines) all this was intolerable to 
 hear ; I cannot even now think on it with calmness — and at the 
 moment I was provoked to anger such as I had never felt in 
 my life before. The thought crossed me that I would retort 
 upon the Amphissians for their impious invasion of the 
 Kirrhaean land. That plain, lying immediately below the 
 sacred precinct in which we were assembled, was visible 
 throughout. 'You see, Amphiktyons (said I), that plain cul- 
 
 Insult to Ath- 
 ens by an 
 Amphissian. 
 
 Retaliation of 
 jEschines.
 
 i 9 4 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Appeal of 
 
 1 5i hinestothe 
 Amphiktyons. 
 
 He reminds 
 them of the 
 oath of their 
 forefathers. 
 
 Excitement of 
 the Amphikty- 
 
 tivated by the Amphissians, with buildings erected in it for 
 farming and pottery ! You have before your eyes the harbor, 
 consecrated by the oath of your forefathers, now occupied and 
 fortified. You know of yourselves, without needing witnesses 
 to tell you, that these Amphissians have levied tolls and are 
 taking profit out of the sacred harbor ! ' I then caused to be 
 read publicly the ancient oracle, the oath, and the impreca- 
 tions (pronounced after the first sacred war, wherein Kirrha 
 was destroyed). Then continuing, I said : ' Here am I, ready 
 to defend the god and the sacred property, according to the 
 oath of our forefathers, with hand, foot, voice, and all the 
 powers that I possess. I stand prepared to clear my own city 
 of her obligations to the gods ; do you take counsel forthwith 
 for yourselves. You are here about to offer sacrifice and pray 
 to the gods for good things, publicly and individually. Look 
 well then — where will you find voice, or soul, or eyes, or cour- 
 age, to pronounce such supplications, if you permit these ac- 
 cursed Amphissians to remain unpunished, when they have 
 come under the imprecations of the recorded oath ? Recollect 
 that the oath distinctly proclaims the sufferings awaiting all im- 
 pious transgressors, and even menaces those who tolerate their 
 proceedings, by declaring —They who do not stand forward to 
 vindicate Apollo, Artemis, Latona, and Athene Pronaea, may 
 not sacrifice undefiled or with favorable acceptance." 
 
 Such is the graphic and impressive description given by 
 yEschines himself some years afterwards to the Athenian as- 
 sembly, of his own address to the Amphiktyonic meeting in 
 spring 339 B. C, on the lofty site of the Delphian Pylaea, with 
 Kirrha and its plain spread out before his eyes, and with the 
 ancient oath and all its fearful imprecations recorded on the 
 brass plate hard by, readable by every one. His speech, re- 
 ceived with loud shouts, roused violent passion in the bosoms 
 of the Amphiktyons, as well as of the hearers assembled 
 round. The audience at Delphi was not like that of Athens. 
 Athenian citizens were accustomed to excellent oratory, and to 
 the task of balancing opposite arguments: though susceptible 
 of high-wrought intellectual excitement — admiration or repug- 
 nance as the case might be — they discharged it all in the final 
 vote, and then went home to their private affairs. Rut to the 
 comparatively rude men at Delphi, the speech of a first-rate 
 Athenian orator was a rarity. When /Eschines, with great
 
 The Fourth Cent toy B. C. 
 
 195 
 
 Mass of the 
 people still re- 
 vere the gods. 
 
 rhetorical force, unexpectedly revived in their imaginations the 
 ancient and terrific history of the curse of Kirrha — assisted by 
 all the force of visible and local association — they were worked 
 up to madness ; while in such minds as theirs, the emotion 
 raised would not pass off by simple voting, but required to be 
 discharged by instant action.* 
 
 All this is most interesting, as showing us that in 
 spite of philosophers and historians, in spite of rational 
 inquiry and moral protests, the gods of the Greek pan- 
 theon were still gods to the mass of the people, and it 
 was still possible to discredit and ruin an adversary by- 
 charging him with impiety. This sort of faith seems to 
 remain in the people down to the latest and most skep- 
 tical days, when most of the serious thinkers and most 
 of the educated classes do not hesitate to avow their 
 skepticism. But have we not had similar phenomena 
 many times since, during the Italian Renaissance, dur- 
 ing the French Revolution, and even after a polite 
 fashion in our own day ?f It should be remembered in 
 palliation of the Greeks that they had no revelation, no 
 faith purified of superstition, no high moral standard 
 preached by any established clergy in their land. Their 
 highest moral teachers were laymen, and, if I may so 
 say, amateurs in theology. 
 
 This sudden flame excited by yEschines, as sudden as 
 the outbreak of the Armenian disturbances in 1895, 
 clouded the whole political horizon, brought Philip 
 through the passes (he fortified Elatea in the critical 
 place), and forced at the last moment the Thebans and 
 Athenians to combine in a vain attempt to resist him. 
 The battle of Chaeronea (338 B. C.) settled the question JcrLrorS. 
 
 * Grote, " History of Greece," Chap. XC. 
 
 t Thus at a recent election for the British Parliament held in Dublin Univer- 
 sity the opponents of the famous historian, Mr. Lecky, who were lawyers, and 
 desired to return one of their own body, raised a religious cry against him, 
 with no more honesty than the tirade of yEschines. This happened in the year 
 ofour Lord 1895. 
 
 Philip advances 
 into Greece.
 
 ig6 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The lion of 
 ChEeronea. 
 
 of the supremacy in Greece. Two memorable monu- 
 ments remain of this crisis, one the lion over the fallen 
 in that battle, the other the "funeral oration " of Greek 
 liberty — the famous speech "On the Crown" delivered 
 some years later by Demosthenes. As regards the lion 
 I cannot tell the impression it made upon me better 
 than by repeating my words written long ago. 
 
 As we saw it, on a splendid afternoon in June, it lay in per- 
 fect repose and oblividn, the fragments large enough to tell the 
 contour and the style ; in the mouth of the upturned head, 
 wild bees were busy at their work, and the honeycomb was 
 there between its teeth. The Hebrew story came fresh upon 
 us, and we longed for the strength which tore the lion of old, 
 to gather the limbs and heal the rents of his marble fellow. 
 The lion of Samson was a riddle to the Philistines which they 
 could not solve ; and so I suppose this lion of Chaeronea was a 
 riddle, too — a deeper riddle to better men — why the patriot 
 should fall before the despot, and the culture of Greece before 
 the Csesarism of Macedonia. Even within Greece there is no 
 want of remarkable parallels. This, the last effulgence of the 
 setting sun of Greek liberty, was commemorated by a lion and 
 a mound, as the opening struggle of Marathon was also marked 
 by a lion and a mound. At Marathon the mound is there and 
 the lion gone — at Chaeronea the lion is there and the mound 
 gone. But doubtless the earlier lion was far inferior in expres- 
 sion and in beauty, and was a small object on so large a tomb. 
 Later men made the sepulcher itself of less importance, and 
 the poetic element more prominent ; and perhaps this very fact 
 tells the secret of their failure, and why the refined sculptor of 
 the lion was no equal in politics and war to the rude carver of 
 the relief of the Marathonian warrior. 
 
 These and such like thoughts throng the mind of him who 
 sits beside the solitary tomb ; and it may be said in favor of its 
 remoteness and difficulty of access, that in solitude there is at 
 least peace and leisure, and the scattered objects of interest are 
 scanned with affection and with care. 
 
 Demosthenes's The other monument is the great speech, which was 
 Crown':' out of date when it was delivered, for the particular 
 
 The lion of 
 Marathon.
 
 The Fotirth Century B. C. 197 
 
 question was not only settled, but the gigantic figure of 
 Alexander loomed upon the world ; it is ever fresh to 
 the present day, as the proudest and most perfect pro- 
 test of the Hellenic idea of liberty against the imperial- 
 ism of Macedonia. 
 
 Here again we have a jewel in Greek literature which subtleties of 
 no translation can even faintly reproduce. For apart Demosthenes. 
 from the subtle woof of the oration, which blends cold 
 argument with impassioned appeal, personal invective 
 with large policy, urgent reasons with specious fallacies 
 which we can still analyze, the rhythm and balance 
 of the composition, the almost poetical rise and fall of 
 the periods, the careful attention to sound as well as to 
 sense, are such that only in recent days are its secrets 
 being unlocked, and we are beginning to understand 
 what was meant when men said that such a speech smelt 
 of the midnight lamp. The subtleties of this oration are 
 like the delicate curves in all the lines of the Parthenon, 
 which looked a building easy enough to copy with 
 modern appliances, whereas we now know that such a 
 task would be perfectly vain. 
 
 One feature, however, is especially worth mentioning: _ , 
 
 r J ° Calm of peror- 
 
 here, as it recurs in most of Demosthenes' s speeches, ation - 
 and that is the quiet and almost tame ending. The 
 great splendor of the speech is not reserved for perora- 
 tion, but shines all over its framework. As in tragedy, 
 so in eloquence, it seems rather in accordance with 
 Greek taste to allow the hearer's feelings to subside 
 into calm before the orator concluded.* 
 
 These remarks upon the eloquence of Demosthenes 
 suggest to me that a word may be said concerning the 
 society of Athens which is addressed in the speeches not 
 
 * In modern art I can point to an example in some of Gounod's finest songs, 
 which after a passionate outburst have a tame and almost poor conclusion.
 
 198 ./ Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 only of this great master, but of his predecessors as far 
 back as Lysias at the opening of the century, and of his 
 successors or younger contemporaries, with whom he 
 was frequently in conflict. 
 
 It does not concern us to know whether the arguments 
 
 Studies of t . 
 
 character in the f Lysias and his school were accurate. In one thing 
 
 speeches of J . 
 
 Lysias. they must have approached hie as nearly as the genteel 
 
 comedy did ; they composed their court speeches in 
 character, and put very different arguments in a very 
 different style according as their clients varied in rank 
 and circumstances. We have the bold and reckless 
 young aristocrat, full of horse-play and insolence, the 
 timid householder appealing for mercy by bringing up 
 his wife and little children to excite commiseration, nay 
 even in one speech of Lysias "Concerning the Pauper,"* 
 a picture of what is commonly called an "original," a 
 man patronized by the rich for his pleasant manners and 
 good sayings, and who defends himself against the 
 charge of being no pauper, because his friends give him 
 a horse to ride, with no little humor. 
 
 The genius of Demosthenes does not lie in this direc- 
 tion. The speeches written for his private clients do 
 not show this dramatic turn. Even in the long process 
 against his guardians, we do not feel any more difference 
 in their varieties of dishonesty than we do in the secon- 
 dary characters in " Pickwick," which are, with one or 
 two exceptions, lay figures. 
 
 It will be said by his extreme admirers that he was 
 
 Evidence from too serious for such matters, that he fixed his whole 
 
 Demosthenes . . . . , . . , « 
 
 forthemoral attention on the case, without desiring to do more than 
 
 standard of . ^p, 
 
 public life. press home the most convincing arguments. 1 hat ma\ 
 
 be true, but to give us a picture of society he is therefore 
 
 * He was supported as such by a state allowance. His accuser thought it no 
 proper case for such charity because the man was really well off.
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 
 
 199 
 
 not so useful as his inferior but more human rivals. 
 His honesty is only worth considering as giving us a clue 
 to the moral standard of public life at Athens in those 
 days. That such a standard could be absolutely very 
 hisrh we know from the life and acts of Phocion, who Phocion's 
 
 £> attitude to 
 
 seems always to have despised Demosthenes not only as Demosthenes. 
 a man of too many words, but (I fancy) as a man of 
 doubtful honesty. 
 
 But I desire to insist upon this, that we must rather blame , 
 
 r a 1 1 j j Low average 
 
 the low average of political honesty at Athens than degrade of political 
 the great orator to the position to which modern morals would onest >- 
 condemn him. In fact, the ordinary rules of political life at 
 Athens tolerated abuses which may perhaps still exist in 
 America, but which are happily almost extinct in England. 
 I allude above all to the abuse of allowing indirect profits to be 
 made by politics. 
 
 Our evidence on this point and in the case of Demosthenes is 
 too precise to be refuted, and shows us that he must have done 
 many acts in his life which left him open to charges of dis- 
 honesty which he could only rebut by a general appeal to his 
 character, but which he could never directly refute. All his 
 accusers agree in speaking of his great wealth in mature life. 
 It is the common theory of the moderns that he made his 
 fortune by speech-writing. But as he abandoned this profession 
 early, and as we never hear of its being a very lucrative one, 
 such an explanation is quite inadequate. How do his oppo- 
 nents account for it? Hypereides is peculiarly precise, and 
 gives us exactly the information which is interesting for our 
 present purpose. "As I have often before said in public, 
 
 judges, vou allow many profits without demur to generals and Profits of 
 ■ J & ' 3 J ^ ° political life, 
 
 politicians — not by the permission of the laws, but from your 
 
 easy temper and good nature — making this one condition, that 
 
 what they make must be for your sake, and not against your 
 
 interests. And I suppose that Demosthenes and Demades, 
 
 from the mere decrees passed in the city, and their relations 
 
 with aliens, have each received more than sixty talents, apart 
 
 from gifts from the Persian king." We have the same thing 
 
 asserted in the speech for Euxenippus quite generally ; as to 
 
 Demosthenes, we have in the accusation of Deinarchus the
 
 200 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 These profits 
 made in interest 
 of the democ- 
 racy. 
 
 Monetary 
 problems in 
 Demosthenes's 
 speeches. 
 
 Token money. 
 
 same facts worked out in detail. We are given a list of decrees 
 which he was supposed to have carried not without gratuities 
 for doing so, and then we are informed that he had an immense 
 property of ready money — as much as a hundred and fifty 
 talents — the evidence of the large profits of his politics. 
 
 I can see no reason to doubt, and I am convinced no con- 
 temporary doubted, the truth of these statements as to his 
 wealth, and his manner of acquiring it. But I repeat that it 
 was looked upon as fair and honorable in the society of that 
 day, provided it was obtained from friends, and not from 
 enemies of the democracy, and provided it was spent liberally 
 on public objects. In fact, the ordinary formula of accusation 
 all through these orations is not that the accused took bribes 
 and benevolences, but that he took them "against your 
 interests," and this was the only criminal point. Accordingly 
 in Demosthenes's replies, so far as we can judge from the 
 " Oration on the Crown," he never denied his wealth ; he never 
 denied that he had received large monies on the score of 
 politics, but he insists that he never acted or spoke except in 
 the interests of the democracy.* 
 
 The business side of these speeches is a special study 
 which requires intricate research, and the monetary 
 questions which sometimes arise in this and later days 
 are as complicated and incomprehensible as the bimetal- 
 lic controversy in our own time. We know from a dia- 
 logue attributed to one of the companions or followers 
 of Socrates (yEschines, not the orator) that the great 
 traders of the eastern Levant, the Phenicians, had long 
 since discovered the use of token money. They had no 
 doubt also bills and checks, but the device in question 
 was to seal up small bags professing to have within them 
 a certain sum, which was stamped upon the outside 
 with the seal of the state. Though it was notorious 
 that the coin was not there, such a bag, so long as it 
 carried the seal guaranteeing its value in exchange, 
 passed as actual money. 
 
 *" Social Life in Greece," Mahaffy, pages 425-7 (7th edition).
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 201 
 
 The most doubtful point about their business arrange- 
 ments seems to be the persistent high rate of interest — ^|| J 1 ™ te of 
 twelve per cent was thought very low, and could be had 
 on the safest investments, whereas we find that as se- 
 curity increases, and men come to understand inter- 
 national duties, the interest on money that is safe sinks 
 lower and lower, so that now our state securities in 
 England are even below three per cent. This arises, I 
 suppose, from two causes, either or both of which might 
 produce this result. First, the insecurity of republics 
 as such and the frequency of wars made investments Reasons for 
 
 ^ J low rate of 
 
 for any Ions: period unsafe, and it is only investments interest in 
 
 . our day. 
 
 which are practically permanent, which cause no trouble 
 or care to the investor, that are now placed at very low 
 interest. Secondly, the want of accumulated capital 
 makes it more difficult to obtain idle money for imme- 
 diate commercial use, and raises the price which men 
 are willing to pay for that use. In every disturbed 
 place, or on the frontiers of civilization, money is even 
 now dear enough, and there are plenty of societies 
 whose men would willingly borrow if they could at 
 twelve per cent, because they can obtain quick returns 
 with very large profits. Such considerations are ob- 
 vious. To enter more deeply into money questions 
 would require a special knowledge which I do not - 
 possess. 
 
 While speaking of the great orators, who made style 
 their first object, we have naturally drifted away from 
 the other great contemporary development in Greek 
 writing. I mean the philosophical, which despised all 
 the adiuncts of grace, of pathos, of humor, with which Philosophical 
 
 J ° L prose alter 
 
 Plato had set forth his system, and set store upon PIato - 
 nothing but logical acuteness and scientific accuracy. 
 This is the reason why we often feel that Aristotle, in
 
 202 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Wide range of 
 Ai istotle's 
 studies. 
 
 Aristotle's 
 definition of 
 
 rhetoric. 
 
 His theory of 
 intellectual 
 pleasure as the 
 end of life. 
 
 many senses the greatest of the Greeks, is not a Greek 
 at all. He was an encyclopaedist ; his studies embraced 
 all departments of human knowledge. Like Solomon, 
 he discoursed on plants, ' ' from the cedar that is in Leb- 
 anon to the hyssop that groweth on the wall ' ' ; upon 
 animals, upon the heavenly bodies and their divine 
 author, on the mind of man and its faculties, intellectual 
 and moral, in fact, on all things human and divine. 
 
 He even turns, not only to rhetoric, which he defines 
 as the art of persuasion, but to poetry, especially the art 
 of representing fictitious characters upon the stage, and 
 subjects what we should call a mere form of amusement 
 to the most searching analysis and criticism. But here 
 he is indeed a Greek, and bases his researches upon the 
 theory that intellectual and refined leisure is the chief 
 end of man. This he holds to be even the happiness of 
 the gods, or of the Deity, and whatever beings there are 
 in a higher state than men. They are employed in the 
 contemplation of the immense variety and beauty of the 
 universe, and this contemplation is no labor, but the en- 
 joyment of perfect knowledge and perfect leisure. This, 
 too, should be the happiness of the cultivated man here, 
 whose leisure hours should not be spent in regarding 
 vulgar cares, or be wasted upon vulgar sympathies, but 
 engaged in contemplating ideal human actions — not 
 always ideally good, but ideal in their greatness, their 
 dignity, their importance, as illustrations of the laws 
 which govern the world. Thus he raises the tragedy of 
 the great masters to a subject fit for divine philosophy, 
 and not unworthy of the highest scientific treatment. 
 We need not here turn aside to his purely physical 
 labors — labors which have affected medieval life far 
 more than they affected his own time and age, labors in 
 which he substituted for the poetry of Plato's theories
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 
 
 203 
 
 Aristotle's 
 
 " Ethics " and 
 
 " Politics." 
 
 the prose of the painstaking observation of myriad facts. 
 Here we should find his most universal and non-Hel- 
 lenic side. But in his " Ethics" and his " Politics" he 
 is still a Hellene of the Hellenes, overrating the power 
 of intellect as compared with moral instincts, above all 
 overrating the politics of the little Greek democratic 
 state in comparison with the imperial system inaugu- 
 rated by his great pupil Alexander.* And yet he never 
 took any practical part in the turbulent affairs of the 
 states in which he lived. 
 
 He sojourned in Macedonia, in Asia Minor ; he ulti- 
 mately kept a school at Athens ; but even there he was 
 a " Peripatetic," not settled as it were, or rooted to any Aristotle a true 
 
 11 1 tt 11 "Peripatetic." 
 
 spot, not bound, as every other Hellene was, to one 
 narrow fatherland. Thus he comes to have but little 
 place in this book, for I cannot but instinctively regard 
 him as a great outsider, combining many narrownesses 
 indeed of his age and race with a certain cosmopolitan- 
 ism which was no small agent in breaking down the 
 peculiar virtues as well as the weaknesses of Hellene- 
 dom, and changing it into the broader, shallower, more 
 commonplace Hellenism, which we shall consider in a 
 subsequent chapter. As in his personal appearance, so 
 in his writings, there was an almost total absence of Absence of 
 beauty, and the recovery of his lost work on the con- workplaces 3 
 stitution of Athens has not altered that judgment. Gr^ek'cuUur^ 
 
 What place can a man devoid of this feature have in 
 a study of Greek culture ? None, I think, but that of a 
 strange and notable exception, given us, as it were, to 
 show that even in scientific severity, in cold reasoning, 
 in complete absence of any relaxation of thought and of 
 life, the Greeks were our masters, and equalled the best 
 
 * I must refer the reader for details to the chapter on Aristotle in my 
 tory of Greek Classical Literature."
 
 204 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Aristotle's 
 influence on 
 scientific 
 discovery. 
 
 Reverence for 
 Aristotle in the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 modern men here, as they surpassed them in manifesta- 
 tions of the beautiful. For there never was any single 
 man who had a greater effect in promoting the knowl- 
 edge of his own and of succeeding generations. It may 
 even be said in proof of his greatness that he also re- 
 tarded more than any other man ever did the course of 
 scientific discovery. For he bound the learned men of 
 the Middle Ages by the superstitious veneration for his 
 words, which they accepted as almost inspired. In the 
 thirteenth century he was all but canonized as a saint by 
 the Roman Catholic Church. And so modern thinkers 
 found it their hardest task to break through the bonds 
 of Aristotle, whom early thinkers had failed to follow in 
 his marvelous investigations. Were there ever stranger 
 or more inconsistent evidences of human greatness !
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 the fourth century b. c. (Continued). 
 
 Having now surveyed rapidly the most remarkable 
 developments of the fourth century B. C. down to 
 the accession of Alexander, it is worth while to pause at 
 the threshold of a new epoch and reflect upon the 
 wonderful age which we have just passed through. It 
 may fairly be said that the century 435-335 B - C - was 
 the most important that ever yet has occurred for 
 the cultivation of the human race. Not in quantity 
 or extent of culture — far from it — but in quality. It was Culture of the 
 during that century that there was attained in many ^f^aiied!" 
 of the highest departments of human intellect a standard, 
 which has not only never been exceeded, but to which 
 we have ever since been striving as an ideal, and striving 
 in vain. When we speak of classical works, as a stand- 
 ard for our literature, we refer to the works which were 
 produced within a hundred, or at least a hundred 
 and fifty years, ending with the fall of the liberties of 
 Greece. We may use the word in a second-hand sense, 
 as applying to Roman models. But these were all Greek masler . 
 depending directly upon the Greek originals, which P^cestheoniy 
 were the only true classics the world has yet produced. 
 There have been other great developments of art and 
 literature called Romantic, called Medieval, called By- 
 zantine, or what you like, and very splendid some 
 of them have been. But once and again the world has 
 turned from them with the enthusiasm of a new dis- 
 covery to the great original classics, which exalt the
 
 2o6 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Greek sculpture the primary object. 
 
 result of art 
 
 Greek 
 ignorance 
 of anatomv. 
 
 mind and give repose to the feelings by the strict chas- 
 tity of their forms and the ideal perfection of their 
 designs. 
 
 This unique phenomenon in history is most easily 
 seen, of course, in those products where pure form is 
 There is not the smallest question 
 about the products of Greek sculpture from Phidias, 
 who walked with Pericles, to Lysippus, who added 
 glory to Alexander the Great. We have but scanty re- 
 mains of it, or else Roman copies, which are but faithful 
 translations of the originals with the anxiety of the copy- 
 ist marring the freedom of the conception. But this is 
 enough, quite enough, to tell us that no medieval 
 or modern sculptor has ever approached their excellence 
 in treating ideal humanity. They did not dissect the hu- 
 man body ; they had no lessons in anatomy, such as the 
 modern sculptor may attend, to show him the accurate 
 working of joints, the play of muscle, the secrets of 
 nature in raising a machine into an organism. But the 
 daily experience of youths in the palestrae, the study 
 of the nude in the other sex, in a society and a climate 
 where the nude was not shocking, and therefore not ex- 
 ceptional, gave them knowledge enough to set the 
 criticism of the most careful modern anatomist at de- 
 fiance, and prove to him that it is not science, but 
 art, which solves problems, which understands mys- 
 teries, so far as its province is concerned. 
 
 But the isolated figure only affords us a small idea of 
 this classical sculpture. When we consider the compo- 
 ibr composition sition of a frieze, the bringing into harmony the variety 
 of many figures, the various attitudes, such as we have 
 them in the Parthenon frieze, or in the Attic tomb- 
 reliefs, then their sense of beauty, of proportion, of free 
 symmetry, strikes us with even greater wonder. We
 
 20S 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Poverty of art 
 instincts of the 
 present age 
 illustrated by 
 architecture. 
 
 The Parthenon 
 i model for all 
 periods. 
 
 shall revert in due time to an instance of this composi- 
 tion (on the great sarcophagus of Sidon) as well as 
 to the perfection of a single figure (the Venus of Melos), 
 which prove that these secrets were not lost as suddenly 
 as they were found, and that even late into the Hellenis- 
 tic decadence men were able to appreciate and even 
 to reproduce the beauties of truly classical sculpture. 
 The case is nearly as clear in architecture, though here 
 many other nations, ancient and modern, have sup- 
 plied us with other splendid models, which we can 
 copy, but cannot rival by any new creation of style. 
 It is the most singular proof of the poverty of the art in- 
 stincts of our century that in an age where not only the 
 science of mechanical construction, but the control of 
 new materials, has attained a pitch unheard of before, all 
 this new power has not taught us to apply it in a 
 new way, or in a style either original or beautiful. Thus 
 the conquest of iron as a building material in our 
 century ought to have produced a distinctive style, 
 as much as the conquest of Pentelic marble did in 
 the days of Ictinus and Mnesicles, the great builders on 
 the Athenian Acropolis. But it is not so. Our iron 
 buildings imitate older designs, they copy Renaissance 
 ornaments, compound and contort old ideas into some- 
 thing pretending to be new, but it is only a pretense. 
 "For the old is better." If any city in the world could 
 now secure for one of its public buildings an exact 
 replica of the Parthenon, it would at once be recognized 
 as the most peerless and perfect thing which that city 
 could procure. We know also that the cost of it 
 now would be almost fabulous. And though the temples 
 in Egypt are splendid, they have become antiquated 
 to modern taste. No one would now seek to reproduce 
 them on a large scale, any more than we should re-
 
 The Fourth Century B.C. 209 
 
 produce Chinese pagodas. But the Parthenon would be 
 no more antiquated than the English of the Bible is anti- 
 quated, for we have had our artistic taste fed on it from 
 our infancy, nationally and individually. Therefore the 
 Romans tried to adopt it, and the men of the Renais- 
 sance, and since that time we also, though not one of us 
 even understood the plan till Mr. Penrose explained 
 it to us in his "Athenian Architecture." 
 
 Nor were these wonderful people confined to one 
 
 . , Ionic style in 
 
 strict style. We have what is called the Ionic, suited to architecture. 
 
 smaller and more decorated buildings, still showing blue 
 
 and gold on the ceilings, still showing delicate tracing 
 
 round door-frames. And just at the close of the epoch 
 
 we have the still richer Corinthian, which so took the Corinthian. 
 
 fancy of the Romans, and indeed of the Hellenistic age 
 
 which the Romans copied, that we might fairly call it 
 
 the Graeco-Roman order, with which the emperor 
 
 Hadrian adorned not only Greece but the whole Roman 
 
 world, from Palmyra to Spain. 
 
 Their painting and their music are gone, and it may 
 be that these men, so perfect in some forms of art, were 
 not perfect in all, and that this loss had tended to raise 
 them in our estimation. But if musical faculty consists 
 in the rhythm of language, in delicately constructed 
 periods, in expressive meters, then we must hold that 
 the Greeks of the fourth century B. C. had the most fonthe beauty- 
 exquisite feeling for the beauty and symmetry of sound. 
 Even in our miserable modern pigeon-Greek, which 
 represents no real pronunciation, either ancient or 
 modern, the lyrics of Sophocles or Aristophanes are 
 unmistakably lovely poetry ; the dialogues in inter- 
 changed lyrics and iambics in Euripides dramatic 
 beyond all modern parallel. 
 
 But form is after all but the lesser side of literary art. 
 
 of sound.
 
 2io A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 What were the ideas which these people clothed in 
 Lofty ideas such exquisite dress ? Were they ideas commonplace, 
 
 combined with » » * 
 
 perfection of unworthy, even provincial, special, not fit for trans- 
 ference into modern life? Far from it. The first and 
 greatest Athenian poet who comes before the golden 
 age of literature, yEschylus, has indeed such vast con- 
 ceptions that his utterance at times fails him, and 
 though a hundred imitators have essayed to give us his 
 "Agamemnon," it still remains half revealed to us in 
 its mysterious gloom. But when we come to Sophocles, 
 though the subject of his greatest tragedy is hardly 
 more fit for modern taste than Shelley's "Cenci," yet 
 in every line of it there is refinement, there are beauty 
 and fitness of expression, there is such an avoidance of 
 dread details as shows the perfect artist, and with all 
 the richness of this work, with all the lyric splendor of 
 the odes, the pathetic dignity of the dialogue, there is 
 one feature common to the architecture, the poetry, the 
 sculpture, the eloquence — its chastity in style. 
 
 I know not by what other word I can designate this 
 
 Greek e s?yi" J " essentially classical feature, which means the absence of 
 all that is tawdry, the absence even of all that we could 
 call florid, a certain severity and reticence which are as 
 marked in the prose of Thucydides as they are in the 
 marble of Phidias. The art of Euripides was censured 
 
 ofthes C tyie C of m b > f tlie older school of this century as deficient in this 
 
 Euripides. quality : he sought, they said, to excite pathos too 
 
 directly and violently, instead of purifying such emo- 
 tions of the soul by exercising them on high and pure 
 ideas, far from the vulgarities of life. But if this be so, 
 he surely sought to gain in breadth what he may have 
 lost in height ; he desired to bring the more common 
 phases of life into the tragic dignity ; he sought, too, to 
 infuse into his dialogue touches of that deeper philoso-
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 211 
 
 phy which had hitherto been a stranger to the stage. 
 For Euripides was the friend of Anaxagoras, whose gggjjg** ' 
 rationalism attracted Pericles and the higher spirits, but 
 excited the persecutions of the crowd. Such meat was 
 too strong for babes in metaphysics ; it was through 
 the pores of their intellectual skin that Euripides admin- 
 istered the medicine that they would not or could not 
 drink. He was the spiritual friend also of Socrates, 
 whose great home mission must have affected him with 
 deep sympathy, though we do not hear of any close 
 intercourse between the recluse of the study and the 
 missionary who spent his life in the streets. 
 
 These were the men who led the way in the second Plat0 - smastery 
 half of our period to the divine philosophy of Plato, of st y ,e - 
 which combines with the purest and loftiest thinking 
 that perfection of form not since equalled, and places 
 that great spirit not only among the deepest thinkers, 
 but the most perfect artists of all time. The old fashion 
 of presenting philosophical systems in poetic form, 
 which had been that of Parmenides, of Empedocles, of 
 Democritus — how splendid such poetry can be, we 
 know from the reproduction by Lucretius — now gave 
 way forever to the treatment in prose ; but, as if to 
 show us how this classical period was destined to out- 
 strip in everything later and lesser epochs, all the subse- His gtyle never 
 quent essays in prose philosophy never attained to ggfjj}^ 
 Plato's perfection. There have since been great phi- 
 losophers ; there have since been great prose writers ; 
 but never has the combination been so admirable ; not 
 even in the dialogues of our greatest English masters, of 
 whom Bishop Berkeley alone may be called a worthy 
 follower and pupil of Plato, but very far indeed from a 
 rival. 
 
 Is it not the most wonderful evidence of the absolute
 
 212 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 superiority of this matchless century, that in such a sub- 
 ject, where subsequent thinking, subsequent discoveries, 
 subsequent advances in science have corrected so much 
 of what Plato thought, and added so much to what 
 Plato said, not a single master has ever given us a life- 
 Greek perfec- work to compare in its artistic perfection with this clas- 
 
 tion in all their r . . . . , 
 
 artistic work. s i ca l edifice of philosophy ? So it is with the forensic 
 eloquence, so it seems to be wherever the Greeks of that 
 day chose to show us a model of artistic work. 
 
 We must not weary of repeating these things in a 
 concerted and self-conscious age, among people who 
 imagine that the great conquests over matter in our 
 century imply great conquests in the domain of mind. 
 But science is not art ; science is not human life ; science 
 is not perhaps even the best highroad to happiness, 
 though it may be to material comfort. 
 
