PREFACE
There have been many explanations of ancient Greece and its peculiar spirit. If I may say so, the only original thing about the explanation offered in this book is its want of originality; for it is the explanation of the Greeks themselves. They believed that Hellenism was born of the conflict between the Greeks and the Barbarians. As Thucydides puts it (I. 3), “Greek” and “Barbarian” are correlative terms; and Herodotus wrote his great book, “seeking,” as he says, “digressions of set purpose,” to illustrate just that. About such an explanation there is obviously nothing startling at all. It is indeed (at first sight) so colourless and negative, that it must be dissatisfaction with it which has provoked all the other explanations. Scholars must have said to themselves, “What is the use of repeating that Hellenism is the opposite of Barbarism? We know that already.” But they knew it only in a formal or abstract way. It is but the other day that classical scholars have begun to study the Barbarian and to work out the contrast which alone can give us the material for a rich understanding of the Greek himself. Without this study one’s ideas of the Greek could not fail to be somewhat empty and colourless. But any one who cares to read even the meagre outline which these essays supply will hardly complain that there is a lack of colour.
The subject indeed is so vast that one is compelled to be selective and illustrative. Even to be this is far from easy. For instance, it seems extraordinary to write upon the meaning of Hellenism without a chapter on Greek art. Such a chapter, however, is excluded by the design of this book, which must dispense with illustrations; whereas in dealing with literature I could always drive home my point by simple quotation. Then again it may appear a little old-fashioned and arbitrary that I confine myself to the centuries before Alexander. But after all it was, in these centuries that Hellenism rose into its most characteristic form—and in any case a man must stop somewhere.
We lovers of Greece are put very much on our defence nowadays, and no doubt we sometimes claim too much for her. She sinned deeply and often, and sometimes against the light. Things of incalculable value have come to us not from her. There probably never was a time when she had not something to learn from the Barbarians about her—from Persia, from Palestine, from distant China. But when all is said, we owe it to Greece that we think as we do, and not as Semites or Mongols. I believe that on the whole our modes of thought are preferable. At any rate they have on the whole prevailed. And what we students of Greece argue is that she was fighting our battle; that in the deepest and truest and most strictly historical sense the future of the things we cherish most was involved in her fortunes. How then could we fail to sympathise with her? I have tried to be just; I could not be dispassionate.
[CONTENTS]
| PAGE | |
| PREFACE | [9] |
| THE AWAKENING | [13] |
| KEEPING THE PASS | [32] |
| THE ADVENTURERS | [45] |
| ELEUTHERIA | [82] |
| SOPHROSYNE | [105] |
| GODS AND TITANS | [122] |
| CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC | [147] |
| NOTES | [205] |
| INDEX | [213] |
GREEKS AND BARBARIANS
I
THE AWAKENING
It began in Ionia. It may in truth have been a reawakening. But if this be so (and it is entirely probable), it was after so long and deep a slumber that scarcely even dreams were remembered. The Ionians used to say that they remembered coming from Greece, long ago, about a thousand years before Christ—as we reckon it—driven from their ancient home on the Peloponnesian coast of the Corinthian Gulf by “Dorians” out of the North. They fled to Athens, which carried them in her ships across the Aegean to that middle portion of the eastern shore which came to be known as Ionia. For this reason they were in historical times accounted (by the Athenians at least) “colonists of the Athenians.” Nobody in antiquity appears seriously to have disputed this account of the Ionians. There may be considerable truth in it; and if not, the Ionians were pretty good at disputing. The Athenians belonged to that race. But if you questioned the Ionians further and asked them about their origins in prehistoric Greece, you had to be content with the Topsy-like answer that the first [(Note 14)]Ionians grew out of the ground. They were Autochthones, Earth-Children. The critical Thucydides puts it this way: he says the same stock has always inhabited Attica. People in his time could remember when old Athenian gentlemen used to wear their hair done up in a top-knot fastened by a golden pin in the form of a cicala—because the cicala also is an Earth-Child.
Of course in historical times the Ionians were Greeks. But they may not always have been Greeks. Herodotus apparently thinks they were not. He says they learned to speak Greek from their Dorian conquerors. The natural inference from this would be that they were of a different racial stock. Herodotus, however, is nearly as fond of a hypothesis as Mr. Shandy, and it is quite possible that he is here labouring an argument (which in turn may have been mere Dorian propaganda), that the only pure-blooded Hellenes were the Dorian tribes, who admittedly came on the scene much later than the Ionians. In fact the Ionians may have been simply an earlier wave of a great invasion of Greek-speakers which came to an end with the Dorians. We do not know, and Herodotus did not know. The Ionians themselves did not know. There are two possibilities. Either they were an indigenous people who became Hellenized (as Herodotus supposes), or they were a folk of Hellenic affinities who were long settled in Greece in the midst of a still earlier population. What of that? Only this, that we have suddenly discovered a great deal about this prehistoric Aegean population, above all that it had developed a civilization which seems almost too brilliant to be true. Now if [(Note 15)]the fugitives who escaped to Ionia were a fragment of this race, or even were aliens who had only imbibed a portion of its culture, the awakening which came so long after may have been in fact a reawakening.
Archæologists, digging in the sites of old Ionian cities, have discovered evidence that the early settlers possessed something of the Aegean culture. The crown and centre of that culture was the island of Crete, and there existed some dim traditions of Cretans landing in Ionia; only then it was probably not called Ionia. This, and some other considerations, have prompted the suggestion that the Ionians really came from Crete. But it seems more in accordance with the evidence to suppose that the main body of them came from Greece proper, where they had learned the “Mycenaean” culture, which was the gift of Crete. The calamitous Dorians wrecked that wonderful heritage, but for some time at least the settlers in their new “Ionian” home would remember how to fashion a pot fairly and chant their traditional lays. Then, it would seem, they all but forgot; little wonder, when you consider how dire was their plight. Yet even in that uneasy sleep into which they fell of a recrudescent barbarism the Ionians remembered something as in a dream; and it became the most beautiful dream in the world, for it is Homer.
Now let us appeal to history. The history of Ionia is a drama in little of what afterwards happened on a wider stage in Greece.
The settlers found a beautiful land with (so Herodotus, not alone, exclaims) “the best climate in the world.” Considerable rivers, given to “meandering,” carve long valleys into the hilly interior [(Note 16)]of Asia Minor and offered in their mouths safe anchorages for the toy-like ships of the ancients. It is typical Aegean country and would have no unfamiliar look to the settlers. Naturally they did not find the new land empty. It contained a native population who were called, or came to be called, by the general appellation of “Carians”—barbaric warriors with enormous helmets crowned by immense horse-hair crests, and armed with daggers and ugly-looking falchions like reaping-hooks. The newcomers fought with them, slew largely among them, made some uncertain kind of truce with them, married their women, got their interested help against the Persian when he grew powerful. But that was all. They never succeeded in making them truly Greek or completely civilized. They only mast-headed them on their hills and, if they caught one, made a slave of him. Throughout Greek history the Carians maintained a virtual independence in the highlands of Ionia, keeping their ancient speech and customs, cherishing the memory of their old-world glory when they rowed in the ships of King Minos of Crete and fought his battles, and professing no interest in the wonderful cities growing up almost or quite in view of their secluded eyries. Very strange it seems. Yet it is typical. If we think of Greek civilization as a miracle wrought in a narrow valley with sullen Carians hating it from the surrounding hills, we shall get no bad picture—for I will not call it an allegory—of the actual situation all through antiquity till Alexander came. So near was the Barbarian all the time.
The Ionians had always to struggle against being crowded into the sea by the more or less savage [(Note 17)]races of Anatolia. That vast region has always been full of strange and obscure races and fragments of races. It is so formed that the migrating peoples flooding through it were sure to lose side-eddies down its deep, misleading valleys, to stagnate there. It must, when Ionia was founded, have had a peculiarly sombre and menacing aspect. The mighty empire of the Hittites had fallen and left, so far as we can see, a turmoil of disorganized populations between the sea and the dreadful Assyrians. Here and there no doubt traces of the Hittite civilization were discernible, sculptures of a god in peasant dress—a sort of moujik-god—or of that eternal trinity of Divine Father, Son, and Mother. The wondering Greeks saw a great cliff at Sipylos fashioned like a weeping woman, and called her Niobe. They seem to have admired Carian armour and borrowed that. There was probably nothing else they could borrow from the Carians except their lands. There was a numerous people dwelling farther inland called the Lydians, who even then must have had some rudimentary civilization and who afterwards, absorbing what they could of Ionian culture, threatened the cities with slavery. Further down the coast, in the south-western corner of the peninsula, where somewhat later the Dorians settled, lived the Lycians, who had the kind of civilization which counts descent on the mother’s side and buries its dead in holes of a cliff, as sea birds lay their eggs. The northern part of the Aegean coast was occupied by Mysians, Phrygians and kindred races, who never could get themselves cultivated. They worshipped gods like Papaios, which is Papa, and Bagaios, which must be the same as Bog, which is the Russian for God.
This was the kind of world into which the fugitives were thrown. It mattered the less perhaps because their real home was the sea. Yet even the sea gave them only a temporary escape from the Barbarian. Wherever they landed they met him again on the beach. Imagine, if you will, a ship trading from the chief Ionian harbour, Miletus. Imagine her bound for the south-east coast of the Black Sea for a cargo of silver. She would pick her way by coast and island till she reached the Dardanelles. From that point onwards she was in unfriendly waters. On one side were the hills of Gallipoli (Achi Baba and the rest—we do not know their ancient names), inhabited by “Thracians” of the sort called Dolonkoi; on the other side was the country of the kindred “Phrygians.” It was likely to go hard with a Greek ship cast away on either shore. Thence through the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus into the Euxine. Then came days and days of following the long Asiatic coast, dodging the tide-races about the headlands, finding the springs of fresh water known to the older hands, pushing at night into some rock-sheltered cove, sleeping on the beach upon beds of gathered leaves. And so at last to some harbour of “Colchians,” men whose complexion and hair would make you swear they were Egyptians, circumcised men, violently contrasting with their neighbours the Phasianoi, who live in the misty valley of the romantic Phasis—large, fat, sleepy-looking men, flabby men with pasty faces, who grow flax in the marshy meadows of their languid stream. From these partially civilized peoples the Greeks would glean news of the mountain-tribes of the interior, uncanny “Chalybes,” who know where to find iron and silver in the ribs of their guarded hills, and the utter savages of the Caucasus, whose single art is printing the shapes of beasts in colours upon their clothes, and who, like the beasts, are without shame in love.
Or suppose our ship bound for the corn-bearing region behind the modern port of Odessa in South Russia. Once through the Bosphorus, she would make her course along the shore of a wide and wintry territory inhabited by red-haired, blue-eyed Thracians, a race akin to certain elements in the population of Greece itself, warlike, musical, emotional, mystical, cruel. Here and there the merchant would land for water or fresh meat—at Salmydessos, at Apollonia, at Mesembria, at Odessos, at Tomi (but we do not know when these places got their names)—till he reached the mouths of the Danube. Wherever he touched he might have the chance to hear of wild races further inland, such as the Getai, very noble savages, who believed in the immortality of men, or at least of the Getai. They were of the opinion that when one of them left this life he “went to Salmoxis.” Salmoxis, he lived in an underground house and was their god. Every four years they sent a messenger to him to tell what they wanted. Their method was this. First they told the messenger what he must ask, and then they tossed him in the air, catching him as he fell on the points of their spears. If he died, this meant a favourable answer from Salmoxis. But if the messenger did not die, then they blamed the messenger and “dispatched” another. Also they used to shoot arrows at the sun and moon, [(Note 20)]defying those luminaries and denying their godhead. These were “the most righteous of the Thracians,” according to Herodotus, who expresses and perhaps shared the sentiment, at least as old as Homer, which attributed exceptional virtue to remote and simple peoples like the Hyperboreans and the Ethiopians and the “Koumiss-Eaters,” the Hippemolgoi or Glaktophagoi. If the Getai were the most righteous of the Thracians, one rather wonders what the rest were like. These were certainly capable of nearly anything in their moments of religious frenzy. They would tear raw flesh with their teeth, sometimes (it was whispered) the living flesh of children. At certain times of the year the Thracian women went mad upon the midnight hills, worshipping Dionysus. (The wild splendour of that scene shines and shudders like one of their own torches through the Bacchae of Euripides.) The Thracians of the coast had an evil reputation as wreckers....
Beyond the Danube was “Scythia.” All that district between the river and the Crimea was from the earliest times of which we have record what it is to-day, a grain-growing country. Its capital was the “Market of the Borysthenites,” which preferred to call itself Olbia, “the City of Eldorado.” Here the merchant would find a curious population, very fair in type, great horsemen, wearing peaked caps of felt and carrying half-moon shields. In the Russian army which fought Napoleon in 1814 were Siberian archers whom the French nicknamed Les Amours. I do not venture to say that these were Scythians, but it is clear that an ancient Scythian (half naked, with his little recurved bow) must have looked rather like an overgrown barbaric [(Note 21)]Cupid. At Athens it was thought comic to stage a Scythian. Only, as to that, it should be remembered that the Athenians recruited their police from Scythia, and that the human mind seems to find something inherently comic in a policeman.
The Scythians were not all savages. Some of them were skilled farmers. With these the Greek settlers intermarried, and as early as Herodotus there was a considerable half-breed population. A motley town like Olbia was the place for stories—stories of the “Nomads” who neither plough nor sow, but wander slowly over the interminable steppes with their gipsy vans in which the women and children huddle under the stretched roof of skins; stories of the Tauri, who live in the Crimea, and sacrifice the shipwrecked to their bloody idol, clubbing them on the head like seals. And their enemies when they subdue them they treat as follows. Every man cuts off a head and carries it away to his house, and then fixing it on a long pole sets it up high above the house, generally above the chimney; for they will have it that the whole house is protected by the heads up there. They live by plunder and fighting. The Neuroi, another of these Scythian tribes, were driven from their original home by “serpents,” and look as if they might be sorcerers. For the Scyths and the Greeks who live in Scythia say that once a year every man of the Neuroi turns into a wolf, but is restored to human shape after a day or two. Now when they say this they do not convince me—Herodotus—still they say it and even take an oath in saying it. But the Man-Eaters are the worst savages of all, for they follow neither rule nor law of any kind. They are nomads, and are dressed like Scyths, and have a language of their own, and are the only cannibals among [(Note 22)]those peoples. The Black-Cloaks all wear black cloaks. Hence their name. Their customs are Scythian. The great tribe of the Boudinoi have all bright blue eyes and excessively red hair. They live in a wooden town. They are aboriginal nomads and eat lice.
Beyond the Boudinoi lived a folk that were bald from birth—men and women—besides having snub noses and large chins. The bald ones lived upon wild cherries, straining the juice off thick and dark, and then licking it up or drinking it mixed with milk. They dwelt under trees, every man under his tree, on which in winter he stretched a piece of white felt to make a kind of tent. On the mountains leaped goat-footed men; and beyond the goat-footed lived men who slept away six months of the year. The Issêdones ate their dead fathers, whose skulls they afterwards gilded and honoured with sacrifices. “In other respects” they were accounted just, and the women had as much authority among them as the men. Then came the one-eyed Arimaspeans and the gold-guarding griffins....
Suppose we change the scene, and send the Milesian ship on a voyage to the African coast. What would the merchant find there? Herodotus will tell us. By the shores of the Greater Syrtis live the Nasamônes. They in summer (he tells us) leave their flocks by the seashore and go up-country to gather dates at an oasis. They catch locusts, dry them, pound them, sprinkle the dust on milk, and swallow the draught. Beyond their territory are the Garamantes “in the Wild Beast Country.” They run away when they see anybody, and do not know how to fight. West of the Nasamônes on the coast are the Makai, who dress their hair in the fashion of a cock’s comb and fight with shields of ostrich skin. Beyond the Makai live the Gindânes, whose women wear leathern anklets, putting on a new anklet for every new lover. “And each woman has many anklets.” On a promontory of this region dwell the Lotos Eaters....
The Nomads roam from oasis to oasis over a land of salt and sand. Here is found the race of Troglodytes or Cave Men, swiftest of human beings; whom the Garamantes hunt in four-horse chariots. The Troglodytes feed upon snakes and lizards and other reptiles. Their language does not sound human at all but like the squeaking of bats. At some distance from the Garamantes dwell the Atarantes, among whom nobody has a name. These, when the sun is excessively hot, curse him and cry him shame for scorching them and their land. The Atlantes, whose dwelling is under Mount Atlas and its shrouded peaks, are said to be vegetarians and to have no dreams. Beyond these stretches the unknown desert, where men live in houses built of salt, for it never rains there. Hereabouts wander a number of tribes concerning whom Herodotus remarks generally, “All these peoples paint themselves vermilion and eat monkeys.”
Well, that was the kind of world in which Greek civilization was born. Do not say I have been describing a remote barbarism. Remoteness is relative to more than space, and to the Ionians the sea was no barrier, but the contrary. They knew the whole south coast of the Black Sea, for instance, better than their own Asiatic hinterland. But even if we exclude the Black Sea and Libya as remote, where did they not at first find barbarism? In Hellas? But they had just escaped from Hellas, driven out by the wild first “Dorians,” who were steadily engaged in ruining what the Ionians in their new home were trying to save. In Mesopotamia? But between it and them lay all mountainous Anatolia crowded with diverse races, most of them savage, all of them hostile. Egypt at first and for long was closed to them by an exclusive foreign policy. The unoriginal and materialistic culture of Phoenicia was withheld (for what it was worth) by commercial rivalry. The West as yet had nothing to give. Weak in numbers, in want of everything, shut in with such neighbours, Ionia discovered in herself the force to rescue her feet from this mire, and to found our modern civilization of reason and freedom and imaginative energy.