 On the other hand, I am not sure that the perfect ap- 
 
 Appreciation of preciation of the beautiful has as yet, in any society, 
 
 the beautiful r , . . £ 
 
 does not imply implied what it ought to impiv, the keenest pursuit ot 
 
 pursuit of the r , .... 
 
 good. the good, and I at least have maintained tor many years 
 
 the position that the average Greeks of this time were 
 not wonders of beauty, delicacy, and refinement in their 
 every-day life. To me it is chimerical to assert that the 
 average young Spartan or Athenian was like the ideal 
 figure of Phidias and Praxiteles ; these great men knew 
 how to idealize better than our sculptors do, which 
 means that from ordinary men and women they were 
 able to draw types of what was better and more splen- 
 did, that like Virgil copying from Aratus,* the transla- 
 tion while faithful was far purer and more poetical than 
 sk S scu?pture the original. Had our sculptors been transferred to 
 
 nusiead"us. those studios, they would probably not have found 
 models as perfect as any sculptor might now find if he 
 
 * in his "Georgics," concerning the signs of weather.
 
 The Fourth Century B.C. 213 
 
 went to study the play of limb and muscle among the 
 naked and free islanders of Fiji or Samoa. The average 
 thinker on philosophical subjects was probably far in- 
 ferior to the average that might now be met in any cul- 
 tivated society, and yet Plato, with few and imperfect 
 models, passed beyond mere imitation to the creation of 
 something far beyond their dictation. 
 
 This is the feature which so many learned students of Greek genius 
 Greek life seem to me to have misunderstood ; it is the JJ^SS Us 
 long distance between the artist who has genius and the 
 ordinary facts which inspire his work. I am not sure 
 that it is wise to pry into the back scenes of any great 
 play. The modern fashion, which we find among the 
 later Greeks, of adorning the person of the artist and 
 searching greedily into his private life is a vulgar and 
 mischievous taste, quite foreign to what is really noble 
 in art. For the real genius of the worker is in his 
 spirit, not in his " muddy nature of decay," it comes to 
 us in his work, though his personality is sometimes 
 mean, sometimes even odious. The student of history 
 and of art has no concern with these things, if he can 
 but take from each man or each age the purest and best 
 that that man or age has produced. It is therefore to 
 be remembered that no foibles or failings which we find 
 in the men of Plato's or of Demosthenes' s age can mar 
 the classical perfection of what they have produced. 
 But some knowledge of these foibles may even enhance 
 our appreciation of their art, for it may show us how far 
 thev rose out of their every-day surroundings, and how The genius of 
 
 J .. the Greeks 
 
 it mav vet be possible for another age to manliest an- glorified 
 
 J J r ••111 commonplace 
 
 other such burst of immortal genius, without the total surroundings, 
 reformation of society, without the fulfilment of the 
 dream of the socialist, that the whole mass of men 
 should be raised to so exceptional a level.
 
 214 -^ Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The world moments of great art are like those brilliant 
 Greeklffenot constellations which occur at long intervals in the starry 
 bythegenius ed heavens. The whole ground as we sec it, though made 
 of a few. U p { innumerable lights, is dark and only studded with 
 
 some isolated luminaries. Here and there, there is a 
 brilliant group, but these do not make any change in 
 the background, unless it is that they obscure the lesser 
 lights which are beside them. The floor of heaven 
 shows nothing but consistent gloom. So it is with the 
 background of human history. Up to the present day 
 it is only the few that have ever made the glory of a so- 
 ciety : the masses, even the classes, have contributed in 
 some cases encouragement, in many more hindrances 
 and obstacles to the rise of genius. Average human \ 
 nature has in all ages been a poor and vulgar thing, and 
 I do not think that even the brilliant Athens of Pericles 
 was more than a partial exception to this sad rule. 
 
 These are the considerations with which I desire to 
 of the picture. e introduce a few remarks on the lesser and lower side of 
 Greek life, even at Athens, at this memorable time. It 
 is not for the sake of carping at the shady side of 
 splendor, or of bringing down the achievements of these 
 people to the level of our own. Far from it. But when 
 rightly understood it will complete our picture by show- 
 ing us that we are dealing with no race of superior 
 beings "delicately marching through the most pellucid 
 air," but with men of like passions with ourselves, and l 
 in some respects worse than we have learned to be, 
 though in others vastly our superiors. History shows 
 no steady and systematic advance from barbarism to 
 semi-barbarism, from semi-barbarism to lower, then to 
 higher civilization, but a chronicle of brilliant beginnings 
 that were but dreams, of splendid hopes that turned to 
 disappointment, of eras which heralded a great future
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 215 
 
 and turned to decay. Even as individual genius com- 
 monly springs from obscure parents, and produces 
 obscure children, so epochs grow suddenly splendid 
 and yet produce no offspring worthy of their greatness. 
 The first thing that meets a modern reader when he 
 studies the history of the Golden Age of Greece is the Cruelty of 
 
 J ° Greeks to slaves 
 
 constant occurrence of cruelty. Not only are slaves and prisoners. 
 
 constantly put to the torture when required to give 
 
 evidence, as if they were unable otherwise to speak the 
 
 truth, but we find in war that it is quite usual, even for 
 
 the Athenians who boast of their humanity, to put 
 
 prisoners to death in cold blood. I have indeed by 
 
 an emendation which I consider certain removed from 
 
 the text of Thucydides what seemed the most horrible 
 
 instance : After the public assembly at Athens had 
 
 actually decreed that the whole adult male population 
 
 of Mytilene, subdued after a revolt, should be put to 
 
 death, and this cruel vote which affected five thousand 
 
 lives had been rescinded, and the execution of the 
 
 decree stopped at the last moment, the historian says 
 
 quietly : " The ringleaders, however, the Athenians put 
 
 to death, and they were more than a thousand." Hap- of Thucydides. 
 
 pily I was able to show that the early signs for 1, 4, and 
 
 30 were constantly confused in early cursive writing, 
 
 and that in the present case A , which is 30, must have 
 
 been mistaken for A, and then made into '^, which is 
 
 the sign for 1,000. 
 
 But there can be little doubt about atrocities fully as 
 great at the close of what we may call the ' ' Thirty massacre of 
 Years' War," when Lysander and the Lacedaemonians spartan", 
 put to death in cold blood over three thousand Athenian 
 prisoners on the shore of the Hellespont. During the 
 course of that war the Plataean prisoners of war had 
 been executed one by one with similar atrocity. I need
 
 2l6 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Greed and 
 jealousy of the 
 Greeks. 
 
 Candor of Soc- 
 rates would 
 not have been 
 tolerated in 
 politics. 
 
 Their rapacity 
 blinds Greeks 
 to questions of 
 right and 
 wrong. 
 
 not delay upon this painful subject ; the facts in these 
 latter cases seem to be indisputable. 
 
 Not less disagreeable though less shocking is the 
 ingrained grasping and jealousy of the Greek nature, 
 shown in their politics, both home and foreign, all 
 through the epoch. It was indeed the fashion still to 
 appeal to the gods and to the cause of justice, but these 
 appeals were never regarded, and seem quite idle except 
 to excite odium against the aggressor. For the founda- 
 tions of honor and mercy are laid so deep in all human 
 nature that no course of crime seems able to eradicate 
 them ; there were, moreover, in Greece always great 
 individuals who still kept alive among men the high 
 standard which the old poets and moralists had 
 preached. But greed and jealousy seem always to be 
 there, as they are in some of the modern nations of 
 Europe. 
 
 When Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates that 
 noble defense of his mission called the " Apologia," he 
 replies to the question why so constant a teacher and 
 preacher had not taken to politics and given advice to 
 the Athenians in public affairs, by saying that had he 
 done so, he would have been exiled or put to death 
 long ago, because the assembly would not tolerate any 
 adviser who resisted their passions and censured their 
 injustice. 
 
 If this be true of the Athenian assembly, how much 
 more must it have been so with inferior states ? The 
 cold-blooded selfishness of Spartan policy is even more 
 repulsive than the passionate outrages of the Athenian. 
 Even still piracy was regarded rather as adventurous 
 than criminal, and the Attic navy kept the seas clear not 
 because the "vintage of the sea" was regarded as 
 criminal and cruel, but because it interfered with com-
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 
 
 217 
 
 Indifference of 
 Hellenes to the 
 
 mercial enterprise. No Greek state would have felt the 
 smallest qualms of conscience at permitting pirates to 
 make a descent upon a rival or unfriendly city's coasts. 
 In the same way it was not regarded that any non- 
 Hellenic state, especially the realm of the Persian king, i&J 1 t e s n °J° on " 
 had any rights whatever against Greek aggression and 
 Greek rapacity. The calm and polished Isocrates thinks 
 it perfectly legitimate to unite all Greece in an attack 
 upon Persia, regardless of all treaties, " in order that 
 poor Greeks may be enriched, and that the barbarians 
 may think less of themselves." All this was contempo- 
 raneous with the pure morals of Socrates and the lofty 
 metaphysic of Plato. 
 
 But if the artists, as I have explained, had created 
 ideals far above their models in ordinary life, so the 
 philosophers had soared far beyond the clouds and mists 
 of ordinary morals. The whole picture then is un- 
 pleasant, but not unnatural. In the present day we 
 have known artists of consummate skill, and with a very 
 refined sense of beauty, yet anything but pure or lofty - 
 in their lives. The pursuit of the beautiful is not yet 
 identical with the pursuit of the good, and in some 
 senses only with the pursuit of the true. 
 
 Some of the causes of these grave defects are not far Some causes of 
 
 the Greek lack 
 
 to seek. I will not pretend to say that they are of moral sense. 
 
 adequate to explain all. For the differences of national 
 
 character are so deep set, and so obscure, that it were 
 
 idle to attempt any complete explanation. Among the 
 
 first we may place the attitude of women, who were in 
 
 most Greek states brought up, as Xenophon says, in 
 
 silence and in fear, at Sparta, on the contrary, in license 
 
 and insubordination, so that although to philosophers 
 
 they seemed a model for the arrangements of their ideal 
 
 states, to ordinary Greeks their license seemed rather a
 
 218 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Secluded life 
 and inferior 
 position 
 of women. 
 
 Lack of 
 kindliness. 
 
 Exposure 
 of infants. 
 
 Spartan eccentricity than a thing to be copied or 
 desired. This absence of the moral influence of women, 
 who lived and thought apart, and whose private life was 
 suspected of many disorders which we cannot establish 
 or gainsay, had, I believe, a great effect in making 
 Greek life hard and unlovely. The angel of the house, 
 who allays so much strife, who sets the example of so 
 much unselfishness, who protects the feeble and the sick, 
 was wanting there. The gentleness of modern life is 
 not the gentleness of the Greeks. No man was ever 
 sounder in morals than Socrates, yet there is a strange 
 want of kindness about him. In his great dying scene 
 his wife and children are sent away as an obstacle to 
 noble talk ; as a mere annoyance, with their lamentation 
 and their tears ! Could anything be more significant of 
 the contrast of which I speak ? 
 
 Those who had most effect upon society were women 
 like Sappho or Aspasia, who combined with a high 
 intellect and a thorough education a life unrestrained by 
 ordinary moral considerations. We might put it in a 
 paradox and say that they were in society and influenced 
 society, because they were out of society. If the habit 
 of exposing infants was indeed common, and the evi- 
 dence on this point is usually thought conclusive, can we 
 conceive anything more brutalizing and searing to the 
 natural instinct of affection of any young mother than to 
 have her new-born infant taken from her, and thrown to 
 the ravens and the wolves ? And yet it is very hard to 
 evade the statements not only that such conduct was 
 strictly legal, but that it frequently occurred. I person- 
 ally still feel skeptical, for I know not in actual history of 
 any case where such an infant was picked up, or where 
 exposure of this kind is said to have been perpetrated by 
 a person with a name. But in Greek fiction, from the
 
 The Fourth Century B. C. 
 
 219 
 
 early legends down to the comedies of Menander, it 
 is the constant background of a story. This at least 
 shows that it was tolerated by Greek sentiment, and 
 is another proof of the hardness of their hearts. 
 
 It is quite possible that the habit of keeping slaves 
 may have had much to do with this inhumanity in 
 the life of ancient nations. Men are not regardless 
 of the rights of human beings in one relation without the 
 penalty of falling into general callousness. The inflict- 
 ing of pain on others, unless it be opposed by a sen- 
 timent of horror, is not likely to be checked by rational 
 considerations or by legislation. I suppose that to 
 their domestic animals these people were also cruel. 
 The urgent speed at which the Parthenon and the Pro- 
 pylsea were built probably entailed horrible suffering on 
 countless slaves and countless beasts of burden. We 
 wonder at the purity and perfection of the design ; 
 we forget the tears and the blood shed in the labor of 
 the building. We know very well that in many cases 
 the slave was well treated, that he became the confidant, 
 even the friend of his master. Euripides turns aside 
 constantly to show upon his stage the faithfulness of the 
 slave who really owed his master nothing but his manual 
 labor. Increasing refinement, if not humanity, must 
 have revolted against continuous and barbarous punish- 
 
 Slavery a cause 
 of inhumanity. 
 
 Certain 
 redeeming 
 features of 
 slavery do not 
 
 ments, and houses where the lash and the cry of anguish possibilities of 
 were often heard must have been avoided because it was 
 coarse and disagreeable, if not because it was tyrannous 
 and unjust to exercise such barbarous control. But the 
 frightful possibilities were always there, though we have 
 no Greek "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to display them to us. 
 Such, then, is my estimate of this wonderful moment 
 in the world's history. I have striven to avoid all exag- 
 geration, to get rid of the prejudices of the pedant, the
 
 220 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Death ofPhilip 
 and fall of 
 Demosthenes 
 mark the end 
 of a political 
 phase. 
 
 The wide- 
 spread neglect 
 of post-classical 
 writers. 
 
 Spread of Greek 
 language a 
 
 natural cause of 
 loss of precision 
 and delicacy. 
 
 strong and just prepossessions of the Christian ; what- 
 ever was there to censure and to blame, I have not 
 scrupled to put it forward, and take discount from 
 the sum of the obligations under which the Greeks have 
 laid us. And I have paused here, in the middle of 
 my work, to make up the account, because there is 
 in Greek history, with the death of Philip, with the col- 
 lapse of Demosthenes' s policy, a strange and complete 
 halt, and a new beginning, which broke completely with 
 the past. 
 
 The Greece known in our schools and colleges is only 
 the older Greece, before it really came to influence 
 a large part of the world. Because the style of Thucyd- 
 ides and Xenophon is purer than that of Polybius and 
 of Plutarch, these latter, great and instructive as they 
 are, have no place in the education of our youth. I 
 need not point out to any educated man how false 
 this perspective is, how in earlier times Plutarch in- 
 fluenced the greatest men, or was justly esteemed 
 the most precious possession left us by the Greeks. It 
 is high time that all partial views of this kind should be 
 laid aside, and that as we admire the Parthenon and its 
 matchless relief, so we should also wonder at the Nike 
 of Samothrace and the Greek tomb of the king of Sidon 
 at Constantinople, not to say the Venus of Melos, all of 
 them work inferior to nothing that Hellenic sculpture 
 has left us. In language, indeed, the very fact that the 
 knowledge of Greek spread to various foreign lands 
 made it necessary that some of the exquisite refinement 
 of Plato or Demosthenes should be lost. Any language 
 which aspires to be a Wcltsprache (world-language), as 
 the Germans say, must sacrifice much of its delicacy, its 
 shades of meaning expressed by many synonyms and 
 particles and tenses, which the foreigner in his hurry and
 
 The Fourth Century B.C. 221 
 
 without contact with natives cannot be expected to 
 master. But the very power of accommodation in the 
 Greeks was one of the most wonderful features in 
 the people. For though exceedingly proud, though 
 despising other languages and compelling all those who 
 aspired to their civilization to be at pains to learn their 
 tongue — no small effort before the day of scientific 
 grammars — they yet so accommodated themselves to 
 Macedonian, Syrian, Roman masters that they became Greek 
 indispensable in the household, or the diplomatic, or the 
 military, service of all these nations. 
 
 These are the reasons that the present book, depart- 
 ing from the usual practice, will devote a large space to 
 the development of Hellenistic (as opposed to Hellenic) 
 culture through and in consequence of the conquests of 
 Alexander and the sovereignties of his successors. 
 
 It is not a little curious how much more attractive, at 
 first sight, the later work was than the earlier and 
 purer. When the discoveries of the Renaissance burst 
 upon Europe, it was the Apollo Belvedere, the Farnese 
 Hercules, the Venus de Medici, and the architecture of 
 Hadrian which fascinated the world. To men like 
 Raphael and Michael Angelo, the Parthenon and the Neglect of 
 Temple of Paestum were things unknown and neglected, purercfreek 
 while all their enthusiasm was reserved for the work since period!" 
 which the Romans had borrowed from Pergamum, 
 Rhodes, and Alexandria during what is called the 
 "period of Greek decadence." They did not even 
 appreciate the difference which we think so striking 
 between the few genuine pieces of old Greek work and 
 the feebler though more ornate work of the later epoch. 
 If any one is tempted to judge these men of the Renais- 
 sance harshly, let him remember that the most cultivated 
 Romans, who had before them all the splendor of the
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Golden Age intact, nevertheless both in literature and 
 in art long preferred the later models, and copied 
 from Parthenius and Callimachus, from Tauriscus and 
 Pasiteles, long before they were led to believe that the 
 older work was better. Even then they went to the 
 Parallel of the opposite extreme, and preferred archaic things because 
 
 Roman attitude . 
 
 to the art of the they were stiff and odd to the perfect moment when 
 
 Golden Age. J 
 
 archaic modesty and reserve are combined with modern 
 grace and mastery of material. So difficult is it to judge 
 correctly of the work of our predecessors.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE TIME OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND HIS 
 EARLY SUCCESSORS.* 
 
 Perhaps the best way to approach the work which 
 Alexander did for Greek civilization and to estimate its 
 value is to speculate for a moment on what would 
 possibly have happened had he not come to the throne. 
 It is idle to say that Greece was free during the closing 
 years of his father Philip's reign. That able prince had 
 shown clearly that with the aid of a hardy nation of 
 mountaineers devoted to his house, with money to hire 
 troops of mercenaries, with the chiefs of Thessaly 
 supplying him with cavalry, all chance of real inde- 
 pendence was gone for a set of small states which were 
 mutually jealous, mutually distrustful, and which were 
 each quite ready to call him in to settle its quarrels, 
 provided he would humble its rivals. All this was 
 plainly seen by Isocrates in Philip's lifetime, as we may 
 see from his " Letter to Philip," already commented on. 
 We may therefore say with confidence that all possibility 
 of a great and united Greece, observing the independ- 
 ence of each state and combining against every com- 
 mon enemy, was gone. This was of course the ideal 
 condition of which many had dreamed. 
 
 Hardly more practical was the notion that Greece 
 should be led by one dominant power, which should 
 guide all foreign policy, while internal affairs were left 
 
 Alexander's 
 influence on 
 Greek civil- 
 ization. 
 
 Impossibility 
 of a united 
 Greece. 
 
 * All this period has been treated in fuller detail in my "Greek Life and 
 Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest " (2d edition).
 
 224 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Greek dislike 
 of a hegemony. 
 
 Gloomy politi- 
 cal outlook. 
 
 to the individual cities. Three leading states had 
 attempted this : first Sparta, then Athens, then Sparta 
 again, then Thebes. In every case, except the first, 
 the dominant power had at once taken advantage of its 
 leading position to gratify private jealousies, to avenge 
 old griefs, to enrich private citizens at the expense of 
 the lesser states. And in every case this sort of federa- 
 tion under a leading power showed symptoms of 
 becoming a tyranny, an irresponsible rule by the 
 military power which could coerce if it could not 
 persuade. Hence the growing feeling in Greece had 
 been against such hegemony, as they called it, and in 
 favor of autonomy, or home rule, in every city state. 
 There were indeed a few exceptions among the poorer 
 and more insignificant mountain tribes, which had no 
 real cities, but dwelt in little fortified places so called, 
 and which were now crystallizing into federations in 
 ^Etolia, Achaea, and Acarnania, destined ere long to 
 take a prominent part in Greek politics. There was 
 also some such league in the mountainous Lycia, but 
 the greater cities in Asia Minor had long been under the 
 sway of Persia ; many of them had been dismantled : 
 Smyrna, for example, and Ephesus were now only 
 groups of scattered villages,* and here all political life 
 seemed dead. 
 
 The outlook therefore in politics seemed very hope- 
 less. No state seemed likely to lead, and, if willing, 
 would not be allowed to lead ; internecine wars were 
 wasting the youth and strength of the country ; com- 
 merce was suffering greatly by these foolish quarrels, 
 and the glories of Greece seemed so completely passed 
 away, at least politically, that the first vigorous and 
 
 * It was the policy of Alexander's early successors (Antigonus, Lysimachus) 
 to refound these cities, but they were not free from the modern vanity of re- 
 naming them after themselves.
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 225 
 
 fresh nation of invaders was sure to do what the 
 Dorians had done of old, and overrun most of the coun- 
 try with ease. In the earlier days of Demosthenes, 
 when a vigorous king, Darius Ochus, came to the 
 Persian throne, there was considerable apprehension in 
 Greece that the policy of Xerxes would be renewed, 
 and if this had really taken place, now that Epami- 
 nondas was dead, and that the mercenary generals could 
 obtain far higher pay from the great king than Athens 
 or Thebes could afford to give them, it is more than Mac^on^ 
 likelv that Greece would have succumbed like Asia to a Persian 
 
 J , invasion. 
 
 Minor, and its famous liberties have been quenched in a 
 mean old age of subjection to the barbarian. It was 
 Philip and his Macedonians who formed the real bar to 
 such an invasion, and yet the Greeks so hated Philip 
 that they would even have sided with the Persian to 
 overthrow him, hoping to make terms for themselves 
 when their dreaded neighbor was removed. 
 
 When the news came that Philip was assassinated 
 there was nothing: but open joy in Greece. The league Greek rejoic- 
 
 , ~ 1 /-. • 1 1 ing at death 
 
 which he had forced upon the Greeks at Corinth, by of Philip. 
 which they were to combine under him in a great 
 campaign against Persia, was at once dissolved. He 
 had taken the first steps ; he had sent on troops to the 
 Dardanelles ; he was eagerly stretching out his hand to 
 pluck the fruit of all his labors in strategy and in diplo- 
 macy, when the knife of the assassin struck him. It 
 was no blow struck for the liberty of Greece, but mere 
 vulgar vengeance for a personal affront which Philip 
 refused to redress. The private life of Philip was such 
 as does not bear inquiry here. He fell a victim to the 
 vices which he practiced and tolerated at his court, and Philip's vices, 
 which stained and marred his greatness. 
 
 Everything promised the grumbling and discontented
 
 226 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Uncertainty 
 of Macedonian 
 
 succession. 
 
 Alexander's 
 greatness not 
 
 to be ascribed 
 to Aristotle's 
 influence. 
 
 Innate great- 
 ness of Alex- 
 ander. 
 
 Greeks a relief from Macedonian domination. Philip 
 had been slain in the flower of his age, without a 
 moment of notice ; no preparations were made for the 
 succession, unless we count as such the various intrigues 
 of several claimants, both older and younger than 
 Alexander. It was more than likely that a civil war 
 would ensue. 
 
 But the genius of Alexander soon crushed all the 
 expectations of his enemies. He had been brought up 
 at the quiet Mieza, far from the immoral and disorderly 
 court of Philip, under the care of Aristotle, whom Philip 
 with consummate judgment had chosen for the task. 
 Never did such a master have such a pupil. And yet 
 nothing is more remarkable — I do not hold it strange 
 — than the complete independence and originality of 
 Alexander's ideas. We cannot find one feature of his 
 policy, or of his daily life, which can be fairly attributed 
 to Aristotle's influence. At all times and among all 
 men, the influence of education is wont to be exag- 
 gerated. There seems to be a constant tendency to 
 attribute anything which a man does to some advice he 
 has got from somebody else. It is far nearer the truth 
 to say that every man comes into the world a distinct 
 being, with a character which education can only some- 
 times modify, but which it can never change. The 
 conditions of this character lie in the parents, perhaps 
 even in the ancestors, and are transmitted by them un- 
 consciously with their physical characteristics to their 
 offspring. Alexander's parents were both strong and 
 dominating characters. They were possessed both of 
 beauty and of very passionate tempers. Yet we know 
 only too well that no known combination of clever 
 parents will secure a clever offspring. The great 
 majority of those supreme intellects which have trans-
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 227 
 
 formed the world have sprung from obscure or insignifi- 
 cant parents. When such appear, their educators, even 
 were they Aristotles, can do little more than watch with 
 wonder their developments. 
 
 We have not a word, even of allusion, in Aris- 
 totle's many works to this subject, which would have 
 been to us far more interesting than his metaphysics, or 
 his natural history of the lower animals. But there 
 is ground for asserting that as Aristotle's studies in 
 "Politics" are completely antiquated in the light of 
 Alexander's conquest, as the whole range of Aristotle's ^mnderj^ 
 political vision is confined to the little Greek states than Aristotle's, 
 of previous centuries, and ignores the great empire 
 which he saw created, as it were by magic, before 
 his eyes, so there must have been many other points in 
 which Alexander chose to differ from his great instruc- 
 tor. The young king's Greek style was bad ; that we 
 know from the text of his open letter to Darius, which 
 he intended all the world to read. But style was per- 
 haps the only corner of culture to which we may 
 suppose Aristotle indifferent, and therefore no zealous 
 teacher thereof. The work recently recovered, which 
 the ancients attributed to his pen, if it be indeed his, His Greek 
 
 j ... style bad. 
 
 gives us even a poorer idea than we had already of his 
 writing, as compared with his thinking. 
 
 It is, however, very probable that though Aristotle 
 could not make him think in any Aristotelian line, he 
 helped him, were it only by his opposition, to think for 
 himself, if it be indeed thinking, and not some higher 
 spontaneous power, which enables a genius to solve with- 
 out trouble problems that are the despair of ordinary men. 
 His military training was not theoretical but practical ; Alexander's 
 as a boy of seventeen or eighteen he took a leading part £1? training* 
 in the great battle of Chaeronea and his flatterers after-
 
 228 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Alexander 
 at Chaeronea. 
 
 He puts his 
 rivals to death. 
 
 He exacts a 
 pledge from the 
 Greets. 
 
 Alexander's 
 first expedition 
 
 ward attributed to him the lion's share of the victory. 
 But Diodorus's account is so meager and so full of 
 vague rhetoric, that we do not even know whether 
 Alexander fought with the cavalry, as was his constant 
 practice afterward or whether he commanded a pha- 
 lanx of infantry. At all events, he had, when he was 
 suddenly called to the succession, actual practice in 
 battle ; he had, moreover, been involved in angry dis- 
 putes with his father, and must have been rapidly learn- 
 ing how to discern his faithful friends and how to evade 
 or overcome the plots of his rivals and enemies. His 
 education therefore in political intrigues must have been 
 very advanced for his age. Upon his succession, how- 
 ever, he settled such difficulties by simply putting to 
 death those whom he suspected, in this acting as every 
 Macedonian king, in that polygamous court, felt com- 
 pelled to do for his personal safety. 
 
 Of course Greece prepared to rise against him. The 
 Hellenic people had no traditional or other loyalty 
 to bind them to his allegiance. They had pledged 
 themselves to his father Philip personally; had Philip 
 met with any reverse in war their pledge would not have 
 been kept for a day. But Alexander did not give them 
 time for any open revolt. He appeared with his army, 
 and exacted from them, as his father had done, a pledge 
 that they would serve with him against Persia. Then he 
 returned home, and set out for the first of his expedi- 
 tions, the campaign through Thrace to the Danube, 
 and home again by way of Illyria. This was the time 
 when he saw an embassy of Gauls or Galatae, who sent 
 to ask his friendship. The story goes that he asked 
 them of what they were most afraid, and that they 
 answered: "Of nothing, except that the sky might 
 fall." The anecdote is only worth repeating to show
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 229 
 
 the character of these marauders, only too well known in 
 after history, and also to indicate that they were already 
 looking westward for new settlements. Very probably 
 their invasion of the Balkan Peninsula was only delayed 
 by their knowledge of Alexander's power. 
 
 However, in this ' ' preliminary canter ' ' against bar- 
 barians, living in a difficult country with mountain 
 passes and rivers, Alexander not only made trial of the 
 marching power of his army, but obtained through his 
 conquests the adhesion of mountaineers who furnished 
 him with his most valuable light troops. 
 
 His absence and then the positive news of his death 
 
 1 Insurrection 
 
 was enough to set Greece again aflame. He heard ofThebans. 
 suddenly in the Illyrian country that his garrison at 
 Thebes, which was the most insubordinate of his Greek 
 allies, inasmuch as it had most recently been the most 
 dominant, was besieged and hard pressed in the citadel. 
 So he burst like a thunder cloud upon Greece, this time 
 in earnest about these Greek revolts. 
 
 Thebes was stormed with great massacre, but razed Thebesraze d 
 to the ground and the inhabitants sold as slaves, not to the ground, 
 by his order, but by the vote of the neighboring Boeo- 
 tian towns, to whom he committed the decision. In 
 order to gratify old hatreds, in order to secure for them- 
 selves some of the confiscated land, these neighbors 
 passed a vote of absolute destruction upon one of the 
 oldest and most celebrated cities in Greece. It was 
 Alexander, and not these wretched creatures, who ^Irestffe 
 spared the house of the poet Pindar, and of those p°n<fa° f 
 who claimed to be his descendants. Such considera- 
 tions affected a Macedonian king ; they would never 
 have affected a Hellenic peasant. Nothing but a Mace- 
 donian fortress remained to show where Thebes had 
 stood. But after this stern lesson, Alexander showed
 
 230 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Clemency of 
 Alexander. 
 
 Demosthenes 
 plots against 
 Alexander. 
 
 Usual histor- 
 ical estimate of 
 Demosthenes 
 is false. 
 
 ckmency and humanity. He left dangerous opponents 
 such as Demosthenes and the orators opposed to Mace- 
 donia free at Athens ; he insisted on no murders, con- 
 fiscations, or dismantling of fortifications — generous and 
 large minded himself, he may have hoped that he would 
 be requited by some gratitude, by some consideration 
 from the men whose lives he had spared. But his hopes 
 were vain. It is the stain upon his opponents which we 
 meet in so many other centuries of Greek history. 
 Gratitude seems to them an unknown virtue. All the 
 rest of his life Demosthenes kept planning and plotting 
 against him, negotiating with the Persian king, and 
 spreading disaffection with Persian gold in Greece. At 
 last he was even charged with embezzling this gold 
 for his own use. And yet it is Demosthenes who com- 
 mands all the sympathies of the historians. Not even 
 the gallant and simple Phocion, whose soul was so pure 
 as to raise him above all the falsehood and the meanness 
 of the times, who clearly saw through and repudiated 
 the policy of Demosthenes, can obtain from them more 
 than scant praise. 
 
 Why is so strange a result possible? How can 
 learned and honest men blind themselves so completely 
 to the facts ? Simply because Demosthenes was a great 
 orator, who has told us his own story, whereas the case 
 against him is told by inferior men, and by those whom 
 he has persuaded us to have been dishonest. But the 
 false estimate of Demosthenes as a politician is the 
 natural product of those commentators who spend so 
 many years in expounding the perfections of his elo- 
 quence that they cannot endure to admit a single fault in 
 the man. 
 
 The false and misguided patriotism of Demosthenes 
 had very fatal results. If he and the other leading poli-
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 231 
 
 ticians had loyally accepted the situation, and helped 
 Alexander not only with the arms of their states, but 
 with their brains, his whole attitude to Greece would 
 have been changed. He certainly began with every 
 consideration for them ; he even spoke out about the 
 strange contrast of Hellenic and Macedonian society, A at£n"e e with es 
 calling the former gentlemen and the latter boors ; the Greeks. 
 he desired above all things to be known as the leader of 
 the Greeks, not of the Macedonians, against Persia. 
 The stupid and unworthy conduct of the leading cities 
 soon made him change his mind. Though he was 
 always ready to promote individual Greeks that served 
 him well, he found in the conquered Persians more 
 loyalty, more honesty, more desire to do his will ; 
 and so Athens and Thebes lost an opportunity of guid- 
 ing the course of history which never recurred. 
 
 The case of Sparta was even more striking-, and 
 
 1 . ° Alexander's 
 
 the conduct of Alexander, and indeed of Philip, regard- indulgence 
 
 1 , ° toward Sparta. 
 
 ing it is well worth our consideration. Both kings were 
 with their armies at Corinth, where all the Greeks 
 assembled and accepted their presidency. But there 
 was one notable exception. Sparta would take no part 
 in the congress, and refused to acquiesce except by 
 its moody silence in the decision of all Hellas. It was 
 certainly within the power of either to conquer the city. 
 The campaign in Thrace and across the Danube, from 
 which Alexander had just returned victorious, offered far 
 greater difficulties, and moreover difficulties were ex- 
 actly what Alexander loved. Why then did both Philip 
 and Alexander spare Sparta in spite of her sulky imper- 
 tinence? I can suggest no other reason than this, that 
 Sparta was now the nurse of the best mercenary soldiers Reasons for 
 in Greece. Not only were they personally brave sol- oYsVarta tment 
 diers, with old traditions of valor, but they commanded
 
 232 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Importance 
 of Spartan 
 mercenaries. 
 
 Mercenary 
 soldiering an 
 honorable 
 
 profession. 
 
 the respect of all other Hellenes, who were content 
 to serve under a Spartan when they were most jealous 
 of any other officer. Hence a good understanding with 
 the Spartans was of considerable importance to generals 
 who desired an efficient mercenary contingent from 
 Greece. The great majority of the men of Sparta were 
 growing poor ; the land was passing into fewer hands : 
 the rest were idle and discontented, and ready at 
 any moment to go off to the great mart of mercenaries 
 at Tasnaron. If Sparta were taken by an enemy, all 
 these people would sail away and join the Persian army 
 in Asia Minor. It was therefore not only contemptu- 
 ously generous, but politic, to leave Spartans free to join 
 the Macedonian army, and fight under a king who had 
 at least refrained from invading Laconia. Accordingly 
 the Spartans were left in their proud isolation, posing as 
 the purest and most aristocratic of Greeks, looked up to 
 as men of blue blood and lofty traditions, while their 
 poverty compelled them to go abroad and fight other 
 men's quarrels for pay. 
 
 But soldiering even as mercenaries has always been 
 looked upon by aristocrats as more respectable than any 
 peaceable trade. There is in the profession of arms 
 idleness, adventure, and a chance of great prizes ; and 
 if Aristotle inquires in one of his "Problems" why 
 actors are usually very bad characters, and solves it by 
 pointing out the strong contrasts of wealth and poverty, 
 of idleness and work, in fact all the ups and downs of 
 their lives, he might have said much the same of mer- 
 cenary soldiers. Be it remembered also that these 
 mercenaries were far more than a mere guard for a 
 king, like the Scottish archers of Louis XL, or the 
 Swiss guard of the pope. They were great bodies of 
 men with their own generals, as we know from
 
 Time of Alexander arid His Successors. 233 
 
 Xenophon, and were often intrusted with a whole 
 campaign by subsequent kings. We know of one 
 /Etolian Scopas, in the next century, whose pay was 
 two hundred dollars per day. 
 
 Now to all these people the expedition of Alexander 
 was an extraordinary good fortune. At first many of Profits to 
 
 J <-> J mercenary 
 
 them got large Persian pay for fighting against him ^l^nde™™ 
 under Mentor and Memnon, the Rhodians ; but these expedition, 
 seem to have been cut to pieces at the first battle (of 
 the Granicus). It is indeed clear that the Persian 
 grandees commanding their native cavalry did not trust 
 the Greek infantry, and left them in reserve until the 
 battle was lost. But though Alexander treated his 
 Greek prisoners as traitors to the cause and to the 
 treaty of Corinth, and set them to work in the Mace- 
 donian mines, though his succeeding campaign was one 
 tide of success, a large division of mercenaries was 
 present on the Persian side at the battle of Issus, and 
 fought with bravery against him, thus showing how in- 
 grained was the habit of serving for pay, and how little 
 sentiment these adventurers possessed. For it is well- Grote's injustice 
 nigh absurd to say, as Grote does, that the Persian 
 cause was now the real cause of Greece. That eminent 
 radical historian can see nothing in Alexander but the 
 man who superseded the little quarrelling Greek democ- 
 racies, with their parliaments and liberties, by the great 
 empire of the East in which Hellas formed but a small 
 province. If the Persian had indeed won, if Alexander 
 had been killed at the Granicus, would the world not 
 have fared far worse than it did ? Were not four 
 centuries of city politics quite sufficient to discover all 
 their virtues, to extract all the art and poetry and 
 philosophy they were likely to give to mankind ; and 
 was not the time come for a larger scope, a greater
 
 234 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Modern view 
 that the 
 mission of 
 Alexander was 
 no misfortune 
 to Greece. 
 
 Adoption of 
 Greek in 
 Macedonia. 
 
 The "common' 
 dialect. 
 
 diffusion in Hellenic culture? These are the reasons 
 why most modern historians esteem the mission of 
 Alexander as no misfortune for Greece. 
 
 Of course its first and immediate effect was to make 
 the use of Greek a necessity for the composite army 
 which went into Asia. It is quite clear that there was 
 no attempt to impose Macedonian, as the language of 
 the conquerors, upon the world, though it was kept up 
 with pride and used at special meetings of the Mace- 
 donian soldiery for some generations. But Greek 
 became so completely the language of the new empire 
 that all Alexander's official correspondence, nay even 
 his letters to his mother, and the Royal Diary of his 
 life, were kept in that tongue. There were intimate 
 moments when the king would exclaim something in 
 Macedonian and when his soldiers would shout 
 applause in that language. But throughout the East 
 the Macedonians are called Greeks by all their subjects. 
 Yet of course the delicacies of the language, the use of 
 various dialects, the graces of composition suffered by this 
 adoption. We find almost suddenly a dialect called the 
 "common," which is derived from, or similar to, Attic, 
 but which has many peculiarities, not yet fully explained, 
 for its history is quite obscure. It grew up in camps and 
 marts without any systematic teaching, and we wonder 
 how it kept as pure as we find it in the remote provinces 
 of Egvpt in the next century.* There were individual 
 cities indeed in Thessaly, Asia Minor, Crete, which still 
 set up decrees couched in the local dialects ; but for all 
 business purposes the language at last became uniform. 
 
 •This we now know from the many Prtrie Papyri dating from 260-20 which 
 I have deciphered and published for the Royal Irish Academy, and which give 
 us the dialect in an earlier and purer form than any extant book. The 
 Septuagint translation of the Old Testament is about the same age, but done 
 by men who were not Greeks and moreover had their freedom of style 
 shackled by their close adhesion to the Hebrew original: hence their work 
 can hardly be called a fair specimen of the average Greek of the time.
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 235 
 
 It is needless to dilate upon the enormous advantage 
 which this expansion and unification of the language 
 produced upon civilization. Men who could formerly 
 hardly understand each other in Greece could now 
 meet as members of the same society ; many civilized 
 orientals who were formerly regarded as mere barbari- 
 ans could now teach their old traditions, their arts, 
 their religion to the once proud and exclusive Hellenes. 
 We may well prophesy of that as:e : ' ' Knowledge shall Advantages 
 
 J ° ° from the spread 
 
 increase and men shall run to and fro." The precious of Hellenism, 
 things of the East were domiciled in Europe ; the pre- 
 cious things of the West found their way to Asia and 
 to Egypt, and if the orientals were far superior in handi- 
 crafts, the Greeks were still far superior in art. Great 
 sculptors and painters still flourished in Greece, notably 
 Apelles the colorist, and Lysippus the artist in bronze. 
 Apelles is to us a mere name, but the copies of Lysip- 
 pus' s work which remain, for example the young athlete Lysippus. 
 with the strigil* in the Vatican at Rome show that he 
 was worthy of the greatest traditions of his great race. 
 
 We now also know that he stood not alone, but that 
 nameless men of his generation could do work which 
 puts to shame all modern sculpture. It is but the other 
 day that there was found at Saida (Sidon) the family 
 vault of a Sidonian king which contains several marble 
 coffins of the purest Greek style. The principal one is 
 adorned on all four sides with scenes of battle and 
 of chase in which Macedonians, Greeks, and Persians 
 take part — in the chase as friends and comrades, in the a sidonian king, 
 battle as foes. The choice of subjects, and the apparent 
 prominence of a figure known as representing the type 
 of Alexander, prove the work to have been done in his 
 generation ; some foolish people even asserted that it 
 
 * I. e., the scraper with which he is cleaning the oil and dust from his limbs.
 
 236 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 A treasure of 
 Greek art at 
 Sidon. 
 
 Preserved in 
 museum of 
 Constantinople. 
 
 Its importam e 
 
 for the history 
 of art. 
 
 was his tomb. From its prominence in the midst of the 
 tombs of earlier and later Sidonian kings we may infer it 
 with good reason to be that of the Sidonian king whom 
 Alexander patronized; perhaps the Philocles who helped 
 the hrst Ptolemy in his wars. At all events, what 
 we have before us is a perfectly pure and splendid piece 
 of Greek art brought to Sidon and deposited there. 
 
 Happily the modern traveler can now see this ines- 
 timable treasure not at Saida on a barren coast, where, 
 as Ezechiel prophesied, instead of wealth and splendor 
 the fisher now spreads his nets, but in a museum of Con- 
 stantinople, where the anxious and intelligent care of 
 the discoverer, Hamdi Bey, has put together every frag- 
 ment which sacrilegious hands had broken, and has set 
 up, under a safe cover of glass, this monument which 
 stands second only to the Parthenon friezes in excel- 
 lence of design, while it far surpasses them in richness of 
 execution. The silver bridles, the silver spears and 
 swords, have been wrenched from the hands of the fig- 
 ures that held them, but these figures are mostly perfect, 
 retaining even the original colors, with which the artist 
 had adorned the cold marble. 
 
 This discovery tells us with a clearer voice than 
 all our books what Hellenic art, and so Hellenic cul- 
 ture, was, in the generation when Alexander spread it 
 over a large part of Asia. The splendid publication 
 wherein Hamdi Bey has pictured and described his dis- 
 covery is naturally very costly, but ought to be in every 
 public library of America. * The first feature in these 
 
 * " I'ne NScropole royale de Sidon," by Hamdi Bey and Theodore Reinach. 
 Paris. Leroux, 1892-4. The fourth and last volume lias not yet appeared (1895). 
 But even in this noble book, which has made full use of the existing resource of 
 photography, the colors of the original are not yet reproduced. Let us hope 
 that the great advance — the reproduction of the natural colors — which my 
 friend Mr. Joly has recently made in Trinity College will soon be applied to 
 this work, and so give to the remote world a perfect copy of so unique a master- 
 piece.
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 237 
 
 remarkable compositions is the studied equality of the 
 three great races, Persian, Macedonian, Greek. They 
 are perfectly marked out by their dress or want of dress. 
 For the Greek infantry seems to figfht quite nude, we Dress of the 
 
 ~ ° ^* Persians, Mace- 
 
 may presume for artistic reasons, rather than the repro- donians, and 
 
 . , Greeks repre- 
 
 duction of fact ; the Macedonians are all on horseback, sented. 
 and clothed down to the wrist and ankle, as might be 
 expected from people coming from a cold and mountain- 
 ous country. But the Persians are even more closely 
 clad, and have a cap which includes a muffler around 
 the mouth, thus reminding us that the great nation 
 which so long ruled the East was also a nation bred 
 and hardened in rugged and cold mountains. In no- 
 bility of type and beauty of countenance the artist 
 clearly gives the palm to the Persians. But they are all 
 represented with blue eyes and ruddy hair, this too for 
 artistic reasons ; for black hair and swarthy skin would 
 have marred the harmony of color which pervades the 
 whole composition. In the war scene there is a distinct 
 advantage allowed to the Macedonians ; none of their 
 chiefs on horseback are defeated, whereas the leading 
 Persian, perhaps the father of the owner of the tomb, is 
 represented as falling from his horse dead, and sup- 
 ported by his anxious followers. On the other hand, in 
 the hunting scenes the Persians are foremost, and con- 
 tending both on horse and on foot with valor against the 
 lion and the panther. These wild animals and the 
 dogs are decidedly inferior to the men and horses in P etai >e d . 
 
 _ ■' description ol 
 
 their drawing ; as regards the wild animals, it is easily thesarcopha- 
 
 accounted for by the want of living models under which 
 
 the Greek artists suffered. Why the dogs are not so 
 
 well given as the horses I am at a loss to explain. There 
 
 is a murder scene on one of the ends of the sarcophagus, 
 
 which no one has yet been able to explain.
 
 Sculpture on the Sarcophagus of a Sidoniam King. (See page 237.) 
 
 238
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 239 
 
 We have therefore a living picture of what Alexander 
 meant by the marriage of Europe and Asia. It was not 
 merely that Macedonian grandees should marry Persian 
 princesses ; it implied the social combination of all that 
 was noble and manly in both races, and more especially 
 of Macedonians rather than Greeks, on account of their 
 open-air habits and the love of sport which only aristo- 
 crats with large domains in wild country can gratify. 
 The Greeks were more fit for office work, for the intelli- 
 gence department, for diplomatic wiles. But they were 
 not an aristocracy, like the other two, unless it be the 
 Spartans, whose sullen refusal kept them aloof.* Thus 
 it is characteristic that among all Alexander's leading 
 men, there was but one Greek, Eumenes of Cardia, who Eumenes of 
 
 .... Cardia. 
 
 was his confidential secretary and whose great ability 
 secured the foremost position in the disputes which suc- 
 ceeded the conqueror's death. But it is equally signifi- 
 cant that his being a Greek was an insuperable obstacle 
 to his keeping the command over Macedonian soldiers. 
 He could win battles with them, but his success, if 
 against a Macedonian noble, was rather resented than 
 applauded, even by his own troops. Thus he fell a vic- 
 tim to their treachery. 
 
 But though the Greeks may have felt that so far they „ , _ , 
 
 & J J Results for the 
 
 were an inferior race— the Persian nobles had always Greeks of the 
 
 J Macedonian 
 
 despised them as venal mercenaries — they must have conquest. 
 seen perfectly that the Macedonian conquest opened all 
 the world to their talents. The education of the Mace- 
 donians was unequal to the administration of so vast a 
 dominion. In every office of government, in the com- 
 mand of many remote dependencies, in all sorts of in- 
 tellectual work, the Greeks were indispensable ; as 
 
 * The fact of the Spartans fighting for pay of course lowered them in the 
 social esteem of the more chivalrous races.
 
 240 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Stimulus to 
 trade given by 
 gold currency. 
 
 Increase of 
 luxury. 
 
 explorers, as envoys to foreign potentates, such as the 
 remote kings of India, they were equally so. And what 
 shall we say of trade? It is hardly possible now to esti- 
 mate the extraordinary stimulus given to trade and 
 commerce, not only by the opening up of Asia and 
 Egypt to the western world, but perhaps even more by 
 the freeing from the Persian treasure-houses at Susa and 
 at Pasargadae of the hoards of gold which had there been 
 accumulated for centuries. There was indeed among 
 the Phenicians some attempt at token money. But 
 throughout inner Asia merchants could only trade (if 
 not by barter) with coin, and so long as current coin 
 was only silver or copper, the weight to be carried made 
 large transactions with distant lands almost impossible. 
 When millions of gold and precious stones were scat- 
 tered or lost among the soldiers, and made their way 
 into business hands, the trader found that he could now 
 carry in his belt more money value than he had formerly 
 laden upon a camel. The issue, therefore, of Alexan- 
 der's gold currency must have been almost like the 
 invention of bank notes as compared with actual coin. 
 
 With all this stir in the mercantile world there came a 
 great increase of luxury. The successful soldier is usu- 
 ally a spendthrift and is lavish of his loot ; the " Miles 
 Gloriosus " of the time is a common figure on the comic 
 stage, and ridiculed for his vulgar ostentation.* But 
 although the cultivated Athenian might deride the ex- 
 travagance of the common mercenary, who had risen 
 from indigence to sudden wealth, it was not so when he 
 came to see royal courts, with the refinements of ancient 
 and traditional splendor. Even the great king of Mace- 
 don when he entered the suite of tents which Darius had 
 
 * The extant Plautine play of that name is taken from a Greek model of this 
 period.
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 241 
 
 left behind in his flight from Issus, when he saw the 
 bathrooms, dressing rooms, ante-chambers, under can- f£-?V£ et 
 vas, and the royal table laid ready with precious plate 1 Per ^ i r an 
 and ware, exclaimed to his officers : "Well! this is 
 indeed to live like a king." He took care to adopt this 
 princely luxury, and so increased the appointments of 
 his table that he presently had to fix two thousand dol- - 
 lars as the daily allowance. This of course included the 
 large retinue which dined, if not at the king's table, at 
 least in the room, as well as the many extravagances and 
 the wastefulness which mark a royal kitchen. 
 
 His assumption of oriental royalty went so far as the . 
 
 ^ J J Asserts his 
 
 assertion of his own divinity, and this, as it is a some- divinity, 
 what disputed point, and as it had a great effect on the 
 sentiment of the Hellenistic Greeks, it is well to explain 
 at some length. It had long been the practice in Greece 
 to give to a founder and benefactor of a free city the 
 honors of a tomb, treated as that of a hero. Thus the 
 town of Amphipolis buried the Spartan hero Brasidas in 
 the market-place, and had a sacred enclosure about it, 
 where periodical libations and offerings were made in 
 honor of him.* This honor did not as yet go so far as 
 actual worship, but was such as may now be seen in 
 Upper Egypt and Nubia, where the tombs of departed 
 sheiks have a chapel built over them, to which the pop- 
 ulation, though Mohammedan, and strictly monotheistic, 
 bring periodical offerings. 
 
 But the tendency to honor men with the honor due to _, .. it 
 
 J Deification of 
 
 the gods did not stop there. When Lysander had Lysander. 
 crushed the Athenian power (405 B. C. ) and was prac- 
 tically — though not even king at Sparta — lord of the 
 Hellenic world, we hearf that to him first of the Greeks 
 
 * Cf. Thucydides, Book V., Chap. II. 
 f Plutarch's "Lysander," Chap. XVIII.
 
 242 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 I'pean to 
 Lvsander. 
 
 Reasons why 
 the Greeks 
 recognized 
 Alexander's 
 claim to 
 divinity. 
 
 Alexander's 
 \ i-it to the 
 Temple of 
 Amnion. 
 
 the (liberated) cities set up altars as to a god, and sac- 
 rificed, and to him first they sang paeans, of which one 
 begins thus : 
 
 " The general of Greece, from the broad-winged Sparta, we 
 shall praise in hymns, Oh ! Paean, Healer ! " 
 and the people of Samos even decreed to call their 
 Heraea (feast of Hera) Lysandrea. 
 
 It is very likely that this deification was as yet con- 
 fined to the Asiatic Greek cities. They had been long 
 used to the Persian royalty, and the Asiatic subjects of 
 the great king had never been very chary of giving such 
 honor to a monarch whose daily service contained an 
 etiquette approaching very closely in its prostrations to 
 the reverence given to a deity. It is therefore certain 
 that the Greeks were quite prepared, by previous in- 
 stances, to recognize such a claim in a sovereign whose / 
 deeds seemed superior to those of ordinary men. We 
 must also remember that according to the Greek re- 
 ligion, as expounded by the old poets and practiced by 
 the priests, the gulf between the god and the man was 
 by no means so insurmountable as it is to us. 
 
 Thus it was no great stretch of belief on the part of 
 any man then living in Greece to think that so wonder- 
 ful a person as Alexander was of divine origin, nor was 
 it difficult to persuade the king himself, who felt strongly 
 the inspiration of his genius, that he was no ordinary 
 mortal. He could indeed be wounded or even killed in 
 battle, but were not the very gods in Homer's Iliad 
 wounded, and had not many sons of gods died violent 
 deaths at the hands of their enemies ? The visit to 
 Amnion's temple in the oasis of Siwah had indeed all 
 the appearance of being a political device to obtain the 
 sanction of that famous shrine to his claim, but with the 
 young Alexander the claim was probably quite serious,
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 243 
 
 and not the least intended to deceive. It is very re- 
 markable that his first child, the son of Barsine, the 
 widow of Memnon, his principal opponent in Asia 
 Minor, was called Heracles. I am not aware that any Alexander 
 
 J names his son 
 
 Greek ever ventured to call his son by such a name ; for Heracles. 
 Heracles was the most famous son of Zeus and Alcmena. 
 This simple fact proves to us that he was determined on 
 asserting his divinity, which was readily accepted not 
 only by the orientals, but by the Asiatic Greeks, and 
 very soon by the Hellenic race generally. Thus when 
 the king quarrelled with his army at Opis, the mutinous 
 Macedonians bade him carry on his wars with the aid of 
 his father Ammon, upon which he leaped from his plat- 
 form, and causing thirteen of them to be seized, put 
 them to death at once. 
 
 These considerations show it to be in no way incred- 
 ible that he should send home to Greece, ordering the 
 cities, even Athens and Sparta, to pay him divine honor. 
 Nor would there have been the smallest difficulty in their 
 acquiescence had he not accompanied this order with 
 another, which affected their pockets. He ordered all order"restora- 
 their exiles to be restored to their homes. That meant, V°nV° f the 
 as I have already explained, a return of property, which 
 had changed hands, from the present owners to those 
 who had formerly held it. No transaction of the kind 
 can take place in any state, ancient or modern, without 
 shaking confidence in contract, and without annulling 
 many honest sales, and inflicting incalculable hardships 
 on many honest people. But as regards the admission 
 of divinity by Athenians, we know that within twenty 
 years of this time they volunteered to confer the title of 
 " Saviour Gods" on Antigonus and his son Demetrius 
 (the Besieger), and when the latter came to Athens v the 
 worship of him as a divine person and his association 
 
 exiles.
 
 244 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilisation. 
 
 Cult of Roman 
 emperors 
 imitated from 
 Hellenistic 
 kings. 
 
 Disastrous 
 moral effect of 
 assumption of 
 
 divinity. 
 
 with the virgin goddess in the Parthenon were so effusive 
 and disgusting as to shock even the people of that day. 
 
 Before the year 300 B. C. every Hellenistic king had 
 begun to assert his own divinity, to claim descent from 
 Heracles, or Apollo, or Dionysus, to have a priest and 
 an altar, and to associate his own worship with that of 
 the principal gods in his city. We have already seen it 
 in the case of Demetrius, we know that Seleucus at 
 Antioch made the same claim, as did also Ptolemy in 
 Egypt, and though systematized and extended in after 
 generations, the idea was adopted from Alexander him- 
 self bv the first Diadochi. It was from these royalties 
 that the worship of the emperor was taken by Augustus, 
 and set up as the one uniform cult of the Roman Em- 
 pire. This is one of the ideas in which the Hellenistic 
 world differs profoundly from any medieval or modern 
 societies, and yet the kings who in the Middle Ages 
 asserted their divine right, the pope who asserted his 
 infallibility, were not very far removed from the other 
 claim, as a Greek would understand it. 
 
 The effect upon the Hellenistic kings was, however, 
 much the same as the lesser claim upon their medieval 
 successors. It caused both to regard themselves above 
 the ordinary laws of morality. The result could not but 
 be disastrous as well to themselves as to the people who 
 came in contact with them. This may be shown in 
 various instances. To take the most obvious, they were 
 all polygamous, they made and broke alliances as they 
 thought convenient. The queens and princesses of 
 those days were not ashamed, but proud of the number 
 of their husbands. They were just as free of their per- 
 sons as the princes. Take the case of Arsinoe, daughter 
 of the first Ptolemy. First she is married to Lysima- 
 chus, king of Thrace, one of her father's companions,
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 245 
 
 and probably forty years her senior. After his death in 
 battle and the murder of Seleucus, his conqueror, by 
 her half-brother Ptolemy Keraunos, she is induced by 
 him to become his wife, whereupon he promptly mur- 
 ders her children, and she flies, or is exiled, to a refuge 
 in the sacred island of Samothrace. But after a while 
 she returns to Egypt, where her full brother Ptolemy II. 
 was now king ; and she so manages to influence him Adventures of 
 that she persuades him to divorce his wife, who had 
 borne him children, and raise her, his full sister, to the 
 dignity of " sister and wife," as the queen of Egypt was 
 called. 
 
 In this her last adventure she attained to great power 
 and importance ; her name and bust appear upon coins, 
 she is worshiped in the temples as ' ' the goddess that 
 loves her brother ' ' ; she is paid the due of one sixth 
 upon all the vineyards and gardens in Egypt, which had The worship of 
 
 r ' ° 1 1 j- • Arsmoe. 
 
 hitherto been paid to the local temples ; she dies in 
 power and splendor, leaving her husband disconsolate. 
 This was the ancestress of a line of queens which ended 
 with the famous, or rather notorious, Cleopatra VI., 
 who, if she was a worthy descendant of such a race, was 
 hardly an exceptional one. 
 
 But Arsinoe is one only of a whole gallery of desper- 
 ate ladies, who stain the annals of that period with their 
 violence and their crime. Olympias, the queen mother oiympias. 
 of Alexander, was all her life a woman of violent pas- 
 sions and jealous temper. The later legends of the life 
 of Alexander, which we know under the name of Callis- 
 thenes, ascribe to her other vices, of which history 
 knows nothing beyond the suspicion that the great 
 Alexander could not have been the son of a mortal 
 father. But according to Egyptian legend, the last 
 king of Egypt, Nectanebo, who had mysteriously dis-
 
 246 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Legends about 
 the birth of 
 Alexander. 
 
 Luxui y of the 
 Ptolemies in 
 imitation of 
 Alexander and 
 the Persians. 
 
 appeared, and who was accounted a magician, had gone 
 to Macedon, and there under the form of a serpent ap- 
 peared to Olympias, and become the father of Alexan- 
 der. By this fable the Egyptians strove to show that 
 the conqueror was after all their legitimate sovereign. 
 Nor were the Persians behind hand. They too invented 
 a legend to show the legitimacy of Alexander as king of 
 Persia.* 
 
 But when the kings began to claim divine descent, 
 some allowance must be made for the conduct of their 
 mothers. Yet this too is to be remembered, that in 
 Egypt at least, the divine origin of a king, though ex- 
 pressly asserted, was in no way supposed to interfere 
 with the paternity of his earthly father. The second 
 Ptolemy, who was the son of Ra, and a god, was at the 
 same time the son of Ptolemy Soter and Berenike. 
 These are attitudes of mind which it is vain for us to ex- 
 plain and vindicate ; we can do no more than state them 
 as historical facts. 
 
 It follows as a natural consequence that these divinized 
 rulers kept great state, and lived after a fashion quite 
 superior to ordinary men. They knew the effect to be 
 obtained by gold and silver plate, rich carpets and hang- 
 ings, splendid armor and jewelry, a great household 
 with endless lords in waiting, ladies of honor, pages, 
 household troops, and servants' servants. All this came 
 through the court of Alexander, but originally from the 
 Persian court, as its prototype. When the Rhodians, 
 during the great siege of their city by Demetrius, cap- 
 tured some of the personal effects coming in a ship from 
 his queen Phila, they sent them as a present to King 
 Ptolemy, seeing that such garments of purple and such 
 
 *See the legend in Gobineau's " Histoi redes Perses," Vol. II. (Paris, 1869), a 
 very curious and original book. ^\\ intc the oriental side of the Persian struggle 
 with the West, and the view which the orientals took of Alexander.
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 247 
 
 ornaments were quite useless to any one but a king. 
 
 But this Demetrius loved not only splendor of this kind, JJgSlrfMt 
 
 he was a munificent patron of art. We know how he 
 
 carefully preserved the work of Protogenes, the painter, 
 
 which he found in a suburb of Rhodes.* 
 
 We still have, fairly preserved, a magnificent statue of 
 Victory (Nike) which he set up, probably after his great ^■Jgff. "£ 
 sea battle with Ptolemy. It is now in the Louvre, and the Louvre, 
 is known as the Nike of Samothrace. In this sacred 
 island it stood on the side of a hill, a huge female figure 
 standing on the prow of a ship, and blowing a trumpet 
 in announcement of a naval victory. It has been iden- 
 tified by means of extant coins of Demetrius, which give 
 the complete figure on their reverse, and is one of the 
 most striking evidences how pure and noble Greek art 
 still remained under the early Diadochi. What was said 
 before of the famous tomb of Constantinople applies here 
 also. If we were not sure of the date of this statue and 
 
 Worthy of the 
 
 of the identity of the donor, we should probably have golden age of 
 
 J . Hellenic art. 
 
 referred it to the golden age of Hellenic art. 
 
 It is remarkable that this very dissolute man's wife, 
 Phila, maintained all her life the highest character for 
 devotion and fidelity to her husband, and is specially 
 praised for having taken poison when she despaired of 
 his success. None of his vagaries or infidelities ever 
 shook her constancy. The same high qualities are as- 
 cribed to his son Antigonus (known as Gonatas, and Antigonus, son 
 
 ..., , • r ■»» in 1 of Demetrius. 
 
 after many vicissitudes king of Macedon), who was 
 always most loyal to his father, and offered his own 
 liberty to save him from bondage. The wildest of the 
 successors, therefore, must have been, with all his faults, 
 a very lovable man. Probably the case was not so with 
 
 * All the details about him will be found in Plutarch's most interesting " Lite 
 of Demetrius," Chaps. XXIII.-XXVIII., to which I refer the reader, both as the 
 verification of what I say, and also for many more anecdotes than I can quote.
 
 248 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Mercenary 
 armies a pest at 
 Lhis period. 
 
 Their demoral 
 izing effect on 
 SO< nt\ . 
 
 King Pyrrhus of Epirus, the other great knight-errant of 
 this age, who seems not to have been able to fascinate 
 women in spite of his genius for wars and that chivalry 
 which forms so attractive a chapter in early Roman his- 
 tory. 
 
 The mercenary armies of these men must have been 
 like the armies which roamed about Germany in the 
 Thirty Years' War, faithful only to individual leaders, 
 and to them only so long as they were successful ; treat- 
 ing each other in battle with great consideration, but a 
 ruthless pest to the peaceable population. Many of 
 these soldiers of fortune were not even civilized Greeks, 
 but barbarous Thracians, and, still more, barbarous Gala- 
 tians, who were now pressing from the west into the 
 Balkan Peninsula, and selling their services to the high- 
 est bidder. These were the principal perpetrators of 
 the horrible cruelties which we hear of in this troubled 
 time. These were the men who rifled the ancient tombs 
 of the Macedonians and of other kings, and who were 
 for many a day the terror of Asia Minor, so that the 
 main glory of the Attalid kings of Pergamum was to 
 have checked them, and to have confined them to their 
 new home (Galatia). The old respectable citizen sol- 
 diers had disappeared. No army fought except for pay ; 
 and the first attempt, when two forces met, was to settle 
 the dispute by offers of money. Very often one side 
 would desert to the other under these circumstances, 
 and the poorer man, however righteous his cause, would 
 find himself a general without an army. The general 
 effect of such a system of warfare must have been most 
 demoralizing to society. The habit of violence and 
 treachery does not confine itself to those who habitually 
 and cynically practice it. "Evil communications corrupt 
 good manners." The account of the conduct of the
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 249 
 
 Athenian democracy regarding the judicial murder of 
 Phocion is too significant not to be quoted here. 
 
 At this juncture arrived Alexander, the son of Polyperchon,* 
 with an army, under pretense of assisting the city against Nica- 
 nor ; but, in reality, to avail himself of the fatal divisions and 
 to seize it, if possible, for himself. For the exiles who entered 
 the town with him, the foreigners, and such citizens as had 
 been stigmatized as infamous, with other mean people, resorted 
 to him, and altogether made up a strange disorderly assembly, 
 by whose suffrage the command was taken from Phocion, and 
 other generals appointed. Had not Alexander been seen alone 
 near the walls in conference with Nicanor, and by repeated 
 interviews given the Athenians cause of suspicion, the city 
 could not have escaped the danger it was in. Immediately the 
 orator Agnonides singled out Phocion, and accused him of 
 treason ; which so much alarmed Callimedon and Pericles 
 that they fled out of the city. Phocion, with such of his friends 
 as did not forsake him, repaired to Polyperchon. Solon of 
 Platiea and Dinarchus of Corinth, who passed for the friends 
 and confidants of Polyperchon, out of regard to Phocion, 
 desired to be of the party. But Dinarchus falling ill by the 
 way, they were obliged to stop many days at Elatea. In the 
 meantime, Archestratus proposed a decree, and Agnonides 
 got it passed, that deputies should be sent to Polyperchon, 
 with an accusation against Phocion. 
 