Naturally the process took time. The first century or so must have been largely lost in the mere struggle for survival. There may even have been in some ways a retrogression—a fading out of the Mycenaean culture, the admission of “Carian” elements needing gradual assimilation. That period is historically so much of a blank to us, that when we do begin to note the signs of expansion they give us the surprise of suddenness. Miletus is all at once the leading city of the Greek world. It plants colony after colony on the Dardanelles, in the Sea of Marmara, along the shores of the Euxine. Ionia is awake while Hellas is still asleep. Ionian traders, Ionian soldiers, Ionian ships are everywhere. The men of Phokaia opened to trade the Adriatic, Etruria, Spain. In the reign of Psammetichos—the First or Second—some Ionian and Carian pirates were [(Note 25)]forced to land in Egypt. They were clad according to their fashion in panoply of bronze. An Egyptian came to the Marshes and told the king that “bronze men from the sea are wasting the plain,” having never before seen men in such armour. Now the words of the messenger were the very words of an oracle that had bidden Psammetichos seek the help of “bronze men from the sea,” so the king hired the strangers to serve in his army, and by their aid overcame his enemies. The story (which is in Herodotus) is told in a way to provoke the sceptical. But wait a moment. At Abusimbel in Upper Egypt there is a great temple, and before the temple stand colossal statues. On the legs of one of these are scratched Greek words: When King Psamatichos came to Elephantine, those who sailed with Psamatichos the son of Theokles wrote this; and they went above Kertis, as far up as the river let them, and Potasimpto led the men of alien speech, and Amasis the Egyptians. Archon the son of Hamoibichos and Pelekos the son of Houdamos wrote me—this is, the inscription. Beneath are the signatures of Greek-speaking soldiers. The writers must have been Ionian mercenaries under a leader who for some reason adopted the king’s name. It is to such fellows we owe our names for Egyptian things. “Crocodile” is just the Ionian word for a lizard, and “pyramid” really means a wheaten cake. Ostriches they called “sparrows.” The British private soldier in Egypt is probably making similar jokes to-day. To return to the inscription, the “men of alien speech” commanded by Potasimpto—an Egyptian name—were probably Carians. The date of the writing cannot be later than 589 B.C. when Psammetichos II [(Note 26)]ceased to reign. The date is not so striking as the fact that these fighters (who, to put it gently, are not likely to have had the best Ionian education) could legibly write. Their spelling, I admit, is not affectedly purist; but then, spelling is a modern art.
The first great Ionian (discounting the view of some that Homer was an Ionian poet) was the greatest of all. This was Archilochus, who was born in the little island of Paros somewhere about the end of the eighth century before Christ. His poetry is all but lost, his life little more than a startling rumour. The ancients, who had him all to read, spoke of him in the same breath with Homer. He was not only so great a poet, but he was a new kind of poet. Before him men used the traditional style of the heroic epic. This Archilochus sings about himself. We hear in him a voice as personal, as poignant, as in Villon or Heine or Burns; it is a revolutionary voice. Modern literature has nothing to teach Archilochus. One can see that in the miserable scanty fragments of his astonishing poetry that have come down to us.
As for the man himself, the case against him looks pretty black. He himself is quite unabashed. But he also complains of hard luck, and there may be something in this plea. If he was a bastard, much could be forgiven him; but that theory seems to rest on a misapprehension of his meaning. His father was evidently an important man among the Parians. There does not appear to be any good reason why Archilochus should have had so bad a time of it except the reason of temperament. One great thing I do know, quoth he, how to pay back in bitter kind the man who wrongs me. He certainly did know that, but the knowledge was not going to make him popular. He never could get on with people. He hated Paros, where, one would have thought, his father’s son had a fair chance of happiness. Damn Paros—and those figs—and a life at sea. Later he accompanied a colony, led by his father, to the island of Thasos off the Thracian coast; and he did not like Thasos any more than Paros. It sticks up, he says in his vivid way, like a donkey’s backbone, wreathed in wild woods. He also grumbles that the plagues of all Hellas have run in a body to Thasos. He did not like the sea, and yet he was a good deal on it. Pulling at an oar and munching onions no doubt seemed to him a poor conception of life, but a thrilling line Let us hide the bitter gifts of the Lord Poseidon rather breathes an imaginative horror. The man is a master of this kind of sinister beauty. There were thirty that died—we overtook them with our feet—a thousand were we who slew. There you have it again. Oh yes, he had an overpowering sense of beauty, and a wonderful imagination—but also he had something else. That was just the tragedy. His genius had a twist in it which hurt himself as well as other people. He had loved a girl whom he saw playing with a branch of myrtle and a rose, in the shadow of her falling hair. He believed that she had been promised in marriage to him; but something happened, and they did not marry. It may be said for Neoboule and her father that Archilochus was not the sort they made good husbands of; and if any one is still disposed to condemn them, he may relent when he hears that the poet assailed them with a fabulous bitterness of tongue—assailed them till, according to the story, they hanged themselves. He meantime followed the call of his temperament, or of the poverty into which his temperament had brought him, and became a professional soldier. I shall be called a mercenary like a Carian, he says with a touch of what looks like bravado. What a life for a poet! I am the servant of the Lord of War, and I know the lovely guerdon of the Muses, he says superbly. His way of living is reflected in his speech. There is lust and drunkenness in it, and a kind of soldierly joviality. Wild-fig-tree of the rock feeding many crows, good-natured Pasiphile who makes strangers welcome. Pasiphile hardly needs a commentator. Nor does the half-line preserved by a grammarian (who quoted it to illustrate the dative case)—plagued with lice.
Archilochus was sent to fight the Saioi, a wild tribe of the Thracian mainland opposite Thasos. It would seem that the Greeks were defeated. At any rate, he for one ran away, abandoning his shield—to Greek sentiment an unforgivable offence. Who tells us this? Archilochus himself, adding impudently that he doesn’t care; he can easily get another shield, and meantime his skin is whole. The ancient world never quite got over the scandal of this avowal. Archilochus aggravated it by a poem to a friend in which he remarks that a man who pays much attention to charges of cowardice won’t have very many pleasures. But cowards don’t become soldiers, and don’t write humorous accounts of their misbehaviour. He was a fighter to the last. A man of Naxos killed him.
There are in the fragments of Archilochus notes of tenderness and even delicacy, notes of a singularly impressive pathos. There are indeed all notes in him, from the bawdy to the divine. It would be absurd to call him a bad man—quite as absurd as to call him a good one. He is a man. And what makes him so fascinating is just this, that for the first time in literature a man expresses himself. His extraordinary greatness is almost a secondary matter by the side of that portentous phenomenon. It was the Ionians who produced him.
Archilochus was absorbed in his own adventures, but even he must have noted the tremendous events which were changing the nations before his eyes. A fierce and numerous folk, known to the Greeks as the Cimmerians (Kimmerioi—their name survives in Crimea and Crim Tartary), broke loose or were thrust from their homes in the steppes and poured into Asia Minor, apparently through what is called the “Sangarios Gap” in Phrygia. You may see them fighting Ionians on a sarcophagus from Clazomenae which is in the British Museum. They rode bareback on half-tamed horses and slew with tremendous leaf-shaped swords. They destroyed the power of Phrygia, then the greatest in the peninsula, and King Midas, last of his race, killed himself (by drinking bull’s blood, men said). Lydia succeeded to the place and the peril of the Phrygians. She was under the rule of a new king (called “Gugu”), who made a strong fight of it, but was ultimately, about 650 b.c., defeated and slain by the half-naked riders under their king Tugdammi, who sacked the Ionian towns. The Ionians, however, made common cause with Ardys the son of Gugu or Gyges, as the Greeks called him, and along with the Lydians they beat this Tugdammi and drove away his people. Then the kings of Lydia, secure and strong and wealthy, turned their arms against Ionia, which thenceforward has to fight one long and losing battle with overmastering enemies. Gyges, Ardys, Sadyattes, Alyattes, Croesus—they all attacked her. Meantime, in the reign of Alyattes, the greatest of these monarchs, a new and far more imposing power had got itself consolidated to the east of the Lydian empire. This was the kingdom of the Medes. The rivals fought a great battle, which ended in the twilight and alarm of a total eclipse of the sun on May 28, 585 B.C. They made peace for the time, and Alyattes could proceed with the gradual reduction of the ports. But in the next generation—for all the East had been set in motion—the Medes in their turn had fallen under the authority of the kindred Persians and the great conqueror Cyrus, who in due time rushed west with his invincible footmen and his unfamiliar camels, destroyed Lydia in a moment, and contemptuously left a general to complete the conquest of Ionia.
All this time, and even under the Persian, the Ionians continued to develop and enrich the mind of the world. If science means the effort to find a rational instead of a mythological explanation of things, then the Ionians invented science. Thales of Miletus predicted that eclipse. Anaximander of Miletus held a theory about the origin of life which anticipates modern speculation. He wrote a book about it, which was probably the first example of literary prose in Greek. He also made the first map. His fellow-citizen Hecataeus invented history.... These are just some of the things the Ionians did. The rest of the Hellenes—first the colonies in Italy and Sicily, then the Athenians—caught the flame from them and kept it alive through later storms. But there was no more than time for this when the eastern cloud descended on Ionia. Athens could take up the torch. But Ionia was down.
II
KEEPING THE PASS
The innumerable East was pouring out of Thessaly into the Malian Plain, flooding in by two main channels, the hill-road through the pass of Thaumaki and the coast-road along the shore of the westward-bending Gulf of Malis. First came the pioneers, then the fighters, then the multitude of camp-followers and trains of supply which had fed all those numbers over so many leagues of hostile and unharvested regions. On attaining the brow of the steep climb to Thaumaki, had one looked back upon the view which gave this point its name of The Place of Wondering, he must have seen the wide Thessalian plain alive with an unwonted stir of men and baggage-wains and animals, and touched with shifting points of barbaric colour. As the continuous stream flowed past him he could note everything in greater detail—“Persians and Medes and Elamites,” the different contingents with their varying armature; footmen and horsemen; sumpter-mules and a number of high-necked, slow-striding camels, some of them showing on their flanks the proof that there were lions in Macedonia. Through the noise of the march would come the babel of strange oriental tongues. Enclosing all this, very far away could be descried a shadowy girdle of great mountains, from the highest and most distant of which the gods of Olympus looked down upon the invasion of Greece.
But Xerxes, driving along the coast-road to where it meets the Thaumaki route at Lamia, beheld a different sight. Mount Oeta stretched its wild massif there before him. At its western extremity (which he was approaching) the range piles itself into a shapeless bulk, crowding together its summits, which here in a surprising manner suddenly leap up some six or seven thousand feet from the plain. As the system trends eastward it sags down to a much lower level, but is there formidably guarded by the black precipices of the Trachinian Cliffs. Eastward yet it continues declining, until it is perhaps not three thousand feet high, then rises again another two thousand. This is the part that was called Kallidromos. Between the marshy shore of the Gulf and the broken cliff-wall of the mountain runs the Pass. Towering over all, at a vast distance rises the strange, enormous peak called Giona; while far to the south may be descried the most famous mountain in the world.
In the fierce sunlight of that sweltering day the King could not have failed to mark on his side of the Pass, under the very highest peaks of the range, a great black gash in the rocky barrier. As he approached it revealed itself to be the gorge through which the tormented Asôpos bores its narrow way between sheer walls of an altitude that disturbs the mind. A little space beyond the gorge, on the farther side of the Asôpos where it enters the Gulf, [(Note 34)]begins the Pass. The army was halted. Xerxes sent forward a scout.
The scout entered the Pass at a point where the sea barely left room for the road between it and the mountain, which here, gradually accentuating the gentle slope near the summit, comes down precipitously in the last few hundred feet. He rode a mile and met no one. Then the Pass, opening out a little towards the right, showed him the old temples where the Amphiktyones, the “Dwellers Round,” used to meet upon their sacred business. The road kept skirting the sea-marsh for a little, then rose in a long slope. He made his way cautiously to the summit. Arrived there, he all at once saw, thrust as it were into his face (so near they seem) the monstrous precipices of Kallidromos, three thousand feet high, all glistening at its eastern end with the whitish deposit of those clear bluish-green sulphur springs which gave its name to this famous place—the “Hot Gates,” Thermopylae. But the scout had no eyes for this great vision, for he saw, where the road again approaches the rocky wall, the red tunics of Spartan hoplites.
What were they doing? Some of them were practising the use of their weapons. Some were sitting on the ground and—yes—combing their long hair! One of them must have made a jest, for the others broke out laughing. The scout could not understand it at all. He counted them: a ridiculous handful. There were in fact rather more of them than he could see; an ancient wall across the Pass hid the rest. The scout rode quietly back with his information. Now one reason why the Spartans were combing their hair was this. It was customary among them to comb the hair of the dead.
They knew what was before them. Two of their spies had been captured by Xerxes, who let them go after fully showing them his whole array. The report of the spies was not likely to fall short of the facts as a result of this policy. All the East was on the march! Besides the Persians, Medes and Kissians, who formed the flower of the invading army, were coming the Assyrians, one of the great conquering races of history, distinguishable by their helmets of bronze and leathern straps curiously interwoven, by their clubs studded with iron nails, and by their linen breastplates. There were coming, the Bactrians with their bows of cane; the Sakai wearing their pointed sheepskin caps and armed with their native battleaxes; dark Indians in their cotton garments, carrying their bows of bamboo and iron-tipped arrows. There were hide-wrapped Caspians bearing sword and bow; Sarangians in dyed raiment and booted to the knee; Paktyes, Outioi, Mykoi, Parikanioi.... There were Arabians in flowing burnous who shot with the long bow; Ethiopians in the pelts of leopards and lions bearing spears of antelope’s horn and bossy maces and huge bows of split palm-wood with little arrows tipped with agate, who when they went to battle coloured half their black bodies with chalk and half with vermilion. (The “Eastern Ethiopians” wore on their heads the scalps of horses with the mane and ears attached; their shields were the backs of cranes.) There were Libyans from North Africa in goatskin garments; and buskined Paphlagonians in plaited headpieces. There were Phrygians, Armenians, Lydians, Mysians. There [(Note 36)]were Thracians with their foxskin caps, their deer-skin buskins, their long, many-coloured mantles. There were tribes armed with little shields of cow-hide and hunting-spears, two for each warrior; on their heads were bronze helmets and on the helmets the ears and horns of an ox in bronze, their legs were bound in crimson puttees. The Milyai were there, their cloaks fastened by brooches and with leathern skull-caps on their heads; the Moschoi, whose helmets were made of wood; the Tibarenes, the Makrônes, the Mossynoikoi; the Mares; the Colchians with wooden helms and raw-hide shields; the Alarodians and the Saspeires; the tribes from the islands of the Red Sea....
These (and more) were the infantry of the King. In addition there were the cavalry and the fleet.
There was the fine Persian cavalry. There were the Sagartians, who fought with the lasso; Medes and Kissians; Indians, some riding on steeds, some in chariots drawn by horses or by wild asses; Bactrians and Sakai; the Libyan charioteers; Perikanians; Arabians on camels.
To form the vast fleet came the famous mariners of Phoenicia and Syrians of Palestine—helmeted men with linen breastplates and rimless shields, throwers of the javelin. The Egyptians sent their navy, whose men had defences of plaited work on their heads, and carried hollow shields with enormous rims, and were armed with boarding-pikes and poleaxes and great triangular daggers. The Cyprian contingent could be recognized by the turbans of their “kings” and the felt hats of the common sort. The Cilician seamen were there in woollen jerseys. Pamphylians were there. The Lycian crews wore greaves and cuirasses, and were armed with bows of cornel wood and reed arrows without feathers, and with casting-spears; you knew them by the goatskins floating from their shoulders, their plumed hats, their daggers and crescent-shaped falchions. The Dorians of Asia were there, men of Greek race; the subject Ionians, alas; some from the Greek isles; the Aeolians; the “Hellespontians.” On board of every ship was a band of fighting men.
To defend the Pass there were three hundred Spartans; to be exact, 297, all picked men and, that their race might not perish out of Sparta, all fathers of sons. They were accompanied by their less heavily armed attendants. There were 2,196 men from Arcadia, 400 from Corinth, 200 from Phlius, 30 from Homeric Mycenae, now a ruinous little town, 700 Thespians, 400 Thebans of doubtful loyalty, 1,000 Phocians, the whole levy of the Opuntian Locrians; in all not eight thousand men. The whole force was under the command of one of the two Spartan kings. You know his name.
The right flank of the Greeks rested upon the narrow seas between the Malian coast and Euboea. The Athenian fleet was at Artemision guarding the narrows against the vastly superior navy of the enemy. From the heights above the road Leonidas could signal to the Athenian admiral.
The King prepared to attack simultaneously by land and sea. While the great army was making its way into Malis, his fleet was sailing along the iron coast of Magnesia, where the sea breaks under the imminent range of wooded Pelion. A squadron was detached to circumnavigate Euboea and cut off the retreat of the Greek ships in the Straits. Next morning everything would be ready for the concerted assault. The main portion of the fleet would enter the Malian Gulf, while the other ships were entering the “Hollows of Euboea.” Then Xerxes would rush at the Pass.
Only—in the sultry night following the long, hot day thunder began to mutter along the heights of Pelion. It increased to a violent storm, and the watchers on the Euboean mountains saw every now and then the whole range lit up by vivid lightning. Then the wind—the “Hellesponter” from the north-east—rose to so great a fury that the sea was quickly all in a turmoil. For three days the tempest raged, for three nights the bale-fires of the Greeks tossed their red beards in the wind. Great numbers of Persian ships were cast away upon the rocks about Cape Sepias. The squadron sent to round Kaphareus was wrecked in the Hollows. So rich a treasure was lost that a farmer near Sepias became the wealthiest Greek of his time by merely picking up what was washed upon the beach. And for these three days Xerxes must mark time before the Pass.
On the fourth day the Persian fleet succeeded in entering the Pagasaean Gulf. Then Xerxes ordered the attack. His Persian bodyguard, the ten thousand “Immortals” who were his best troops, were held in reserve. Meanwhile the Medes and Kissians, admirable infantry to whom victory had long become a habit, were sent forward to wear down the Spartan resistance. They were dressed in close-fitting leathern garments, in trousers (which surprised the Greeks) and curious fez-like caps, of soft felt or cotton, [(Note 39)]projecting in a kind of drooping horn at the front. (But the Kissians wore turbans.) They had sleeved tunics of many colours and cuirasses of bronzen scales like the skin of some great fish. They had wicker shields from behind which they cast their long spears (but the Greek spears were longer) and shot the reed arrows from their little bows (but the Greek bows were smaller). At their right sides swung from their girdles their foot-long stabbing swords. Their emperor, throned on a golden chair with silver feet, watched them advance to the assault. On his head was a stiff upright fez, on his feet saffron-tinted slippers. His mantle was purple, purple his trousers and flowing robe embroidered in white with the sacred hawks of his god Ahuramazda. He was girt with a golden zone, from which was hung his Persian sword thickly set with precious stones.