 The two parties came up to Polyperchon at the same time, as 
 he was upon his march with the king, near Pharuges, a town of 
 Phocis. . . . There Polyperchon placed the king under a 
 golden canopy, and his friends on each side of him ; and, 
 before he proceeded to any other business, gave orders that 
 Dinarchus should be put to the torture, and afterwards des- 
 patched. This done, he gave the Athenians audience. But as 
 they filled the place with noise and tumult, interrupting each 
 other with mutual accusations to the council, Agnonides 
 pressed forward and said, " Put us all in one cage and send us 
 back to Athens, to give account of our conduct there." The 
 king laughed at the proposal ; but the Macedonians who 
 attended on that occasion, and the strangers who were drawn 
 thither by curiosity, were desirous of hearing the cause ; and 
 
 * The Macedonian general. 
 
 Plutarch's 
 story of the 
 judicial murder 
 of Phocion. 
 
 The decree of 
 Archestratus.
 
 >5o 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Tii lair trial of 
 Phocion by the 
 king 
 
 He is carried to 
 Athens. 
 
 Phocion's 
 speech to the 
 people 
 
 therefore made signs to the deputies to argue the matter there. 
 However it was far from being conducted with impartiality. 
 Polyperchon often interrupted Phocion, who at last was so 
 provoked that he struck his staff upon the ground and would 
 speak no more. Hegemon said, Polyperchon himself could 
 bear witness to his affectionate regard for the people ; and that 
 general answered, " Do you come here to slander me before 
 the king?" Upon this the king started up and was going to 
 run Hegemon through with his spear ; but Polyperchon pre- 
 vented him ; and the council broke up immediately. The 
 guards then surrounded Phocion and his party, except a few, 
 who, being at some distance, muffled themselves up, and fled. 
 Clitus carried the prisoners to Athens, under color of having 
 them tried there, but, in reality, only to have them put to 
 death, as persons already condemned. The manner of con- 
 ducting the thing made it a more melancholy scene. The 
 prisoners were carried in carts through the Cerarrricus to the 
 theater, where Clitus shut them up till the archons had 
 assembled the people From this assembly neither slaves, nor 
 foreigners, nor persons stigmatized as infamous were excluded ; 
 the tribunal and the theater were open to all. Then the king's 
 letter was read ; the purport of which was " That he had found 
 the prisoners guilty of treason ; but that he left it to the 
 Athenians, as free men who were to be governed by their own 
 laws, to pass sentence upon them." At the same time Clitus 
 presented them to the people. The best of the citizens, when 
 they saw Phocion, appeared greatly dejected, and covering 
 their faces with their mantles began to weep. One, however, 
 had the courage to say, "Since the king leaves the determina- 
 tion of so important a matter to the people, it would be proper 
 to command all slaves and strangers to depart." Rut the 
 populace, instead of agreeing to that motion, cried out, "It 
 would be much more proper to stone all the favorers of 
 oligarchy, all the enemies of the people." After which no one 
 attempted to offer anything in behalf of Phocion. It was with 
 much difficulty that he obtained permission to speak. At last, 
 silence being made, he said, " Do you design to take away my 
 life justly or unjustly?" Some of them answering, "Justly," 
 he said, " How can you know whether it will be justly, if you 
 do not hear me first ?" As he did not find them inclinable in 
 the least to hear him, he advanced some paces forward and
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 251 
 
 said, "Citizens of Athens, I acknowledge I have done you 
 injustice ; and for my faults in the administration adjudge my- 
 self guilty of death ; but why will you put these men to death 
 who have never injured you?" The populace made answer, 
 " Because they are friends to you." Upon which he drew back 
 and resigned himself quietly to his fate. 
 
 Agnonides then read the decree he had prepared ; according The decree is 
 to which the people were to declare by their suffrages whether read - 
 the prisoners appeared to be guilty or not ; and if they ap- 
 peared so, they were to suffer death. When the decree was 
 read, some called for an additional clause for putting Phocion 
 to the torture before execution ; and insisted that the rack and 
 its managers should be sent for immediately. But Agnonides, 
 observing that Clitus was displeased at that proposal, and 
 looking upon it himself as a barbarous and detestable thing, 
 said, " When we take that villain Callimedon, let us put him to 
 the torture ; but, indeed, my fellow-citizens, I cannot consent 
 that Phocion should have such hard measure." Upon this, 
 one of the better disposed Athenians cried out, "Thou art 
 certainly right ; for if we torture Phocion, what must we do to 
 thee?" There was, however, hardly one negative when the Heis 
 sentence of death was proposed ; all the people gave their ™*5™°^j y 
 voices standing ; and some of them even crowned themselves 
 with flowers, as if it had been a matter of festivity. . . After 
 the assembly was dismissed the convicts were sent to prison. 
 The embraces of their friends and relations melted them into 
 tears, and they all went on bewailing their fate, except Pho- 
 cion. His countenance was the same as when the people sent 
 him out to command their armies ; and the beholders could phocion . s 
 not but admire his invincible firmness and magnanimity, firmness. 
 Some of his enemies, indeed, reviled him as he went along ; 
 and one of them even spit in his face ; upon which, he turned 
 to the magistrates, and said, "Will nobody correct this 
 fellow's rudeness?" Thudippus, when he saw the execu- 
 tioners pounding the hemlock, began to lament what hard 
 fortune it was for him to suffer unjustly on Phocion's account. 
 "What then," said the venerable sage, "dost thou not think 
 it an honor to die with Phocion ?" One of his friends asking 
 him whether he had any commands to his son ; "Yes," said h[ l Is t ™ agnan " 
 he, " by all means tell him from me to forget the ill-treatment 
 I have had from the Athenians." And when Nicocles, the
 
 252 . / Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 He drinks the 
 
 most faithful of his friends, begged that he would let him 
 drink the poison before him ; "This," said he, " Nicocles, is a 
 hard request ; and the thing must give me great uneasiness ; 
 but since I have obliged you in every instance through life, I 
 will do the same in this." When they came all to drink the 
 quantity proved not sufficient ; and the executioner refused to 
 prepare more, except he had twelve drachmas paid him, which 
 was the price of a full draught. As this occasioned a trouble- 
 some delay, Phocion called one of his friends, and said, 
 
 hemlock. " Since one cannot die for nothing at Athens, give the man his 
 
 money." This execution was on the nineteenth day of April 
 when there was a procession of horsemen in honor of Jupiter. 
 As the cavalcade passed by, some took off their chaplets from 
 their heads ; others shed tears, as they looked at the prison 
 doors ; all who had not hearts entirely savage, or were not 
 corrupted by rage and envy, looked upon it as a most impious 
 thing, not to have reprieved them at least for that day, and so 
 to have kept the city unpolluted on the festival. 
 
 I low ever, the enemies of Phocion, as if something had been 
 
 His enemies wanting to their triumph, got an order that his body should 
 
 refuse Phocion not b e suffered to remain within the bounds of Attica ; nor that 
 
 funeral honors. . 
 
 any Athenian should furnish lire for the funeral pile. There- 
 fore no friend durst touch it ; but one Conopion, who lived by 
 such services, for a sum of money carried the corpse out of the 
 territories of Eleugis, and got fire for the burning of it in those 
 of Megara. A woman of Megara who happened to assist at 
 the ceremony with her maid servants raised a cenotaph upon 
 the spot and performed the customary libations. The bones 
 she gathered up carefully into her lap, carried them by night to 
 her own house, and interred them under the hearth. At the 
 same time she thus addressed the domestic gods: "Ye 
 
 His bones are guardians of this place, to you I commit the remains of this 
 
 interred 111 & ~ * J 
 
 Megara. good man ; do you restore them to the sepulcher of his ances- 
 
 tors, when the Athenians shall once more listen to the dictates 
 of wisdom."* 
 
 If these things were done at Athens which boasted 
 to be the acme of culture and humanity, what would 
 happen in less polished cities? What used to hap- 
 
 * Plutarch, " Phocion," Chaps. XXXIII.-XXXVI1
 
 Time of Alexander and His Successors. 253 
 
 pen at Alexandria, where we know that the mob at 
 times actually tore in pieces persons who had of- f h r e u ^ l b y ° f 
 fended it ? Nor is it fair to say that it was owing to Alexandria. 
 the Egyptian element in the population of that great 
 composite city. The Egyptians must have been very 
 few, and the bloody riots, of which we hear, were car- 
 ried on not in the Egyptian quarter, but among the 
 Macedonians and Greeks, and in the fashionable part of 
 the town. But unfortunately we only get a glimpse of 
 such places as Alexandria when in riot, we can tell of 
 Athens in the peaceable and ordinary days. We have 
 some knowledge of both the frivolous and the serious 
 society which inhabited that great center of thought and 
 of idleness. But as both were intellectual, we can- 
 not but suppose that the outrage upon Phocion must 
 have incurred the reprobation of many respectable peo- 
 ple in that city. Nor would we suppress the counter- 
 balancing case, of which Grote has made so much. I 
 mean the loyalty and fidelity of the Athenians to Dc- Magnanimous 
 mosthenes, even when his policy had turned out a Demosthenes 
 failure, and had brought the city into the immediate Xthenis 
 danger of capture by a victorious enemy. It was then 
 that the firmness of the people, in refusing the extra- 
 dition of the heads of the national party, shed the last 
 ray of light upon the declining fortunes of the city. 
 The Athenian democracy, like every other, was capable 
 of noble acts, and performed them. It was also capable 
 of panics, and of criminal follies prompted by paroxysms 
 of terror or of revenge. These feelings are utterly in- 
 consistent with each other, but not with the common 
 human nature in which they reside. 
 
 nans.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE HELLENISTIC WORLD, 25O-I50 B. C. 
 
 Rome's first 
 contact with 
 Hellenism in 
 southern Italv. 
 
 Struggle be- 
 tween Pyrrhus 
 and the Ro- 
 mans. 
 
 When all the immediate successors of Alexander had 
 fought out their troubled lives over the succession, and 
 had found their ends, most of them on the field of 
 battle ; when even the next generation of knight-errants, 
 politicians, opportunists, had settled their main differ- 
 ences, and had definitively won or lost their crowns, the 
 Hellenistic world settled down into the complex thing 
 which ultimately came in contact with the Romans, and 
 was swallowed up by the all-devouring republic. 
 During the early days of this period, Rome was still 
 struggling for the preeminence in Italy, then in Sicily, 
 and the first rude contact with Hellenism was the conflict 
 in southern Italy with the Greek cities, and their condot- 
 tiere, King Pyrrhus of Epirus. There were stories cur- 
 rent that Alexander the Great had thought of conquer- 
 ing the Romans, that they had sent, among the other 
 nations of the world, an embassy of peace and of obser- 
 vation to the king of Babylon. We have no good evi- 
 dence for these stories, and we know that during Alex- 
 ander's life, and for years after it, the Romans were very 
 busy subduing the Samnites and Lucanians, and so 
 approaching the Greek cities on their southern coast, 
 which led to the interference of Pyrrhus. 
 
 This conflict, the first between the Hellenistic and 
 Italic powers, was most interesting, and has given rise 
 to some of the most characteristic stories — most of them 
 inventions — on the part of the Roman historians. To 
 
 254
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B.C. 255 
 
 Pyrrhus, who was not only a born strategist, but had 
 published a treatise on his art, this new military power 
 and its methods of fighting must have given many occa- 
 sions for reflection. He saw immediately that he had to 
 do with a solid infantry, such as would conquer the Excellenceof 
 world for him if he could enlist it under his banner. *°™ an v 
 But the prime difficulty was that this people would 
 serve under no banner save that of their own republic. 
 Pyrrhus had been used, all through his military life, to 
 nothing but mercenary armies, which consisted of men 
 ready to serve under any successful and liberal master. 
 As soon as the fate of a battle was decided, such men, 
 brought in as prisoners, were ready at once to take the 
 oath of allegiance to the victor, and transfer their battal- 
 ions to his standard. But when Pyrrhus had conquered 
 these Romans in a most bloody battle, he found to his 
 astonishment that the prisoners would have nothing to 
 say to him. They were Roman or Italian citizens, not Roman soldiers 
 
 J , ,. , not mercenary. 
 
 mercenaries. This therefore marked a deep line or 
 severance, deeper perhaps than that of language, in the 
 habits of the East and the western communities. 
 
 The Hellenistic sovereign who saw the importance of 
 Rome at once was the second Ptolemy. No sooner had 
 he learned the result of the war with Pyrrhus than he 
 sent a polite embassy offering friendship and other Ptolernv > s 
 friendly relations, especially of trade, to the Romans. SJJSm.* * 11 " 
 There is still clear evidence in the honors they conferred 
 upon him, and in the dignity of the return embassy 
 which they sent, how deeply flattered they felt at this 
 attention from a monarch who must naturally have re- 
 garded them as barbarians. The splendors of Alex- 
 andria must have affected the Roman envoys with aston- 
 ishment. One practical result is mentioned by Pliny,* 
 
 * " Natural History," Chap. XXXIII., 13.
 
 256 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Greek stoicism their great adversaries 
 
 not influenced 
 bv Rome. 
 
 The Stoic 
 philosophy. 
 
 The founders 
 of the Stoic 
 school. 
 
 that it was owing to this visit the Romans learned to 
 coin (in 269 B. C. ) the silver coins, called consular 
 denarii. * 
 
 But this is the only serious contact of the Romans 
 with the Hellenistic world for many years. The First 
 Punic War occupied all their energies, and their friend 
 Ptolemy only helped them by refusing to lend money to 
 
 It is worth noting these facts 
 particularly, lest it might be imagined that Roman 
 seriousness had anything to say to the serious aspects 
 of Greek life in the third century B. C. There is so 
 much that is Roman associated with Stoicism as to pro- 
 duce a sort of general impression that it was essentially, 
 or at least mainly, an outcome of the Roman gravitas. 
 Nothing is further from the truth. If Stoicism was not 
 purely Hellenic, it was distinctly oriental, rather than 
 occidental. 
 
 I cannot do better than begin this sketch of the inner 
 life of the best period of Hellenism by considering its 
 most serious and permanent feature, and therefore I 
 shall start at once with that Stoicism which survives to 
 the present day, one of the great legacies of the Greek 
 mind to the world. It originated, as I have just said, 
 in the eastern limits of Hellenism, and in contact with 
 foreign, apparently Semitic races, which were brought 
 into contact with Greeks. The proper home of the 
 Greeks had nothing to say to it, beyond the accepting 
 and following the doctrine which came from the East. 
 Of the three great teachers, who like the three great 
 tragic poets formed a group never again equalled, 
 Zeno and Chrysippus came from the island of Cyprus, 
 Cleanthes, whose extant hymn is a noble prayer, came 
 from Assos, not very far from the site of Troy. But 
 
 * Cf. my " Empire of the Ptolemies," page 489.
 
 The Hellenistic World, 230-150 B. C. 257 
 
 besides Cyprus, the opposite coast of Asia Minor, Lycia, 
 and rough Pisidia, showed a strong inclination for this 
 doctrine. Tarsus was long a well-known school of this 
 philosophy, till it sent forth one of its most brilliant pu- 
 pils, Saul, who under his changed name and faith pre- 
 served very much of the Stoic spirit, and not a little of 
 Stoic doctrine. Zeno, the second philosopher of the zeno. 
 name,* though probably a half-bred Greek, with Phe- 
 nician blood in his veins, enjoyed a high and deserved 
 reputation throughout all the Hellenistic world, and es- 
 pecially at Athens. We hear that he earned the favor 
 and respect of Antigonus Gonatas, the excellent king of 
 Macedonia. He is even called the tutor of that prince, 
 who strove to bring him from Athens to his court and 
 who gave him a public funeral in the Ceramicus, when 
 he was besieging Athens in the Chremonidean War 
 (264 B. C. ). Yet he was a very simple and even rude- 
 spoken man, of great parsimony, writing in a bad dia- 
 lect, using foreign words, and, still more, setting forth 
 very strange doctrines. For in imitation of Diogenes 
 the Cynic, who was one of his teachers, he published an 
 ideal sketch of a "Republic," as Plato had done, but "tfc?SliWk al " 
 one which displayed the most trenchant and disgusting 
 socialism. Not a single one of the sentiments of ordi- 
 nary men concerning the rights of property, the rights 
 of marriage, the avoidance of certain unions as inces- 
 tuous or odious, were respected by him. All things 
 were to be in common, and all men bound together 
 merely by mutual affection. Indeed, the work was so 
 offensive in many respects that later Stoics, especially 
 at Pergamum, tried hard to prove it spurious. 
 
 Of his pupils Cleanthes, the most famous, was so poor cieanthes. 
 
 * The older Zeno (of Elea) was a subtle metaphysician, wholly disconnected 
 from the present subject.
 
 258 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 that he was obliged to support himself as a day laborer 
 while he attended the lectures of Zeno. He too was 
 without grace of diction or elegance of manners. 
 Though coming from a truly Greek town, he seems to 
 have affected his master's contempt for style. Yet he 
 too had friendly relations with royalty, though he chose 
 the very un-Stoic second Ptolemy as his friend, and 
 sent him a pupil when invited to go himself and live at 
 the Museum. 
 
 Chrysippus. The systematizing of the doctrines of these and the 
 
 other Stoics was done by Chrysippus, who taught in the 
 latter half of the third century B. C. and whose literary 
 
 His literary activity — seven hundred and five separate books or 
 tracts — was such that the saying went abroad, ' ' No 
 Chrysippus, no Stoa." The Stoa was the colonnade 
 with frescoes on its inner wall in which Zeno had walked 
 up and down while discoursing with his favorite pupils. 
 Chrysippus is noted for having no relations with kings, 
 and this seemed to men of that day extraordinary ; but 
 it was more consistent with a Stoic life, and with the 
 rude manners and careless dress affected by the school. 
 In what, then, consisted the extraordinary dignity 
 , and importance of the Stoic creed ? Why has it lasted 
 
 The nobility of r _ •11 
 
 the Stoic creed, from that day to this as the symbol of a certain lofty 
 type of human nature ? Because it was a noble creed 
 in itself ; also because it set itself against the opposite 
 theory of Epicurus, and fought hard for the dignity of 
 the human soul. To the Stoic the whole world was 
 under the control of a single guiding providence, or 
 even with some of the school the whole world was but a 
 manifestation of that eternal Being, in whom, as St. 
 Paul cites their words, "we live, and move, and have 
 our being." This is what we now call pantheism, the 
 
 Stoil ]>;inthe- ...... . r, . r , 
 
 ism. doctrine that there is but one immense Being, 01 whom
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 259 
 
 all the world that we see and know is but a manifesta- 
 tion : ' ' The gods are his laughter, the race of mortal 
 men his tears," says a late and obscure follower, using a 
 huge metaphor. 
 
 But if it has been cast up to the pantheist that he 
 destroys all moral responsibility, by destroying the dis- 
 tinct individuality of each man, we might answer for him 
 by quoting the parallel and perfectly logical accusation Parallel of 
 brought against the Calvinist, that he destroyed the Caivinists. 
 same moral responsibility by abolishing all human free- 
 dom. Though both arguments are logical, both are in 
 fact false ; for no men have been more stringent in re- 
 quiring moral duties from men than the Stoic panthe- 
 ist and the Calvinist necessitarian. The duty of man 
 was to learn the course and will of providence, and to 
 shape his life accordingly. He had not been put into 
 the world to enjoy himself, nor was pleasure, as some 
 said, the end of life, but to forward, so far as in him lay, 
 the course of divine order in the world. That world, 
 the Stoic held, was not eternal, but would once and 
 again be destroyed by fire. Nevertheless, when a man 
 had grasped that by his reason God had made him a par- 
 ticipator in the working out of his providence, and that 
 there was a principle to be followed out, in always act- 
 ing according to the highest laws of nature, then the 
 Stoic sage became the forerunner of the Puritan in many stoic sage the 
 
 111 1 • forerunner of 
 
 curious ways. He was suddenly and sometimes even the Puritan, 
 unconsciously transformed from a fool, whose every 
 action was wanting in principle, into a state of enlighten- 
 ment or grace, differing in kind from his former state. 
 There was no gradual approach to this salvation. As 
 a man in the water was drowned, whether he was six feet 
 or six inches under the surface, and gained no safety till 
 his head was above water ; as the puppy born blind saw
 
 260 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 as little the eighth day as the first, so the fool who 
 thought to make some progress toward wisdom had 
 gained nothing till the real light suddenly dawned upon 
 him. Then he became absolutely free from vice or from 
 misfortune, for nothing could shackle his mind, and he 
 could leave his body like a garment in the hands of the 
 tyrant or persecutor, if imprisonment or torture threat- 
 ened him. Nay, he was rich with unfailing treasure 
 though poor ; he was perfectly satisfied, though hungry ; 
 he was a king, though in the condition of a slave. No 
 one can therefore mistake the Stoic source of St. Paul's 
 
 st. Paul and famous passage: "as deceivers, and yet true; as un- 
 known and yet well known ; as dying, and behold, we 
 live ; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing ; as poor, yet 
 making many rich ; as having nothing, yet possessing 
 all things."* 
 
 He held, then, the theological doctrine of assurance 
 in the highest degree, and as the sage was incapable of 
 sin, so the righteousness of the fool was but dross, his 
 virtue of no merit, his pretended knowledge utter igno- 
 rance. This gave the individual wise man a dangerous 
 right to dictate to the world, and so to interfere in poli- 
 tics, though philosophers as a rule professed to with- 
 draw from the arena of debate and chicanery, and re- 
 fused to advise the turbulent democracies in which they 
 lived. But the Stoics never refused to advise a tyrant, 
 or single ruler, if he would take their advice ; not un- 
 frequently they joined in removing him, if he were 
 vicious ; and no conspirator was so dangerous as the 
 man who despised death and tortures in comparison 
 with the carrying out of his convictions. 
 
 Opposed The opposed system of Epicurus had many points in 
 
 Epicurus * 2 Corinthians VI., 8 so. Our fullest account of these Stoics is in the third 
 
 book of Cicero's treatise De Finibus." We have also Diogenes Laertius on 
 the lives of the masters.
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 26 r 
 
 common with this lofty system, and was in many re- 
 spects also more comprehensible to the average man. 
 Epicurus also asserted that happiness could be obtained 
 in this life, but only by the true sage. But he started 
 not from the conception of falling in with the ways of 
 providence, but from the pursuit of pleasure, an instinct 
 ingrained in every animal, which only wanted proper ex- 
 planation and purification to be an adequate philosoph- 
 ical theory of life. For, after all, human pleasure was 
 mostly the avoidance of pain ; the denial of violent pas- 
 sions in order to attain reasonable and permanent hap- 
 piness. 
 
 This quietism of Epicurus was more Greek in its 
 character, more logical too, and practical, and so within 
 the reach of the large number of average people who 
 could not grasp the ideal of Zeno. But it was also 
 liable to grave misconstructions, and was denounced 
 from the beginning as an apology for the votaries of any 
 lawless pleasure. 
 
 Yet nothing could be purer and more Stoical than 
 Epicurus' s own life. He took care to show by his life 
 and doctrine that pleasures of sense are fleeting, and, 
 when excessive, involve great consequent pains, that our 
 interest, when rightly understood, leads us to prefer 
 mental to bodily pleasure — the delights of memory, of 
 imagination, and of hope, to the tumults of passion. 
 Thus virtue came to be identical with the longest and 
 greatest pleasure, and duty coincident with interest. 
 He declared also that the happiness of the wise man was 
 independent of fortune, and even compatible with pov- 
 erty and pain. He divided scanty rations among his 
 pupils with perfect contentment during the famine of a 
 long siege. He asserted his perfect happiness when 
 dying slowly of an agonizing disease. Though he re- 
 
 Doctrine of 
 
 pleasure. 
 
 Epicurean doc- 
 trine open to 
 miscon- 
 struction. 
 
 Purity of per- 
 sonal life of 
 Epicurus. 
 
 Pleasure and 
 virtue identi- 
 fied.
 
 262 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Consistency of 
 
 Epicurus. 
 
 Lucretius 
 the Roman 
 Epicurean. 
 
 Attraction of 
 Epicureanism 
 for the scien- 
 tific mind. 
 
 Skepticism not 
 yel fashionable. 
 
 garded the basis of friendship to be mutual profit, no 
 one was more sentimental in his attachments.* This is 
 indeed the most prominent feature in the long and ex- 
 plicit account of his life and writings left us by Diogenes 
 Laertius. We see too in the great poem of Lucretius 
 with what majesty this advocacy of pleasure could be 
 stated. But in the day of its birth, the real moment of 
 the doctrine lay in its satisfying the want of that other 
 kind of mind which revolts from Stoicism, which desires 
 a clear reason, and a practical one, for every action, 
 which desires to get rid of false theory and traditional 
 wisdom, which is sick of politics and discontented with 
 traditional faith, and yet will not be satisfied with mere 
 skepticism. To such tame, unpoetical natures Epicurus 
 offered a system based directly on what they could see 
 and feel, on the pursuit of such satisfaction as they all 
 understood, on the putting aside of religion as a system 
 of control or a source of fear, and supplanting it with a 
 scientific creed, a large and distinct body of doctrine. 
 
 For this, too, is to be noted in that age, that it was 
 not prepared for trenchant skepticism. Such a system 
 was tried by Pyrrho of Elis, but in spite of his followers. 
 Timon and yEnesidemus, he made no large school and 
 left but small traces on Greek thought. The days were 
 not yet come when the Platonists turned skeptics and 
 brought the world round with them ; it was still the age 
 of positive teaching, of a firm belief that knowledge was 
 attainable, of the substitution of philosophic creeds for 
 the old religions. Second-rate people went in crowds 
 to the second-rate successors of Plato and Aristotle, 
 
 • Upon this Wilamowitz (" Aniigonus of Karystos," page 93, note) has well 
 remarked, that it met one of the chief tendencies of the age. It was a day 
 when other bonds among men had given way, when patriotism felt itself all 
 astray, when the ties of family and of creed were loosened. Then it was that 
 the eternal, ineradicable bond of personal sympathy and of personal attach- 
 ment came into the foreground, ami was embraced even by such a system as 
 that of Epicurus, which logically seemed to contradict it.
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 263 
 
 whose schools were now well established at Athens. 
 But Xenocrates and Theophrastus could only lead such 
 men as Demetrius of Phaleron, or Menander, and what 
 they taught was not life but learning. Hence we may 
 be sure that if the lesser number frequented the Stoa or 
 the Garden, to hear men who were strangers in birth or Select following 
 
 ° of Stoics and 
 
 in education, but stranger still in their creed, these few Epicureans. 
 were indeed the solid and thoughtful minds of the day. 
 
 It is not at Athens only, but in many cities of Greece — 
 at Corinth, Elis, Colophon, Heraclea in Pontus — that 
 this sober and serious teaching made men look away 
 from the folly, the turmoil, the war which racked 
 the Hellenic world for forty years, to what true and 
 solid satisfaction was still attainable. The Greek who 
 lost his autonomy politically regained it spiritually, and 
 reasserted this new and greater liberty without elegance, 
 with contempt of style, but with the sincerity of a deep 
 conviction. The exquisite prose of Plato could not E P j curean a „a 
 hold its place against the bald aphorisms of Epicurus or of° s \ c v i<? ntempt 
 the clumsy arguments of the Cypriote Zeno. These 
 men openly despised any quality in style except clear- 
 ness, and we may be sure that in this they appealed 
 to the sense of their public, which was tired of idle 
 rhetoric. 
 
 Such were the principal systems which emerged from 
 the agitated times of the early Diadochi. As Adam Smith 
 observed long ago, the circumstances of life, which may 
 best be compared to the Thirty Years' War in Germany, 
 made it quite probable that any man in any city, 
 however peaceful he was, however neutral his city insecurity of 
 
 , , , , , , q. . the period 
 
 endeavored to be, would some day sutler in an invasion, following 
 have his property plundered, his family enslaved, and 
 himself exposed to destitution, if not to a violent and 
 unjust death. Hence it was vital, as it was in the early
 
 264 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Stoic and Epi- 
 curean systems 
 meet a vital 
 need of the age. 
 
 Permanance of 
 Stoic and Epi- 
 curean types. 
 
 The age as 
 reflected in 
 corned v. 
 
 Menander. 
 
 Christian ages, to preach a doctrine which would offer 
 grounds to despise such ills of fortune, to stand firm 
 under tyranny and oppression, to value life not as a 
 priceless jewel, but as a thing only worth having under 
 reasonable conditions. As I said before, these practical 
 systems of life embrace all that has ever been thought 
 out since by men, apart from divine revelation. Setting 
 apart as exceptional and less important the modern 
 cynic, the conscientious skeptic, both of whom had 
 their counterpart, as they also found their names among 
 the schools of ancient Greece, there remain the two 
 frames of mind, the Stoical and the Epicurean, which 
 divide the world. Far the majority is Epicurean ; far 
 the highest and finest natures are Stoical. Whatever 
 their dogmas, whatever their creed, these types are to be 
 met with in every society, and will be met with so long 
 as human nature remains the same. 
 
 I turn now to the inferior side of the picture, and, 
 having endeavored to portray the earnest and thinking 
 classes, will say something of the idle and frivolous peo- 
 ple, who then, as now, formed a large part of the most 
 fashionable society in each decaying town of Greece. 
 Our information we owe to the writers of genteel 
 comedy, who have left us innumerable fragments though 
 not a single complete play. We have from several 
 of them, Philemon, Diphilus, Menander, passages of 
 description, of reflection, of worldly wisdom, of stage 
 folly, which give us adequate materials for a judgment, 
 not to speak of the Latin versions, for they are little 
 more than translations, left us by Terence. The grace 
 and the elegance of Menander are manifest even in the 
 Latin version, and justify the well-known panegyric : 
 " Oh, Menander and Life, which of you has copied the 
 other 5 "
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 265 
 
 But when all has been said that ought to be, or 
 can be, in praise of Menander's style, and when we 
 come to inquire from him and from the New Comedy 
 what they have to tell us about their age, the outcome 
 is miserably small. They appear indifferent regarding 
 all the great events of the day, all large political in- 
 terests, all serious philosophy, and eager to reflect 
 the idlest, the most trivial, and the most decayed gentil- Comedy dealt 
 
 J ° with the trivial 
 
 itv of Athens. They do not even invent new scenery, side of Athe- 
 
 J J J J man life. 
 
 new framework, to convey their elegancies to the audi- 
 ence. Starting from a commonplace as old as Aristopha- 
 nes, the "rape and recognition " of some respectable 
 and therefore wholly insignificant girl, they added a few 
 other stock characters — the young and fashionable 
 spendthrift, the morose and stingy father, the indignant 
 uncle, the threadbare parasite, the harpy courtesan, and 
 by ringing the changes upon these constituents of 
 decayed and idle Attic society produced a whole litera- 
 ture of graceful talk, polite immorality, selfish ethics, 
 and shallow character. It is usual to lament the irrepa- 
 rable loss of the plays of Menander, but it may be 
 doubted whether, apart from style, history would gain 
 from a further knowledge of them. We have his senti- 
 ments, and those of Diphilus and Philemon, in hundreds 
 of fragments ; we have rude copies, too rude to imply 
 alterations of much import, in the collection of Plautine 
 plays, and in Terence. We may feel confident that, ex- 
 cept by some stray allusion, the rest would have told us 
 little more of the history, the manners, or the real life of 
 the age. 
 
 This generality of treatment, this absence of local for 
 
 color, this avoidance of the special interests of the age — barton' oVuie" 
 this it is which has given the New Comedy its popular- New Comedy 
 ity among widely different ages and people. Thus the
 
 266 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Narrowness 
 of the New 
 Comedv. 
 
 "Characters of 
 Theophrastus " 
 criticised. 
 
 rude and barbarous Romans, though their society was 
 infinitely purer, and in other respects at total variance 
 with that implied in the New Comedy, could neverthe- 
 less understand the miser and the spendthrift, the skep- 
 tic and the superstitious, the matron and the courtesan 
 there painted in their universal characteristics ; while the 
 plays of Aristophanes, or even the literary and philosoph- 
 ical criticism of the so-called Middle Comedy, were to 
 them wholly unintelligible. Even later Greeks like 
 Plutarch felt this, and knew that, while Aristophanes 
 was only to be fully understood by those who under- 
 stood Periclean Athens, the later comedy might be acted 
 at Antioch or Alexandria or Seleucia on the Tigris as 
 well as in Greece. And yet with this quasi-philosophical 
 generality, how narrow it all was ! If, instead of bitter 
 and scurrilous allusions to great personages, which were 
 frequent enough, and innuendos against virtue and 
 morals, they had boldly painted Demetrius the Besieger, 
 or the Philosopher, or Cassander's pedant brother, or the 
 conceited artists of the day, what far deeper instruction 
 they would have left us ! Their personages are like the 
 ingenious variations of second-rate composers upon a 
 well-known melody, which exhibit grace and ingenuity 
 but enrich us with no new feeling. A single national 
 air, with its inexpressible charm of distinct local color — 
 in fact, of originality — is worth a whole world of these 
 variations. 
 
 The same criticism applies to the tract known as the 
 " Characters of Theophrastus," a book far more praised 
 than it deserves. In the form now extant it gives a 
 series of portraits of various social vices — all of them 
 forms of littleness or meanness such as are the character- 
 istics of a shabby and idle society. Moreover, the draw- 
 ing of these characters is not psychologically subtle, as
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 267 
 
 is often asserted. The features brought out are rather 
 those intended for stage characters than those drawn 
 from a careful observation of real life.* 
 
 Theophrastus's book has to me the air of a treatise not ^^ hrastus , s 
 copied from the New Comedy, as has been suggested, book perhaps a 
 
 r ■> '-"-' handbook for 
 
 but rather composed as a handbook of characters for a writers of 
 
 r . comedies. 
 
 young author intending to write such comedies. It was 
 then the fashion to have recourse to philosophers, and 
 to take their advice on most matters of life. They were 
 supposed to know human character better than their 
 neighbors. Menander himself, though his practical phi- 
 losophy was distinctly that of his friend Epicurus, 
 studied in this very Peripatetic school of Theophrastus, 
 whose distinctive feature was the attention to natural 
 history of every kind, from stones and plants to piety 
 and pride. So Bolingbroke drew up on human nature a 
 series of propositions which Pope undertook to adorn 
 with his splendid style in the famous " Essay on Man." 
 But in the ' ' Characters " it is the nature of man as 
 shown in an idle and decaying provincial society — the 
 passions and pursuits of people with no public spirit or 
 interests ; the virtues are omitted, even the stronger 
 vices, and all the changes rung upon the foibles and 
 vulgarities of every-day life. 
 
 This tedious itching to describe types equally infects picsearchuss 
 
 r ' /~> 1 r. 1 .1 description of 
 
 the fragments of a tour in Greece left us under the name types, 
 of Dicaearchus. The writer not only professes to give a 
 distinct character to the inhabitants of each town he 
 names in Bceotia, but even draws distinctions of this 
 kind between the people of Attica and the Athenians. 
 
 * How far the fourth book of Aristotle's " Ethics " may have been intended 
 to give sketches of real life is not easy to say. The famous portrait of the 
 " great-souled man " seems to me more of a stage character than anything 
 else. " His voice must be deep, and his step slow " seems to me very like a 
 theatrical suggestion. But so large and controversial a question must not be 
 raised here.
 
 268 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Greek comedy 
 reflected by 
 Plautus and 
 Terence. 
 
 Typical char- 
 acters in the 
 New Comedv. 
 
 Such refinements might be serviceable for a stage bound 
 by the shackles of tradition. In a would-be observer of 
 real life it leads us to doubt his accuracy in cases where 
 a real distinction existed. 
 
 Through the troubled medium of Plautus, as well as 
 through the more colorless Terence, we can perfectly 
 well recover what types of life were represented on the 
 Attic stage. Any personal allusions, indeed, which 
 would have told us some of the history of political feel- 
 ing, are left out. Perhaps the plays which had a little 
 more than the slightest local color were not translated by 
 the Latin copyists, who could not postulate in their 
 audience any knowledge of eastern history. But all the 
 personages, the scenes, the manners of the comcedia 
 pallida of the Romans were Attic. If then we were to 
 believe these elaborate studies of manners in Alexander's 
 and his successors' days, the life of youth consisted in 
 drinking, in squandering money, nay even in committing 
 the worst kind of felony without the punishment of 
 much remorse. The young man who is strictly brought 
 up has to stay in the country and help to mind the farm. 
 But how complete and oppressive an exile this was con- 
 sidered appears from a curious comparison in the tourist 
 just cited (Chapter IV.) : "To sum up, as far as the 
 rest of cities surpass the country for the pleasure and the 
 right 7ise of life, so far again does Athens exceed them." 
 
 Accordingly the sympathy of the audience is warmly 
 enlisted for the oppressed youth who escapes by strata- 
 gem from his watchful father and comes to spend a night 
 of riot in the city. He does this too with the connivance 
 of elders, and through the machinations of a "faith- 
 ful " slave. For old men are divided into two opposed 
 classes. The one is thrifty, morose, hard, censorious ; 
 the other indulgent, generous, lax in morals. If two
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 269 
 
 old men appear in a play they are generally brothers, 
 and generally opposed in this way. The mothers of the 
 house are either imperious heiresses, who lead their 
 weak and sneaking husbands no pleasant life, or more 
 respectable ciphers, the mothers of girls who innocently 
 fall into the most serious mischief, and are only saved 
 from ruin by what an Irish judge called "the fortuitous 
 interference of providence." If the attending of night 
 festivals was (as the stock incident of these plays im- f^P' 018 of 
 plies) so disastrous to the character of respectable girls, Comedy. 
 one is at a loss to know how any Attic father or mother 
 should have allowed it. We may therefore fairly as- 
 sume that this theatrical commonplace, though not 
 unheard of, was almost as rare in real life as it is now in 
 connection with religious night services. It is certainly 
 no mirror of ordinary Greek life. 
 
 I wish I could affirm that the frequent stage cases of 
 
 Exposure of 
 
 exposed children, especially girls, brought up by the infants. 
 
 worst kind of slave-dealers, were equally rare in real 
 
 life. But with the increase of both wealth and poverty 
 
 in these stormy days, when the requirements of genteel 
 
 life were greater, and the means of meeting them not 
 
 forthcoming, the exposing of female infants may have 
 
 been one of the causes contributing to the alarming 
 
 decrease of population in the next century. For though 
 
 it may have been so far humanely contrived that the 
 
 infant seldom perished, those who saved it from death 
 
 were not likely to do so for the purpose of hereafter 
 
 making it the mother of a family. Still there is one 
 
 circumstance about this matter of exposure which makes 
 
 me suspect its frequency. In all the plays and frag- fr^uentVs ^ 8 
 
 ments we have I cannot remember a case occurring from comedy. 
 
 during the action of the play. There is no case, for 
 
 example, of the finding of such a child, when exposed
 
 270 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Adherence to 
 fixed types in 
 comedv. 
 
 Narrow 
 Atticism in 
 Menander's 
 period. 
 
 by its desolate and ruined young mother, leading to its 
 recognition by the peccant father, and its consequent 
 rehabilitation. There is no lamentation that when a 
 child is born it will have to be exposed. All the cases 
 of exposure mentioned are in the past, and happened far 
 away. Have we then before us merely another fiction 
 of the stage ? 
 
 So strict was the adherence of all Greek art, even the 
 best and greatest, to fixed models, that if one great 
 master sanctioned this device we may be certain to find 
 hundreds of direct imitations, and so the pedants of 
 after days are led away to state as natural, or as ordi- 
 nary, what is really the invention of a single brain. In 
 all our social inferences from Greek literature caution on 
 this point is of capital importance. Thus every heiress 
 in the plays is imperious, disagreeable, disgusting to her 
 husband, often indeed only because she will not tolerate 
 his immoralities. Of course there were at Athens and 
 throughout Greece plenty of amiable heiresses — thou- 
 sands who had not bowed the knee to Mammon. If we 
 believe the New Comedy there were none. So also 
 there is no color in any profession save one. The 
 skippers who came into port from foreign parts are all 
 the same. The soldiers are all the same — cowards, 
 braggarts, and defeated in love. Menander declared by 
 the mouth of one of his characters that not even the 
 gods, if they tried, could produce a polished soldier. 
 Vet in that day, when the profession was a leading one 
 of Greece, there must have been plenty of soldiers of 
 fortune similar in type to Xenophon, and far more culti- 
 vated by travel and experience than their Attic critics. 
 But the use of an un- Attic form, or a local name not 
 recognized at Athens, would be enough in Menander's 
 day to set them down as boors.
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 
 
 Far more disagreeable than these portraits in the New 
 Comedy are the many pictures of immoral old age, of ^\^ or ^ li ' y 
 fathers indulging their sons in vice, and conniving at it, Comedy, 
 nay worse, taking part in it in the presence of their 
 sons. The apologies of the Grex at the end of the 
 play are exhibitions of the very worst Epicureanism ' ' of 
 the stage," and we may indeed wonder how the solid 
 Romans of the Second Punic War, a great and sound 
 society, could have tolerated such pictures of vice as 
 would have been thought outrageous if occurring at 
 Rome. How could the Fabii, the Aurelii, the Marcelli 
 of that day endure that their children should be made 
 intimate with the society of courtesans, as a part of 
 elegance and culture? It would be irrelevant to discuss 
 this question. Suffice it to say that we now tolerate in 
 bookshops and even on our tables French novels which, Modern 
 
 1 • -1 • -1 parallel of 
 
 if printed in English, would be subject to prosecution by French fiction, 
 the law, and which no respectable bookseller would 
 venture to advertise. Recently the English people even 
 feted in London one of the worst authors in infamous 
 literature. In some such way the Romans may have 
 tolerated in the comcedia palliata things which would 
 have been revolting to them if represented as Italian. 
 
 What we have said concerning the evidence of comedy 
 about the age of the first Diadochi amounts to this : Me- 
 nander and his successors— they lasted barely two gener- 
 ations — printed in a few stereotypes a small and very 
 worthless society at Athens. There was no doubt a 
 similar set of people at Corinth, at Thebes, possibly even 
 in the city of Lycurgus. These people, idle, for the most 
 part rich, and in good society, spent their earlier years 
 in debauchery, and their later in sentimental reflections x ,id V frivoiit • 
 and regrets. They had no serious object in life, and re- "octe^ 6 " 13 ' 1 
 garded the complications of a love affair as more inter-
 
 272 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Want of 
 education and 
 earnestness in 
 men and 
 women . 
 
 Rise of new- 
 cities and 
 spread of 
 city life. 
 
 esting than the rise and fall of kingdoms or the gain and 
 loss of a nation's liberty. They were like the people of 
 our day who spend all their time reading novels from 
 the libraries, and who can tolerate these eternal varia- 
 tions in twaddle not only without disgust but with inter- 
 est. They were surrounded with slaves, on the whole 
 more intelligent and interesting, for in the first place 
 slaves were bound to exercise their brains,- and in the 
 second they had a great object — liberty — to give them a 
 keen pursuit in life. The relations of the sexes in this 
 set or portion of society were bad, owing to the want of 
 education in the women and the want of earnestness in 
 the men. As a natural consequence a class was found, 
 apart from household slaves, who took advantage of 
 these defects, and, bringing culture to fascinate unprin- 
 cipled men, established relations which brought estrange- 
 ments, if not ruin, into the home life of the day. 
 
 Such then being the society which we find depicted at 
 Athens, and by implication throughout Greece — for the 
 scenes of the New Comedy by no means confine them- 
 selves to Attica — what notion can we frame of the prin- 
 cipal cities, in which the general features already de- 
 scribed may have been modified by circumstances, and 
 what were the circumstances ? The most brilliant and 
 populous cities in the Hellenistic world were at that 
 time not the old historic towns of Greece or Asia Minor, 
 but great new creations, which tried hard to obtain for 
 themselves the stamp of antiquity, and invented many 
 legends of mythical founders, but still were perfectly 
 known to be upstart foundations. Even in many cases 
 where old cities like Smyrna and Ephesus revived, it 
 was from the gathering of the surrounding villages, into 
 which they had been scattered by the Persians, of a pop- 
 ulation no longer really the inheritors of the old fame
 
 The Hellenistic World, 230-150 B. C. 273 
 
 and tradition of these cities. But now city life became 
 the fashion. Everywhere the Hellenistic kings under- 
 took to found them — first of all their respective capitals, 
 then other foundations to which the neighboring people 
 came spontaneously, or were forced to come, to form a 
 new center. In many cases two or more decaying cities 
 were induced or compelled to amalgamate by Antigonus, 
 or Lysimachus, or Seleucus, as we know from inscrip- 
 tions, and from the testimony of Strabo. 
 
 Of the older cities, Cos and Rhodes were the most cosand 
 prominent. The latter was not very ancient, but it had 
 been founded (in 408 B. C.) by three very ancient 
 neighboring cities, so that it might fairly claim the 
 respectability of antiquity. But in the behavior of its 
 citizens and the prudence of its government it proved 
 that these claims were founded upon solid reasons. For 
 both here and at Cos we seem to find a life far more 
 orderly and respectable than at Alexandria or at An- 
 tioch. These latter, together with Pergamum, were the 
 most notable of the new foundations, because they were 
 all capitals, and the seats of courts and royalty. Hence 
 we know a little — very little — about them, whereas such 
 great cities as Apamea, Laodicea, and Seleucia on the 
 Tigris are now no more than a name. 
 
 Let us take up Cos and Rhodes first. The smaller 
 
 . f . , Cos under the 
 
 island is known to us as the place of retirement and rest patronage of 
 
 , , . , , . 11 •, the Ptolemies. 
 
 for people wearied with the excitements and the turmoil 
 of Alexandria. It was a favorite place for the Ptolemies 
 to send their children to be brought up in a quiet and 
 wholesome society, of pure blood and of good manners. 
 The second Ptolemy was actually born there, and con- 
 sequently the island enjoyed his liberal favors. But not 
 only were princes glad to find this harbor of refuge for 
 their growing infants and for themselves, but literary
 
 274 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Unreality of 
 
 Theocritus. 
 
 men also retired there, and formed a literary society of 
 which we have a most charming sketch in the seventh 
 idyll of Theocritus. There the weary pedants of the 
 Museum appear as shepherds or vine-dressers, enjoying 
 a country feast and singing rural strains of love and of 
 wine. The modern public was long deceived by this 
 charming idyll, and took as literal fact what was evi- 
 dently a mere convention of the moment. As well 
 might Marie Antoinette and her dairy at the Trianon 
 have been taken for genuine dairy work. Both were 
 the revolt of a human nature with sound instincts against 
 the excessive ceremony, etiquette, artificiality, pompos- 
 ity, of an overwrought and unnatural society. Here 
 then we find, perhaps for the first time in Greek life, a 
 growing distaste for town life, and consequent love of 
 the country with its simpler tastes and homelier pursuits. 
 To us this is natural enough, for the Anglo-Saxon race 
 has always been a sporting race, and field sports postu- 
 late country life. But the old Greeks were essentially 
 townsmen, regarding the city or polity as the only civi- 
 lized place of living, and consequently the dweller in the 
 country was regarded as rustic, pagan, boorish, and gen- 
 erally uncultivated. "How shall he become wise that 
 holdeth the plough, that glorieth in the shaft of the goad; 
 that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labors, and 
 whose discourse is of the stock of bulls ? They shall not 
 be sought for in the council of the people, and in the 
 assembly they shall not mount on high, neither shall they 
 declare instruction and judgment, and where parables are 
 they shall not be found." These are the words of a Jew 
 Jewish parallel, deeply influenced with Hellenism, and with the same 
 contempt as the old Greeks had for country pursuits.* 
 
 * Ecclesiasticus xxxix. 24, S9. I have omitted the verses which include the 
 skilled mechanic in this town class of useful hut not honorable members of 
 
 Greek distaste 
 for country life
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 275 
 
 It was in direct contrast to all this that Theocritus 
 made his mark and his permanent place in the world of Theocritus? 
 letters, by deserting Alexandria and its streets for the 
 glades and upland pastures of Sicily, and in spirit at 
 least returning to the free life of the shepherd and the 
 neat herd, revelling in "the divine leisure" of the 
 fields, the myriad depth of the woods, "the moan of 
 doves in immemorial elms, and murmuring of innum- 
 erable bees." All the "properties" of the medieval 
 Arcadia, with its coy nymphs and piping shepherds, its 
 murmuring streams and complaining nightingales, were 
 here introduced into poetry, and have ever since been 
 the stock in trade of bards who had little inspiration 
 from reality, and who sought to compensate with arti- 
 ficial graces for the lack of inspiration. Theocritus was, 
 however, too good an artist to impose childish inno- 
 cence upon his swains ; the human passions, perhaps 
 rather the animal passions, are strong in them, and 
 make his idylls far more realistic than those of his me- 
 dieval followers. I fancy the poet made most of his 
 studies of this rural life at Cos or in the island of 
 Rhodes ; there is no evidence that he lived in Sicily, 
 any more than that his greatest imitator, the Neapolitan 
 Sannazaro, ever went to Arcadia.* For the whole of his Artificiality of 
 work is artificial, unreal, though so artistic that it has rheocritus - 
 imposed upon the world as the effusion of a pastoral 
 heart. 
 
 It is well to insist upon this feature in the Hellenistic 
 poetry of this century, when we come to consider the 
 recent discovery which gives us sketches of the town 
 life at Cos, professedly during the poet's own life and « Mimiambics , 
 observation. The " Mimiambics " of Herondas, anew ofHerondas. 
 
 * On this Sannazaro and his Arcadia, see what I have said in the chapter 
 on Arcadia in my " Rambles and Studies in Greece."
 
 276 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Base and vul- 
 gar life depicted 
 
 bv Herondas. 
 
 Pictures of life 
 at Syracuse 
 rather than Cos. 
 
 Perhaps imi- 
 tated from the 
 " mimes " of 
 
 Sophron. 
 
 treasure of the British Museum, professes to give us 
 life-pictures, especially of the daily walk and talk of 
 women of the middle class, their efforts at educating un- 
 ruly boys, their love of bargaining in shops and trying 
 on new clothes, their petty jealousies and intrigues, not 
 to speak of their actual vices. If these were indeed the 
 general features of female life at Cos, we might well 
 wonder that any one should choose it as a resort for lit- 
 erary leisure, still less for the safe education of children. 
 For all the life depicted is base and vulgar ; where there- 
 is not degrading vice there is meanness of motive, pro- 
 vinciality of language ; there is hardly a redeeming 
 feature in the moral picture that the poet presents to us. 
 But here again it is only the unwary pedant who will be 
 deceived. These are not pictures of actual life at Cos, 
 but also borrowed from Sicily, and describing not the 
 fair country, but the back streets of Syracuse. The prose 
 "mimes" of Sophron of Syracuse had long been cel- 
 ebrated for their sketches of low life in dramatic form, so 
 celebrated as to have been the constant study of Plato 
 when composing his dialogues. A whole book of these 
 sketches was devoted to the ways and works of women. 
 It is,more than probable that this book was Herondas' s 
 model, and that he put into verse, and dressed up as re- 
 cent and actual, what was really two centuries old, and 
 what belonged to a society long past in a remote part of 
 the Hellenic world. Every original sketch of any society 
 has general features which will fit any age. It is the 
 reproduction of these which give to Herondas as well as 
 to Theocritus that illusive appearance of actuality which 
 is more or less persuasive according to the genius of the 
 artist. 
 
 On no account, therefore, should we judge the society 
 of Cos from these studies. The island has been ex-
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 277 
 
 amined recently by Mr. Paton, in the hope of finding 
 inscriptions which would be far more trustworthy 
 evidence. But his hopes have been in the main dis- 
 appointed. Except some corroborations of the Ptole- 
 maic patronage, and votive inscriptions set up by their 
 officers, the search for new material has been sadly 
 unfruitful. Let us turn to Rhodes. 
 
 This commonwealth has taken the place of Athens in Rhodes, 
 the eastern Levant. What Athens had done a hundred 
 and fifty years before, in clearing the seas of pirates and 
 keeping guardships upon the water thoroughfares, in 
 combining the coasts and islands into a confederacy for 
 the purpose of mutual help and advantage, was now 
 being done by Rhodes. But there is this important 
 difference, that the government of Rhodes never became 
 a democracy in the Greek sense, where every free citizen 
 could vote, but always remained in the hands of a rich 
 aristocracy of merchants, who satisfied the poor with 
 bread, not with power, and by attending to their 
 material welfare saved them from becoming the political 
 mischief which the mob had shown itself in so many 
 other free cities. Hence we never hear of those public 
 follies being committed at Rhodes which disgrace the Government 
 later history of Athens, and which, even in better days, aristocratic. 
 were the main cause of her downfall. The prudent 
 aristocracy of Rhodes was indeed guilty of some grave 
 indiscretions. The commercial ruin of their city, which 
 had been designed and prepared by Roman speculators, 
 was brought on after the battle of Pydna by their falling 
 into a very simple trap. They were advised by a 
 Roman noble who was in the "Tammany ring" of the 
 time to offer their mediation between Rome and Mace- Cause of 
 
 Roman indig- 
 
 don. For centuries they had been acting as mediators nation against 
 all over the Hellenistic world ; their good offices had
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Financial ruin 
 of Rhodes. 
 
 Caution and 
 diplomacy of 
 the- Rhodians. 
 
 been gratefully accepted. But when the Roman Repub- 
 lic had become a proud empire, dictating to the East, 
 the offer of mediation from a merchant city was met 
 with a howl of indignation, got up by the money people, 
 who desired a conflict, and who almost produced a 
 declaration of war against Rhodes at Rome. By declar- 
 ing Delos a free port the financial ruin of the city was 
 however sufficiently accomplished. And this would 
 certainly have been brought about, whether Rhodes 
 had made a diplomatic mistake or not. She was 
 probably led into it by deliberate lies on the part of 
 Romans, who seemed responsible persons, and who 
 pretended that they gave the advice suggested by the 
 friends of Rhodes at Rome. 
 
 In earlier days Rhodes was remarkable for avoiding 
 all hasty legislation, still more for avoiding all declara- 
 tion of revenge or personal dislike toward her enemies. 
 Here the caution of merchant princes shows itself in 
 contrast to the passions of a mob. When besieged 
 and brought to the greatest straits by Demetrius 
 Poliorcetes, the Rhodians would not submit to the 
 proposal of some angry citizen to pull down and 
 destroy the statues erected in former years by the grate- 
 ful state to this king and to his father. Very probablv 
 they intended to show by this example how different 
 they were from an excitable mob such as that of Athens, 
 which presently overthrew and destroyed all the statues 
 of the other Demetrius, who had been for ten years the 
 successful ruler of Athens. They showed it again, in a 
 war undertaken with Byzantium for the sake of keeping 
 the Bosphorus open to Greek trading ships without pay- 
 ing toll to that city. The Byzantine people had been 
 blackmailed by their inland neighbors, the Thracians, 
 and the city had begged aid from the Greek world.
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250- r 50 B.C. 279 
 
 When refused, they began to stop ships and levy toll. 
 To this strong objections were made, and a war was 
 begun by the Rhodians. But no sooner had they got 
 the advantage than they made peace without demanding 
 any indemnity, without humiliating their adversaries ; 
 they merely demanded that the old rule should be 
 resumed, and that ships should pass free through the 
 Bosphorus. 
 
 It was owing to this reasonable and honorable way of 
 conducting their trading supremacy that all the world 
 was ready to contribute great sums when Rhodes was 
 nearly destroyed by an earthquake, about 225 B. C. 
 The list of gifts from kings and from free cities is given 
 by Polybius, who wonders over the generosity of that 
 day, as compared with his own, only half a century 
 later. But he omits to tell us what we can infer from 
 other evidence, that these gifts were no mere generosity, 
 but a practical way of averting the impending financial 
 crisis, which the ruin of the Rhodian banks would entail 
 upon all the civilized world. 
 
 Rhodes was also a favorite place of education, not 
 only for young business men, but for young orators and 
 men of letters. The schools were admirable ; there was 
 good and steady society ; in art we know that there 
 was a famous Rhodian school, marked with the charac- 
 teristics we should expect — moderation and strictness of 
 design, at least in comparison with the luxurious and 
 sensational schools of Asia Minor. The same thing was 
 said of the rhetoric taught there. They professed to 
 derive their style from the famous yEschines, the adver- 
 sary of Demosthenes, who went thither in exile. In 
 any case the Rhodian style is contrasted with the 
 Asianic, of which Hegesias was the teacher, by its 
 chastity and adherence to older and stricter models. 
 
 Magnanimity of 
 the Rhodians. 
 
 Importance of 
 Rhodes in the 
 financial world. 
 
 Education 
 at Rhodes. 
 
 " Rhodian " 
 style in 
 rhetoric.
 
 2<So A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Cos, therefore, this city, and perhaps Tarsus, shared 
 with Athens the reputation of being what we might call 
 university towns, whither it was safe to send young men 
 to prosecute their studies. 
 
 Far different were the two great capitals of the eastern 
 Antiochand Hellenistic world, Antioch and Alexandria. The cir- 
 
 Alexandna. 
 
 cumstances of the foundation of each were not very 
 dissimilar, but in every other respect, except that they 
 were both new and both capitals, there are strong con- 
 trasts. Alexandria was situated on flat sandbanks by 
 the sea, and fed with water by canals from the Nile ; 
 Antioch was in the narrow valley of the Orontes, 
 between rugged mountains and the rushing river, at 
 least twelve miles from the sea. Alexandria had no 
 The two cities other great city near it ; Antioch was one of four, 
 
 compared. . . . 
 
 Seleucia (its port), Apamea, and Laodicea, which were 
 all great and populous, and essentially Greek cities. 
 Alexandria had only one other insignificant Greek city, 
 Naucratis, within reach of it, and in all Egypt only one 
 other far away, Ptolemais in the upper country : Antioch 
 had around it in Syria and Coele-Syria many Graeco- 
 Macedonian settlements with privileged inhabitants. 
 Alexandria was founded once for all by the great 
 conqueror himself ; Antioch was built by Seleucus from 
 the debris of the earlier Antigoneia, which his rival 
 had founded a few miles further up the river. But 
 both were great cities, with the characteristics of such 
 cities containing a mixed population. Both played an 
 important part hereafter in the history and development 
 of Christianity. 
 
 All these reasons would make a comparison of them 
 History of highlv interesting, but bad as is our knowledge of Alex- 
 
 andria, that of early Antioch is still worse. We only 
 know of its fair suburb called Daphne, where the ample
 
 The Hellenistic World, 230-150 B. C. 281 
 
 supply of mountain springs made a shady and cool resort 
 for the population ; we know that Macedonians, Jews, 
 Greeks, and native Syrians formed a population scat- 
 tered through four distinct quarters, added by the 
 Seleucid kings according as the population outgrew the 
 older bounds. Twice it was occupied by Ptolemies who 
 invaded the country ; in neither case after a battle or 
 siege, but with the consent of a large part of the popula- 
 tion. It is but the other day that I recovered a frag- Recovery of a 
 ment of a narrative which tells how the troops and h^f"^" 1 of Its 
 sailors of the third Ptolemy were received with demon- 
 strations of joy by the populace.* Seleucia at the 
 mouth of the Orontes was held by the Egyptians as a 
 fortress in the enemy's country for more than twenty 
 years. We know from Josephus that the seventh 
 Ptolemy was crowned there just a century later, and an 
 extant coin, representing him as king of Syria, proves 
 the accuracy of the historian. 
 
 Alexandria never submitted to this indignity (though 
 Antiochus Epiphanes was stopped at its very gates by 
 the Romans) till the days of its last king, Auletes, who 
 was ' ' restored ' ' by the Romans with great slaughter, 
 and then in the campaign of Julius Caesar, who was 
 practically a prisoner there with his little army for many 
 months, and well-nigh concluded his career in its 
 harbor. 
 
 But unfortunately no great creation of the Macedonian 
 Greeks has left such slight traces of its existence as slight traces 
 Antioch. Known and inhabited as a village (Antakia) ^n^nni? 
 in the days of the crusades, it has hitherto tempted no 
 explorer to search for the remains of its centuries of 
 splendor. The reason is clear enough. Founded in a 
 
 * Cf. the Petrie Papyri, Vol. II., No. XLV., for this curious text, which has 
 given rise to many essays and commentaries in Germany since its discovery.
 
 282 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Antioch a cen- 
 ter of Hellenic 
 civilization. 
 
 Alexandria a 
 .inter of Greek 
 literature and 
 science. 
 
 district liable to frequent earthquakes, Antioch suffered 
 in the early centuries of our era such a series of devasta- 
 tions from this dreadful disturbance that it became 
 uninhabitable. Probably great masses of rock have 
 been tumbled from above down upon its palaces, colon- 
 nades, and streets. The remains of the Seleucids may 
 in many cases be hidden under hopeless accumulations 
 of natural ruin, which is not like the ruins of mere 
 human habitations, capable of being probed or removed 
 by the spade.* But these things would not have 
 hindered our knowing something about this great and 
 splendid city, the capital of a province far more Greek 
 than any part of Egypt, if any native writer or any 
 early description had survived. It is only from Strabo, 
 and then from Dio and from John Chrysostom that 
 something of the life of the Antiochenes survives. We 
 can therefore say no more of it in this place than to 
 repeat the important fact that the Hellenic civilization, 
 of which the golden epoch had been confined to Greece 
 and the coast of Asia Minor, had now found for itself 
 this new and splendid center in Syria, from whence it 
 could influence not only Ccele-Syria and Palestine, 
 but the inner country as far as the Euphrates and 
 Tigris. The Seleucid kings very justly chose for their 
 capital a site not beyond the reach of Greek culture ; 
 thus they spread its influence far away across deserts, 
 rivers, and mountains, to the confines of India. 
 
 Not less splendid and far more celebrated in Hellen- 
 istic history is Alexandria, which took up the torch of 
 learning from decaying Greece, and did all that could 
 be clone to perpetuate, to propagate, to promote Greek 
 
 ♦The history of Antioch, with all the troubles from riots, angry emperors, 
 Saracens, Turks, and earthquakes, is to be found in a well-known Latin essay 
 of K. O. Muller, published in the fifth volume of his collected essays on 
 archaeology. There is an insufficient article in the great new German encyclo- 
 paedia of Pauly-Wissowa.
 
 The Hellenistic World, 230-150 B. C. 283 
 
 literature and science. The Ptolemies who ruled at 
 Alexandria never indeed succeeded in Hellenizing 
 Egypt, as the Seleucids had Hellenized Syria, but they 
 did not choose to do so. With practical sense they 
 must have seen that the tough though pliant Egyptian 
 character would never take this new training. They re- 
 frained from building many Greek towns in Egypt. But JJgJJ^fS«& 
 they determined to concentrate all their energies upon p"^^ the 
 the capital, so that in Alexandria might be found every 
 kind and form of Greek product in art, literature, and 
 science. It is held universally that Alexandria was de- 
 signed by Alexander for a commercial city, because, I 
 suppose, it turned out admirably suited for that purpose. 
 I have endeavored to show elsewhere that the neighbor- 
 hood of the older Naucratis had something to say to his 
 decision.* Possibly, however, he may have intended it 
 as a provisional and very safe capital, where he could 
 gather stores and train the recruits necessary for his 
 conquest of the remaining Persian Empire. The con- 
 queror's views probably expanded by degrees. 
 
 But if as a commercial site Alexandria was unrivalled, 
 
 Lack of natural 
 
 we cannot say much for its natural beauty. Sandhills beauty in the 
 without wooding, without cliffs, and a tideless sea, with andria. 
 no far mountains or islands in sight — what could be 
 more dreary to those who had been accustomed to the 
 enchanting views from the Greek and Asiatic coast 
 towns? We know that the Greeks of classical days 
 said little about the picturesque. Nevertheless its un- 
 conscious effect upon their poetry and other forms of art 
 is clearly discernible, and perhaps not a little of the un- 
 picturesqueness of Alexandrian culture is due to the 
 absence of this vague yet powerful influence. The 
 grandeur of solemn mountains, the mystery of deep for- 
 
 Cf. my " Empire of the Ptolemies," Chap. I.
 
 284 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 ests, the sweet homeliness of babbling streams, the scent 
 of deep meadows and fragrant shrubs, all this was 
 familiar even to the city people of Hellenic days. For 
 their towns were small, and all of them surrounded by 
 scenes of natural beauty. But the din and the dust of 
 the new capital, reaching over an extent as great as 
 modern Paris, were only relieved within by a few town- 
 parks or gymnasia, and without by fashionable bathing 
 suburbs, where the luxuries of city life replaced the 
 sweets of nature ; and if there were retirement and 
 leisure within the university, it was eminently the retire- 
 ment among books — the natural home for pedants and 
 grammarians. 
 