The Medes and Kissians attacked with fury. Against these lighter-armed troops the Spartans with their metal panoply and great heavy spears would have been at a terrible disadvantage. It was vital for them to keep the enemy engaged at close quarters. The tactics of Leonidas therefore were designed to effect this. His men made short rushes into the thick of the foe; feigned flights; reformed again and renewed the charge. They did this again and again. What discipline! In that narrow space, fifty feet wide, the ponderous Lacedaemonian spears of the Greek vanguard went through the wicker shields and the scale armour of the Barbarians like papyrus, while the points of the Median lances bent or broke against the solid buckler and breastplate of the Spartan hoplite. Leonidas hardly lost a man. Still the enemy came on, yelling; their dead choked the mouth of the Pass. Hour after hour in that late-summer weather the fight raged on. Loaded with their armour, trusting much to mere superiority of physical strength as they thrust back the assailants with their shields, all that time the Spartans kept up these violent rushing tactics. And then Xerxes sent the “Immortals” at them.
These men were perfectly fresh. They greatly outnumbered, not merely the Spartans, but all the defenders of the Pass together. They were the flower of one of the great conquering armies of history. The Spartans lifted their shields again and renewed the furious fighting. They made a dreadful slaughter of the Immortals, till at the long day’s end the Persians fell back, beaten and baffled. The Spartans dropped on the ground and slept like dead men.
Next day was a repetition of the day before.
Xerxes, or his generals, grew anxious. The closest co-operation with the fleet was necessary for the victualling of so numerous a host; and the fleet had failed to penetrate into the Malian Gulf. And the Pass was not yet forced.
At this critical hour a man craved audience of the King. He was a Malian Greek, a native of the region, and he knew all Oeta like one of its foxes. (Long years after, when a price was on his head, something drew him back to the scene of his immortal crime, to be slain there by no public avenger.) This fellow offered, for gold, to lead the Persians by a path he knew, which would take them by a long, steep, circuitous climb and descent to a position in the rear of the men in the Pass. The offer was accepted eagerly.
Hydarnes, commanding the Immortals, set out under the guidance of the traitor. As they left the Persian encampment darkness was falling and lamps began here and there to glimmer. The guide led the way into the wild ravine of the Asôpos. If outside the light was failing, here it was already night. Far above their heads the men could see a star or two shining between the narrow slit where the sheer walls of the gorge seemed almost to meet, so high they were. The path, by which a laden mule could with difficulty pass, followed the course of the rushing stream over gravel and between great boulders. It was part of the old hill-road to Delphi and well known to pilgrims and bandits. It had an evil reputation. “It hath ever been put to an ill use by the Malians.” (We can imagine to what sort of use our Malian had been wont to put it.) Moreover the Asôpos would sometimes rise suddenly and come roaring in spate down the gulley, flooding over the road. A sinister path.
For about three miles the Persians in Indian file threaded the ravine, which then opened out into a valley, up the slope of which they toiled, aided by their spears, along a track getting ever rougher and steeper. Sometimes the way would conduct them through a pitchy wood of firs. Now and again a man would stumble in the thick scrub or over a projecting edge of rock. Superstitious terror, begotten of the darkness upon such hills in the minds of those worshippers of Ahriman, troubled and silenced them. They emerged at last on a kind of rocky pavement. Then they descended a ravine and climbed the opposing slope. As they climbed the darkness lifted a little; a faint glimmer came from their golden bangles and the pomegranates of gold and silver on the butt of their spears. When they reached the summit of the path called Anopaia which they had so long been following, the dawn was clear behind the acute peak of Mount Saromata.
Anopaia was not unknown to the defenders of the Pass, and Leonidas had detached his Phocian contingent to guard it. In the silence of that windless night, in the hour before the break of day, the Phocian outposts heard a mysterious sound—a sort of light, dry, continuous roar, gradually growing nearer and louder. It was the Persians passing through an oak wood and dispersing with their feet the fallen leaves of many autumns. Suddenly the men appeared in the open. The Phocians were taken by surprise. Under a shower of arrows they retreated upon a little fort crowning a height about half a mile away. There they awaited the attack of Hydarnes. But he, neglecting these Phocians, pressed on along the path, which now began to descend, very steep and narrow. In no long time he would be on the road behind Leonidas. The Pass was turned.
While it was yet night, deserters had come to the Greeks with news of the march across the mountain. Soon after scouts came running down from the heights confirming the tale. Tradition says that Leonidas in so desperate a case bade his allies depart and save themselves; as for himself and his men, their orders were to defend the Pass to the utmost. It has, however, been recently suggested that the contingents which withdrew went to meet Hydarnes. If such was their purpose, either they came too late, or missed the enemy, or like the Phocians shrank from the conflict with the odds so heavy against them. At any rate they now pass out of the story. They were all the Greek forces save the Lacedaemonians, the thousand who must have composed nearly the whole fighting power of Thespiai, and four hundred Thebans. Of these the Thebans, it is said, were retained by Leonidas as hostages, their city being tainted already with suspicion of disloyalty. Yet they may have been true men. But the Thespians stayed willingly. Even when it was known that Hydarnes could not be stopped, they chose to stay. They had no traditional code of military honour like the Spartans; their proportionate stake was twenty times greater. “Their leader was Demophilos the son of Diadromês, their bravest man was Dithyrambos the son of Harmatidas.”
It was full daylight when Xerxes according to arrangement attacked. The Greeks, who hitherto had lined up behind the old wall which the Persian scout had seen drawn along the ridge of a mound within the narrowest part of the Pass, now, knowing the end was come, issued forth into the broader space beyond. Then followed a fight which men who only read of it never forget. The Barbarians came on in wave upon wave; the Greeks slew and slew. They could see the Persian officers lashing on their men with whips to the assault. Now and again one of themselves would fall with a rattle of bronze. But the enemy fell in heaps. Many were thrust into the sea and drowned; still more were trampled to death beneath the feet of their fellows. Two brothers of Xerxes were slain.
Then Leonidas fell.
The Spartans gathered about their king and fought to rescue the body. By this time their spears were broken, and they were fighting with their swords. One of the two men who had been left behind at the base in the last stages of ophthalmia appeared, led by his servant. The helot turned the face of his master towards the enemy and fled. The blind man stumbled forward, striking wildly, until he was killed. Four times the Barbarians were driven back, and the body of Leonidas was saved.
Word came that the Immortals were on the road behind them. Therefore the Greeks changed their plan of battle and retreated to the narrower portion of the Pass; all but the Thebans, who surrendered to the foe. The men of Sparta and Thespiai fought their way back to the mound and behind the stone wall across the mound, and there made their final stand. With cries the Barbarians swarmed about them on front and flank and rear. In a moment the wall was down. Such of the Greeks as still had swords kept using them. When their swords were gone, they fought with their bare hands; and died at last rending their enemies’ flesh like wolves with their teeth.
Thus, and not more easily, did Xerxes win through the Pass.
III
THE ADVENTURERS
The Greek world, like the English, was largely the creation of adventurous men. To follow in their track would be in itself a literary adventure of the most fascinating and entirely relevant to our subject, the conflict of the Greek and the Barbarian. Unfortunately for our delight the adventurers did not often write down their experiences; or if they did, their accounts have for the most part disappeared. There was a certain Pytheas of Massalia, that is Marseille, who about the time of Alexander the Great sailed up the eastern coast of England and discovered Scotland, and wrote a book about it afterwards. We should like to read that book; if only to see what he said about Scotland. But his account is lost, and we should hardly know about him at all, if it were not for a brief reference in the geographer Strabo. Pytheas seems to have got as far as the Orkney or even the Shetland Islands—one German sends him on a Polar expedition—and had something to say about a mysterious “Thule.” He remarked on the extraordinary length of the summer days in these northern latitudes, thereby provoking his fellow-countrymen to regard him as “extremely mendacious” (Ψευδίστατος).
Long before the time of Pytheas one Skylax of Karyanda in Asia Minor—a Greek or half-Greek—was sent by King Darius to explore the mouths of the Indus, that “second of all the rivers which produced crocodiles.” He sailed down a river “towards the dawn and the risings of the sun into the sea and through the sea westward,” circumnavigating India. What river was that? Whatever river it was, he accomplished a wonderful thing. Skylax also wrote a book, apparently, on this voyage. There exist fragments of his Voyage Round the Parts Without the Pillars of Heracles. His Indian narrative might be the worst written volume in the world, but it could not fail to excite the imagination in every sentence. Sailing along a river of crocodiles in a Greek galley in the reign of Darius the King!
Skylax was an Ionian or an Ionized Carian; and this reminds us that Ionia produced the first adventurers. There went to the making of that colony a great commingling of races. The first settlers may actually have come from Crete bringing with them what they could of the dazzling Cretan civilization. Many certainly came from Greece, which had enjoyed a civilization derived from Crete. No doubt the colonists had to accept help from any quarter and adopt dubious fugitives from Dorianized Hellas and “natives”—Carians, Lydians, Leleges and the like, who had learned to speak a kind of Greek—and marry native wives, who had not even learned to do that, and who would not eat with their husbands, and persisted in a number of other irrational and unsympathetic customs. But it is possible to believe that some memory of the ancient lore was long preserved, and in particular a knowledge [(Note 47)]of the sea-routes the Cretan ships had followed. I have argued elsewhere in this sense, venturing the suggestion that the Greek colonial empire (which started from Ionia) began in an effort to re-establish the great trading system which had its centre in early Crete. Excavators keep on discovering signs of Cretan—“Minoan” or “Mycenaean”—influences in the very places to which the Greek colonists came; and it looks as if they came because they knew the way.
The Ionian cities were nearly all maritime, and this in the fullest sense that the word suggests. The relation of Miletus, for example, to the Aegean did not less effectually mould the character of that state than the Adriatic moulded Venice. Therefore to understand Ionia we must approach her from the sea. She early discovered that this was her element. From Miletus harbour, from the shell-reddened beach of Erythrae, from Samos, from Chios, from Phokaia her ships ventured yearly farther, seeking (if we are right) to recover the old trade-connexions so long severed by the Invasions; to recover the old and, if possible, to pick up new. Ionian seamen became famous for their skill and hardihood. Not merely in the Aegean, but also in remoter waters, it soon became a common thing to see a little wooden many-oared vessel, a great eye painted on either bow (to let her see her way, of course), a touch of rouge on her cheeks; her sail set or her rowers rowing to the music of one that played on a flute. Her burden would be (for a guess) wine and olive oil and black-figured pottery, with a quantity of the glittering rubbish with which traders have always cheated natives—for the chief an embroidered belt or a woollen [(Note 48)]garment dyed as red as possible, for his wife a bronze mirror or a necklace of glorious beads. Having reached her destination and done good business, the ship would leave behind one or two of the crew with instructions to collect and store the products of the country against her return next spring. If all went well and the natives did not suddenly attack and exterminate the foreign devils in their midst, the storehouses would increase and the settlers with them, until at last the factory seemed important enough to undergo the solemn ceremony of “foundation” (Oikismos) and to be called a “colony” (Apoikia). Normally the “foundation” meant a great influx of new settlers, and from it the colony dated its official existence. But it might have had a struggling unofficial existence quite a long time before. More likely than not it had. These settlements at the sea-ends of trade-routes are immemorially old.
Let me quote an anecdote from Herodotus. He is engaged in relating the saga of the founding of Cyrene by certain men of the Aegean island Thera, and at a point in his narrative he says of these Theraeans:
In their wanderings they came to Crete and namely to the city of Itanos. There they meet a man that was a seller of purple, whose name was Korôbios; who said that he had been caught in a tempest and carried to Libya, even to the island of Platea, which is part of Libya. This man they persuaded to go with them to Thera, giving him money; and from Thera men sailed to view the land, being few in number as for the first time. But when Korôbios had guided them to this Isle Platea, they leave him there with provision for certain months, and themselves set sail with all speed to report concerning the island to the Theraeans. Now when they did not return in the time agreed upon, Korôbios was left with nothing. But then a ship of Samos that was voyaging to Egypt put in at this Platea; and when the master of the ship, whose name was Kolaios, and the other Samians had heard the whole tale from Korôbios, they left him a year’s food, and themselves put off from the isle, being eager to make Egypt. However, they were driven from their course by a wind out of the east. And passing out through the Pillars of Heracles they arrived at Tartessos, the wind never ceasing to blow. Thus were they marvellously led to this market, which at that time was untouched, so that these men won the greatest profit in merchandise of all Greeks of whom we surely know.
It would be easy to write a long commentary on that story. I might invite the reader to share my admiration of an art which makes you see so much in so little. You see the lonely man on his desert island of sand and scrub, with no companions but the wild goats (if goats there were) and the sea-birds fishing among the breakers. You picture his despair as he watches his store of victuals coming to an end, with no sign of his returning shipmates; his extravagant joy when he descries a Greek vessel; the astonishment of the strangers at the sight of this Crusoe; his bursting eagerness to tell them “the whole tale”; the departure of the Samians and the belated reappearance of the Theraeans; the face of Korôbios as he goes down to meet them, thinking of the things he will say. But the point I wish more particularly to make is the significance for history of the story. Desiring to learn what [(Note 50)]they can of the commercial possibilities of the Cyrenaica, the Theraeans come to Crete, and not only to Crete, but to that part of it where there still dwelt in the eastern corner of the long island a remnant of Eteocretans, that is “Cretans of Pure Blood,” descendants of the “Minoan” Cretans, who had been such famous traders and mariners. Itanos, where Korôbios lived, was an Eteocretan town. It has been excavated and has revealed material evidence of “Minoan” culture. That the ships of Minos visited Cyrenaica any one would conjecture who looked at a map. Ethnographers and archæologists adduce arguments of their own pointing to the same conclusion. Where the Greek town of Cyrene later grew up was the end of a caravan-route of unknown age from the Oasis of Siwah to the Mediterranean. Was not trade done there by the Minoans long before it was reconstituted as a “colony” of the Theraeans? Might not some knowledge of this African market and the sea-road thither linger on among the ruined and hunted Eteocretans?
In Herodotus’ account Korôbios appears to know only Platea, and it only by accident. That Eteocretan then must have felt no end of a surprise when the Samians came so opportunely to his help in the island he had “discovered.” Platea is supposed to be the little island of Bomba, which gives its name to the Gulf of Bomba. The Theraeans stayed in Platea a matter of two years. Then, urged by want and the Delphian Oracle, they landed in a body on the mainland opposite the island. It was a beautiful spot called Aziris, shut in by wooded hills and nourished by a river. Here they lived six years. Then at last, guided by friendly Libyans—are not those [(Note 51)]“friendlies” somewhat significant?—they pushed on to the site of what came to be known as the city of Cyrene. Korôbios has dropped out of the story, and the whole business looks like a bit of “peaceful penetration” into unknown country. That is the impression Herodotus wishes to convey. But it is a wrong impression, for somebody did know a remarkable amount about the Cyrenaica. The god of Delphi knew. It is he who is always urging the reluctant Theraeans from stage to stage of their advance. Herodotus, less perhaps from pious than artistic motives, emphasizes the contrast of the divine foreknowledge with the timid ignorance of men; it makes everything more dramatic. But we need not suffer ourselves to be imposed upon. For the god we substitute his ministers. The priests at Delphi had in their possession some previous information about the Libyan coast. They made a point of collecting such information. Where they got this particular piece of knowledge we do not know; but the old Homeric hymn tells how in ancient days a ship sailed from Crete to establish the oracle at Delphi.
But we have not yet exhausted the interest of that brief excerpt from Herodotus. Our thoughts travel with those Samians who, making for Egypt, were driven by contrary winds farther and farther west, until at last they passed the Straits of Gibraltar and found a superb new market at Tartessos just outside. It has been generally believed by scholars that Tartessos is the Tarshish with which, as we read in the Old Testament, King Hiram of Tyre exchanged merchandise; but of this there is now some doubt. Tartessos stood on an island at the [(Note 52)]mouth of the Guadalquivir, and was doubtless known to the Phoenicians before the Samians got there. It is surely of it that Arnold is thinking at the end of that long simile which concludes The Scholar Gipsy, when he tells how the Phoenician trader after passing the Atlantic straits reaches a place where through sheets of foam, shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come. The discovery of the Atlantic made a profound impression on the Greek mind. Pious and conservative spirits, like Pindar, thought it wicked to venture beyond the Straits; and indeed, it was long before any one did venture far, because, for one thing, the sort of craft which was suited to the tideless Mediterranean could not face so well the different conditions of the ocean. For another thing, the Phoenicians had got a monopoly of the British trade.
We do not know how the Samians lost the market of Tartessos, but in later times we find their fellow-countrymen the Phokaians in possession. This privilege was the result of the friendliness of Arganthonios, King of the Tartessians, who reigned eighty years and lived to be “quite a hundred and twenty.” The Phokaians perhaps deserved their luck, for they were the most daring of all the Ionian navigators. Some of their adventures would doubtless make good reading. The Phokaians also attract us because of all the Ionians they loved their freedom most. When Harpagos, the general of Cyrus, besieged them, rather than live even in a nominal subjection to the Persian, they launched their famous fifty-oared ships, and embarking their wives and children and furniture sailed to Chios. However, the Chians could not help them, so they decided to [(Note 53)]go and settle in distant Corsica. But first they made a sudden descent on their city and slew the Persian garrison which had occupied it. Then, when this had been done by them, they made strong curses against any who should remain behind of their company. And beside the curses they sank also a lump of iron and sware an oath that they would not return to Phokaia until this lump came up to light again. But as they were setting out for Corsica, more than half the people of the town were seized with longing and pity for their city and the familiar places of the land, and broke their oath and sailed back to Phokaia. The remnant reached Corsica, where they dwelt five years. Then they fought a disastrous drawn battle with a fleet of Etruscans and Carthaginians. Once more they took on board their wives and children and property and sailed away, this time to Reggio, from which they set out again and “founded that city in the Oenotrian land which is now called Hyele,” better known as Elea, a little south of Paestum.
Half a century later, when the Ionians revolted against the Persian rule, they chose for their admiral a Phokaian called Dionysios. Later they regretted their choice, considering Dionysios to be altogether too much of a disciplinarian, and would no longer take his orders. Disunion broke out among them, and they were entirely defeated at the Battle of Ladê. What did Dionysios do? He captured three of the enemy’s vessels, and then, to elude pursuit, sailed into the Levant, where he sank a number of trading-barks and collected a great treasure. Then he made for Sicily, where he “set up as a buccaneer,” sparing Greek ships of course, [(Note 54)]but attacking Etruscans and Carthaginians. I suppose it was piracy, but at least it was Drake’s sort, not Captain Kidd’s. We may hope he came to a good end.