 It would require a separate volume to give any ac- 
 
 Literature of . . 
 
 the Alexandrian count of the vast body of literature which has reached 
 
 period. . . . 
 
 us from this epoch. Literature in the pure sense of 
 model writing it is not ; but literature in the sense of 
 scientific teaching, archaeological teaching, historical and 
 philological inquiry, in the highest sense. It is never to 
 be forgotten that the learned men of the great library 
 and of the Museum (as the great College of Alexandria 
 was called) preserved and purified the texts of the great 
 classics, sorted the wheat from the chaff, and appended 
 those critical marks and explanatory notes which have 
 given us almost all the knowledge we possess of the lit- 
 erary history of earlier Greece. Thus, for example, 
 Aristophanes would be well-nigh unintelligible were it 
 not for the scholia which come from the Alexandrian 
 critics, and which we find copied in the margins of our 
 best medieval manuscripts. All our scientific knowledge 
 of Homer dates from the discovery, late in the last cen- 
 tury, of an eleventh-century copy at Venice, furnished 
 with the critical marks and notes of Aristarchus. These 
 men also left us commentaries upon their own produc- 
 
 Importance of 
 
 Alexandrian 
 
 critics. 
 
 Homeric 
 
 criticism.
 
 Gold Cup from Mycenae. (See page 30.) 
 From Schuchhardt's " Schliemann," page 239. 
 
 285
 
 286 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The inost note- 
 worthy book of 
 this age the 
 " Idylls" of 
 Theocritus. 
 
 The "Ele- 
 ments" of 
 Euclid. 
 
 Alexandria the 
 real center of 
 Hellenism. 
 
 tions. We have the " Argonautics " of Apollonius 
 Rhodius and the "Cassandra" of Lycophron so ex- 
 plained, and if either of them were worth ranking among 
 the classics, we should find these notes of the highest 
 value. But the learned world has come to a tacit agree- 
 ment that of all the Alexandrian books surviving none 
 is to have the honor of forming modern taste except the 
 "Idylls" of Theocritus. His pastorals have been so 
 long and so constantly imitated, ever since Virgil's day, 
 that he is as much a household name among literary 
 men as any of his predecessors. The great scientific 
 works, the mathematics, astronomy, geography of Hip- 
 parchus, Euclid, Eratosthenes, Apollonius, have been 
 absorbed into the more recent systems, not without the 
 permanent recognition and gratitude of the learned. 
 Euclid indeed still holds his place in all English mathe- 
 matical teaching as the unapproachable introduction to 
 strict scientific thinking. Whether he should now be 
 replaced by some modern text-book or not, there is no 
 doubt that in logic he will never be surpassed, and it is 
 of the logic of thinking that his " Elements " will ever 
 remain a perfect specimen. If the Alexandrian Greeks 
 had left us nothing else, would not the modern scientific 
 world owe them a permanent debt of gratitude ? nor is 
 it a doubtful sign of greatness to have been the plague 
 and the detestation of myriads of schoolboys for count- 
 less generations. 
 
 The greatness of this city, the splendor of its court, 
 the wealth of its sovereigns, made it in this century the 
 real center of Hellenism to outside nations. It was not* 
 from Athens with all its ancient prestige, but from Alex- 
 andria that the Romans learned their civilization. We 
 can still trace the spread of Greek arts and comforts 
 from the first port which was opened by the Romans to
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 287 
 
 Alexandrian ships, the port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli) close 
 within the entrance of the Bay of Naples. The old 
 Greek traditions of that country, which had been 
 crushed by the conquests of Samnites and Romans, re- 
 vived again under the influence of the many Greeks who 
 worked this Alexandrian trade. Presently Baiae, Ne- Trade of 
 
 .. Alexandria. 
 
 apohs, Herculaneum, Pompeii, all became fashionable 
 settlements for Romans, owing to the Greek flavor of 
 the population, and the facility of obtaining from Alex- 
 andria the arts and crafts which gave comfort and re- 
 finement to private life. Recent researches have shown 
 that all the elegant designs in Roman houses, all those 
 conventional ornaments which were copied from the 
 ruins of Roman palaces by the masters of the Renais- 
 sance, all the graceful house decoration which we have 
 found beneath the ashes at Pompeii, are copied directly 
 from Alexandria. We have even specimens of purely 
 Egyptian ornament, crocodiles, hippopotami, and papv- Influei »ce of 
 
 . ...... r f fJ Alexandrian art 
 
 rus plants, utilized by these Romans through the inter- at Rome, 
 mediation of the Alexandrians. 
 
 But though the kingdom of Egypt thus furnished a 
 home and a new center for Greek art, Greek learning, 
 Greek letters, it was no home for Greek politics, or the 
 special side of literature developed by politics. There 
 was no eloquence at Alexandria, doubtless because the 
 Ptolemies knew that to let the Greeks lash themselves found no home 
 with their periods and heat themselves with their meta- 
 phors would be dangerous to the court and the public 
 order. The city population was inflammable enough ; 
 riots were both frequent and bloody ; had there been a 
 school of orators to promote them, the consequences 
 might indeed have been disastrous. Hence there were 
 not even Hellenic rights granted to the population. 
 They had no Boule or demos, no council or assembly of 
 
 at Alexandria.
 
 288 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 PerRamuni. 
 
 Its history. 
 
 The kingdom 
 of the Attalids 
 
 citizens, which was the distinctive feature of every free 
 Greek city. Magistrates appointed by the crown, with 
 administrative powers of a semi-military kind, kept the 
 city in order. There was a garrison of household troops, 
 so-called Macedonians, with special privileges, the proto- 
 type of the praetorian guards at Rome. Indeed, many of 
 the city arrangements at Alexandria were copied by the 
 emperor Augustus, when he was organizing his power. 
 
 But he may also have taken some ideas from another 
 very interesting model, which is most characteristic of 
 the age now under consideration — I mean the city and 
 royalty of Pergamum. This interesting kingdom, which 
 lasted from the beginning of the third century to the time 
 when it was bequeathed to, and absorbed by, the Roman 
 people during the days of the Gracchi, has many char- 
 acteristic features, which were not known by us till the 
 results of the recent excavations by the Germans were 
 made known. The fort had been a treasure fort, held for 
 Lysimachus by the founder of the dynasty, then retained 
 after his death and that of Seleucus, and held against 
 Antiochus, the new king of Syria (281 B.C.), whose 
 difficulties were so great that he was compelled to permit 
 the revolt. We know now that Philetaerus even lent 
 money from his treasure to the neighboring Greek cities 
 to purchase their freedom from Antiochus. 
 
 Thus arose the kingdom of Attalids, ruled by rela- 
 tions of the founder, seldom inheriting in the direct line, 
 but nevertheless showing the strongest family affections, 
 and avoiding those domestic conflicts which were the 
 ruin of both the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties. The 
 political role of the Attalids was to protect the liberties 
 of the surrounding cities not only from Syria, but from 
 the new kingdoms of Bithynia and Cappadocia, which 
 threatened to absorb them. But, above all, these kings,
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 289 
 
 Eumenes I., Attalus I., Eumenes II., Attalus II., earned 
 
 great glory and the gratitude of all the Greeks by re- The Attaiids 
 
 & & J & J resist the in- 
 
 sisting the inroads of the pestilent Galatians, who had rpads ofthe 
 
 made for themselves a robber state in the interior of 
 
 Asia Minor, and were now the scourge and terror of all 
 
 their neighbors. 
 
 To check and defeat these marauders was the greatest 
 
 service possible to Hellenism, and this it was which 
 
 made Pergamum the center of civilization and of art for 
 
 all Asia Minor. The kings celebrated their victories Pergamum the 
 
 ° center of civil- 
 
 over the Gauls by splendid works of art, and their i A za . tio ". for 
 
 J r Asia Minor. 
 
 school of sculpture has survived not only in the splendid 
 remains of the high altar, recently brought to the 
 Museum of Berlin, but in those famous statues of dying 
 Gauls, which were mistaken by our fathers for statues 
 of gladiators. There was one of a Galatian who had 
 just killed his wife, her body has fallen beside him, and 
 who is thrusting his sword into his own heart, in the 
 Villa Ludovisi (now destroyed) ; there is another of 
 the so-called gladiator, made famous by Byron's lines, 
 which shows us plainly how the triumph of the Attaiids 
 and the despair of the barbarians were represented in 
 Pergamene art. These examples and the large remains Pergamene art. 
 of the groups of reliefs, which adorned the sides of the 
 great altar, have afforded recent historians of Greek art 
 one of their most attractive chapters. It is remarkable, 
 however, that though these kings gathered a great 
 library, in imitation of that at Alexandria, and though 
 they had a school of Homeric critics, and though they 
 favored the great Stoic doctrine and patronized its mas- male no impor- 
 ters, the contribution of Pergamum to Greek literature bution to Greek 
 
 t1 • .1, literature. 
 
 amounts to nothing.* 
 
 * Cf. the discussion of the critical work of Crates and his school in Suse- 
 mil's book on " Alexandrian Literature," II., page i sqq.
 
 290 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Political con- 
 stitution of 
 Pergamum. 
 
 Its kings. 
 
 Wealth of the 
 Attalids. 
 
 What the inscriptions have taught us concerning the 
 political constitution of the state is far more instructive. 
 Pergamum appears to have had the regular constitution 
 of a Greek city, and all the extant decrees are passed by 
 the council and demos. The kings appear in fact out- 
 side the constitution, except that they nominate officers 
 called strategi, and these are mentioned as proposing 
 the decrees passed by the people. There are also 
 frequent decrees voting thanks, divine honors, etc., to 
 the kings as benefactors of the state, as if their actual 
 control of it was studiously ignored. Nevertheless 
 these kings had all the state and appointments of other 
 Hellenistic kings ; they had heroic honors and altars 
 erected to them during their lives ; they were deified 
 after their death ; in all the discussions with the Romans 
 and other foreign powers there is no mention of the 
 demos of Pergamum, but only of the king. 
 
 These curious facts point to a compromise between 
 the new Hellenistic and the old Hellenic ideas of city 
 government, and evidently a most successful compro- 
 mise. We do not hear of any struggles of the royalty 
 with the commons. When the last king had bequeathed 
 his rights and privileges to the Romans, we find the 
 people ready to adopt the cause of an illegitimate pre- 
 tender, who carried on for some years a dangerous war 
 with the power of Rome. The Attalids were evidently 
 very wealthy. Either by monopolizing the state domains 
 of the old Persian, and then Seleucid kings, which were 
 scattered all over Asia Minor, or by a judicious system 
 of taxation, they amassed sufficient treasure, in addition 
 to the original nine thousand talents held by Philetaerus, 
 to adorn their own capital with splendid temples, colon- 
 nades, altars, palaces. They even adorned Greek cities, 
 especially Athens, with works of art and of public
 
 The Hellenistic World, 250-150 B. C. 291 
 
 comfort. The first Attains had offered splendid groups 
 
 of statues on the Acropolis. The second Eumenes had 
 
 built a stoa or colonnade of which the remains are still 
 
 visible. Thus they preserved their popularity in Greece, 
 
 while they took care to help the Romans in their eastern 
 
 wars, and received after the battle of Magnesia (190 B. ^ewardufe"* 
 
 C. ) most of Asia Minor as a reward. Attahds. 
 
 It is quite possible that the peculiar constitution con- 
 structed by Augustus for his own empire at Rome owed 
 some of its characteristic features to Pergamum, as well 
 as to Alexandria. If the police and administration of 
 the city show traces of the latter, surely the curious 
 compromise of empire and republic, of a sovereign out- 
 side and yet controlling the state, of the mixture of 
 nominees of the crown and those elected by the people, Resemblance 
 of that curious fear of asserting royalty while securing ^^^^ 
 all its advantages, may have been borrowed by the £° t ™*" fpP. ire 
 shrewd and politic Augustus from the remarkable model, gamum. 
 which was so successful in the second century B. C.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 GREEK CULTURE UNDER THE ROMANS. 
 
 We have now brought Hellenic civilization down to 
 the time when the " cloud in the West" began to over- 
 shadow it. We have seen how after the disruption of 
 Alexander's empire, his successors and the old free 
 cities, amid many rivalries, many wars, many new foun- 
 dations, many destructions or amalgamations of old 
 ones, had nevertheless kept alive Hellenic culture. In- 
 deed, the existence of many centers for art and literature 
 must have been far more favorable, upon the whole, for 
 Numerous cen- the culture of the race and its dissemination among 
 lfterature kept neighboring races than if the whole empire had been 
 alive. ° U ture kept under one ruler, and all its greatest products cen- 
 tralized in one huge capital. We knew in the case of 
 Germany, during the earlier part of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, how many small courts, each promoting the arts, 
 the learning, the refinements of life, did far more for the 
 country than a centralized German empire will ever 
 effect. The rivalries of Alexandria, Antioch, Perga- 
 mum, Rhodes, Athens, and many other cities gave 
 scope for many artists, for many schools, and so main- 
 tained the varieties so characteristic to Greek culture, 
 even after many cities of old Greece were decayed, and 
 not likely to hold aloft the torch they had received from 
 their ancestors. We showed reason to believe that the 
 art of the period stood very high ; what we still have 
 from the tombs of Sidon and from the sculptures of Per- 
 gamum are of the first class. If they did not equal the
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 293 
 
 work of Phidias himself, they certainly equalled and 
 even exceeded the work of many of his lesser contem- 
 poraries, nor is it aught but narrowness of mind to pin 
 our faith to one epoch only, and refuse to admit perfec- So-called " de- 
 
 tr J ' i cadence of 
 
 tion in any other. The works alluded to are the only sculpture of 
 
 J } Hellenistic 
 
 specimens. The splendid groups known as the P eriod not 
 
 " r b 1 borne out by 
 
 Laocoon and the Toro Farnese (in Naples) show a extant sped- 
 
 v r J mens. 
 
 boldness of conception and daring of execution which 
 have many features distinctly in advance of the quieter 
 and less emotional earlier work. These groups handle 
 marble as easily as the painter uses colors ; and if we 
 would see how such work affects a great poet, we have 
 the famous scene in Virgil's yEneid describing the 
 priest's death, which was doubtless inspired by this very 
 group, then well known and already brought to Rome. 
 But if there be those who maintain that this extremely 
 passionate treatment in marble is traveling beyond the 
 sculptor's sphere — a statement to which I do not sub- 
 scribe — what will they say when they study the Venus Mno^fateness 
 of Melos (Milo) which was long believed to be of the ofitsdate 
 school of Phidias, and has only of recent years been dis- 
 covered to be a work not older than 150 B. C. ? Here 
 is repose, here are grace and dignity ; here are all the 
 perfections of the Golden Age found in a work of the 
 supposed decadence. The fact is that the majority of 
 the statues most celebrated throughout the world, and 
 copied for all our museums, are works of the Hellenistic 
 period, which were not wrought till after the death of 
 Alexander. 
 
 I cannot but think that a false impression regarding Reasons for 
 the plastic arts has been derived from the contempt in * he ^ or y fj 
 
 r 1 decadence in 
 
 which the polite literature of the age has been held. Hellenistic art. 
 The great philosophies, which were its glory, are only 
 preserved to us in fragments, and we know positively
 
 294 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Decadence of 
 stylo in the 
 Alexandrian 
 age did not 
 spread to the 
 other arts. 
 
 The critical 
 school of Alex- 
 andria dies out 
 in the reign of 
 Ptolemy VII. 
 
 Polyhius. 
 
 that they scorned the art of composition. The excessive 
 strictnesses and refinement of such work as that of Isoc- 
 rates, or of Demosthenes, must have seemed wasted 
 labor to men who had many weighty things to say, and 
 thought it of little importance how they said them. 
 But in the other branches of literature (excluding of 
 course pure science) a decadence of style cannot pos- 
 sibly be denied. The people of this age essayed all 
 kinds of composition ; they believed themselves as great 
 as their predecessors, if not greater ; yet in two small 
 departments only, that of bucolic poetry and in the epi- 
 gram, have they left us work worthy of their great tra- 
 ditions. Those who have felt this inferiority of style in 
 the third and second centuries B. C. are very apt to im- 
 agine that it was paralleled in other arts, and that the 
 men who wrote badly also carved and built and painted 
 badly. Such was not the case. If we but saw the dec- 
 orations of a Hellenistic palace, or the architecture of a 
 Hellenistic city, I feel sure that we should reverse our 
 judgments. 
 
 We have already considered the poetry of Alexandria, 
 and know how both this and the great critical school ap- 
 pear to die out in the time of the seventh Ptolemy. 
 When the great Scipio /Emilianus went to visit Egypt 
 in company with Pametius, he may still have found 
 there some eminent scientific men, but Aristarchus, the 
 king of critics and the last of his race, was in exile, and 
 perhaps even already dead. 
 
 But in Greece itself we have one great figure, the man 
 who lived to see the growth of the Roman Republic, the 
 conquest of Macedonia, the conquest of Greece, and its 
 final subjection to Rome. He stood between the living 
 and the dead, but the plague was not stayed. 
 
 This unique figure is the historian Polybius, to whom
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 295 
 
 we owe, even in his shattered and lacerated remains, al- 
 most all our knowledge of this momentous time. There 
 was no man better suited by his circumstances to be the 
 mirror of the a^e ; he had taken part in wars, in embas- His close asso- 
 
 * ciation with the 
 
 sies, in debates ; he had seen the courts of Alexandria, life oflh L e ,K°- 
 
 man nobility. 
 
 of Pergamum, probably of Macedonia, and his long in- 
 ternment in Italy was changed by good fortune into a 
 residence in the greatest noble house in Rome, where 
 he learned to know and to appreciate the real strength 
 and purity of the best Roman life. 
 
 From him then we can learn the aspects of Hellenism, 
 as they appeared to him. He was born of the better 
 classes, and always took the aristocratic side ; hence, 
 though he advocated all through his life the liberty of 
 the Greeks, he shows no real horror for tyrants as such, 
 and a very great respect for kings. He was quite accus- His aristocratic 
 tomed to royal courts as the home of good manners, and 
 often notices with serious displeasure breaches of eti- 
 quette. Courtiers were then what they are now, false, 
 smiling, obsequious people, and yet because they exer- 
 cise their vices for the pleasure of royalty, they are ex- 
 cused, and even applauded by society. But Polybius 
 could criticise even the manners of kings. He tells us 
 that the two great diplomatic qualities in a sovereign are 
 urbanity and secrecy. He must be courteous and keep 
 his temper under all circumstances : he must never be- 
 tray his confidants under any. He turns aside specially His ideal of 
 to commend a very wicked man, King Philip V. of 
 Macedon, for having carefully burnt all compromising 
 papers in his possession after his defeat at Cynosceph- 
 alae. His son Perseus, a boorish and miserly person, 
 who possessed no kingly instincts, neglected to do so 
 after the battle of Pydna, and brought thereby great 
 miseries upon the Greeks. For in that seething com-
 
 296 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Polvbius plays 
 an important 
 part in Greek 
 politics. 
 
 His contempt 
 for the -Sitolian 
 League. 
 
 Contrast be- 
 tween Roman 
 In mesty and 
 ( I reek treach- 
 ery. 
 
 plex of states full of patriots, full of traitors, full of 
 diplomacy, full of promises unfulfilled, there was corre- 
 spondence enough to ruin half the world. 
 
 Within Peloponnesus, where Polybius had his home, 
 he was a strong party politician. He was ever advoca- 
 ting the claims and the dignities of the Achaean League, 
 of which he was a very leading member ; he is ever 
 praising the political and military qualities of these 
 Achaeans and Arcadians, who produced at that time so 
 many remarkable men, and made so interesting an essay 
 in international politics. On the other hand, he will not 
 say a good word for the neighboring league of ^tolia, 
 which was no less important, and which, owing to its 
 naval side, found members far away through the Greek 
 world. He calls this league a mere set of pirates and 
 thieves, and accounts for their importance, and the re- 
 spect with which they were treated by kings and states 
 in international questions, by the statement that system- 
 atic injustice and violence cease to excite the indigna- 
 tion which single acts of the kind do, so that the villain 
 on principle is always more regarded and less censured 
 than the respectable man who commits a crime. 
 
 Such a judgment only shows how bitter a partisan 
 Polybius could be ; yet the facts of his history make it 
 plain that the standard of honesty, both political and 
 social, was very low at this epoch throughout the Hel- 
 lenistic world. This was the striking fact which came 
 out when the Greeks were compared with the Romans 
 in their first diplomatic relations. If a Roman gives 
 you his word you may trust him implicitly ; he will re- 
 store you a fortune if you intrust it to him ; whereas 
 sheaves of oaths and crowds of witnesses will not secure 
 a single talent for you in the hands of a Greek. These 
 contrasts of national honesty are very curious, all the
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 297 
 
 more curious because the old Spartan type in Greece 
 had been above the smallest suspicion of lying, while 
 the Roman aristocrats degenerated so rapidly by con- 
 tact with the Hellenistic world that honesty became as 
 rare among them as a white crow. The whole policy 
 even of the Roman Senate, in Polybius's own day, was g^^j^ 
 full of tortuous deceit ; if the collected body did not ^ e c g' r t e a e c k t s with 
 state open falsehoods this business was committed to in- 
 dividual commissioners or envoys who promised what 
 they liked, threatened whom they chose, and repudiated 
 what they found inconvenient. 
 
 Polybius, who is picturesque enough, and who has 
 left us some pages of brilliant descriptions, though his 
 style cannot be called elegant, is nowhere more striking 
 than when he describes (xxxix., 8-9) the despair that 
 fell upon the Peloponnesus, and indeed all Greece, 
 when the ultra-democratic party broke out openly 
 against the cold and selfish tyranny of the Romans, and Conquest of 
 
 *> J J . Greece by 
 
 brought upon them the Roman legions. Conquest in the Romans 
 those days was ruthless and brutal, but in this case all Polybius. 
 the more so because a strong, dominant, coarse people 
 overthrew the silly and sentimental resistance of a 
 people they disliked and despised, and disliked all the 
 more because they were unable to despise them without - 
 reservations. 
 
 For when all was said that could be said against 
 the Greeks, the fact remained that in the arts and refine- 
 ments of life all other nations were bound to borrow 
 from them and imitate them, nor could the Greek, even 
 were he a captive or a slave, conceal his contempt 
 for his boorish captor, or efface the contrast which any 
 
 .1 1 ii-i J .x. Failure of the 
 
 man could see between the loutish master and the Romans to ap- 
 lettered slave. Polybius was present at the sack of art treasures 
 Corinth, and told how he had seen soldiers playing dice
 
 298 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 upon the precious pictures of renowned artists ; others 
 added that Mummius had sent his spoil — unique pic- 
 tures, statues, ornaments — to Italy under contract with 
 the skippers that they should replace anything which 
 was lost ! This honest and bluff Roman, whom Polybius 
 considers not only just but even humane, had no appre- 
 ciation of Greek fineries. And yet he was a far safer 
 master than the snob who abandoned the simplicity 
 of his fathers, wore Greek clothes, and lisped bad Greek, 
 Gracomania wrote books in Greek (corrected by his slaves), and 
 Romans. e vaunted his descent from vEneas or his Trojan band. 
 
 These creatures had their Greek parallels — men like 
 Charops the ^Etolian, who used his fortune to live 
 at Rome, speak Latin, and teach the Romans to despise 
 his countrymen. The essays in approximation between 
 Greece and Rome were therefore at this moment most 
 unfortunate, and made by the most contemptible classes. 
 In art, of course, there was no question about Greek 
 superiority, but the Romans failed for a long time to see 
 that the importation of ready-made foreign refinement is 
 of little use, when the temper and taste of the recipients 
 are not sufficiently prepared. Polybius tells of one 
 of the early attempts to introduce flute playing, dancing, 
 and choral singing at the triumph of a victorious gen- 
 eral, L. Apicius, who had brought with him artists from 
 men e t k in e the e ;rts Greece (XXX., 14). When these famous performers be- 
 by^Roma,^ gan the audience were at first puzzled, then bored ; 
 at last a lictor indicated to them that the public expected 
 something of a physical contest. The ready Greeks 
 presently took up the idea, and the affair ended in a free 
 tight on the stage, to the complete satisfaction of the 
 crowd. ' ' What I have to say about the performance of 
 the Greek tragedies at the same time," says Polybius, 
 " will seem a humorous invention " ; but here the frag- 
 
 at this time.
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 
 
 299 
 
 ment breaks off, and we are left without further details. 
 Such, then, were the general conditions of Greece 
 when the absorbing process by Rome began. It pro- 
 ceeded by stages. Corinth was destroyed and Achaea 
 made a district under a Roman governor in 146 B. C. 
 Then the kingdom of Pergamum was bequeathed by 
 Attalus III. to the Romans and occupied by them as a 
 province in 130. There came a pause during the inter- 
 nal dissensions of the Gracchi, then of the great Social 
 War, and the conquest of Spain. But no sooner were 
 the military forces of the republic free than Pompey 
 conquered and settled the Seleucid dominion ; last of all 
 came the formal conquest of Egypt, spared long after 
 the fruit was ripe by the old and close friendship which 
 its dynasty had kept up with Rome, then when all such 
 considerations had no weight with Roman greed, when 
 the mutual jealousies of the leaders feared to let any one 
 ambitious man handle the vast wealth of this unique 
 kingdom. This is the general outline ; but for our pur- 
 poses it must be carefully remembered that the senti- 
 mentality and the policy of the Romans not only 
 permitted but encouraged what they called free and in- 
 dependent cities all through the Hellenistic world. It 
 was in these cities, impoverished, decayed, often treated 
 with brutal tyranny, that the Greek culture of former 
 days maintained itself, and recovered into no insignifi- 
 cant after-bloom. Even for them there was a frightful 
 pause in the early days of Roman domination. When 
 young patrician ruffians were let loose as praetors or 
 governors into these provinces, there was no sort of 
 oppression perpetrated by any old tyrant which ex- 
 ceeded their crimes. We have the case of Verres whom 
 Cicero attacked, that of Flaccus whom he defended, 
 which was perhaps nearly as bad ; we have the horrid 
 
 Gradual ab- 
 sorption of 
 Greece into the 
 Roman Empire. 
 
 The conquest 
 of Egypt. 
 
 Violence and 
 extortion prac- 
 ticed by Roman 
 governors in 
 their provinces.
 
 300 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 picture drawn by Seneca of the Roman praetor walking 
 about the public place at Ephesus among heads and lie- 
 tors and bodies, and when he heard the sound of the 
 rods, and saw the executions going on, perhaps for some 
 small offense, exclaimed with pride : "This is indeed 
 royal state ! ' ' 
 
 In addition to these villains was another class not 
 Roman specu- l ess destructive of all leisure and tranquillity, still more 
 
 lators in the * 
 
 provinces. G f any further developments of art or culture. I mean 
 
 the speculators who sought to squeeze from the prov- 
 inces gold for their luxuries or their ambitions at Rome. 
 The two classes of miscreants were not indeed distinct ; 
 cruelty, ostentation, and avarice were often blended in 
 these descendants of the honest and noble men who had 
 conquered Italy, and then had commenced, against their 
 will, to conquer the world. For the better of them 
 knew well enough, while they were drifting from one 
 foreign complication to another, that wild ambitions 
 were abroad, that the advocates of a strong outward 
 policy were not honestly trying to secure the frontiers of 
 Italy, but hoping for great careers for themselves. 
 
 The force of events was, however, too strong. Polyb- 
 ius himself does not see how Roman domination could 
 have been avoided ; and how rapidly honesty and all 
 other good principles died out of a people that had no 
 culture to depend on appears very clearly when we take 
 account of the case of Brutus, "the noblest Roman of 
 them all," which Cicero lets out in his correspondence 
 from Cilicia. He wanted, through an agent called Scap- 
 tius, to extract forty-eight per cent for a loan to the city 
 of Salamis in Cyprus, and because they did not pay, 
 shut up the senate of the city in their council house, till 
 one of them actually died of hunger ! This was the ten- 
 der creature who could not bear his companions, the 
 
 Roman 
 domination 
 
 inevitable. .
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 301 
 
 Roman aristocracy, to lose their license of harrying the 
 world, and so murdered his benefactor, and the world's 
 benefactor, because he crushed at once this shocking re- 
 publican tyranny. This was the same Brutus who, in 
 his campaign against Octavian and Antony, offered his 
 mercenary army, as a reward, the sack of perfectly inno- 
 cent Greek cities. There has seldom been a worse 
 criminal than Brutus, and all the worse because he Cold-blooded 
 
 cruelty of 
 
 assumes before the world the air of an apostle and Brutus. 
 a martyr, still worse even because the creature per- 
 suaded himself of his own moral magnificence, and 
 performed his detestable crimes with the air of piety and 
 virtue. These were the men who aped and crushed 
 Greek culture and Greek letters ; these were the men 
 who, when plundering by individual magistrates was 
 stopped, fought out their great civil war for supremacy 
 on Greek ground, and with Greek treasure and Greek 
 blood. 
 
 If the rapid Roman degradation be a striking sign of 
 the moral dangers of the want of education, the mainte- 
 nance of a high standard in the Greek world, in spite of 
 the terrible misfortunes of the first century B. C., is an 
 equally striking proof of the inestimable value of that 
 culture. There were indeed many polished villains, 
 many complaisant slaves, many advisers of evil, among 
 the Greeks who sought service in Roman houses. 
 There were philosophers resident there, in somewhat 
 the position of private chaplains, who knew how to phUosophens 
 justify the vices of their patrons by Epicurean philoso- Romanhouses. 
 phy, and who were not very bold to contradict a Roman 
 senator when he put the coarsest construction upon the 
 maxim of the pursuit of pleasure. Cicero has drawn a 
 very interesting picture of this sort of philosophical edu- 
 cation in his ribald speech "against Piso." But even
 
 302 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Philodemus 
 of Gadara. 
 
 Roman debt to 
 Greek culture. 
 
 Romans lacked 
 power to origi- 
 nate. 
 
 this creature had his domestic philosopher, the well- 
 known Philodemus, whose many tracts have been re- 
 covered from the lava of Herculaneum, and apparently 
 from his own (and Piso's) country library.* 
 
 Thus it happened that when the empire was estab- 
 lished, and the real pax Romana, with the blessed relief 
 of the suffering provincials, became an accomplished 
 fact, the Hellenistic culture became more than ever the 
 culture of the world. The Romans had attained to the 
 dignity of a conquering race ; they could now boast 
 of two or three generations of passable education ; they 
 who at the beginning of the epoch had been dying 
 to pose as Greeks, now began to fancy themselves the 
 more refined, and to speak even of the Greeks among 
 the "foreign nations." But all their posing and all their 
 assertion of their own high qualities against their east- 
 ern neighbors could not blind any man to the fact that 
 they owed all the more refined side of their life to 
 Greece. What Romans would ever have produced dur- 
 ing the troubles and terrors of the first century B. C. 
 such books as those of Diodorus or of Strabo ? What 
 Roman could attempt even to copy with success any 
 Greek masterpiece in marble or in color ? What Ro- 
 man could think out any new philosophic system, and 
 not rather follow afar off the instructions of Zeno, Epi- 
 curus, Arcesilaus, Carneades, so far as he could under- 
 stand them ? The cooking in great houses was done by 
 Greeks, the waiting also ; the appointments of the table 
 were copied from the splendors of Antioch, Alexandria, 
 or Pergamum ; old ware and silver were named and 
 prized according to the Greek workshop which had pro- 
 duced it ; even polite conversation was better carried on 
 
 ♦Concerning this man and Piso cf. my " Greek World under Roman Sway," 
 pages 127 sq.
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 303 
 
 in Greek. If the vices of Rome also became Greek, it 
 
 does not imply that they increased in quantity or in- o f r G d r ° n k nai r Ce 
 
 tensity ; the vices of boors are as great, and far more and refinement 
 
 J a > in Rome. 
 
 disgusting, than those of gentlemen ; refinement is gen- 
 erally on the side of virtue, and the love of the beautiful 
 in no way opposed to the love of the good. 
 
 Thus we have brought the subject down to the days 
 of the nascent empire, and may pause to consider how 
 far Augustus and his successors were influenced by Hel- 
 lenistic civilization, and how far they sought to make it 
 their model in the administration of their vast estate. 
 The constitution established, or adopted from the views 
 of Julius Caesar, who was a man of ideas as well as of ac- 
 tion, had evidently many important features borrowed Constitution of 
 
 rr ...... ~ the Roman Em- 
 
 from Hellenistic models. Caesar had already ordered pire borrowed 
 
 1 • c 1 -111-111 fronl Hellenistic ' 
 
 the mensuration 01 the empire by the skilled surveyors models. 
 who did that work on a small scale in the ever-changing 
 farms of the Nile Valley. He had likewise reformed the 
 calendar according to the changes commanded (but not 
 carried out) in the decree of Canopus.* 
 
 Augustus went in the same direction. Pretending, 
 like the kings of Pergamum, to be the accidental presi- 
 dent or head of a republic, he allowed all the old forms 
 to be kept up, while he interfered, not only by having 
 his nominees elected by the people, but by making his 
 administrators all powerful in some provinces, by claim- 
 ing a large royal estate from the domain of the republic, 
 by keeping control of the army, and establishing a 
 household corps in the city, by making the privy 
 council of his friends or advisers more important than 
 any of the decisions of the senate. Still more signifi- 
 
 1 11-1 r 1 1 • r a The worship 1 if 
 
 cant was the establishment of the worship of Augustus the emperors. 
 
 * Cf. my " Empire of the Ptolemies," page 235, for the text of the decree on 
 this important point.
 
 Greek Culture Under tlie Romans. 305 
 
 and of the fortune of Rome as a common cult in all the 
 cities of the empire. This was exactly what the Ptole- 
 mies had done, when they procured the proclamation by 
 the priests that their statues were to be set up in each 
 of the temples and beside the various gods of Egypt, 
 being declared contemplar gods. 
 
 All these things were therefore borrowed from Alex- 
 andria or from Pergamum. Augustus indeed made a 
 show of speaking Latin, and speaking it purely, but at 
 every turn he must have spoken Greek to servants, 
 confidential secretaries, artists, professional men ; he 
 was fond of sojourning at Samos or Rhodes, and so 
 breathing Hellenic air and quaffing Hellenic refinement. 
 The poets of this ae;e showed themselves as completely Augustan poets 
 
 . r & . . and their Greek 
 
 addicted to Greek models as their predecessors, but it models. 
 so happened that Virgil was far greater than the rest, 
 and that Horace went back to far better and older 
 models. It is for this reason that these Augustan poets 
 have made such a reputation for their age as a literary 
 age. Yet they were not less beholden to the Greeks 
 for meter, subject, and treatment than our architects 
 are nowadays to Gothic or classical models. It was as 
 impossible for a Roman to work out an original subject 
 and style in poetry as it is for an Englishman now to 
 construct a building in a style which shall not be bor- 
 rowed from classical, Renaissance, or Gothic models. 
 And in both cases the highest originality is asserted for 
 those that borrow most deftly, and steal without confin- 
 ing their theft to one model. 
 
 Greek culture was therefore in greater demand than 
 ever, though the Romans had for one hundred and still supreme, 
 fifty years done all they could to damage or destroy it, 
 and though the mischief done was irreparable. It was 
 all very well for humane and enlightened emperors to
 
 306 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Vitality of the 
 Greek race 
 apparently de- 
 cayed forever. 
 
 The survival 
 of the Greek 
 games and 
 the Eleusinian 
 Mvsteries. 
 
 spend great sums on the restoration of decayed or 
 ruined cities in Greece and Asia Minor, and to set up 
 colonnades and temples, to remit taxes in years of earth- 
 quake or famine. The health and vitality of the race 
 were gone. They could still teach their old masters ; 
 they could still copy their old statues ; they could still 
 expound the revived systems of Greek philosophy ; but 
 the age of new creation, of development, of great ideas, 
 was gone. 
 
 To all appearance these things were gone forever ; yet 
 after a century's rest we find this wonderful mine yield- 
 ing new veins of ore ; we find it the vehicle for the 
 Christian religion ; we find in Greek what could never 
 have been written in any other language, the gospels of 
 Jesus Christ, the epistles of St. Paul, the orations of Dio 
 Chrysostom, the "Lives" of Plutarch. Of these we 
 shall speak presently. For the present we must delay 
 to note that still in the decayed towns of Greece there 
 were shadowy assemblies, powerless resolutions of 
 councils and citizens, elections to high offices — all the 
 outward show and paraphernalia of the antique free citv. 
 What was much more interesting to Romans and 
 foreigners of taste, there were numerous festivals for 
 athletics and for literary contests, some, like the Olym- 
 pian and Pythian games, reaching back into hoar 
 antiquity, others founded in Hellenistic days, where the 
 old customs and old amenities of life were shown to 
 visitors, especially visitors of the dominant race. There 
 were still the Eleusinian Mysteries, sacred rites in Samo- 
 thrace and elsewhere, where the pious and the archaeo- 
 logical could find ample edification and instruction, and 
 there still remain countless inscriptions set up in honor 
 of rich citizens, or benevolent strangers, for having 
 spent money and care upon the endowment and sustain-
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 307 
 
 ment of these ceremonies. It became the fashion of 
 noble Romans to give endowments of various kinds to 
 the Greeks ; an Appius Claudius built a new entrance 
 to the great temple of Demefer at Eleusis, of which the ^enfof Greek" 
 foundations are now visible ; Cicero contemplated some- temples, 
 thing similar ; and the remaining Hellenistic kings in 
 the East emulated in the first years of the empire the 
 liberalities whereby the Hellenistic monarchs and tyrants 
 had kept the furious hatreds of the democracies in 
 abeyance, and even produced pompous decrees of good- 
 will toward themselves from the men who would cry, 
 the same day, " Death to the tyrant. " But the Greeks 
 never showed much dislike on principle to a tyrant who 
 did not press upon themselves, especially if he was 
 liberal with gifts. Who had been the great benefactors 
 to Athens, Olympia, Delphi, among the Hellenistic 
 kings ? First of all, the Ptolemies, bad and good, who 
 were almost always on good terms with the Greek 
 democracies, then individually Eumenes II., who had 
 bought the island of yEgina from the victorious Romans 
 for ready money, and whose offers of money to condone 
 this act were so indiscreet as to produce the rarest of Greeceamong 
 phenomena, a refusal on the part of the Achaean kin g s. e 
 League,* then Antiochus Epiphanes, who filled Greece 
 with his donations, then Herod the Great. Now both 
 the latter were active propagators of Hellenism in their 
 own dominions, and both had striven to force its 
 customs upon the recalcitrant Jews ; inside their own 
 dominions, therefore, they were godless and ruthless 
 tyrants ; in Greece or Asia Minor they were mild and 
 generous benefactors, blessed in honorary decrees by 
 many grateful communities. 
 
 This long habit of receiving donations and begging 
 
 * Cf. Polybius XXII., 10-12.
 
 3 o8 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Greece a favor- 
 ite haunt of Ro- 
 man tourists. 
 
 The afterglow 
 of Greek liter- 
 
 for them, this long obsequiousness to the great people 
 of other lands, this pliant submission to the task of mak- 
 ing tyrants popular and masters seem cultivated, would 
 surely have degraded any other people than the Greeks. 
 But their ancient heritage could not all be taken from 
 them. There were still in many temples of the land 
 statues of gods and goddesses, portraits of heroic men, 
 which fascinated the world, and made Greece the 
 favorite ground for all intelligent pleasure-seekers. Like 
 the Italy of our day, with its wonderful medieval 
 riches, so Greece in Roman days was the tourist's 
 Elysium. We still have from the hand of Pausanias, an 
 enthusiastic archaeologist in the second century, a 
 description of the old sites, shrines, and historic monu- 
 ments all over the country, and then at least we find 
 that public taste had gone beyond the Golden Age 
 back to the archaic, and admired things not because 
 they were beautiful, but because they were old. Even 
 the rudest things that remained then found men to study 
 them, and profess that they loved them, as is often the 
 case in our own century. 
 
 But I must hurry on to the great books which mark 
 the close of my subject. After the spread of Christianity 
 the power of Hellenism indeed remains, but the interests 
 of the world are changing. Up to the flourishing and 
 thoroughly Hellenistic reign of Hadrian this is not so, 
 and we have a splendid afterglow, or shall I call it a 
 Martinmas summer, in literature, which shows very 
 clearly that much of the old gentleness and urbanity and 
 real refinement lived throughout the cities, and even in 
 the glens and mountains of this fascinating country. 
 
 But let us say a word in passing upon the Greek of 
 Palestine in the middle of the first century, that Greek 
 which comes before us in the New Testament. Nothing
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 309 
 
 is more indisputable than that the Greek language, and 
 . not the Hebrew, was from the first the vehicle of the T , h ? Greek 
 
 of the New 
 
 new world-religion. To any one who has considered Testament, 
 the conditions of the Roman Empire at that time, the 
 thing seems not only obvious but necessary. A religion 
 preached in Latin or in Hebrew could never have ex- 
 tended over the world. The " common dialect," which 
 was known to every society from the Tigris to the 
 Tagus, was the essential vehicle for such a movement. 
 I advert next to the fact that the language as used by 
 the men of Judaea appears to us from an artistic point of 
 view vastly superior to the labored and rhetorical work 
 which we find among learned writers in this century. 
 To those who are familiar with first century "common 
 dialect" there appears at once in the Synoptic Gospels a fectionlnthe 
 simplicity, a picturesqueness perfectly new and strange, ment. Testa ~ 
 and fresh up to the present day. The actual language 
 is not refined Greek, the vocabulary is poor, the gram- 
 matical forms often debased ; but far above these details 
 is the spirit, the literary conception of a life to be written 
 without ornament, without reflection, without the 
 writer's personality, without moral applications. I can- 
 not express to the reader how strange this all appears to 
 me in that age and in that society. Yet to all this Greek 
 lends itself perfectly, and speaks with this new voice as 
 with all the many voices it had already assumed. 
 
 When we come to such books as St. John's gospel 
 and the epistles of St. Paul, we again find ourselves in 
 a familiar atmosphere. Here we have the metaphysical 
 side, the language of the schools, the terms of phi- 
 losophy, used by men who had studied in the manner Hign average 
 that Greeks only studied, and who spoke to an audience SPthe Greeks^ 
 more intelligent than any average public from that day epistles of the 
 to this. It is still to me a matter of daily wonder how St '
 
 310 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 His meta- 
 plivKh s under- 
 stood by the 
 average Hellen- 
 istic audience. 
 
 This culture 
 not an affair of 
 race. 
 
 the epistles of St. Paul, addressed not to the ilite of so- 
 ciety, not to the learned, or the members of the schools, 
 but to lower classes, to slaves, at best to the average so- 
 ciety of the city he addressed, could not only have been 
 intelligible, but practical and effective teaching. After 
 centuries of commentary and explanation, after a fa- 
 miliarity of many years, we learn to follow their subtle 
 and tangled arguments. But what should we say if any 
 of them appeared now suddenly as open letters ad- 
 dressed to any ordinary city in America ? The apostle 
 himself was a trained man, versed in the controversies 
 of the schools at Tarsus, and from such in that day we 
 might fairly expect considerable mental training, but 
 what shall we say of his hearers ? Perhaps in the whole 
 of the preceding volume I have produced no argument 
 so convincing to an American audience of the abnormally 
 high position I claim for the average Greek civilization. 
 The arguments of the early Christian teachers are ad- 
 dressed, I contend, to hearers far more educated in the 
 proper sense than we are. Their faculties of apprehen- 
 sion of an argument, sustained attention to its details, 
 readiness to grasp its intricacies, were far higher than 
 ours. Nor can we say that it was affair of race. The 
 populations addressed by Paul were mixed in blood, 
 confused in nationality, often oriental, often occidental, 
 agreeing only in the one primary condition : they had 
 all learned Greek, and through it they had been com- 
 pelled to adopt Hellenistic culture. 
 
 Further than this I dare not go into the questions 
 which encompass the relation of this great engine of 
 civilization to the new force which Jesus Christ had just 
 brought into the world. This is no book of theology, still 
 less of controversy, and the mere suggestions I have made 
 will be enough for the frame which I now desire to fill.
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 
 
 3ii 
 
 I will not delay the reader with the lighter effusions of 
 the day, that host of epigrams which remained fashion- 
 able for some centuries and which are collected in the 
 big book called the " Anthology." For these exercises 
 of wit are seldom serious ; they are only meant to show 
 the artist's cunning ; what real life they regard is of a 
 description not suitable for general discussion. But 
 there were serious men in the closing first century 
 whose work is even now well worth studying : Dionysius 
 of Halicarnassus, the archaeologist and critic ; the author 
 of the tract "On the Sublime" ; Dio of Prusa (called 
 Chrysostom) ; and, above all, Plutarch. These men 
 honored learning, advocated good taste, and promoted 
 good morals and educated life. Yet their works are so 
 little read nowadays that I feel constrained to cite 
 passages from them in support of what I say. Let us 
 consider what Dio recommended by way of the best 
 reading in a time when the world had been flooded with 
 all manner of tawdry and meretricious literature. 
 
 Let Homer of course be your daily spiritual bread, the 
 beginning, middle, and end of every culture, for young and 
 old, who gives to each as much as he can receive. Lyric 
 and elegiac poetry is all very well, if you have great leisure, 
 otherwise you may pass it by. Thus in tragedy you may 
 prefer Euripides, and in comedy Menander to the older and 
 perhaps greater masters, because they contain more practical 
 wisdom. History is essential, but Herodotus for charm and 
 Thucydides for excellence are far superior to Ephorus, Theo- 
 pompus, and the rest. 
 
 In oratory Demosthenes is of course supreme in force 
 and Lysias in the disguise of force, but Dio recommends 
 Hypereides and ./Eschines, as it is easier to understand 
 their art. Nor will he object to the modern rhetoricians 
 of the previous generation being studied, especially as 
 men approach them with a free critical spirit, and not in 
 
 Epigrams in the 
 "Anthology." 
 
 Dionysius of 
 Halicarnassus. 
 
 Dio of Prusa. 
 
 The reading 
 recommended 
 by Dio. 
 
 In oratory Dio 
 recommends 
 Hypereides 
 and ^Eschines.
 
 312 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 The treatise 
 "On the Sub- 
 lime " formerly 
 attributed to 
 Longinus. 
 
 Outlines of the 
 treatise. 
 
 that slavish admiration which they feel toward the 
 ancients. Among Socratic thinkers none is serviceable 
 to the man of action except Xenophon, who indeed is 
 in history also the most perfect and excellent of masters. 
 
 Such is the training in letters recommended by the 
 most eminent orator of his century. It is only vague 
 and general, not going into any detailed criticism ; and 
 this generality is also the character of the tract " On the 
 Sublime," formerly attributed to Longinus, but now 
 placed by general agreement at the close of the 
 Augustan Age, and in that moment of reaction from 
 Alexandrianism and Asianism to the pure Atticism of 
 the Golden Age. This essay seeks to stimulate a taste 
 for the real masterpieces in letters rather than to give 
 any analysis of their excellence ; it is the writing of a 
 clever dilettante rather than of a professor, and though 
 very valuable in directing the public taste, can hardly 
 be said to have contained new knowledge. And yet 
 among all the books of this age none has received more 
 attention than this remarkable tract. It is certainly the 
 most modern and enlightened of all that the Greeks 
 have left us on the theory of art. Unfortunately the 
 text is miserably lacerated, and often breaks off in the 
 middle of an important discussion. 
 
 The general attitude the author assumes is that 
 though genius is distinctly heaven-born, its splendid re- 
 sults are attained by using the resources of art. He 
 rightly holds fast to the great Greek principle that noth- 
 ing perfect can be produced without study, that spon- 
 taneity may suggest but will never work out what is 
 really beautiful or majestic. But at the same time he 
 agrees perfectly with modern criticism in recognizing 
 that irregularities may be only a flaw in genius of the 
 highest order, perhaps even a characteristic of such
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 313 
 
 genius, seeing that unvarying correctness is seldom, if 
 
 ever, the attribute of the highest work. Thus in criti- ( 'titicism of the 
 
 rhetor Caecihus. 
 
 cising the rhetor Caecilius, who was evidently the advo- 
 cate of strict correctness, and who consequently placed 
 the pellucid but thin graces of Lysias above the richness 
 of Plato, he breaks out into the following reflections : 
 
 What was in the minds of those godlike men who aimed at 
 the highest perfections of their art, when they despised minute 
 accuracy of detail ? This among many other considerations, 
 that nature hath not made our species mean and ignoble 
 creatures, but introducing us to life and all the universe around 
 it as to a great festival and pageant, to be spectators of all its 
 grandeur and keen competitors for its prizes, hath engrained in 
 our souls an indelible love of everything that is great and there- 
 fore more divine than ourselves. Hence it is that to the specu- Man is bom 
 lation of man and the reach of his imagination not all the uni- [h S id V al after 
 verse sufnceth, but our thoughts are ever passing its furthest 
 bounds, so that if any one will consider in his own life how far 
 the great exceeds the beautiful, he will know forthwith where- 
 unto we were created. It is nature which tells us not to ad- 
 mire the rivulet though it be pellucid and fit for use, but the 
 Nile, the Ister, the Rhine, and above all the ocean ; nor are we 
 struck by the fire upon the hearth, however clear be its flame, 
 but rather by the celestial fires, oft though they be obscured, 
 or again by the crater of /Etna, whose eruptions cast from its 
 abysses great rocks and vast masses, and send forth rushing 
 torrents of essential fire. 
 
 On these grounds he worships the capricious and 
 variable Plato, and appreciates the splendors of the 
 rugged Thucydides. If there be a flaw in his judgment 
 it is in his coldness toward Aristophanes. 
 
 Far more precise were the studies of Dionysius on the 
 great prose writers of his people, especially on the ora- Dj onvsius . s 
 tors ; and had all his work been preserved we might GreeiTprose 
 well say that ancient criticism had nothing more to add to 
 his researches. And yet even he does not seem to have 
 led a school, but to have been an independent thinker. 
 
 writers.
 
 314 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 His extant studies upon Demosthenes and upon Thu- 
 cydides make us regret deeply the loss of most of his 
 parallel studies on the other orators. Dio, in some of 
 his orations, speaks as if the decadence of Greece was 
 hopeless and complete. But we cannot but suspect that 
 some allowance must be made for this citizen of a 
 second-rate and newly civilized town in remote Asia 
 Minor, who cannot but have desired to uphold Asiatic 
 Hellenism and other prosperous Asiatic Greeks, at the 
 expense of the poor and decayed cities of older and 
 greater fame in Greece itself. 
 
 For there is considerable reason to think that the 
 Partial revival days of Dio were by no means the worst which Greece 
 had seen, but that a considerable revival had taken 
 place since its complete exhaustion after the great civil 
 wars with their terrible requisitions upon life and prop- 
 erty. It is true, and very remarkable, that Asia Minor 
 revived and recovered her commercial prosperity with 
 promptitude and lasting success, whereas that of Greece 
 can hardly ever be called flourishing again till the trade 
 in silk and in currants made some stir in Justinian's 
 time. Still there were always certain articles of export 
 which, in other days and with other habits, would have 
 employed much industry. Horses from the now ex- 
 tended pastures of the depopulated country, oil from 
 other provinces as well as Attica, honey from the slopes 
 of Mount Hymettus, were always prized. Far more 
 Trade in profitable to labor was the production — no longer as a 
 
 statues ' fine art, but as a trade — of statues at Athens and 
 
 elsewhere for the adornment of Asiatic and Italian 
 temples ; so were the famous marble quarries of the 
 Cyclades, which seem, however, like the gold and silver 
 mines, to have been often a monopoly of the Romanyfa- 
 cus, and thus less productive than might be expected.
 
 Greek Culture Under the Roma?is. 
 
 315 
 
 Dio's picture 
 of life at 
 Borysthenes. 
 
 Dio was an itinerant orator, who desired to be 
 thought a moral preacher, not teaching any special phi- 
 losophy but using his great eloquence to enforce the 
 ordinary and received catalogue of social and moral vir- Dio a preacher 
 tues, especially the social which were akin to politics, 
 and which affected the general well-being of each city. 
 For this purpose he not only uses argument, but par- 
 ables, if I may so call the picturesque descriptions of 
 remote or primitive life among poor and unknown 
 Greeks, which are meant in their simplicity and purity 
 to afford a contrast to the life in Alexandria or in 
 Antioch. I shall quote from the two most remarkable. 
 
 The first is the picture he gives of life at Borysthenes, a 
 Greek settlement at the mouth of the Dnieper on the north 
 coast of the Euxine, whose inhabitants had long been severed 
 from their mother country, and surrounded with Scythian bar- 
 barians far more intractable to civilization than Parthians or 
 even Celts. The introduction to this speech, which is really an 
 essay on monarchy, as suggested by monotheism, or monarchy 
 among the gods, is like the scenery of the oration "On 
 Poverty," which we shall presently discuss; and therefore I 
 cannot but suspect the former, as I suspect the latter, of being 
 mere dramatic invention. Thus in discussing with the Borys- 
 thenites the Platonic view that the rule of one man is best, he 
 never once alludes to the fact that the " Bosporan kingdom," 
 which included the Crimea and the Greek marts on either side 
 of it, had not been for a long time under the control of kings — 
 the last kings tolerated within the Roman sway, a nominal 
 kingdom till the reign of Constantine. In Dio's time Pliny 
 mentions a messenger from King Sauromates coming to Nicaea. 
 If it be however true that the town of Olbia (the other name 
 for Borysthenes) was left independent, it would still be more 
 odd that he should discuss with a " free people" the propriety 
 of monarchy without the smallest allusion to the practical bear- 
 ing of the question. Still, as he repeats in his " Olympica " 
 that he had visited this outlying region from curiosity, I think 
 we may, in this case, accept the sophist's picture as historical. 
 
 He begins with a very graphic description of the city lying 
 
 Description of 
 the Euxine 
 cities.
 
 316 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Dio's descrip- 
 tion of Borys- 
 thenes. 
 
 Greek cities 
 weakened by 
 attacks of the 
 barbarians. 
 
 His meeting 
 with the inhab- 
 itants. 
 
 on a tongue of land where the great rivers Borysthenes and 
 Tanais meet, and thence continue their course to the sea over 
 vast shallows studded with lofty reeds, which appear like a 
 forest of masts to approaching mariners. Here was the great 
 factory for preparing salt which supplied all the barbarians of 
 the interior. The city itself he found greatly shrunken away by 
 successive stormings of the surrounding barbarians, with whom 
 it had been for centuries at war— the last great reverse being 
 the conquest by the Getae of the whole coast as far as Apol- 
 lonia about 120 B. C. From this the Greek cities had never 
 recovered, some being wholly deserted, others rebuilt on a 
 small scale, and obliged to admit barbarians as occupiers. 
 Borysthenes, however, was settled again, to serve as a mart for 
 the Scythians with the Greeks, who would otherwise have 
 abandoned altogether any attempt to deal with the barbarians. 
 Yet even in its restored state the houses were mean and the 
 area of the city contracted. It was attached, so to speak, to 
 part of the old circuit wall, with a few towers remaining of the 
 old size and strength. The new wall, which joins the arc of 
 the old circuit, is low and weak, and the area within only 
 partially occupied by houses. There are solitary towers still 
 standing out in the country far apart from the present town. 
 Another sign of its old disaster is that not a single statue in the 
 shrines is intact, but all are mutilated, as are also those on the 
 other monuments of the city. 
 
 Such was the town which Dio was observing with interest on 
 a summer forenoon from the suburb along the river. Some of 
 the townsmen joined him, and there comes up on horseback a 
 fine young man, who dismounts and gives his horse to an 
 attendant. 
 
 "Under his short light black Greek cloak (black in imitation 
 of the Scythians) he had a huge sword and trousers, and in fact 
 Scythian dress. This Callistratus was reputed equally formid- 
 able in battle and zealous in philosophy. Indeed the whole 
 population is so devoted to Homer and to the worship of his 
 Achilles (whose temple is on a neighboring island) that 
 though they talk very bad and barbarized Greek, most of them 
 have Homer off by heart ; a few go so far as to study Plato." 
 
 Dio then quotes to them a saw of Phocylides, whose name 
 they do not know, and makes some disparaging remark on 
 Homer and his many details of Achilles's jumping and shout-
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 317 
 
 ing, while the Gnomic poet gathers much ethical wisdom into 
 
 a couplet. They tell Dio that but for their extreme respect and 
 
 liking for him, no citizen of the place would have tolerated 
 
 any aspersion upon the divine Achilles and the well-nigh divine 
 
 Homer. But they are ready to hear what Dio has to say, even of Homer" " P 
 
 though they run some risk in discoursing with him outside the 
 
 city. 
 
 "For yesterday at noon the Scythians surprised our sentries, 
 slaying some, and taking others alive, as we did not know Dio , s discou 
 which way they had fled, and could not help them, and even in the city, 
 then the gates had been shut, and the war signal was flying 
 from the walls." 
 
 Yet so keen were they that they all came down armed to hear 
 him. Dio then proposes not to discourse on the promenade, 
 but to go inside the city, and they gather at the public place in 
 front of the Temple of Zeus — the magistrates and elders sitting 
 round upon stone steps, and the crowd standing behind them. 
 The sight was delightful to a philosopher, to see these people 
 dressed in antique fashion with long hair and beards, one of 
 them only being cropped and shaven, much to their disgust 
 and contempt. For he was supposed to be obsequious to the 
 Romans and to have adopted their fashion accordingly. 
 
 I need not go into Dio's discourse, which is most politely 
 interrupted by one who tells him how scarce is a decent visitor 
 in these parts. 
 
 " For most of the Greeks who come are more barbarous than 
 we are, traders and hucksters, bringing in worthless rags and 
 bad wine and getting nothing better in exchange." 
 
 Starting from a query about Plato, Dio then discourses in 
 favor of an intelligent monarchy. 
 
 Let us now turn to a very different picture — that of primitive 
 rural life in his seventh oration. 
 
 " This [he opens] I am going to narrate from my own ex- 
 perience, not from hearsay. For perhaps loquacity and the ^fpdmiUve 6 
 difficulty of dropping a subject are not only features of old age ruraI life 
 — they may also be the characteristics bred by a roving life, 
 probably because in each case there are many experiences 
 which men recall with pleasure. I am now going to tell what 
 men and manners I stumbled upon, I may say, in the midst of 
 Hellas. 
 
 " I happened to be crossing from Chios with some fishermen
 
 318 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 in a very little boat, not in the summer season. A great storm 
 rose, and with difficulty we escaped into the ' hollows of 
 Eubcea.' There they smashed the boat, running her ashore 
 on a rough shingle beach under the cliffs, and they went off to 
 some purple-shell fishers at anchor inside the nearest claw of 
 land, intending to work with them and remain there. So I was 
 left behind alone, with no place of refuge, and I was wandering 
 at random along the shore, on the chance of meeting some ship 
 at anchor or sailing by. After a long walk, during which I did 
 not meet a soul, I came upon a buck which had just fallen from 
 the cliff down to the very edge of the water, still gasping as it 
 was being touched by the waves. And presently I thought I 
 heard the baying of dogs far above me, indistinctly by reason 
 of the roar of the sea. Proceeding therefore, and climbing up 
 with great difficulty to the height above me, I found the dogs 
 beating about, which I concluded had forced the game to spring 
 over the cliff, and presently I came upon a man, whose look 
 and dress implied a hunter, of healthy complexion, wearing his 
 hair long behind in no unmanly fashion, but like the Euboeans 
 whom Homer describes coming to Troy. And he hailed me : 
 ' Stranger, have you seen a buck coming this way ? ' to which 
 hunts'man he I answered : ' There he is in the wash of the sea ' ; and I 
 brought him down to his game. So he drew the buck back 
 from the water, and skinned him with his knife, I helping as 
 well as I could, and then he took the haunches with the skin, 
 and proceeded to carry them away. He invited me too to fol- 
 low and eat a share of the venison, as his dwelling was not far 
 off. ' When you have rested the night with us you can come 
 back to the sea, since at present sailing is impossible ; nor need 
 you apprehend that there will be a change while you are rest- 
 ing, for I should be glad to think the storm would subside 
 within the next five days, but it is not likely, so long as you 
 seethe mountain tops capped with clouds as they now are.' 
 He went on to ask whence I came, and how I got there, and 
 whether my boat was not wrecked. ' It was a very small 
 one,' I answered, 'belonging to fishermen, who were cross- 
 ing, and I, being pressed for time, was their only passenger, 
 but we were wrecked upon the shore.' 'Very naturally — 
 look how wild the coast is. This is what they call the " hol- 
 lows of Eubcea," and a ship driven in here hardly ever gets out 
 again. Even the crews are generally lost, unless they are in
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 
 
 3i9 
 
 very light boats, like yours. But come with me and don't fear. 
 First get over your fatigues, and to-morrow we shall consult 
 what to do to send you on safe, as we have now made acquaint- 
 ance with you. For you seem to me some city person, not a 
 sailor or a mechanic, and to have worn down your body by 
 some other kind of hardship than theirs.' I of course went 
 with him gladly, for I never was afraid of being robbed, having 
 nothing with me but a shabby cloak — so hallowed and sacro- 
 sanct a thing have I found poverty, which men violate more 
 rarely even than they would a herald with his insignia. 
 
 ' ' On the way he told me how he lived with his wife and chil- 
 dren. ' There are two of us living in the same place ; we 
 have married sisters, and both have sons and daughters. We 
 live mostly by the chase, with the help of a little farming. For 
 the land is not ours, but our fathers were poor and free like 
 ourselves, earning their bread by herding cattle for one of the 
 rich men of this island who possessed many droves of horses 
 and oxen, many flocks of sheep, many broad acres, and much 
 other wealth ; in fact all the mountains you see around you. 
 But when he died, and his property was confiscated — they say 
 he was put to death by the emperor [Nero?] for the sake of his 
 wealth — his herds were at once driven away, and with them 
 some of our few poor beasts, and nobody thought of paying 
 our wages. So we had to remain where we were with what 
 cattle we had left, setting up some tents, and a courtyard fenced 
 with paling, not large but secure, on account of the calves, for 
 our summer use. For in winter we grazed the plains, where 
 we had plenty of grass and made hay. In the summer we go 
 off to the mountains.' " 
 
 The orator proceeds to describe in detail the beautiful situa- 
 tion of these hunters' home, on a slope close to running water, 
 with fruitful patches of land well manured from their stable, 
 and fair trees giving ample shade. And as they had spare time 
 they turned from herding to hunting with their dogs ; for when 
 the cattle were all driven away, two of the dogs who went 
 with them, missing the herdsmen, turned back after some time 
 to their accustomed home. 
 
 "These dogs followed the herdsmen, and only gradually 
 learned to pursue game, being originally mere watch-dogs to 
 keep off wolves. ' But when winter came on our parents had 
 no out-of-door work, and they never went down to the city or 
 
 A hunter's life. 
 
 Beautiful situ- 
 ation of the 
 hunter's home.
 
 320 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 any village ; so they made their huts and courtyards water-tight 
 and comfortable, and took into cultivation the land about them, 
 and found hunting far easier in the winter. For tracks are 
 clearer in the wet soil, and snow shows the game far off, and 
 leaves tracks as clear as a high road.' " 
 
 So they settled there, and were content. The two original 
 settlers were now dead, having lived out a hale and vigorous 
 old age. One of their widows still remained. It was her son 
 whom Dio had met. 
 
 "'The other man [his cousin] has never been to the city, 
 
 though now fifty years old, but I twice only — once with my 
 
 The hunter's father when we kept the great man's herds, and again when a 
 
 visit to the city. , . r . r . , , 
 
 man came asking us for money, as if we had any, and com- 
 manding us to follow him to the city. We swore we had none, 
 for we would have given it to him at once if we had. So we 
 entertained him as best we could, and gave him two buckskins, 
 and then I went with him to the city [probably Carystos, 
 though Dio takes care to leave it so vague that Chalcis would 
 suit as well]. For he said one of us must go and tell all about 
 it. So I saw again many great houses and a strong wall round 
 them with square towers in it, and many ships lying in the 
 harbor, as if in an inland lake. We have nothing like it here, 
 where you landed ; that is why the ships get lost. These 
 things I saw and a great crowd gathered together with much 
 confusion and shouting, so that I thought there was a general 
 fight going on. 
 