There was a contemporary of Dionysios who is an even more significant figure for our understanding of Hellenism. This is Demokêdês of Kroton. The political background of the story of Demokêdês, as it is told by Herodotus, does not quite harmonize with the rest of his history, for it implies a policy towards Greece which Persia did not adopt till later. But otherwise there is no reason to doubt that things happened much as Herodotus says. Demokêdês was born at Kroton in the extreme south of Italy. It is a town famous in the history of medicine. We do not know how the medical school there originated. The earliest seems to have been in the Aegean island of Kos in connexion with the worship of Asklepios (Aesculapius), the God of Healing. Whether the physicians of Kroton had an independent tradition or not, they soon became famous. The first great name is Demokêdês. That he had a teacher we know from his words to Darius, but he has not mentioned his teacher’s name. The fact is that Demokêdês was the first doctor whose personality refused to be merged in the guild to which he doubtless belonged. At Kos the guild was so powerful (it had a semi-religious character there) that it was not until the Peloponnesian War that the world heard the personal name of one of its members—Hippokratês. Thus Demokêdês corresponds to Archilochus. I am about to tell again the story of a man of genius.
At Kroton he was always quarrelling with his father, [(Note 55)]who had a violent temper. When he could not stand him any longer, he left him and went to Aegina. Settling down there, he in his first year proved his superiority to all the other doctors, although he lacked an outfit and had none of the instruments of his art. And in his second year the Aeginetans hired him for a talent paid by the State, in the third year the Athenian people hired him for a hundred silver pounds, and in the fourth year Polykratês—tyrant of Samos—for two talents.
The instant recognition of Demokêdês is not only an indication of his genius, it shows a remarkable degree of enlightenment on the part of contemporary Greek governments. More credit belongs, no doubt, to the Aeginetans and Athenians than to Polykratês, who evidently retained the services of Demokêdês for the court at Samos. Yet Polykratês too was enlightened. Under his absolute rule or “tyranny,” which is the Greek technical term, the Ionian island of Samos had become the most splendid state in Greece. Not counting those who became tyrants of the Syracusans, there is none of all the other Greek tyrants who is fit to be compared to Polykratês in magnificence. This position was won by sea-power. Polykratês is the first of those Greeks we know who aimed at the Thalassocracy (the command of the sea) save Minos the Knossian and any one else who acquired the rule of the sea before Minos—an interesting remark in view of the theory that the Ionians definitely aimed at reconstituting the maritime empire of prehistoric Crete. This glittering tyrant suffered at last a reversal of fortune so strange and complete that it became a proverbial instance of the hand of God in human affairs. He was enticed to the Asiatic continent opposite his island by the Persian grandee Oroitês, and there treacherously seized and with nameless tortures put to death. His entourage became the slaves of Oroitês. One of them was Demokêdês.
Some years afterwards King Darius, who had in the meanwhile succeeded to the throne, was flung from his horse while hunting and dislocated his ankle. He entrusted his injury to the court-physicians at Susa, who were Egyptians, Egypt being the home of a very ancient body of medical lore transmitted from father to son. But the Egyptian doctors by wrenching and forcing the foot made the evil greater. For days seven and seven nights Darius was possessed by sleeplessness by reason of the malady which beset him, but on the eighth day, when the King was in poor case, one who had caught a report in Sardis before he came to Susa of the skill of Demokêdês of Kroton made report to Darius; and he commanded that he be brought before him with all speed. And when they had discovered him among the slaves of Oroitês in some neglected corner, they brought him into the presence dragging his fetters and clothed in rags. And as he stood there Darius asked him if he understood the art; but he would not admit it, fearing that, if he discovered himself, he would lose Hellas altogether. But Darius perceived clearly that he understood the art, but was feigning, and he commanded the men who had brought him to bring forth pricks and goads. Then indeed Demokêdês discovers himself, saying that he had no accurate knowledge of the matter, but having been the disciple of a leech he had some poor knowledge of that skill. Afterwards when he had entrusted himself to him, by using Greek remedies and applying mild cures after the violent he caused him to get sleep, and in short space restored him to sound health, that no longer hoped to have his foot whole again. For a gift thereafter Darius bestows on him two pairs of golden fetters; but Demokêdês asked him if he thus doubled his misfortunes for a gift, just because he had made him whole. Darius was pleased at the speech and sends him to his wives. And the eunuchs who led him there said to the women that this was the man who had given back his life to the King. And each of them, plunging a cup in the chest of gold, gave Demokêdês so rich a gift that his servant, whose name was Skiton, following him gathered up the nobles that fell from the cups, and a great deal of gold was amassed by him.
Then Demokêdês having healed Darius had a very great house at Susa, and sat at table with the King, and had all else save one thing only, namely his return to the Greeks. And the Egyptian physicians, who formerly tended the King, when they were about to be impaled on the stake for that they had been overcome by a Greek physician, he both saved by his prayers to the King, and also rescued a prophet of Elis, who had followed Polykratês, and was neglected among the slaves. And Demokêdês was a very great matter with the King.
Herodotus is so interesting that it is almost inexcusable to interrupt him; but the essayist has to study brevity. I will therefore in the main summarize what follows, indulging myself in only one remark (which has probably already occurred to my reader) that of course the story has passed through the popular imagination, and that the historian has to admire, not so much the caprice of destiny, as the genius of an indomitable personality.
Shortly after the accident to Darius, his queen Atossa was afflicted by an ulcer on her breast. Atossa was an unspeakably great lady. She was the daughter of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire. She had been the wife of the son and successor of Cyrus, her brother Cambyses. Now she was the wife of Darius and the mother of Xerxes. Darius himself may well have been a little in awe of her. She outlived him, if we may believe Aeschylus, who has introduced her into his play of The Persians, uttering magnificent stately lamentations over the ruin of the Persian cause in Hellas, and evoking from his royal tomb the ghost of the “god” Darius. Such was the half-divine woman, who was to help Demokêdês back to the Greece for which he felt so deep a nostalgia. A single touch of Herodotus makes her as real as any patient you have seen in a hospital. So long as the thing was comparatively little she concealed it and being ashamed of it did not tell anybody, but when she was seriously ill she sent for Demokêdês. He cured her after extracting a promise, which she fulfilled in the following manner. She persuaded Darius to plan an expedition against Greece and, as an aid to this, to send Demokêdês to make a report on his native country. The King then summoned fifteen Persians of distinction and instructed them to accompany Demokêdês on the projected voyage along the coasts of Hellas in quest of intelligence, commanding them on no account to let Demokêdês escape. Next he sent for his healer and explained the nature of the employment to which he designed to put him. He bade Demokêdês take all his movable possessions with him as presents for his father and his brethren, promising to requite him many times over. Demokêdês declined this offer, that he might not betray himself by too manifest an eagerness. He did accept the gift of a merchant-vessel freighted with “goods of every sort” for his “brethren”—and for his father too, we may hope, that irascible old man.
The expedition went first to Sidon, where they fitted out two triremes and the merchant-vessel freighted with goods of every sort, then sailed for Greece. They touched at various points of the coast, spying out the land and writing down an account of what seemed most remarkable. In this way they came at last to Tarentum in Italy. There Demokêdês got in touch with Aristophilidês, whom Herodotus calls the “king” of the Tarentines. Aristophilidês removed the steering-apparatus of the foreign ships, which prevented their sailing, and imprisoned the crew as spies; while Demokêdês took advantage of their predicament to escape to his native Kroton. Then Aristophilidês released the Persians and gave them back their rudders. They at once sailed in pursuit of their prisoner, and found him at Kroton “holding the attention of the Agora,” which was the centre of Greek city-life. There they sought to lay hands on him. And some of the men of Kroton, fearing the might of Persia, would have yielded him up, but others gat hold of him on their part, and began to beat the Persians with their staves; who made profession in such words as these: “Ye men of Kroton, consider what ye do; ye are taking from us a man that is a runaway slave of the King. How then shall King Darius be content to have received this insult? And how shall your deeds serve you well, if ye drive us away? Against what city shall we march before this, and what city shall we try to enslave before yours?” So spake they, but they did not indeed persuade the men of Kroton, but had Demokêdês rescued out of their hands, and the merchantman, which they had brought with them, taken away from them, and so sailed back to Asia; neither did they seek any further knowledge concerning Greece, though this was the object of their coming; for they had lost their guide. Now as they were putting forth, Demokêdês charged them with no message but this, bidding them tell Darius “Demokêdês is married to Milo’s daughter.” For the name of Milo the wrestler was of great account with the King. I think that Demokêdês hurried on this marriage, paying a great sum, in order that Darius might see clearly that in his own country also Demokêdês was a great man.
The explanation of Herodotus is convincing. Demokêdês was suffering from repressed egotism. He had had wealth and consideration in Persia, but he could not breathe its spiritual atmosphere. It is pleasant to reflect that in the court of Susa he may have regretted his father. To the Hellenic mind it was a chief curse in Barbarism that it swamps the individual. How shall a man possess his soul in a land where the slavery of all but One is felt to be a natural state of things? So in ancient Greece it was above all else personality that counted; freedom was a merely external matter unless it meant the liberation of the spirit, the development (as our jargon expresses it) of personality—although this development realized itself most effectively in the service of the State. Greek history is starred with brilliant idiosyncrasies—Demokêdês being one, whom we may now leave triumphant there at home [(Note 61)]in his flaming Persian robe, “holding the attention of the Agora” with his amazing story.
It would be too strange an omission to say nothing about that which, before Alexander’s tremendous march, is the most familiar of all Greek adventures among the Barbarians; I mean that suffered and described by Xenophon the Athenian. Again we witness the triumph of a personality, although that is not the important thing about the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The important thing is the triumph of the Greek character in a body of rascal mercenaries. The personality of the young gentleman who gained so much authority with them found its opportunity in a crisis among ignorant men, but it never became a great one. To the last it was curiously immature. Perhaps it would be an apter metaphor to say of Xenophon what some one said of Pitt—“He did not grow, he was cast.” His natural tastes were very much those of a more generous and incomparably greater man, Sir Walter Scott. They were the tastes of a country gentleman with a love of literature and history, especially with a flavour of romance. The Cyropaedia is the false dawn of the Historic Novel. Both Xenophon and Sir Walter wanted, probably more than anything else, to be soldiers. But Xenophon wanted to be too many things. Before his mind floated constantly the image of the “Archical Man”—the ideal Ruler—who had long exercised the thoughts of Greek philosophers, of none perhaps more than Socrates, whose pupil Xenophon professed himself to be. One day it seems to have struck him: Might not he, Xenophon, be the Archical Man? He may not have framed the thought so precisely, for it is of the kind that even youth does not always admit to itself; but the thought was there. It was his illusion. He was not born to command, he was born to write. He did not dominate, he was always more or less under the influence of some one else—Socrates, Cyrus, Agesilaos. He was an incredibly poor judge of men and the movement of affairs. But put a pen in his hands and you have, if not one of the great masters, yet a master in a certain vivid manner of his own.
He can have been little more than a boy when Fate sent him his incomparable adventure. The King of Persia had died leaving two sons, his heir and successor Artaxerxes, and Cyrus, the favourite of their dreadful mother, the dowager queen Parysatis. The younger son began secretly to collect and mobilize an army in Asia Minor, where authority had been delegated to him, intending to march without declaration of war against Artaxerxes. Xenophon was introduced to Cyrus by Proxenos of Boeotia, who indeed had induced him to visit Sardis. Proxenos, says his friend, thought it was sufficient for being and being thought an Archical Man to praise him who did well and to refrain from praising the wrongdoer. Consequently the nice people among those who came into contact with him liked him, but he suffered from the designs of the unscrupulous, who felt that they could do what they pleased with him. Xenophon appears to have fallen immediately under the spell of Cyrus, who undoubtedly has somewhat the air of a man of genius and who, as a scion of the Achaemenids, would in any case have inspired in him much the same feeling as a Bourbon inspired in Sir Walter Scott. In the army of invasion was a large body [(Note 63)]of Greek mercenary soldiers, chiefly from the Peloponnese, under the command of a hard-bitten Spartan condottiere called Klearchos. Xenophon joined this force as a volunteer. He believed at the time, as did Proxenos, who was one of the “generals” (Strategi), and indeed everybody except Klearchos, who was in the secret, that the expedition was preparing against the Pisidians, hill-tribes delighting in brigandage. It was not until the army had passed the “Cilician Gates” of the Taurus and had reached Tarsus that the Greek troops found confirmed their growing suspicion that they were being led against the King. They protested and refused to go farther. Their discontent was allayed with difficulty, but it is clear that Xenophon had already made up his mind. He went with the rest. They threaded the “Syrian Gates” of the range called Amanus, and struck across the desert. Having reached the Euphrates, they followed the river into “Babylonia,” what we call Mesopotamia, as far as Kunaxa, in the region where the two great streams begin to open out again after coming so close in the neighbourhood of Bagdad. At Kunaxa the Great King met them with an enormous army. A huge disorderly battle followed, in which the Greeks very easily dispersed everything that met them—but Cyrus was slain.
What were they to do? The whole purpose of the campaign—to put Cyrus on the throne—had vanished. It was clear to them that they could not rely on the Barbarians who had marched with them the two thousand miles from Sardis. Nothing to do but retreat. But retreat by the way they had come was no longer possible, since they had eaten up the country. It remained to follow the line of the Tigris up into Armenia, and so cross—in the winter—that savage plateau, in the hope of coming at last to Trebizond, away there on the Euxine, all those leagues away.
So they set out. It was the first requirement of their plan to cross Babylonia to the Tigris. Breaking up their camp at dawn, they were alarmed in the afternoon by the sight of horses, which at first they took for Persian cavalry, but soon discovered to be baggage-animals out at grass. That in itself was surprising—it seemed the King’s encampment must be near. They continued their advance, and at sunset the vanguard entered and took up their quarters in some deserted and pillaged huts, while the rest of the army, with much shouting in the darkness, found such accommodation outside as they could. That was a night of panics. An inexplicable uproar broke out in camp, which Klearchos allayed by proclaiming a reward for information against “the individual who let loose the donkey.” The enemy, as appeared in the morning, had been equally nervous. At least he had vanished from the neighbourhood. Moreover heralds now appeared offering a truce from the King. The offer was accepted under promise that the Greek army would be provisioned. So the host set out again under the guidance of the King’s messengers through a country all criss-crossed by irrigation-ditches, looking suspiciously full of water for the time of year. However, they soon reached some villages full of food and drink. There were some dates ... “like amber,” says Xenophon reminiscently. (He had got no breakfast that morning.) Here also they tasted “the brain of the palm”—the “cabbage”—delicious, but it gave them a headache.
In these excellent villages they remained three days and continued negotiations with Tissaphernes, the subtle representative of the King. As a result of the conversations they moved on again under the satrap’s direction as far as the towering “Wall of Media,” which crossed the land in a diagonal line towards Babylon, being twenty feet broad, a hundred feet high, and twenty leagues long. From the Wall they marched between twenty and thirty miles, crossing canals and ditches, until they struck the Tigris at Sittakê, where they encamped in a “paradise” full of trees. At the bridge of Sittakê met the roads to Lydia and Armenia, to Susa and Ecbatana (Hamadan). Next morning the Greeks crossed without opposition and advanced as far as a considerable stream traversed by a bridge at “Opis,” near which populous centre they found themselves observed by a large force of Asiatics. Thereupon Klearchos led his men past in column two abreast, now marching and now halting them. Every time the vanguard stopped the order to halt went echoing down the line, and had barely died out in the distance when the advance was resumed; so that even to the Greeks themselves the army seemed enormous, while the Persian looking on was astounded.
They were now in “Media”—really Assyria—a very different country from the “Garden of Eden” they had left on the other side of the Tigris. They marched and marched, and at last reached a cluster of dwellings called the “Villages of Parysatis.” Then another twenty leagues to the town of Kainai and the confluence of the Tigris with the Greater Zab, on whose bank they rested three days. All this time the enemy, although never attacking, had been following in a watchful cloud. Klearchos therefore sought an interview with Tissaphernes to discover his intentions. The satrap responded with Oriental courtesy and invited to a discussion at his headquarters Klearchos and the other generals, namely Proxenos, Menon, Agias and Socrates the Achaean. With grave misgivings, relying on the faith of the Barbarian, they entered the Persian camp. There they were immediately arrested. The officers who had accompanied the generals were cut down, and the Persian cavalry galloped out over the plain, killing every Greek they could find. The Hellenes from their camp could make out that something unusual was happening in that distant cloud of horse, but what it was they never guessed until Nikarchos the Arcadian came tearing along with his hands upon a great wound in his belly, holding in his entrails. He told them his story; they ran to arm themselves. However, the enemy did not come on. Meanwhile the generals were sent to the King, who had them beheaded.
As for the leaderless men, few of them tasted food that evening, only a few kindled a fire, many did not trouble to return to their quarters at all, but lay down where each happened to find himself, unable to close their eyes for misery and longing for the home-town, and father, and mother, and the wife, and the baby. Xenophon got a little sleep at last, and as he slept he dreamed that his father’s house was struck by a thunderbolt and set on fire. The dream was so vivid that he awoke and began to ponder what it might signify. His excited imagination revived [(Note 67)]in still more startling colours the terrors of the situation. Here was the stage set for a moving scene. Where was the hero? Where was the Archical Man? Here at last was the opportunity he had prayed for. There was kindled that night in Xenophon the flame of a resolution which, while it lasted, did really keep at the heroic pitch a spirit secretly doubtful of itself. It was the sense of drama acting on an artistic temperament; and of course that army, being Greek, accepted the miracle and naturally assumed its rôle. The gentleman ranker developed a Napoleonic energy, and made eloquent speeches (for which he dressed very carefully); with the result that he was chosen one of the new generals. He became in fact henceforward the leading spirit, and was entrusted with the most difficult task—the command of the rearguard in a fighting retreat. He made mistakes; he was not a Napoleon. But the distinguished French officer who has written the best military history of the Retreat gives him high credit for his grasp of the principles of war, which General Boucher believes he learned from Socrates. Perhaps you have not thought of Socrates as an authority on the art of war?
Next morning they crossed the Zab—it was the dry season—but had not advanced far on the other side when they were overtaken by a small force of horsemen, archers and slingers under the command of a certain Mithradates. These approached in a seeming-friendly manner until they were fairly near, when all at once they began to ply their bows and slings. The Greek army, marching in hollow square, could not retaliate. A charge failed to capture a single man, the enemy retiring before the charge and shooting as they retired, according to the “Parthian” tactics which were to become famous in Roman times. That day the Greeks covered little more than three miles. Clearly something must be done about it. Xenophon discovered that the army contained some Rhodians, who could sling leaden bullets twice as far as the Persians could cast their stones, which were “as big as your fist.” These Rhodians then were formed overnight into a special corps and instructed in their task. Next day the host set out earlier than usual, for they had to cross a ravine, where an attack would be especially dangerous. When they were about a mile beyond, Mithradates crossed after them with a thousand horsemen and four thousand archers and slingers. No sooner had he come within range than a bugle rang out and the special troops rushed to close quarters. The enemy did not await the charge, but fled back to the ravine pursued by a small body of mounted men for whom Xenophon had somehow collected horses. It was a brilliant little victory, stained by the infamy of some, who mutilated the dead—a thing so startlingly un-Greek that I cannot remember another historical instance. And here what was done was not done in cold blood.
In the evening of that day they came to a great deserted city, the name of which was Larissa. A great city; it was girdled by a wall two leagues in length, twenty-five feet in thickness, and a hundred feet high. Hard by was a pyramid of stone two hundred feet in height, where the Greeks found many fugitives who had sought refuge there from the neighbouring villages. Their next march brought them to another great empty fortress, called Mespila, opposite what [(Note 69)]we now call Mosul. Somewhere in this region of Larissa and Mosul had anciently stood the enormous city of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria; and the whole district (as one gathers from Xenophon) was full of dim legends of an overwhelming disaster. The soldiers were marching over the grave of an empire. Even the fragments were imposing. Mespila was based on a kind of ring, fifty feet broad and fifty feet high, built all of a polished stone “full of shells”; and on this foundation rose a wall of bricks, the breadth of it fifty feet, and the height four hundred, and the circuit six leagues.
Beyond Mespila Tissaphernes attacked again with what appeared a very large force. But his light-armed troops were no match for the Rhodian slingers and the Cretan bowmen, whose every shot told in the dense array of the enemy, who withdrew discomfited. The Greek army was now approaching the mountains, which they had long seen towering on the horizon. It appeared to the generals that the “hollow square” must be replaced by a new formation better suited to the narrow ways they would soon be following, and this they now devised. They were to use it successfully henceforward.
They came in sight of a “palace surrounded by villages.” The way to it, they observed with joy, led across a series of knolls where (thought they) the Persian cavalry could not come at them. Their joy was short-lived, for no sooner had the light-armed troops who composed the Greek rearguard begun to leave the summit of the first height than the enemy rushed up after them, and began showering darts and arrows and stones from the sling upon them, and so put them out of action for that day. The heavy-armed did their best. But they were naturally unable to overtake the skirmishers, and it went hard with the army until special tactics were devised which answered their purpose. The knolls which had served them so ill were foothills of a loftier line of heights running parallel to the road. A sufficient detachment was sent to occupy and move along the heights simultaneously with the main body advancing by the road. Afraid of being caught between two forces, the Persian did not attack. This was the first employment of a manœuvre which the Greeks repeated many times, and always with success.
The Palace and Villages turned out to be full of bread and wine and fodder collected by the satrap of the region. So the Greeks halted there for three days, resting their wounded. Having set out again on the fourth day, they were overtaken by the implacable Tissaphernes and, warned by experience, made for the nearest village, where they beat off his attack very easily. That night they took advantage of an unmilitary practice of the Persians in never encamping less than seven miles from an enemy, to steal a march on them. The result was that the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, they proceeded on their way unmolested. On the fourth day they came to a place where the Zacho Dagh, which they had kept so long on their right, sends down a spur to the river, which it steeply overhangs in a tall cliff picturesquely crowned to-day by a native village. The Tigris being still unfordable, the road is forced to climb over the cliff. Cheirisophos, commanding the van, halted and sent a message to Xenophon, who was in command of the rear. This was highly inconvenient to Xenophon, [(Note 71)]because at that very moment who should appear on the road behind him but Tissaphernes? However, Xenophon galloped to the front and requested an explanation. Cheirisophos pointed to the cliff, and there sure enough were armed men in occupation. Between these and Tissaphernes the army was in a perilous position. What to do? Xenophon, looking up at the wall of the Zacho Dagh, noticed that the main height at this part of the range was directly opposite them; looking again, he could make out a track leading from this peak to the cliff. He immediately proposed to seize the peak. A picked force was hastily got together, and off they set upon their climb. No sooner did the men on the cliff catch sight of them than they too began to race for the key-position. With shouts the two sides strained for the goal. Xenophon rode beside his men, encouraging them. A grumbling fellow from Sicyon complained that he had to run with a shield while the general rode on a horse. Xenophon dismounted, pushed the man out of the ranks, took his shield from him, and struggled on in his place. Thus enkindled, the Greeks—the men to whom mountains were native—reached the summit first. But it was a near thing.
Thus the pass was turned. But the situation remained not less than dreadful. On the right of the army arose the cruel mountains of Kurdistan; on their left ran swiftly the profound current of the Tigris. A soldier from Rhodes suggested crossing the stream on an arrangement of inflated skins, such as appears to be still in use upon the Tigris, where it is called a “tellek.” The suggestion was impracticable in face of the enemy, who was found in possession of the opposing bank. Reluctantly therefore they turned their backs upon the river and set their minds upon the mountains. Under cover of darkness they stole across the plain and were on the high ground with the dawn. They were now in the country of the Kardouchians, whom we now call the Kurds, in whose intricate valleys and startling ravines whole armies had been lost. On the appearance of the Greeks the natives fled with their wives and children from their villages and “took to the heather.” The invaders requisitioned the supplies they found, but made some effort to conciliate the highlanders. These remained sullenly unresponsive. All day long they watched the ten thousand hoplites with the light-armed and the women of the camp struggle through the high pass. Then as the last men were descending in the early-gathering darkness the Kardouchians stirred. Stones and arrows flew, and some of the Greeks were killed. Luckily for the army the enemy had been surprised so completely that no concerted attack was made in the steep-walled road. As it was, although they bivouacked that night without further annoyance, they could see the signal fires blaze from every peak, boding ill for the morrow.
When it came they resolved to leave behind all prisoners and all they could spare of the baggage-train. Thus disencumbered, they set forward in stormy weather and under constant attack, so that little progress was made. Finally they came to a complete check. In front of them rose the sheer side of a mountain, up which the road was seen to climb, black with their enemies. A frontal attack was not to be thought of. But was there no byway across the heights? A captured Kurd confessed that there was. Only at one point this path led over an eminence, which must be secured in advance. Therefore late in the afternoon a storming party set out with the guide, their orders being to occupy the eminence in the night, and sound a bugle at dawn. A violent rainstorm served to conceal this movement, whose success was also aided by the advance of Cheirisophos along the visible road. He soon reached a gulch, which his men must cross to gain a footing on the great cliff. But when they attempted the passage the enemy rolled down enormous boulders, which shattered themselves into flying fragments against the iron sides of the ravine, so that crossing was merely impossible. The attempt then was not at that time renewed. But through the night the Greeks continued to hear the thunder of the plunging rocks sent down by the unwearied and suspicious foe.
Meanwhile the storm-troops who had gone by the circuitous path surprised a guard of Kardouchians seated about a fire, and, having dispersed them, held the position under the impression that it was the “col” or eminence. In this they were mistaken, but at dawn they realized their error and set out in a friendly mist to seize their true objective. Its defenders fled as soon as the Greek trumpet sang out the attack. In the road below Cheirisophos heard the sound and rushed to the assault of the cliff. His men struggled up as best they might, hoisting one another by means of their spears. The rearguard, under Xenophon, followed the bypath. They captured one crest by assault, only to find themselves confronted by another. Xenophon therefore left a garrison on the first, and with the rest of his force attacked and captured the second—only to find a third rising before them, being in fact the eminence itself. That also was assailed. To the surprise of the Greeks the enemy made no resistance and made off at once. Soon a fugitive came to Xenophon with the news that the crest where he had left a garrison had been stormed, and all its defenders slain—all who had not escaped by jumping down its rocky sides. It was now evident why the Kardouchians had left the main eminence; they had seen from their greater elevation what was happening in Xenophon’s rear. They now came back to a height facing the eminence and began discussing a truce, while gradually they were collecting their people. An agreement was reached, and the Greeks began to descend from their position, when instantly the Barbarians were on them, yelling and rolling down boulders after them. However, with little difficulty now, a junction was effected with Cheirisophos.
In all a week was consumed in traversing the land of the Kardouchians, and not a day passed without hard fighting. Every narrow way was beset by the fierce mountaineers, who shot arrows two cubits long from bows so mighty that the archer had to use one foot to get a purchase on his weapon. One man was pierced through shield and breastplate and body, another was shot fairly through the head. In these mountains the Greeks “suffered more than all they had endured at the hands of the King and Tissaphernes.” Fighting their way along the Zorawa, they reached at last the more open ground, where that river falls into the Bohtan Su, which Xenophon calls the Kentrîtês. Alas, in the morning light they saw the further bank lined with hostile forces, both foot and horse, while on the mountains they had just escaped the Kardouchians were gathered, ready to fall on their rear, if they should attempt the passage of the Kentrîtês, a deep river full of big slippery stones. Gloom settled again upon the host. But in a little time, while Xenophon was still at breakfast, there ran to him two young men with great news. The pair of them had gone to collect sticks, and, down by the river, they had noticed on the other side “among rocks that came right down to the water an old man and a woman putting away in a kind of cave what looked like a bag of clothes.” So the soldiers put their knives between their teeth and prepared to swim across. To their surprise they got to the other side without the need of swimming. Now here they were back again, having brought the clothes for evidence.
Shortly afterwards they were guiding the division of Cheirisophos to the ford they had so opportunely discovered, while Xenophon led the rearguard, whose duty it was to protect the passage of the army from the assaults of the Kardouchians. These were duly made, but were beaten off and eluded; and the Kentrîtês was crossed.
The Greeks were now in Armenia. Before them stretched a wide rolling plateau, sombre, lonely, savagely inclement at that season; and yet they found it at first like Elysium after their torments up among the clouds. They crossed two streams, the Bitlis Tchai, by whose deep trench the caravans still travel, and the Kara Su. It was in the country of the satrap Tiribazos, who kept following the invaders with an army. So the march went on. One night they reached the usual “palace surrounded by villages,” and there, finding plenty to eat and drink, with joy refreshed their weariness. It was judged imprudent to billet the men out among the villages, so they bivouacked in the open. Then the snow came—a soft, persistent snow; and in the morning nothing seemed desirable except to remain warm and drowsy under that white blanket. At last Xenophon sprang up, and began to chop wood, so that the men were shamed and got up too, and took the log from him, and kindled fires, and anointed themselves with a local unguent. But all were certain that such another night would be the death of them; so it was resolved that they should find quarters among the villages. Off rushed the soldiers with cheers.
But the retreat must proceed. They caught a man who told them that Tiribazos meant to attack them in a high defile upon their road. This stroke they anticipated and, crossing the pass, marched day after day in a wilderness of snow. At one point in their dreadful journey they waded up to their waists across the icy waters of the upper Euphrates. The snow got deeper and deeper. Worst of all the wind—the north wind—blew in their faces. The snow became six feet deep. Baggage-cattle, slaves, some thirty of the soldiers themselves disappeared in the drifts. At last by the mercy of the gods the wind dropped a little, and they found an abundance of wood, which they burned, and so cleared spaces in the snow, that they might sleep upon the ground. Then they must bestir themselves and labour on again. Men began [(Note 77)]to drop from hunger-faintness. Xenophon got them a mouthful to eat; whereupon they got on their legs and stumbled forward with the rest. All the time bands of marauders prowled about the skirts of the army. If a beast were abandoned, they swooped down upon it, and shortly you would hear them quarrelling over the carcase. Not only the beasts were lost, but every now and then a man would fall out because of frostbite or snow-blindness. Once a whole bunch of soldiers dropped behind, and, seeing a dark patch where a hot spring had melted the snow, they sat down there. Xenophon implored them to get up; wolfish enemies were at their heels. Nothing he could say moved them. Then he lost his temper. The only result was a tired suggestion from the men that he should cut their throats. Darkness was falling; nearer and nearer came the clamour of the pillagers wrangling over their spoils. Xenophon and his men lay concealed in the bare patch, which sloped down into a cañon smoking with the steam of the hot spring. When the miscreants came near, up sprang the soldiers with a shout, while the outworn men whooped at the pitch of their voices. The startled enemy “flung themselves down the snow into the cañon, and not one ever uttered a sound again.”
Not long after, the Greeks came to some villages, one of which was assigned to Xenophon and his men. It was occupied so rapidly that the inhabitants had not time to escape. An extraordinary village it was, for the houses were all underground. You entered the earth-house at a hole “like the mouth of a well,” and, descending a ladder, found yourself in a fine roomy chamber, shared impartially by “goats and sheep and cows and poultry” as well as people. There was store of provender for the animals, and wheat and barley and greens for folk. There was also “barley-wine,” which you sucked through a reed, and which was “a very delightful beverage to one who had learned to like it.” Xenophon naturally lived with the headman of the village, whom he graciously invited to dinner at the expense of the house. He managed to reassure the headman, who was troubled about many things, including the capture of his daughter, who had just been married. So the wine was produced, and they made a night of it. Next morning, awakening among the cocks and the hens and the other creatures, Xenophon went to call on Cheirisophos, taking the headman with him. On the way they looked in at all the houses and in each they found high revelry. They were forced to come down the ladder and have breakfast. Xenophon has forgotten how many breakfasts he had that morning, but he remembers lamb, kid, pork, veal and poultry, not to mention varieties of bread. If anybody proposed to drink somebody’s health, he was haled to the bowl and made to shove in his head and “make a noise like an ox drinking.” To the headman the soldiers offered “anything he would like.” (When you think of it, they could scarcely do less.) The poor man chose any of his relations whom he noticed. At the headquarters of Cheirisophos there were similar scenes. The soldiers in their Greek way had wreathed their heads for the feast, making wisps of hay serve the purpose of flowers, and had formed the Armenian boys “in their strange clothes” into picturesque waiters. Xenophon took seventeen magnificent young horses which his village had been rearing for the King, and divided them among his officers, keeping the best for himself. In return he presented the headman with an oldish steed of his own, which he rather thought was going to die.
After a jolly week the weary retreat began again. The headman told the Greeks to tie bags upon the feet of their horses to keep them from falling through the frozen surface of the snow. He went as guide with Cheirisophos in the van. As they marched on and on, never coming to a human habitation, the general flew into a rage and struck the guide. Next morning they found that the man had disappeared in the night. This turned out to be the worst thing that had befallen them yet. After a week of padding the hoof over a white desert with no relief for the eyes but their own red rags, they came to a river. It was the Araxes, and if they had taken the right turn here, a few days more would have brought them to Trebizond. Unfortunately, misled perhaps by the sound of the native name, they got it into their heads that the river was the Phasis, about which everybody knew that it flowed through the land of the Colchians into the Black Sea. Therefore they went down the Araxes.
Fighting began at the very outset. Moreover provisions soon failed them. They were now in the wild country of the “Taochians,” who lived in strong places, where they had stored all their supplies. The army must capture one of these strongholds or starve. The first they came to was typical. It was simply an enclosed space on the top of a precipice. A winding stream served as a moat. There was only one narrow way of approach to the stockade, and this path was commanded by an insuperable cliff. Within the stockade huddled a throng of men and women and animals. On the top of the cliff were Taochian warriors, who flung stones and precipitated rocks on any Greek who ventured to set foot on the path. Several who ventured had their legs broken or their ribs crushed. Some shelter was afforded by a wood of tall pines, through which about seventy soldiers filtered, until no more than fifty or so feet of open ground lay between them and the stockade. An officer called Kallimachos began to amuse the army by popping out and into the wood, thus drawing the fire of the stoners, who let fly at him with “more than ten cart-loads of rock.” Then, in a lull of the stones, two or three made a sudden dash across the exposed ground and into the stockade. The rest followed at their heels. Then occurred a very horrible thing. The women flung their babies down the precipice and jumped after them. A sort of heroic madness swept the helpless defenders. Aeneas of Stymphalos gripped a man who had a splendid dress on; the man flung his arms about Aeneas and took him with him over the cliff. Hardly any were saved.
Now the ten thousand entered the country of the Chalybians, the bravest race they met on all their march; whose strongholds the Greeks did not take. The Chalybians, who wore an immense tasselled breastplate of linen, and carried a prodigious long spear and a short sword, used to cut off the heads of their enemies and go into battle, swinging the heads, and singing and dancing. Having escaped from such savages, the army crossed a river and marched many parasangs, turning west by a route that led them perhaps by way of the modern towns of Alexandropol and Kars to a populous city by Xenophon named Gymnias, which must have been near Erzerum. Here they found a guide, who promised to set them on the true road home. Him they followed for four days. On the fifth day Xenophon, who as usual was in command of the rearguard, heard a great and distant shouting. At once he and his men concluded that the van had been attacked, for the whole country was up in arms. Every moment the far-off clamour increased. As they stared at the mountain-side, which the van had just ascended, they noticed that, whenever a company had got a certain distance, the men suddenly took to their heels and tore up the mountain for their lives. It was clear that something extraordinary was happening. Xenophon sprang on his horse and, followed by the cavalry, galloped to the rescue. But now in a little they could hear what they were crying on the mountain; it was The Sea! The Sea! Then the rearguard also ran, and the baggage-animals and the horses too! And on the top they fell to embracing one another, officers and men indiscriminately, and the tears ran down their faces. Then they raised a great cairn of stones on that hill-top, overlooking “the col of Vavoug,” where the road still passes.
IV
ELEUTHERIA
What was the special gift of Greece to the world? The answer of the Greeks themselves is unexpected, yet it is as clear as a trumpet: Eleutheria, Freedom. The breath of Eleutheria fills the sail of Aeschylus’ great verse, it blows through the pages of Herodotus, awakens fierce regrets in Demosthenes and generous memories in Plutarch. “Art, philosophy, science,” the Greeks say, “yes, we have given all these; but our best gift, from which all the others were derived, was Eleutheria.”
Now what did they mean by that?
They meant the Reign of Law. Aeschylus says of them in The Persians:
Atossa. Who is their shepherd over them and lord of their host?
Chorus. Of no man are they called the slaves or subjects.
Now hear Herodotus amplifying and explaining Aeschylus. For though they are free, yet are they not free in all things. For they have a lord over them, even Law, whom they fear far more than thy people fear thee. At least they do what that lord biddeth them, and what he biddeth is still the same, to wit that they flee not before the face of any multitude [(Note 83)]in battle, but keep their order and either conquer or die. It is Demaratos that speaks of the Spartans to King Xerxes.
Eleutheria the Reign of Law or Nomos. The word Nomos begins with the meaning “custom” or “convention,” and ends by signifying that which embodies as far as possible the universal and eternal principles of justice. To write the history of it is to write the history of Greek civilization. The best we can do is to listen to the Greeks themselves explaining what they were fighting for in fighting for Eleutheria. They will not put us off with abstractions.