 " 'The man then brought me to the magistrates, and said 
 
 laughing: "This is the man you sent me for, but he owns 
 
 nothing except his back hair and a hut of very strong sticks ! " 
 
 Then the magistrates went to the theater, and I along with 
 
 them.' " 
 
 The hunter here describes the theater, adding : 
 
 " ' Perhaps you are laughing at me for telling you what you 
 
 A public know quite well. For some time the mob was engaged at 
 
 meeting. other things, at times shouting in good humor and applauding, 
 
 at times the very reverse. This, their anger, was dangerous, 
 
 and they terrified the men at whom they shouted, so that some 
 
 went round supplicating, and some threw off their cloaks in 
 
 dread, for the sound was like a sudden wave, or thunder. 
 
 Indeed I myself was almost knocked down by the shout. And 
 
 various people got up to address the assembly from the midst
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 321 
 
 of it, or from the stage ; some with few words, others with 
 many. Some they listened to for a long time ; others they 
 would not stand from the outset, or allow them to utter a 
 syllable.' " 
 
 I cannot give the sequel, which goes on through 
 several pages of additional matter not less interesting, 
 and which ends with a charming love affair.* But 
 enough has been said to show that in the opinion of this 
 very competent judge, the lowest and poorest country- 
 people and the most outlying settlements belonging to 
 the Hellenic nation still maintained that high level of 
 intelligence and of taste which made them the models 
 and the instructors of surrounding nations. 
 
 We pass in conclusion to Plutarch, who, if Dio was a 
 
 , .... . Plutarch not 
 
 roving or vagabond teacher, practicing his persuasive- a traveler. 
 ness upon all the cities of Asiatic Greece in turn and 
 even going to Rome on his mission, was the very 
 opposite ; a stay-at-home in the small town of Chae- 
 ronea in Bceotia, which he would not desert, says he, lest 
 so it might become smaller. But from here he sent out 
 his moral and historical treatises into the world, where 
 they have never ceased to be popular, often to be most 
 effective in their teaching. All political life of a serious 
 kind was gone ; the public questions which remained 
 were not worth quarrelling about ; though this con- 
 sideration does not seem to have allayed local jealousies 
 and heart-burnings. 
 
 It is this altered state of public life which justifies 
 Plutarch's portrait of the ideal Greek citizen, the popu- 
 lar man in the true sense of the word, a portrait which resemblance 
 we cannot but suspect to be intended for his own. For l 
 the naive self-consciousness of the man appears through 
 every part of his works. In this, as in so many other 
 
 *The reader will find the full text in my "Greek World under Roman 
 Sway," Chap. XII.
 
 322 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Plutarch's por- 
 trait of the ideal 
 Greek citizen. 
 
 His preference 
 for monarchy. 
 
 features, both of his inner spirit and his outward sur- 
 roundings, does he remind us of Polybius, whose prin- 
 ciples and policy, though adopted at the very outset 
 of this decadence, were so closely analogous. Upon 
 this resemblance I desire particularly to insist, for I 
 know no more remarkable evidence of the persistence of 
 the same kind of life and thinking in Greece for at least 
 two hundred years. Here is the portrait in question : 
 
 First of all let him be easy of access, and the common prop- 
 erty of all ; keeping open house, as it were a harbor of refuge 
 to all that need it ; showing his protection and his generosity 
 not merely in cases of want and by active help, but also in sym- 
 pathy with the afflicted, and rejoicing with those that rejoice ; 
 never annoying others by bringing with him a crowd of attend- 
 ants to the public baths, or by securing good places at the the- 
 ater ; never notorious for his offensive luxury and lavishness, 
 but living like the rest of his neighbors in dress and diet, in the 
 bringing up of his children, and the appointments of his wife, 
 as intending to be a man and a citizen on a par with the public 
 about him. He should also be ever ready to give friendly ad- 
 vice and gratuitous advocacy, and offer sympathetic arbitration 
 in differences of man and wife, of friend and friend, spending no 
 small part of the day on the bema or in the market-place, and in 
 all his other life drawing to him, as the south wind does the 
 clouds, wants and trusts from all sides, serving the state with 
 his private thoughts, and not regarding politics, as many do, a 
 troublesome business or tax upon his time, but rather a life's 
 work. By these and all other such means he attracts and 
 attaches to him the public, which contrasts the bastard and 
 spurious fawning and bribing in others with this man's genuine 
 public spirit and character. 
 
 There had been days when such a man would have 
 hoped for absolute sway in his city, nor do Plutarch's 
 tirades against tyrants, copied from the commonplaces 
 of the old dispossessed aristocrats, outweigh his distinct 
 preference for the rule of one man, whose duty it once 
 had been, if he were convinced of his own fitness, to as-
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 323 
 
 sume the diadem. But now all that a popular politician 
 could gain was the responsibility and burden of ex- 
 pensive honorary duties. In the tract "Upon Exile," 
 a very rhetorical performance, which rather makes a 
 case than expresses a conviction, the main profit of exile 
 is represented as the escape from these duties. ' ' You 
 have no longer a fatherland dragging at you, bothering 
 you, ordering you about ; crying : ' Pay taxes, go on an 
 embassy to Rome, entertain the governor, undertake 
 public festivals.' " Of these requirements I fancy the 
 journeys to Rome must have been the most exacting. 
 For though very young men might greatly enjoy a trip Exacting duties 
 to the capital, even with the risks of dying abroad, the to Romanm-^ 
 envoys sent with formal compliments, in the hope of ob- 
 taining real benefits, were more likely to be elderly men; 
 they were not certain to find the emperor at home, and 
 must follow him even to the Pillars of Hercules, or at 
 least through Italy, where the inn-keepers were notori- 
 ous extortioners ; and moreover the waiting in ante- 
 rooms, the insolence of Roman senators and imperial 
 officials, must have been galling even to an obsequious 
 Greek. We can well imagine how the public at home, 
 who were ready to accord them statues and honorary 
 inscriptions if they succeeded, would treat them if they 
 returned without gaining their object — by far the most 
 likely result. 
 
 Plutarch shows us a greater conservative persistence 
 in the second main department of public life, religion — piutarch's 
 ritual and festivals which were the public relaxation, as j^istence in 
 contrasted with politics, which were still the pretended Greek rellglon - 
 business of every Greek polity. On this side of life the 
 information our author gives us is not less explicit, and 
 full of the same inconsistencies. It will be understood 
 that for the present I shall omit all account of philoso-
 
 324 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 phy as a school of morals, a very notable part of Greek 
 religion in one sense, but wholly dissociated from the 
 traditional rites and ceremonies, and the traditional the- 
 ologies of the people. It is the general effect as regards 
 public worship in the temples and at oracles, and at the 
 established festivals, which I seek now to derive from 
 Plutarch. Nor is the task very easy from a man of com- 
 promises, who desires to adopt reforms and yet retain 
 His attitude to the old courses, who would be a philosopher and yet a 
 S1 ' P ' defender of tradition. I think his real attitude is best to 
 be gathered from the following very noble passage : 
 
 For the Deity is not a thing without soul or spirit under the 
 hand of man [he has just been censuring the use of the word 
 Demeler for wheat, and of Dionysus for wine], but of such 
 material gifts have we considered the gods to be the givers who 
 grant them to us continuously and adequately — the gods who 
 differ not one from the other, as barbarian and Greek, as of the 
 south or of the north ; but if the sun and the moon, and 
 heaven, earth, and sea, are the same to all, though they be 
 called by different names, so for the One Reason that sets all 
 these things in order, and the One Providence that controls 
 them, and for the subordinate forces that direct each several 
 department, various honors and titles have been established by 
 law among divers nations, and men use hallowed symbols, 
 here obscure, there clearer, which lead our thoughts to God, 
 not without risk of failure ; for some have slipped altogether 
 from the path, and fallen into superstition, while others avoid- 
 ing the slough of superstition have gone over the precipice of 
 atheism. 
 
 His theory of He tries to show in myriad instances that the rituals of 
 
 EgypUahand Egyptians and Greeks were the same in idea ; and 
 Greek religions. as re g ar( j s the myths he has recourse to either of the ex- 
 planatory processes which he strongly deprecates when 
 their consequences are carried out boldly — rationalism 
 and allegory. The former was the Epicurean, the latter 
 the Stoic device, adopted of course by other schools in
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 325 
 
 their turn. Plutarch will only adopt them when they 
 suit his convenience, and supplements them with an- 
 other "theory of evasion," which made a great noise in 
 the early Christian controversies. I mean his doctrine of Demon theory, 
 demons, or beings intermediate between man and God, 
 who are both beneficent and maleficent, in fact both 
 angels and devils, and to whom are to be attributed all 
 the polytheistic vagaries of popular mythology. The 
 so-called immoralities of the gods, so great a stumbling- demon theory, 
 block to every sober critic, were all to be referred to the 
 maleficent demons. 
 
 There is much that is reasonable, much that is elo- 
 quent, in this theory ; and yet what is more singular, 
 what more melancholy, than to see the sage clinging to 
 the sinking ship, or rather trying to stop the leak and 
 declare her seaworthy, while in his own country, as well 
 as through the Hellenistic East, there had lately been 
 preached a new faith which he never took pains to 
 understand ? He can tell us how the Jewish high priest 
 was clothed, but as to even Jewish dogmas he manifests 
 the grossest ignorance. His collection of the placita of 
 philosophers is superficial and jejune ; his studies in 
 comparative religion, though his theory asserted the 
 equal dignity and veracity of all religions, are even 
 more superficial and careless. He professed himself 
 a cosmopolitan thinker ; he was really a narrow and 
 bigoted Hellene ; as narrow and exclusive as the old op- 
 ponents of Alexander had been in their day. This in- row Hellene?^ 
 grained bigotry was the real secret of the decay and 
 downfall of Greece. While the Asiatic cities had learned 
 at least something from contact with the East, Greece 
 had remained behind, had become poor and depopu- 
 lated, stagnant in thought as well as in active life. 
 There is no more signal instance of this stagnation than
 
 326 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 the sayings and counsels of Plutarch on politics and on 
 religion. 
 
 The same may be said of his utterances on art. No 
 Stagnation in new production of any merit is mentioned ; old statues. 
 
 Greek art. L J 
 
 old temples, old pictures were still prized. People went 
 to be shown round Delphi by chattering cicerones ; they 
 frequented picture galleries ; they admired the bloom on 
 ancient bronzes ; they praised the splendor of Homer or 
 Pindar, the music of the ancients, which was no longer 
 understood. On these things Plutarch copies Plato or 
 Aristoxenus. But though statues were set up in crowds 
 to benefactors of their several cities, we hear that these 
 monuments of liberality were kept in stock, often with- 
 out the heads, which were added when the dedication 
 was ascertained and the statue bought ; and even this 
 was more tolerable than the practice of erasing old dedi- 
 cations and renaming the effigies of ancient gods and 
 heroes. 
 Plutarch's ^ n addition to his tracts on these serious topics Plu- 
 
 tarch has left us many discussions upon the every-day 
 society which he loved and which he sought to improve ; 
 he is very full and suggestive on the art of conversation, 
 though the topics he selects as suitable for a dinner-table 
 are certainly not those which we should choose.* He 
 gives directions concerning the choice and number of 
 the company, the question of precedence at table, the 
 use of wit and satire in repartee, the ostentation of 
 some, the meanness of others, and a host of other like 
 topics which I have discussed in another work.t These 
 things are not worth repeating here except with the de- 
 
 table-talk. 
 
 * The habit of recitations in Greek had lately (he says) come into fashion at 
 Rome, in his own day, and he discusses (" Symposium " VII., 8) what authors 
 art- fit for this purpose. He protests against Plato's dialogues being paraded 
 at a dinner-table, hut says elsewhere [ibid, qucestiones 5. 41 that Kuripides, 
 Pindar, and Mcnandcr, especially the last, are more suitable. 
 
 t " The Greek World under Roman Sway."
 
 328 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Unpleasant pic 
 ture of Greek 
 society in Plu- 
 tarch. 
 
 Plutarch's 
 vanity. 
 
 tails which give them freshness and interest. Here and 
 there we come upon some admission or some compro- 
 mise regarding morality which shocks us not a little in 
 the midst of much that is lofty, much that is wise. On 
 the question of charity he says and thinks things which, 
 taken by themselves, would make us rank him on no 
 very high level among the world's great moralists. 
 
 But in other respects also the society of Greece does 
 not appear to us in very fair colors, even through this 
 most favorable medium. I repudiate, indeed, altogether 
 the picture drawn by Hertzberg in his history of the 
 shocking features taken from the novels of the day — 
 features rendered impossible by the virtues which he ex- 
 tracts from Plutarch's and Dio's society. This random 
 setting down of every narrative now extant as equally 
 good evidence is a proceeding only saved from ridicule 
 by the great learning and earnestness of the writer. 
 
 But making all due reservations, there is something 
 vain and self-conscious, not only in the general com- 
 plexion of the social meetings which Plutarch so care- 
 fully describes ; there is even some of it in the old man 
 himself, who is evidently proud of his position, his vir- 
 tues, his reputation, and though he often alludes to the 
 follies, the loquacity, the conceit of old age, affords in 
 his own person a specimen, though perhaps a very 
 lovable one, of all these imperfections. There is to me 
 in this, as in every other phase of Greek life which I 
 have studied, a certain want, an absence of the calmness 
 and dignity which we require in the perfect gentleman. 
 Aristotle's disagreeable grand seigneur, who ever stands 
 upon his dignity, is as far removed from our ideal as is 
 Plutarch, with his garrulous unreserve. Nor do I im- 
 agine that the domestic arrangements of the Greek 
 houses, even the most wealthy, ever attained the real
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 
 
 329 
 
 cleanliness which we consider the essence of refinement. 
 The prying man, he tells us, is to avoid looking in at 
 open doors, " For it is not right or fair to the owners, 
 nor is the result pleasant. Within, ill-favored sights 
 meet the stranger's eye, pots and pans lying in disorder, 
 and women-slaves sitting about, and nothing fine or de- 
 lightful." It was well if you did not hear the lash, or 
 the outcry of the slaves being punished, or maids upon 
 the rack ; an ominous passage, for he couples it with the 
 untidinesses to be witnessed about the home of a disso- 
 lute man, the ground wet with wine, and the fragments 
 of garlands lying about. No doubt our superior notions 
 regarding these matters are due to the influence of the 
 women of the house. 
 
 And yet it is plain that in this age the mistress of the 
 house had at last obtained some of her rights. It was 
 probably in imitation of what they saw in Rome that the 
 richer people in Bceotia and Attica adopted the freer 
 treatment of the sex, which they had long noticed, but 
 not copied at Sparta. Plutarch's wife paid visits and re- 
 ceived guests, even when her husband was absent, sat at 
 table with him, and joined in all his public interests. 
 But nevertheless his "Conjugal Precepts" make it plain 
 that he regarded all this as a mere concession or toler- 
 ation on the part of the husband, to which the wife had 
 no claim in the nature of things, just as he enjoins kind- 
 ness and mercy to slaves, without for one moment dis- 
 allowing slavery. In fact, the age was mending its 
 manners little by little, by gradual improvement and 
 gentler habits, just as its moralist is always exhorting 
 the individual to combat his vices by daily resolves and 
 small advances. Such a course of moral hygiene is 
 rational, but has never been really effectual. It requires 
 a new dogma, a great revelation, a startling reform 
 
 Lack of clean- 
 liness and order 
 in Greek house- 
 keeping. 
 
 Freer life of 
 Greek women 
 at this period. 
 
 Plutarch's 
 " Conjugal 
 Precepts."
 
 33Q 
 
 A Survey of Greek Civilization. 
 
 Dio's and 
 Plutarch's igno- 
 rance of Chris- 
 tianity and of 
 Judaeism, 
 
 Pliny's recog- 
 nition of the 
 spread of Chris- 
 tianity in the 
 first century- 
 
 to carry with it the weak and wavering masses of man- 
 kind, who have not the strength or the patience to work 
 out their own salvation. 
 
 Even now "the Word had been made flesh, and 
 dwelt among them, full of grace and truth ' ' ; even now 
 the Gospel had been preached in Syria, in " all Asia," 
 in Macedonia, in Corinth ; and yet the great contempo- 
 raries, Dio, Plutarch, nay, even Josephus, seem hardly 
 to have heard of it. Had Plutarch been at Athens 
 when St. Paul came there, he would have been the first 
 to give the apostle a respectful hearing, as he himself 
 preached the real identity of all religions, the spirituality 
 and unity of the Deity, and the right of all nations 
 to name inferior gods or demons in accordance with 
 their various traditions. But no ; as Judaeism was un- 
 known to him beyond the vestments of the high priest, 
 so Christianity, first identified everywhere as a Jewish 
 schism, was still beyond his ken. 
 
 It is not till the first century has actually closed that 
 Pliny is startled to find in Bithynia the temples deserted, 
 the altars forgotten, and a new religion overrunning the 
 province. Even then we may assume that Christianity 
 was very little known in Greece beyond Corinth, and in 
 all the Macedonian towns only among Jews and people 
 of the poorest class. For the severance of Greece and 
 Asia Minor is not less remarkable at this time than their 
 respective unity under Roman rule. I have spoken of 
 this already as regards the Greece of Plutarch. But 
 even he stands aloof completely from the Hellenism 
 of Asia Minor, and there is but one brief tract (and is it 
 genuine?) which represents the writer as residing in the 
 turmoil and confusion of the principal assize town of the 
 province — Ephesus or Pergamum — which he describes 
 as a scene of passion and of misery. So Dio on his side
 
 Greek Culture Under the Romans. 331 
 
 speaks with a sort of complacency of the decay and dis- 
 grace of Athens, and of its vulgar and base imitations of of S Athei| al ° USy 
 Roman vices, as if the jealous Asiatic Hellenist felt that 
 although the wealth and prosperity of the Asiatic towns 
 were now vastly superior, there was still a primacy of 
 sentiment about the name of Athens and of Greece 
 which no stoas or exedras or liberalities from emperors 
 and rich citizens could supply.
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 I have now endeavored according to my ability to 
 give a general view of the great subject intrusted to me 
 in this book. Had I attempted to touch upon even a 
 tithe of the many topics that crowded upon me from the 
 literature in which I have spent my life, the book would 
 have been a mere kaleidoscope of colors, and would 
 have left no permanent impression. It was imperative, 
 therefore, to make a selection ; and in so doing I have 
 been led by my own fancy, by the preference with which 
 my own mind, without any suggestion from books, 
 brought up one topic and neglected the others. 
 Whether this was a safe guide is of course doubtful ; 
 every one has his prepossessions, and they may not be 
 agreeable to other men, who desire a methodical survey, 
 and who may complain that many a topic of great im- 
 portance has been perhaps omitted, perhaps slightly 
 mentioned. If any are so disposed I sincerely trust 
 they will take up the subject afresh, and treat it with 
 special regard to my omissions. There is more than 
 enough room for many other independent books on the 
 same great and fascinating subject. It is hard, how- 
 ever, to imagine any of them attractive unless it bears 
 the individual stamp of its author ; the idiosyncrasies, it 
 mav be, of his mind ; the peculiarities of his conception 
 of Greek life. I will not deny that in many respects 
 mine differ widely from that of other men, whose 
 authority and fame are far greater in the philological 
 world. What better, even in the face of this danger,
 
 Postscript. 333 
 
 can a man do, than go straight to the sources, and hav- 
 ing studied them for himself, reproduce his impressions 
 honestly, decidedly, plainly, avoiding the extremes of 
 dogmatism and of self-depreciation ? The latter is 
 indeed often the cloak for mere vanity, and brooks no 
 contradiction even of an opinion put forward under the 
 garb of a tentative theory. Provided a writer who has 
 shown proof of research labels each new opinion as his 
 own, and not as an accepted truth, there can be no 
 complaint that he is passing off paradoxes or individual 
 fancies as historic truths. So far the personal element 
 in his writing is necessary as a caution to the reader. 
 
 It is a matter of frequent remark that no impersonal 
 history is ever striking or suggestive ; it is far better to 
 learn from the prejudiced and partial thinkers who main- 
 tain opposite sides of a question, than from the judicial 
 mind that calmly sums up the arguments of both. Even 
 a nation seems to progress more rapidly under govern- 
 ment by party than under a committee of the best men 
 chosen from all shades of opinion. 
 
 These are the excuses I have to make for writing this 
 personal and partial book, wherein are stated many sub- 
 jective views, and wherein many judgments current 
 among Greek scholars are ignored or silently contro- 
 verted. The reader will find in my earlier and more 
 expanded works on the same subject the reasons which 
 have persuaded me in each case. But in most instances 
 it was not requisite to give references ; my American 
 readers, who have long befriended me and given an ear 
 to what I say, will either take my word for it that I have 
 thought out seriously what is put forward, or they will 
 already know where to find the fuller arguments which 
 support my conclusions. This much is certain : the 
 longer any one studies Greek letters and Greek art, the
 
 334 Postscript. 
 
 more deeply will he convince himself that no modern 
 thinker can satisfy himself (not to say his readers) in 
 any attempt to reproduce the impression which grows 
 upon him. Learned men in Germany have written 
 great books of detail on each department in which the 
 Greeks excelled. Have their weighty tomes, bristling 
 with references, made the great problem easier ? French 
 and English men have written brief essays and lively 
 sketches concerning it. Have they satisfied the earnest 
 inquirer ? I have no hope of being able to steer between 
 the Scylla and the Charybdis of this criticism.
 
 r
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Acarnanian League, 224. 
 Achaean League, 115, 224, 296, 307. 
 Achaeans, 71. 
 Acropolis, 84, 146, 291. 
 Adaptability of the Greeks, 221. 
 yEschines, 192-195. 
 jEschylus, 122, 123-128,210. 
 yEtolian League, 224, 296. 
 Afterglow of Greek literature, 308. 
 Agamemnon, 22, 33. 
 "Agamemnon," the, 124, 126. 
 Agesilaus, 168. 
 Alcaeus, 72, 89, 102. 
 Alcman, 78, 79, 83. 
 Alcmseonidse, 118. 
 Alexander the Great, 223, 226-231, : 
 
 241, 242-246. 
 Alexandria, 280-283, 286-288. 
 Alexandrian art, 287. 
 Alexandrian literature, 284-286. 
 Amphictyonic Synod, 192, 193, 194. 
 Amphissians, 193. 
 Amyclae, 30. 
 Anaxagoras, 211. 
 " Anthology," 189, 311. 
 Antigonus Gonatas, 247, 257. 
 Antioch, 280-282. 
 Antiphon, 139. 
 Apelles, 235. 
 
 Apollonius Rhodius, 286. 
 Aratus, copied by Virgil, 212. 
 Arcadia, 79, 174. 
 Arcadian League, 115. 
 Archilochus, 42, 88. 
 Architecture, 130. 
 Argos, 31, 70, 77. 
 Aristarchus, 284, 294. 
 Aristides, 132. 
 
 Aristophanes, 151, 165-167, 178, 266. 
 Aristotle, 33, 201-204, 22 6, 227. 
 Arsinoe, 244-245. 
 Art, 13, 65, 72, 84-86. 
 Artabazus, 122. 
 
 Aspasia, 177. 
 
 Athens, 84, 174. 
 
 Attalids, 288-2S9, 290, 291. 
 
 Attica, soil of, 116. 
 
 Autonomy, struggle for, 149. 
 
 " Bee-hive " tombs, 30. 
 
 Bishop Berkeley's style, 211. 
 
 Bceotia, 95, 115. 
 
 Browning's translations of Euripides, 
 
 159- 
 Brutus, 300-301. 
 Burial, 39. 
 Byzantium, 106. 
 Cadmus, 32. 
 
 " Cassandra " of Lycophron, 286. 
 Chaeronea, 195. 
 Chaeronea, lion of, 196. 
 " Characters " of Theophrastus, 266. 
 Chrysippus, 256, 258. 
 Cleanthes, 256, 257. 
 Clisthenes, 118. 
 
 " Common " dialect, the, 234, 309. 
 " Constitution of Athens," the, 96, 134. 
 Corcyra, massacres at, 154. 
 Cos, 273. 
 Cremation, 38. 
 Cruelty to slaves, 215. 
 Cult of the emperors, 244, 303. 
 Cyrus, 169. 
 
 Darius Ochus, 187, 225. 
 Death, Athenian attitude to, 162-163. 
 Delphic oracle, mistake of, 120. 
 Demetrius, 247. 
 Demetrius, deification of, 244. 
 Dtmocritus, 211. 
 Demon theory, 325. 
 Demosthenes, 175, 188-190, 196, 197, 
 
 199, 230. 
 Dicaearchus, 267. 
 Dio Chrysostom, 311, 315-321. 
 Diodorus, 302. 
 Diogenes the Cynic, 257. 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 311-313. 
 
 335
 
 336 
 
 Index. 
 
 Dorian invasion, 70. 
 
 Dorpfeld, Professor, 26, 27, 86, 143. 
 
 Draco, 97. 
 
 Eastern influences, no. 
 
 Egypt conquered by the Romans, 299. 
 
 Egyptian influences, 71. 
 
 Empedocles, 211. 
 
 Epaminondas, 168, 170, 173, 225. 
 
 Epicurean philosophy, 261-263. 
 
 Epicurus, 261, 267. 
 
 Erechtheum, 148. 
 
 " Ethics" of Aristotle, 203. 
 
 Euclid's " Elements," 286. 
 
 Eumenes of Cardia, 239. 
 
 Euripides, 143, 157-159, 211. 
 
 Exposure of infants, 218, 269-270. 
 
 Extortion by Roman governors, 299. 
 
 Field sports, 172. 
 
 Gelon, 112. 
 
 Glaukopis Athene, 34. 
 
 Gold currency, 240. 
 
 Graecomania among the Romans, 298, 
 
 302. 
 Grote, 16, 68, 233. 
 Gyges of Lydia, 69. 
 Hegemony, Greek dislike of, 224. 
 Hellenic unity, 75. 
 Hermes of Olympia, the, 184. 
 Herondas, " Mimiambics " of, 275-276. 
 Hesiod, 17, 59-63, 116. 
 Hipparchus, 117. 
 Hippias of Elis, 68. 
 Hissarlik, 23, 25, 29. 
 Homer, 15-17, 24, 180. 
 Homeric Age, 41-67. 
 Horace, 89. 
 Hospitality, 52-53. 
 Ictinus, 135, 147, 208. 
 Idealism of the Greek genius, 213. 
 Idols at Troy, 34. 
 Iliad, 17, 24, 42-44. 
 " Ilios," Schliemann's, 26. 
 " In Memoriam," the, 163. 
 Intellectual average high, 128. 
 Interest, rate of, 201. 
 Ionic architecture, 209. 
 Isocrates, 181, 182, 183, 217. 
 Jealousies, commercial, 107. 
 Leuctra, 173. 
 
 Lion Gate at Mycenae, 22. 
 Locrians, 192, 193. 
 
 Longinus's "On the Sublime," 312. 
 
 Long wall, the, 146. 
 
 Lucretius, 211, 262. 
 
 Lycurgus, 80-81. 
 
 Lydian monarchy, 72-73. 
 
 Lyric poets, 88, 101. 
 
 Lysander, 157, 215, 241. 
 
 Lysias, 198. 
 
 Lysippus, 235. 
 
 Macedonian conquest, significance of, 
 
 239- 
 Marathon, 121. 
 Marathon, lion of, 196. 
 Medes, 73. 
 Mehemet Ali, 100. 
 Melians, oppression of, 154-156. 
 Menander, 264, 267, 271. 
 Menelaus, court of, 54. 
 Menidi, 29, 41. 
 
 Mercenary soldiers, 72, 187, 232, 248. 
 Meter of Homeric poems, 46. 
 Middle Comedy, 266. 
 Monarchies, hereditary, 33. 
 Monetary problems, 200. 
 Mummius, 298. 
 Music, 128. 
 
 Mycenae, 24-25, 27, 29, 34. 
 "Mycenae," Schliemann's, 26. 
 Mythology, 18-19. 
 Naucratis, 71. 
 Navy, Athenian, 136. 
 New Comedy, 264-266, 268-272. 
 New Testament Greek, 309. 
 Nike of Samothrace, the, 220, 247. 
 " Nine Wells," the, 86, 117. 
 Odeum, 146. 
 Odyssey, 42, 63. 
 Olympiads, 69. 
 Olympias, 245. 
 Olympieion, 117. 
 Oratory, power of, 132. 
 Orchomenus, 22, 30, 115. 
 Ostrich egg at Mycenae, 31. 
 Paestum, temple at, 131. 
 Pantheism, 105, 258-259. 
 Parmenides, 211. 
 Parrhasius, 183. 
 
 Parthenon, 14, 130, 143, 146, 147. 
 l'ausanias, 30S. 
 Pelopids, 30. 
 Peloponnesian War, 151-154.
 
 Index. 
 
 337 
 
 Pergamene art, 289. 
 
 Pergamum, 26, 288, 289-290, 291. 
 
 Periander, 99-100. 
 
 Pericles, 142, 144-146. 
 
 Perseids, 30. 
 
 Persia, 187. 
 
 Persian aristocracy, in. 
 
 Persian War, effects of, 134. 
 
 Pheidon of Argos, 69, 113. 
 
 Phenician traders, 33, 69. 
 
 Phidias, 147, 206, 210. 
 
 Philip of Macedon, 183, 188, 190-192, 
 
 195, 225. 
 Philodemus of Gadara, 302. 
 Philosophy a necessity for Greeks, 
 
 104. 
 Phocion, judicial murder of, 249-252. 
 Pindar, 91-95, 115, 123. 
 Pisistratids, 86. 
 Pisistratus, 98, 100. 
 Plato, 175-180, 211-212. 
 Plautus, 268. 
 Plutarch, 82, 220, 321-328. 
 " Politics" of Aristotle, 203. 
 Polybius, 294-298, 321. 
 Polygamy of kings of Macedon, 191. 
 Polytheism, 105. 
 Praxiteles, 184. 
 " Prometheus," interpretations of, 125- 
 
 126. 
 Prose, development of, 137-138. 
 Ptolemies, the, 307. 
 Ptolemy II., 245, 255. 
 Pyrrho the Skeptic, 262. 
 Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, 248, 254, 255. 
 Religion, character of, 105. 
 Renaissance, Italian, 13. 
 Rhodes, 273, 277-280. 
 Roman attitude to Greek art, 221 ; 
 
 conquest of Egypt, 299; conquest of 
 
 Greece, 297 ; conquest of Spain, 299 ; 
 
 imitation of the Greeks, 305 ; soldiers 
 
 not mercenaries, 255 ; speculators, 
 
 300. 
 Rotundas, 184. 
 Sack of Corinth, 297. 
 St. Paul, 139, 258, 309-310. 
 
 Sappho, 89, 102. 
 
 Sarcophagus of Sidon, 208, 235-237. 
 
 Saul, 257. 
 
 Schliemann, Dr., 23, 25-27. 
 
 Scopas, 184. 
 
 Sculpture, 128-130, 206. 
 
 Sicily, 108, 112. 
 
 Simonides, 93-94. 
 
 Siphnians, treasury of, 95. 
 
 Skepticism, 262. 
 
 Slavery, 150, 219. 
 
 Socrates, 157, 160-162, 164. 
 
 Solon, 96-98, 118. 
 
 Sophocles, 142, 210. 
 
 Sophron, 276. 
 
 Sparta, 78, 82, 114, 167. 
 
 Spartan aristocracy, 80-81, no; con- 
 stitution, 82; mercenaries, 232; su- 
 premacy, 112. 
 
 Spartans, 113-114. 
 
 Spata, 29, 41. 
 
 Scoicism, 258-260. 
 
 Strabo, 302. 
 
 Tanagra figurines, 185-187. 
 
 Terence, 268. 
 
 Theban insurrection, 229. 
 
 Thebes, 170, 174, 229. 
 
 Themistocles, 121, 122, 132. 
 
 Theocritus, 274, 275, 286. 
 
 Theology in Homer, 17, 47. 
 
 Theoric Fund, 189-190. 
 
 Thucydides, 139, 140-142, 151, 210, 215. 
 
 Tiryns, 22, 24, 25, 26. 
 
 Tombs, evidence from, 35. 
 
 Trade, 48, 64, 240, 314. 
 
 Treasure-house of Atreus, 37. 
 
 Troy, 22-23, 2 5~ 2 6. 
 
 Tyrants, 99, 117. 
 
 Tyrtaeus, 97, 112, 113. 
 
 Vaphio, 41, 78. 
 
 Venus of Melos, 208, 220, 293. 
 
 Wolf's " Prolegomena," 67. 
 
 Women, position of, 54-56, 217-218, 329. 
 
 Xenophon, 113,165, 168-173. 
 
 Xerxes, 121. 
 
 Zeno, 256, 257. 
 
 Zeuxis, 183.
 
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