No one who has read The Persians forgets the live and leaping voice that suddenly cries out before the meeting of the ships at Salamis: Onward, Sons of the Hellenes! Free your country, free your children, your wives, your fathers’ tombs and seats of your fathers’ gods! All hangs now on your fighting! This, then, when it came to action, is what the Greeks meant by the Reign of Law. It will not seem so puzzling if you put it in this way: that what they fought for was the right to govern themselves. Here as elsewhere we may observe how the struggle of Greek and Barbarian fills with palpitating life such words as Freedom, which to dull men have been apt to seem abstract and to sheltered people faded. For the Barbarians had not truly laws at all. How are laws possible where “all are slaves save one,” and he responsible to nobody? So the fight for Freedom becomes a fight for Law, that no man may become another’s master, but all be subject equally to the Law, “whose service is perfect freedom.”
That conception was wrought out in the stress of conflict with the Barbarians, culminating in the Persian danger. On that point it is well to prepare our minds by an admission. The quarrel was never a simple one of right and wrong. Persia at least was in some respects in advance of the Greece she fought at Salamis; and not only in material splendour. That is now clear to every historian; it never was otherwise to the Greeks themselves. Possessing or possessed by the kind of imagination which compels a man to understand his enemy, they saw much to admire in the Persians—their hardihood, their chivalry, their munificence, their talent for government. The Greeks heard with enthusiasm (which was part at least literary) the scheme of education for young nobles—“to ride a horse, to shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth!” In fact the two peoples, although they never realized it, were neither in race nor in speech very remote from one another. But it was the destiny of the Persians to succeed to an empire essentially Asiatic and so to become the leaders and champions of a culture alien to Greece and to us. In such a cause their very virtues made them the more dangerous. Here was no possible compromise. Persia and Greece stood for something more than two political systems; the European mind, the European way of thinking and feeling about things, the soul of Europe was at stake. There is no help for it; in such a quarrel we must take sides.
Let us look first at the Persian side. The phrase I quoted about all men in Persia being slaves save one is not a piece of Greek rhetoric; it was the official language of the empire. The greatest officer [(Note 85)]of state next to the King was still his “slave” and was so addressed by him. The King was lord and absolute. An inscription at Persepolis reads I am Xerxes the Great King, the King of Kings, the King of many-tongued countries, the King of this great universe, the Son of Darius the King, the Achaemenid. Xerxes the Great King saith: “By grace of Ahuramazda I have made this portal whereon are depicted all the countries.” The Greek orator Aeschines says, “He writes himself Lord of men from the rising to the setting sun.” The letter of Darius to Gadatas—it exists to-day—is addressed by “Darius the son of Hystaspes, King of Kings.” That, as we know, was a favourite title. The law of the land was summed up in the sentence: The King may do what he pleases. Greece saved us from that.
No man might enter the sacred presence without leave. Whoever was admitted must prostrate himself to the ground. The emperor sat on a sculptured throne holding in his hand a sceptre tipped with an apple of gold. He was clad in gorgeous trousers and gorgeous Median robe. On his head was the peaked kitaris girt with the crown, beneath which the formally curled hair flowed down to mingle with the great beard. He had chains of gold upon him and golden bracelets, a golden zone engirdled him, from his ears hung rings of gold. Behind the throne stood an attendant with a fan against the flies and held his mouth lest his breath should touch the royal person. Before the throne stood the courtiers, their hands concealed, their eyelids stained with kohl, their lips never smiling, their painted faces never moving. Greece saved us from all that.
The King had many wives and a great harem of concubines—one for each day of the year. You remember the Book of Esther. Ahasuerus is the Greek Xerxes. There is in Herodotus a story of that court which, however unauthentic it may be in details, has a clear evidential value. On his return from Greece Xerxes rested at Sardis, the ancient capital of Lydia. There he fell in love with the wife of his brother Masistes. Unwilling to take her by force, he resorted to policy. He betrothed his son Darius to Artaynte, the daughter of Masistes, and took her with him to Susa (the Shushan of Esther), hoping to draw her mother to his great palace there, “where were white, green and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble.” In Susa, however, the King experienced a new sensation and fell in love with Artaynte—who returned his affection. Now Amestris the Queen had woven with her own hands a wonderful garment for her lord, who inconsiderately put it on to pay his next visit to Artaynte. Of course Artaynte asked for it, of course in the end she got it, and of course she made a point of wearing it. When Amestris heard of this, she blamed, says Herodotus, not the girl but her mother. With patient dissimulation she did nothing until the Feast of the Birthday of the King, when he cannot refuse a request. Then for her present she asked the wife of Masistes. The King, who understood her purpose, tried to save the victim; but too late. Amestris had in the meanwhile sent the King’s soldiers for the woman; and when she had her in her power she cut away her breasts and threw them to the dogs, cut off her nose and ears and lips and tongue, and sent her home.
It may be thought that the Persian monarchy cannot fairly be judged by the conduct of a Xerxes. The reply to this would seem to be that it was Xerxes the Greeks had to fight. But let us choose another case, Artaxerxes II, whose life the gentle Plutarch selected to write because of the mildness and democratic quality which distinguished him from others of his line. Yet the Life of Artaxerxes would be startling in a chronicle of the Italian Renaissance. The story which I will quote from it was probably derived from the Persian History of Ktesias, who was a Greek physician at the court of Artaxerxes. This Ktesias, as Plutarch himself tells us, was a highly uncritical person, but after all, as Plutarch goes on to say, he was not likely to be wrong about things that were happening before his eyes. Here then is the story, a little abridged.
She—that is, Parysatis the queen-mother—perceived that he—Artaxerxes the King—had a violent passion for Atossa, one of his daughters.... When Parysatis came to suspect this, she made more of the child than ever, and to Artaxerxes she praised her beauty and her royal and splendid ways. At last she persuaded him to marry the maid and make her his true wife, disregarding the opinions and laws (Nomoi) of the Greeks; she said that he himself had been appointed by the god (Ahuramazda) a law unto the Persians and judge of honour and dishonour.... Atossa her father so loved in wedlock that, when leprosy had overspread her body, he felt no whit of loathing thereat, but praying for her sake to Hera (Anaitis?) he did obeisance to that goddess only, touching the [(Note 88)]ground with his hands; while his satraps and friends sent at his command such gifts to the goddess that the whole space between the temple and the palace, which was sixteen stades (nearly two miles) was filled with gold and with silver and with purple and with horses.
Artaxerxes afterwards took into his harem another of his daughters. The religion of Zarathustra sanctioned that. It also sanctioned marriage with a mother. According to Persian notions both Xerxes and Artaxerxes behaved with perfect correctness. The royal blood was too near the divine to mingle with baser currents. There is no particular reason for believing that Xerxes was an exceptionally vicious person, while Artaxerxes seemed comparatively virtuous. It was the system that was all wrong. What are you to expect of a prince, knowing none other law than his own will, and surrounded from his infancy by venomous intriguing women and eunuchs? Babylon alone used to send five hundred boys yearly to serve as eunuchs.... I think we may now leave the Persians.
Hear again Phocylides: “A little well-ordered city on a rock is better than frenzied Nineveh.” The old poet means a city of the Greek type, and by “well-ordered” he means governed by a law which guarantees the liberties of all in restricting the privileges of each. This, the secret of true freedom, was what the Barbarian never understood. Sperthias and Boulis, two rich and noble Spartans, offered to yield themselves up to the just anger of Xerxes, whose envoys had been flung to their death in a deep water-tank. On the road to Susa they were entertained by the Persian grandee Hydarnes, who [(Note 89)]said to them: Men of Sparta, wherefore will ye not be friendly towards the King? Beholding me and my condition, ye see that the King knoweth how to honour good men. In like manner ye also, if ye should give yourselves to the King (for he deemeth that ye are good men), each of you twain would be ruler of Greek lands given you by the King. They answered: Hydarnes, thine advice as touching us is of one side only, whereof thou hast experience, while the other thou hast not tried. Thou understandest what it is to be a slave, but freedom thou hast not tasted, whether it be sweet or no. For if thou shouldst make trial of it, thou wouldest counsel us to fight for it with axes as well as spears!
So when Alexander King of Macedon came to Athens with a proposal from Xerxes that in return for an alliance with them he would grant the Athenians new territories to dwell in free, and would rebuild the temples he had burned; and when the Spartan envoys had pleaded with them to do no such thing as the King proposed, the Athenians made reply. We know as well as thou that the might of the Persian is many times greater than ours, so that thou needest not to charge us with forgetting that. Yet shall we fight for freedom as we may. To make terms with the Barbarian seek not thou to persuade us, nor shall we be persuaded. And now tell Mardonios that Athens says: “So long as the sun keeps the path where now he goeth, never shall we make compact with Xerxes; but shall go forth to do battle with him, putting our trust in the gods that fight for us and in the mighty dead, whose dwelling-places and holy things he hath contemned and burned with fire.” This was their answer to Alexander; but to the Spartans [(Note 90)]they said: The prayer of Sparta that we make not agreement with the Barbarian was altogether pardonable. Yet, knowing the temper of Athens, surely ye dishonour us by your fears, seeing that there is not so much gold in all the world, nor any land greatly exceeding in beauty and goodness, for which we would consent to join the Mede for the enslaving of Hellas. Nay even if we should wish it, there be many things preventing us: first and most, the images and shrines of the gods burned and cast upon an heap, whom we must needs avenge to the utmost rather than be consenting with the doer of those things; and, in the second place, there is our Greek blood and speech, the bond of common temples and sacrifices and like ways of life—if Athens betrayed these things, it would not be well....
οὐ καλῶς ἂν ἔχοι, “it would not be well.” When I was writing about Greek simplicity I should have remembered this passage. But our present theme is the meaning of Eleutheria. “Our first duty,” say the Athenians, “is to avenge our gods and heroes, whose temples have been desecrated.” Such language must ring strangely in our ears until we have reflected a good deal about the character of ancient religion. To the Greeks of Xerxes’ day religion meant, in a roughly comprehensive phrase, the consecration of the citizen to the service of the State. When the Athenians speak of the gods and heroes, whose temples have been burned, they are thinking of the gods and heroes of Athens, which had been sacked by the armies of Mardonios; and they are thinking chiefly of Athena and Erechtheus.
Now who was Athena? You may read in books that she was “the patron-goddess of Athens.” But she was more than that; she was Athens. You may read that she “represented the fortune of Athens”; but indeed she was the fortune of Athens. You may further read that she “embodied the Athenian ideal”; which is true enough, but how small a portion of the truth! It was not so much what Athens might become, as what Athens was, that moulded and impassioned the image of the goddess. It was the city of to-day and yesterday that filled the hearts of those Athenians with such a sense of loss and such a need to avenge their Lady of the Acropolis. For that which had been the focus of the old city-life, the dear familiar temple of their goddess, was a heap of stones and ashes mixed with the carrion of the old men who had remained to die there.
As for Erechtheus, he was the great Athenian “hero.” The true nature of a “hero” is an immensely controversial matter; but what we are concerned with here is the practical question, what the ancients thought. They, rightly or wrongly, normally thought of their “heroes” as famous ancestors. It was as their chief ancestor that the Athenians regarded and worshipped Erechtheus. Cecrops was earlier, but for some reason not so worshipful; Theseus was more famous, but later, and even something of an alien, since he appears to come originally from Troezen. Thus it was chiefly about Erechtheus as “the father of his people,” rather than about maiden Athena, that all that sentiment, so intense in ancient communities, of the common blood and its sacred obligations entwined itself. This old king of primeval Athens claimed his share of the piety due to the dead of [(Note 92)]every household, an emotion of so powerful a quality among the unsophisticated peoples that some have sought in it the roots of all religion. It is an emotion hard to describe and harder still to appreciate. Erechtheus was the Son of Earth, that is, really, of Attic Earth; and on the painted vases you see him, a little naked child, being received by Athena from the hands of Earth, a female form half hidden in the ground, who is raising him into the light of day. The effect of all this was to remind the Athenians that they themselves were autochthones, born of the soil, and Attic Earth was their mother also. Not only her spiritual children, you understand, nor only fed of her bounty, but very bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. Gê Kourotrophos they called her, “Earth the Nurturer of our Children.” Unite all these feelings, rooted and made strong by time: love of the City (Athena), love of the native and mother Earth (Gê), love of the unforgotten and unforgetting dead (Erechtheus)—unite all these feelings and you will know why the defence of so great sanctities and the avenging of insult against them seemed to Athenians the first and greatest part of Liberty.
So Themistocles felt when after Salamis he said: It is not we who have wrought this deed, but the gods and heroes, who hated that one man should become lord both of Europe and of Asia; unholy and sinful, who held things sacred and things profane in like account, burning temples and casting down the images of the gods; who also scourged the sea and cast fetters upon it. And it is this feeling which gives so singular a beauty and charm to the story of Dikaios. “Dikaios the son of Theokydes, an Athenian then in exile and held in reputation among the Persians, said that at this time, when Attica was being wasted by the footmen of Xerxes and was empty of its inhabitants, it befell that he was with Demaratos in the Thriasian Plain, when they espied a pillar of dust, such as thirty thousand men might raise, moving from Eleusis. And as they marvelled what men might be the cause of the dust, presently they heard the sound of voices, and it seemed to him that it was the ritual-chant to Iacchus. Demaratos was ignorant of the rites that are performed at Eleusis, and questioned him what sound was that. But he said, Demaratos, of a certainty some great harm will befall the host of the King. For this is manifest—there being no man left in Attica—that these are immortal Voices proceeding from Eleusis to take vengeance for the Athenians and their allies. And if this wrathful thing descend on Peloponnese, the King himself and his land army will be in jeopardy; but if it turn towards the ships at Salamis, the King will be in danger of losing his fleet. This is that festival which the Athenians hold yearly in honour of the Mother and the Maid, and every Athenian, or other Greek that desires it, receives initiation; and the sound thou hearest is the chanting of the initiates. Demaratos answered, Hold thy peace, and tell no man else this tale. For if these thy words be reported to the King, thou wilt lose thine head, and I shall not be able to save thee, I nor any other man. But keep quiet and God will deal with this host. Thus did he counsel him. And the dust and the cry became a cloud, and the cloud arose and moved towards Salamis to the encampment of the Greeks. So they knew that the navy of Xerxes was doomed.”
Athena, the Mother-Maid Demeter-Persephone with the mystic child Iacchus, Boreas “the son-in-law of Erechtheus,” whose breath dispersed the enemy ships under Pelion and Kaphareus—of such sort are “the gods who fight for us” and claim the love and service of Athens in return. It is well to remember attentively this religious element in ancient patriotism, so large an element that one may say with scarcely any exaggeration at all that for the ancients patriotism was a religion. Therefore is Eleutheria, the patriot’s ideal, a religion too. Such instincts and beliefs are interwoven in one sacred indissoluble bond uniting the Gods and men, the very hills and rivers of Greece against the foreign master. Call this if you will a mystical and confused emotion; but do not deny its beauty or underestimate its tremendous force.
But here (lest in discussing a sentiment which may be thought confused we ourselves fall into confusion) let us emphasize a distinction, which has indeed been already indicated. Greek patriotism was as wide as Greece; but on the other hand its intensity was in inverse ratio to its extension. Greek patriotism was primarily a local thing, and it needed the pressure of a manifest national danger to lift it to a wider outlook. That was true in the main and of the average man, although every generation produced certain superior spirits, statesmen or philosophers, whose thought was not particularist. It was this home-savour which gave to ancient patriotism its special salt and pungency. When the Athenians in the speech I quoted say that their first duty is to avenge their gods, they are thinking more of Athens than of Greece. They are thinking of all we mean by “home,” save that home for them was bounded by the ring-wall of the city, not by the four walls of a house.
The wider patriotism of the nation the Greeks openly or in their hearts ranked in the second place. Look again at the speech of the Athenians. First came Athens and her gods and heroes—their fathers’ gods; next To Hellenikon, that whereby they are not merely Athenians but Hellenes—community of race and speech, the common interest in the national gods and their festivals, such as Zeus of Olympia with the Olympian Games, the Delphian Apollo with the Pythian Games. Of course this Hellenic or Panhellenic interest was always there, and in a sense the future lay with it; but never in the times when Greece was at its greatest did it supplant the old intense local loyalties. The movement of Greek civilization is from the narrower to the larger conception of patriotism, but the latter ideal is grounded in the former. Greek love of country was fed from local fires, and even Greek cosmopolitanism left one a citizen, albeit a citizen of the world. So it was with Eleutheria, which enlarged itself in the same sense and with an equal pace.
This development can be studied best in Athens, which was “the Hellas of Hellas.” One finds in Attic literature a passionate Hellenism combined with a passionate conviction that Hellenism finds its best representative in Athens. The old local patriotism survives, but is nourished more and more with new ambitions. New claims, new ideals are advanced. One claim appears very early, if we may believe Herodotus that the Athenians used it in debate with the men of Tegea before the Battle [(Note 96)]of Plataea. The Athenians recalled how they had given shelter to the Children of Heracles when all the other Greek cities would not, for fear of Eurystheus; and how again they had rescued the slain of the Seven from the Theban king and buried them in his despite. On those two famous occasions the Athenians had shown the virtue which they held to be most characteristic of Hellenism and specially native to themselves, the virtue which they called “philanthropy” or the love of man. What Heine said of himself, the Athenians might have said: they were brave soldiers in the liberation-war of humanity.
There is a play of Euripides, called The Suppliant Women, which deals with the episode of the unburied dead at Thebes. The fragmentary Argument says: The scene is Eleusis. Chorus of Argive women, mothers of the champions who have fallen at Thebes. The drama is a glorification of Athens. The eloquent Adrastos, king of Argos, pleads the cause of the suppliant women who have come to Athens to beg the aid of its young king Theseus in procuring the burial of their dead. Theseus is at first disposed to reject their prayer, for reasons of State; he must consider the safety of his own people; when his mother Aithra breaks out indignantly: Surely it will be said that with unvalorous hands, when thou mightest have won a crown of glory for thy city, thou didst decline the peril and match thyself, ignoble labour, with a savage swine; and when it was thy part to look to helm and spear, putting forth thy might therein, wast proven a coward. To think that son of mine—ah, do not so! Seest thou how Athens, whom mocking lips have named unwise, flashes back upon her scorners [(Note 97)]a glance of answering scorn? Danger is her element. It is the unadventurous cities doing cautious things in the dark, whose vision is thereby also darkened. And the result is that Theseus and his men set out against the great power of Thebes, defeat it and recover the bodies, which with due observance of the appropriate rites they inter in Attic earth.
“To make the world safe for democracy” is something; but Athens never found it safe, perhaps did not believe it could be safe. Ready to take risks, facing danger with a lifting of the heart ... their whole life a round of toils and dangers ... born neither themselves to rest nor to let other people. In such phrases are the Athenians described by their enemies. A friend has said: I must publish an opinion which will be displeasing to most; yet (since I think it to be true) I will not withhold it. If the Athenians in fear of the coming peril had left their land, or not leaving it but staying behind had yielded themselves to Xerxes, none would have tried to meet the King at sea. And so all would have been lost. But as the matter fell out, it would be the simple truth to say that the Athenians were the saviours of Greece. The balance of success was certain to turn to the side they espoused, and by choosing the cause of Hellas and the preservation of her freedom it was the Athenians and no other that roused the whole Greek world—save those who played the traitor—and under God thrust back the King. And some generations later, Demosthenes, in what might be called the funeral oration of Eleutheria, sums up the claim of Athens in words whose undying splendour is all pride and glory transfiguring the pain of failure and defeat. Let no man, I beseech you, imagine that there is anything of paradox or exaggeration in what I say, but sympathetically consider it. If the event had been clear to all men beforehand ... even then Athens could only have done what she did, if her fame and her future and the opinion of ages to come meant anything to her. For the moment indeed it looks as if she had failed; as man must always fail when God so wills it. But had She, who claimed to be the leader of Greece, yielded her claim to Philip and betrayed the common cause, her honour would not be clear.... Yes, men of Athens, ye did right—be very sure of that—when ye adventured yourselves for the safety and freedom of all; yes, by your fathers who fought at Marathon and Plataea and Salamis and Artemision, and many more lying in their tombs of public honour they had deserved so well, being all alike deemed worthy of this equal tribute by the State, and not only (O Aeschines) the successful, the victorious....
Demosthenes was right in thinking that Eleutheria was most at home in Athens. Now Athens, as all men know, was a “democracy”; that is, the general body of the citizens (excluding the slaves and “resident aliens”) personally made and interpreted their laws. Such a constitution was characterized by two elements which between them practically exhausted its meaning; namely, autonomy or freedom to govern oneself by one’s own laws, and isonomy or equality of all citizens before the law. Thus Eleutheria, defined as the Reign of Law, may be regarded as synonymous with Democracy. “The basis of the democratical constitution is Eleutheria,” says Aristotle. This is common ground with all Greek writers, whether they write to praise or to condemn. Thus Plato humorously, but not quite [(Note 99)]good-humouredly, complains that in Athens the very horses and donkeys knocked you out of their way, so exhilarated were they by the atmosphere of Eleutheria. But at the worst he only means that you may have too much of a good thing. Eleutheria translated as unlimited democracy you may object to; Eleutheria as an ideal or a watchword never fails to win the homage of Greek men. Very early begins that sentimental republicanism which is the inspiration of Plutarch, and through Plutarch has had so vast an influence on the practical affairs of mankind. It appears in the famous drinking-catch beginning I will bear the sword in the myrtle-branch like Harmodios and Aristogeiton. It appears in Herodotus. Otanes the Persian (talking Greek political philosophy), after recounting all the evils of a tyrant’s reign, is made to say: But what I am about to tell are his greatest crimes: he breaks ancestral customs, and forces women, and puts men to death without trial. But the rule of the people in the first place has the fairest name in the world, “isonomy,” and in the second place it does none of those things a despot doeth. In his own person Herodotus writes: It is clear not merely in one but in every instance how excellent a thing is “equality.” When the Athenians were under their tyrants they fought no better than their neighbours, but after they had got rid of their masters they were easily superior. Now this proves that when they were held down they fought without spirit, because they were toiling for a master, but when they had been liberated every man was stimulated to his utmost efforts in his own behalf. The same morning confidence in democracy shines in the reply of the constitutional king, Theseus, [(Note 100)]to the herald in Euripides’ play asking for the “tyrant” of Athens. You have made a false step in the beginning of your speech, O stranger, in seeking a tyrant here. Athens is not ruled by one man, but is free. The people govern by turns in yearly succession, not favouring the rich but giving him equal measure with the poor.
The naïveté of this provokes a smile, but it should provoke some reflection too. Why does the rhetoric of liberty move us so little? Partly, I think, because the meaning of the word has changed, and partly because of this new “liberty” we have a super-abundance. No longer does Liberty mean in the first place the Reign of Law, but something like its opposite. Let us recover the Greek attitude, and we recapture, or at least understand, the Greek emotion concerning Eleutheria. Jason says to Medea in Euripides’ play, Thou dwellest in a Greek instead of a Barbarian land, and hast come to know Justice and the use of Law without favour to the strong. The most “romantic” hero in Greek legend recommending the conventions!
This, however, is admirably and characteristically Greek. The typical heroes of ancient story are alike in their championship of law and order. I suppose the two most popular and representative were Heracles and Theseus. Each goes up and down Greece and Barbary destroying hybristai, local robber-kings, strong savages, devouring monsters, ill customs and every manner of “lawlessness” and “injustice.” In their place each introduces Greek manners and government, Law and Justice. It was this which so attracted Greek sympathy to them and so excited the Greek imagination. For the Greeks were surrounded by dangers like those which Heracles or Theseus encountered. If they had not to contend with supernatural hydras and triple-bodied giants and half-human animals, they had endless pioneering work to do which made such imaginings real enough to them; and men who had fought with the wild Thracian tribes could vividly sympathize with Heracles in his battle with the Thracian “king,” Diomedes, who fed his fire-breathing horses with the flesh of strangers. Nor was this preference of the Greeks for heroes of such a type merely instinctive; it was reasoned and conscious. The “mission” of Heracles, for example, is largely the theme of Euripides’ play which we usually call Hercules Furens. A contemporary of Euripides, the sophist Hippias of Elis, was the author of a too famous apologue, The Choice of Heracles, representing the youthful hero making the correct choice between Laborious Virtue and Luxurious Vice. Another Euripidean play, The Suppliant Women, as we have seen, reveals Theseus in the character of a conventional, almost painfully constitutional, sovereign talking the language of Lord John Russell. As for us, our sympathies are ready to flow out to the picturesque defeated monsters—the free Centaurs galloping on Pelion—the cannibal Minotaur lurking in his Labyrinth. But then our bridals are not liable to be disturbed by raids of wild horsemen from the mountains, nor are our children carried off to be dealt with at the pleasure of a foreign monarch. People who meet with such experiences get surprisingly tired of them. There is a figure known to mythologists as a Culture Hero. He it is who is believed to have introduced law and order and useful arts into the rude community in which he arose. Such heroes were specially regarded, and the reverence felt for them measures the need of them. Thus in ancient Greece we read of Prometheus and Palamêdes, the Finns had their Wainomoinen, the Indians of North America their Hiawatha. Think again of historical figures like Charlemagne and Alfred, like Solon and Numa Pompilius, even Alexander the Great. A peculiar romance clings about their names. Why? Only because to people fighting what must often have seemed a losing battle against chaos and night the institution and defence of law and order seemed the most romantic thing a man could do. And so it was.
Such a view was natural for them. Whether it shall seem natural to us depends on the fortunes of our civilization. On that subject we may leave the prophets to rave, and content ourselves with the observation that there are parts of Europe to-day in which many a man must feel himself in the position of Roland fighting the Saracens or Aëtius against the Huns. As for ourselves, however confident we may feel, we shall be foolish to be over-confident; for we are fighting a battle that has no end. The Barbarian we shall have always with us, on our frontiers or in our own breasts. There is also the danger that the prize of victory may, like Angelica, escape the strivers’ hands. Already perhaps the vision which inspires us is changing. I am not concerned to attack the character of that change but to interpret the Greek conception of civilization, merely as a contribution to the problem. To the Greeks, then, civilization is the slow result of a certain immemorial way of living. You cannot get it up from books, or acquire it by imitation; you must absorb it and let it form your spirit, you must live in it and live through it; and it will be hard for you to do this, unless you have been born into it and received it as a birth-right, as a mould in which you are cast as your fathers were. “Oh, but we must be more progressive than that.” Well, we are not; on the contrary the Greeks were very much the most progressive people that ever existed—intellectually progressive, I mean of course; for are we not talking about civilization?
The Greek conception, therefore, seems to work. I think it works, and worked, because the tradition, so cherished as it is, is not regarded as stationary. It is no more stationary to the Greeks than a tree, and a tree whose growth they stimulated in every way. It seems a fairly common error, into which Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton sometimes fall, for modern champions of tradition to over-emphasize its stability. There has always been the type of “vinous, loudly singing, unsanitary men,” which Mr. Wells has called the ideal of these two writers; he is the foundational type of European civilization. But it almost looks as if Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton were entirely satisfied with him. They want him to stay on his small holding, and eat quantities of ham and cheese, and drink quarts of ale, and hate rich men and politicians, and be perfectly parochial and illiterate. But Hellenism means, simply an effort to work on this sound and solid stuff; it is not content to leave him as he is; it strives to develope him, but to develope him within [(Note 104)]the tradition; to transform him from an Aristophanic demesman into an Athenian citizen. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton are Greek in this, that they have constantly the sense of fighting an endless and doubtful battle against strong enemies that would destroy whatever is most necessary to the soul of civilized men. Well I know in my heart and soul that sacred Ilium must fall, and Priam, and the folk of Priam with the good ashen spear ... yet before I die will I do a deed for after ages to hear of!
V
SOPHROSYNE
It needs imagination for the modern man to live into the atmosphere of ancient Greece. It ought not now to be so hard for us who have seen the lives and sanctities of free peoples crushed and stained. It should be easier for us to reoccupy the spiritual ground of Hellas, to feel a new thrill in her seemingly too simple formulas, a new value in her seemingly cold ideals. It is opportune to write about her now, and justifiable to write with a quickened hope. For all that, mental habits are the last we lose, and the habit of regarding our civilization as secure has had time to work itself deep into our minds. It has coloured our outlook, directed our tastes, altered our souls.
That last expression may appear overstrained. Yet reflect if it really be so. These many ages we have felt so safe. If fear came on us, it was not fear for the fabric itself of civilization. We grew delicately weary of our inevitably clasping and penetrating culture. We called it our “old” civilization, with some implication of senility; and we were restive under its restraints and conventions. We were affected in different ways, but we were all affected, we were all tired of our security. To escape it some of us fled to the open road and a picturesque gipsyism, some hunted big game in Africa. One or two of us actually did these things, a greater number did them in imagination, reading about them in books. Others, not caring to fatigue their bodies, or too fastidious or sincere or morbid to find relief in personal or vicarious adventures—for this reason or that—pursued “spiritual adventures” or flamed out into rebellion against what they felt insulted their souls. It seems clear enough that our bohemianism of the city and the field is not two things but one, and I am not put from this opinion by the consciousness of temperamental gulfs between typical moderns such as (not to come too near ourselves) Whitman and Poe in America. The symptoms are different, but the malady is the same.
I am not concerned to defend the word “malady,” if it be thought objectionable. It may be a quite excellent and healthy reaction we have been experiencing. But a reaction means a disturbance of poise, leaving us to some extent, as we say, unbalanced. It may have been so in an opposite sense with the Greeks. I may not deny (for I am not sure about it) that they went to the other extreme. It is possible and even likely. But if they were rather mad about the virtues of sanity, and rather excessive in their passion for moderation, this intensity can only be medicinal to us, who need the tonic badly. It may help us to reach that just equilibrium in which the soul is not asleep, but, in fact, most thrillingly sensitive. Being what it is, the human soul seems bound to oscillate for ever about its equipoise. It will always have its actions and reactions. Our violent reaction against the sense of an absolute security is entirely natural because of that strange passion, commingled of longing and fear, that draws us to the heart of loneliness and night. But it has exactly reversed our point of view. We have wished for the presence of conditions which the Greeks, having them, wished away. We have wished the forest to grow closer to our doors. We have admired explorers and pioneers. We have admired them because we are different. Well, the Greeks were explorers and pioneers—and not merely in things of the spirit—and they wished the forest away. Naturally, you see; just as naturally as we long for it to be there.
There is a line in Juvenal which means that when the gods intend to destroy a man they grant him his desire. If we suddenly found ourselves in the heart of savagery, most of us would wish to retract our prayers. Robinson Crusoe tired of his delightful island. Men who live on the verge of civilization are apt to cherish ideals which create strong shudders in the modern artistic soul. On the African or Canadian frontiers, or cruising in the south seas, a man may dream of a future “home” of the kind which has moved so many of our writers to laughter or pity. Whatever our own aspiration might be under the burden of similar circumstances, we should at least experience a far profounder sense of the value of those very civilities and conventions, of which we had professed our weariness. To uphold the flag of the human spirit against the forces that would crush and humiliate it—that would seem the heroic, the romantic thing. Exactly that was the mission of Greece, as she knew well, feeling all the glory and labour of it. And so far as to fight bravely for a fair ideal with the material odds against you is romantic, in that degree Greece was romantic. Her victory (of which we reap the fruits) has wrought her this injury, that her ideal has lost the attraction that clings to beautiful threatened things. It has become the “classical” ideal, consecrated and—for most of us—dead.
But it is not dead, and it will never perish, for it is the watchword of a conflict that may die down but cannot expire; the conflict between the Hellene and the Barbarian, the disciplined and the undisciplined temper, the constructive and the destructive soul. Let that conflict become desperate once more, and we shall understand. But a little exercise of imagination would let us understand now. As it is, we hardly do. We note with chilled amazement the passionate emphasis with which the Greeks repeat over and over to themselves their Nothing too much! as if it were charged with all wisdom and human comfort. We understand what the words say; we do not understand what they mean.
The explanation is certain. The Greek watchword is uninspiring to us, because we do not need it. We are not afraid of stimulus and excitement, because we have our passions better under control, because we have more thoroughly subdued the Barbarian within us, than the Greeks. It is at least more agreeable to our feelings to put it that way than to speak of “this ghastly thin-faced time of ours.” The Greeks, on the other hand, were wildly afraid of temptation, not much for puritanic reasons, although for something finer than prudential ones. It may seem a little banal to repeat it, but— they had the artistic temperament. They had the exceptional impressionability, and they felt the very practical necessity (at least as important for the artist as the puritan) of a serenity at the core of the storm. The wind that fills my sails, propels; but I am helmsman is the image in Meredith. I once collected a quantity of material for a study of the Greek temperament. I have been looking over it again, and I find illustration after illustration of an impressionability rivalling that of the most extreme Romantics. It is difficult to appraise this evidence. Quite clearly it is full of exaggeration and prejudice. If you were to believe the orators about one another, and about contemporary politicians, you would think that fourth-century Athens was run exclusively by criminal lunatics. Nor are the historians writing in that age much better, infected as they are by the very evil example of the rhetoricians. But the cumulative effect is overwhelming, and is produced as much, if not more, by little half-conscious indications, mere gestures and casual phrases, as by the records of hysterical emotionality and scarlet sins. Don’t you remember how people in Homer when they meet usually burst into tears and, if something did not happen, might (the poet says) go on weeping till sunset? It is not so often for grief they weep—unless for that remembered sorrow which is a kind of joy—as for delight in the renewal of friendship, or merely to relieve their feelings. The phrase used by Homer to describe the end of such lamentations is one he also applies to people who have just thoroughly enjoyed a meal. There is a sensuous element in it. Of course, one murmurs “the southern” or [(Note 110)]“the Latin temperament”; but if we understood the Latin temperament better, we should be able to read more meaning into that warning Nothing too much!
A friend said to Sophocles, “How do you feel about love, Sophocles? Are you still fit for an amorous encounter?” “Don’t mention it, man; I have just given it the slip—and very glad too—feeling as if I had escaped from bondage to a ferocious madman.” To be sure Sophocles was a poet and had the poetical temperament, and it would argue a strange ignorance of human nature to make any inferences concerning his character from the Olympian serenity of his art. But listen to this anecdote about an ordinary young man. Leontios the son of Aglaion was coming up from the Piraeus in the shadow of the North Wall, on the outside, when he caught sight of some corpses lying at the feet of the public executioner. He wanted to get a look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted with himself and tried to put himself off the thing. For a time he fought it out and veiled his eyes. His desire, however, getting the mastery of him, he literally pulled apart his eyelids and, running up to the dead bodies, said, “There you are, confound you; glut yourselves on the lovely sight!”
Both anecdotes are in Plato, and may serve as a warning when we are tempted to think him too hard on the emotional elements of the soul. He knew the danger, because he felt it himself, because he understood the Greek temperament—better, for instance, than Aristotle did. Undoubtedly there is an ascetic strain in Plato, as there is in every moralist who has done the world any good. But Greek asceticism is an attuning of the instrument, not [(Note 111)]a mortification of the flesh. It is just the training or discipline that is as necessary for eminence in art or in athletics as for eminence in virtue. The Greek words—askêsis, aretê—level these distinctions.
This high tension is the natural reaction of a spirit, finely and richly endowed as the Greek was, to the pressure of strong alien forces. If the tension relaxed or broke, the result was what you might expect; there was a rocket-like flash to an extreme. Others as well as I may have wondered at the sort of language we find in Greek writers concerning “tyrants.” The horror expressed is not merely conventional or naïve as in a child’s history book, it is real and deeply felt. The danger of tyranny was of course very actual in most of the Greek states, even in Athens. But it is not so much the danger of suffering as of exercising a tyranny that is in the minds of the best Greek writers. The tyrant is a damned soul. Waiting for him in the dark are “certain fiery-looking” devils and the Erinyes, Avengers of Blood. The tyrant is the completion and final embodiment of human depravity.... Well, perhaps he is. But we should never think of giving the tyrant so very special a pre-eminence over every other type of criminal. Yet the Greek feeling seems quite natural when we reflect that the very definition of a tyrant is one that is placed above the law, and is therefore under no external obligation to self-restraint, lacking which the average Greek very rapidly and flamboyantly went to the devil.
There was, for example, Alexander prince of Pherae, whom Shakespeare read about in his Plutarch. Alexander had a habit of burying people [(Note 112)]alive, or wrapping them in the skins of bears or boars; he used to hunt them with dogs. He consecrated the spear with which he had murdered his uncle, crowning it with garlands and offering sacrifices to it under the name of Tychon, an obscene god. This same Alexander was present once at a performance of Euripides’ Trojan Women, and was so overcome by his feelings that he hurried from the theatre, leaving a message for the leading actor, which explained that he did not disapprove of the acting, but was ashamed to let people see him, who had never shown the least pity for his victims, crying over Hecuba and Andromache. What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?
One might perhaps say of Alexander what Ruskin (speaking, as he assures us, after due deliberation) says of Adam Smith, that he was “in an entirely damned state of soul.” It would be easy to multiply examples like that of this Pheraean, but it would be still easier to disgust the reader with them. I will take, then, a milder case (more instructive in its way than much pathology) which has for us this twofold value, that it is full of human and pathetic interest, and at the same time reflects, all the more if there are legendary elements in it, the popular imagination of the tyrant’s mood. It is the tragedy of Periandros, lord of Corinth. Hear Sosikles the Corinthian in Herodotus.
When Kypselos had reigned thirty years and ended his life happily, he was succeeded by his son, Periandros. Now Periandros was milder than his father at first, but afterwards by means of messengers he joined himself to Thrasyboulos the tyrant of Miletus, and became yet more bloody by far than Kypselos. For he sent a herald to Thrasyboulos and inquired how he might most safely put affairs in order and best govern Corinth. Thrasyboulos brought the messenger of Periandros forth from the city, and entering into a field of corn he went through the corn, putting one question after another to the herald on the matter of his coming from Corinth. And ever as he spied an ear that overtopped the rest, he would strike it off, and so marring it cast it down, until in this way he destroyed the fairest and tallest portion of the crop. And having traversed the field he sends away the herald without giving him a word of counsel. When the herald returned to Corinth, Periandros wished to learn the counsel. But the other said that Thrasyboulos had answered nothing, and that he marvelled at him, what manner of man he had sent him to, one beside himself and a destroyer of his own possessions; relating what he saw done by Thrasyboulos. But Periandros, understanding the action and perceiving that Thrasyboulos advised him to slay the most eminent of the citizens, then showed every manner of villainy towards the Corinthians. Whatever Kypselos had left unaccomplished by his slaughterings and banishments, Periandros fulfilled. And in one day he stripped naked all the women of Corinth for his wife Melissa’s sake. For when he had sent messengers to the river Acheron in Thesprotia, to the Oracle of the Dead there, to inquire concerning a treasure deposited by a stranger, the ghost of Melissa appeared and said that she would not signify nor declare in what place the treasure was laid; for she was cold and naked, since she had no profit of the garments that had been buried with her, for that they had not been burned; and for proof that her words were true she had a secret message for his ear.... When these things were reported to Periandros (for the secret forced him to believe, since he had had to do with Melissa when she was dead) immediately after he caused it to be proclaimed that all the wives of the Corinthians should come forth to the temple of Hera. And when they came, wearing their richest garments as for a holy feast, he set his bodyguard in their way, and stripped them all, bond and free alike, and gathering all into a trench he burned the pile with prayer to Melissa. And when he had done this, and had sent to her the second time, the ghost of Melissa told him where she had deposited the stranger’s treasure.
Periandros had murdered Melissa. After her death another calamity, says Herodotus, befell him as I shall tell. He had two sons by Melissa, one seventeen years of age and the other eighteen. Their mother’s father Prokles, tyrant of Epidaurus, sent for them to his castle and kindly entreated them, as was natural, for they were his daughter’s children. But when he was bidding them farewell, he said, “Know ye, my children, who slew your mother?” This saying the elder regarded not, but the younger, whose name was Lykophron, when he heard it was so moved—the poor young man—that when he came to Corinth, he spake no word to his father, accounting him his mother’s murderer, neither would he converse with him nor answer any question. And at last Periandros in great anger drave him from the house. And after he had expelled him, he questioned the elder son, what discourse their uncle had held with them. And he told his father that Prokles had received them kindly, but made no mention of that speech of Prokles, which he uttered at their departing, for he had not marked it. But Periandros declared that it was in no way possible but that he had given them some counsel, and closely questioned the lad, till he remembered and told this also. And Periandros, understanding the matter and resolved not to yield weakly in any thing, sent a messenger to those with whom the son whom he had driven forth was living, and forbade them to take him in. And whenever the wanderer came to another house, he would be driven from this also, Periandros threatening those who received him and commanding them to thrust him forth. And he went wandering from house to house of his friends, who, for all their fear, used to receive him, seeing that he was the son of Periandros. But at last Periandros caused proclamation to be made, that whosoever should receive him in his house or speak to him, the same must pay such and such a sacred penalty to Apollo. Therefore because of this proclamation no man was willing to speak to the lad or to give him shelter. Moreover neither would he himself try to obtain that which was forbidden him, but endured all, haunting the public porticos. On the fourth day Periandros saw him all unwashen and emaciated for lack of food, and was moved to pity, and remitting somewhat of his anger he approached and said, “My son, whether is better, to fare as now thou farest, or to take over my lordship and the good things that are mine, reconciled to thy father? But thou, my son and prince of wealthy Corinth, hast chosen a vagrant life, opposing and showing anger against him whom thou oughtest least to hate. If there has been a mishap in that matter, the same hath befallen me also, and I have the larger share therein, as mine was the deed. But apprehending how far better it is to be envied than pitied, and at the same time what manner of thing it is to be wroth with them that begat thee and are stronger than thou, come back home.” With these words Periandros sought to constrain his son, but he made no other answer but only this, that his father had incurred the sacred penalty to the god by entering into speech with him. And Periandros, perceiving that there was no dealing with nor overcoming of the enmity of his son, sends him away out of his sight on board a ship to Corcyra, for he was master of Corcyra also. But after he had dispatched him, Periandros made an expedition against Prokles his father-in-law, blaming him chiefly for what had happened, and took Epidaurus, and took Prokles himself alive.
But in course of time Periandros came to be old, and knew himself no longer capable of watching over and administering affairs. Wherefore he sent to Corcyra and recalled Lykophron to the tyranny; for he saw nothing in his elder son, but looked upon him as somewhat dull of wit. But Lykophron would not even answer the messenger. But Periandros, who was bound up in the young man, made a second attempt, sending his own daughter, Lykophron’s sister, thinking he would most readily listen to her. And when she had come she said, “Dear Lykophron, is it your desire that our lordship should fall to others and thy father’s substance be scattered abroad, rather than come away and have it thyself? Come home; cease punishing thyself. A proud heart is poor profit. Do not cure one evil with another. Many prefer mercy to justice; and many ere now in seeking what was their mother’s have lost what their father had. A tyranny is a slippery thing, and many there be that long for it; and he is now an old man and past his prime. Give not away what is thine own to others.” These were her words, which her father had taught to her as the most persuasive. But Lykophron answered that he would on no account come to Corinth so long as he knew his father was alive. When she had brought back this answer, Periandros sends a third messenger, a herald, to propose that he should go himself to Corcyra, and bidding Lykophron come to Corinth to succeed him in the tyranny. The young man agreed to these terms, and Periandros was setting out for Corcyra and the prince to Corinth, when the Corcyraeans, becoming aware of all this, in order that Periandros might not come to their land, put the lad to death. Therefore Periandros took vengeance on the Corcyraeans.
The revenge of the old man was to send three hundred boys of the chief Corcyraean families to the great Lydian king, Alyattes, to be made eunuchs.... He was cheated of his revenge by a humane stratagem of the Samians. The lonely old man, with that touch of original nobleness all gone now, black frustrate rage in his heart, love turned to an inhuman hate of all the world, wearing this Nessus shirt of remorse and despair! Such is tyranny, says Sosikles at the end of his speech, Such is tyranny, O Lacedaemonians, and such its consequences.
Periandros, you see, has already become a type. There is a curious fitness in the application to these old “tyrants” of the worn quotation from The Vanity of Human Wishes—they do very specially point a moral and adorn a tale. The moral they point is the danger of losing Sophrosyne. There is a wonderful description in Plato’s Republic of the tyrant’s genesis, a description which may startle us by the intensity of feeling which one touches in it. It is a story of the gradual loss of Sophrosyne, ending in perfect degeneration and the loss of all the other virtues as well. This Sophrosyne (one of the cardinal Greek virtues and the most characteristic of all) confronts us at the outset of any study of the Hellenic temperament. To understand the one is to understand the other. Complete understanding is of course impossible, but we may get nearer and nearer to the secret.
Sophrosyne is the “saving” virtue. That means little—or nothing—until it is steeped in the colours of the Greek temperament, and viewed in the Greek attitude to life. Well then, the Greek attitude to life—how shall we describe that? I am going to describe it in a phrase which is at least accurate enough to help on our discussion greatly: it looks upon life as an Agon, and by an Agon is meant the whole range of activities from the most to the least heroic, from the most to the least spiritual, contest or competition. The reader will forgive an appearance of pedantry in this, since the word needs careful translation. Now my suggestion is that this agonistic view of life, if I may so call it, pervades and characterizes all Classical antiquity. To understand clearly the nature of an Agon we must keep firmly in mind its origin. It would be misleading surely to call its origin religious—as if men needed to be religious to fight!—but it is undeniable that its roots are embedded in that primitive life which is so largely mastered by religion and magic. In consequence an ancient Agon was nearly always a religious ceremony. That seems curious enough to a modern mind, yet nothing is more certain. The great national Games like the Olympic, the rhapsodic and musical contests, the Attic Drama (which was specifically an Agon)—all had this religious or supernatural aura investing them. And when one looks into Greek religion itself, one finds everywhere as its characteristic expression a choric dance, which normally takes the form of an actual or mimic contest between two sides or “semi-choruses.”
The motive then of an Agon differed from that of an ordinary modern contest. It was normally a ritual contest, and its motive a religious motive. It was not held for its own sake, like a football match, but for a definite object. This object the Greeks called Nikê, which we translate—inadequately enough, as is plain from the facts we have been considering—as “victory.” It was felt to be not so much a personal distinction as a blessing upon the whole community. It possessed a magical virtue. There was even a sense in which in an ancient Agon everybody won. Nor does it seem extravagant to say that Greek society, like a primitive society, only in a far richer, more complex, more significant and spiritual way, was organized for the production of Nikê.
That is a large matter. There is, to be sure, no need of accumulated detail to prove that the Agon was the most characteristic institution of ancient life; it only requires to be pointed out; everywhere we find these competitions. What may chiefly interest us for the moment is that the Agon was simply the outward expression of the characteristic Greek outlook upon life and upon the whole human [(Note 120)]scene. For the Greek looked upon life itself as a struggle, an Agon, an opportunity for the production of Nikê. Mr. Wells gives to one of his essays the title of “The Human Adventure.” Life as the Human Adventure very well expresses the Greek feeling about it. Only let us not forget that the Nikê which is the object and justification of every Agon is—I have already remarked it—something utterly, qualitatively different from mere success. It is the triumph of the Cause. “Success”—“the successful business man”—not that kind of success.
The most successful man in Greece, every one remembers, was rewarded with a little garland of wild olive. God help us, Mardonios, said a noble Persian when he heard this, what men are these thou hast brought us to fight against!—men that contend not for money but for merit. The individual Greek could want money badly enough, as may be gathered from the amusing, but satirical, Characters of Theophrastus. Yet in the soul of Hellas, for all its strong sense of reality and despite some inclination to avarice, one finds at last something you might almost call quixotic. Is there not some element of quixotry in every high adventure? And what adventure could be higher than to fight for “the beautiful things,” Ta Kala, against the outnumbering Barbarian?
Sophrosyne is the virtue that “saves” in this battle. Understand it so, and you must share some part of the ardour this word inspired. It means the steady control and direction of the total energy of a man. It means discipline. It means concentration. It is the angel riding the whirlwind, the charioteer driving the wild horses. There is no [(Note 121)]word for it in English, and we must coldly translate “moderation,” “temperance,” “self-restraint.” “Moderation” as a name for this strong-pulsed, triumphant thing! Why even the late-born, unromantic Aristotle, even while he is describing Sophrosyne as a “mean” between excessive and deficient emotionality, turns aside to remark, as a thing almost too obvious to need pointing out, that “there is a sense in which Sophrosyne is an extreme.” This is She whom Dante beheld on the Mountain of Purgatory such that “never were seen in furnace glasses or metals so glowing and red”:
giammai non si videro in fornace
vetri o metalli sì lucenti e rossi.
VI
GODS AND TITANS
It was an ancient hypothesis that the Gods are only deified men. A certain Euêmeros suggested this. His favourite illustration was Zeus; that greatest of the Gods, he said, was a prehistoric king in Crete, as the Cretan legends about him proved. This theory has received a fresh life from the investigations of modern scholars. Historically, it seems to be largely true; psychologically, it explains nothing at all. All men have need of the Gods, says Homer; the religious instinct, that is the important thing, or rather (since the other is important too) that is the fundamental thing. It is also the prior thing, the spring of the religious act. If I want to know why primitive men make a god of one of their number, it seems no answer to assure me that they do so. Yet the historical inquiry has great interest too, and throws a dim and rather lurid light on the development of religion and religious thought. And I could not leave untouched an aspect of the old Greek life so vital as its belief about the gods without illustrating how here also the conflict of Greek and Barbarian worked itself out.
It is almost the other day that we rediscovered [(Note 123)]the old Aegean religion—the immemorially ancient religion of the non-Greek peoples, the Barbarians, who lived about the Aegean Sea. It is now clear that the Hittites, the Phrygians, the ancient peoples of Anatolia generally, worshipped a kind of triad or trinity of Father, Son and Consort. Sometimes, as in the Hittite sculptures, the Father and the Son seem the important members of the group; sometimes, as in the Phrygian religion, the emphasis is chiefly on the Mother and Consort, and the Son. But the third member can always be discovered too, standing pretty obviously in the background. In prehistoric Crete (which, of course, became Greek in historical times) we again recognize the divine Three in the persons of those native divinities whom the Greeks learned to call Kronos, Rhea and Zeus. That is the skeleton of the old religion; the living flesh in which it was clothed was begotten in tribal custom. Primitive peoples fashion their gods after their own image. Their chief god they think of as a greater and more worshipful “king,” swayed by the passions, observing the etiquette, and wearing the regalia of their earthly rulers. Now the primitive king held his place by force or craft or the terror of his rages (his menos)—and by no other tenure. He lived in constant dread of the rival who, younger and stronger, would one day rise against him and seize his throne. The rival might be a stranger, but more frequently he was the king’s own son, who, for one thing, would be thought likely to inherit the magical virtue of his sire. Accordingly, when the Young King was born, the Old King would seek his life. But there he would be apt to meet the opposition of the Queen, [(Note 124)]who would seek to convey the child to a safe retreat. Then, grown at last to manhood, suddenly the Prince would return to challenge the Old King to mortal combat. The Gods behave exactly like that.
The chief depositary in ancient Greece of popular beliefs about the Gods is the curious poem attributed to Hesiod, called the Theogony. Along with certain parts of Homer, it formed what might be called the handbook of orthodoxy, and it tells us with an incomparable authoritativeness what the sacred tradition was. Eldest of all, says the Theogony, was Gaia or Mother Earth, a goddess. Now she bare first starry Ouranos, equal to herself, that he might cover her on every side ... and afterward she lay with him, and bare the deep coil of Okeanos, and Koios, and Krios, and Hyperîon, and Iapetos, and Thea, and Rhea, and Themis, and Mnemosyne, and Phoibe with the gold upon her head, and lovely Tethys. And, after these, youngest was born Kronos the Crooked-Thinker, most dangerous of her sons, who loathed his lusty begetter. There is a fuller account in another place. Next, of Gaia and Ouranos were born three sons, huge and violent, ill to name, Kottos and Briareos and Gyes, the haughty ones. From their shoulders swang an hundred arms invincible, and on their shoulders, upon their rude bodies, grew heads a fifty upon each; irresistible strength crowned the giant forms. Of all the children of Gaia and Ouranos most to be feared were these, and they were hated of their Sire from the first; yea, soon as one was born, he would not let them into the light, but would hide them all away in a hiding-place of Earth, and Ouranos gloried in the bad work. And, being straitened, huge Gaia groaned inwardly; and she thought of a cruel device. Hastily she created the grey flint, and of it fashioned a mighty Sickle, and expounded her thought to her Sons, speaking burning words from an anguished heart. “Sons of me and of an unrighteous Father, if ye will hearken to me, on your Father ye may take vengeance for his sinful outrage, for it was He began the devising of shameful deeds!”
So spake she, but fear seized them all, I ween, neither did one of them utter a word. But mighty Kronos the Cunning took heart of grace, and made answer again to his good Mother. “Mother, I will undertake and will perform this thing, since of our Father (‘Father!’) I reck not; for it was He began the devising of shameful deeds!” So spake he, and mighty Gaia rejoiced greatly in her heart, and hid him in an ambush, and put in his hands the sharp-fanged Sickle, and taught him all the plot.
Great Ouranos came with falling night and cast him broadly over Gaia, desiring her, and outstretched him at large upon her. But that other, his Son, reached out with his left hand from the place of his hiding ... and with his right grasping the monstrous fanged Sickle, he swiftly reaped the privy parts of his Father and cast them to fall behind him.
In calling this story Barbarian, I feel as if I ought to apologize to the Barbarians. Nevertheless it is clearly more in their way than in the way of the Greeks. It excellently illustrates the kind of stuff from which Greek religion refined itself. You will see that it is the old savage stuff of the battle between the Kings. On this occasion it is the Young King who prevails and pushes the Old King from his throne—not to die (for he was a God), but to [(Note 126)]live a shadowy, elemental life. But neither was Kronos able to escape his destiny. For Rhea, subdued unto Kronos, bare shining children, even Hestia, and Demeter, and gold-shod Hera, and strong Hades, that pitiless heart, dwelling under ground, and the roaring Earth-Shaker, and Zeus the Many-Counselled, the Father of Gods and men, by whose thunder the broad earth is shaken. They also—great Kronos was used to swallow them down, as each came from the womb to his holy Mother’s knees, with intent that none other of the proud race of Ouranos should hold the lordship among the Everliving. For he knew from Gaia and starry Ouranos that he was fated to be overcome of his own child.... Therefore no blind man’s watch he kept, but looked for his children and swallowed them; but Rhea grieved and would not be comforted. But when she was at point to bring forth Zeus, then she prayed her own dear parents, Gaia and starry Ouranos, to devise a plan whereby she might bear her Son in secret, and retribution be paid by Kronos the Crafty Thinker for his father’s sake and his children that he gorged. And they truly gave ear to their daughter and obeyed her, and told her all things that were fated to befall concerning Kronos the King and his strong-hearted Son. And they conveyed her to Luktos in the fat land of Crete, when she was about to bring forth the youngest of her sons, great Zeus. Him gigantic Gaia received from her in broad Crete to nurture and to nurse. Thither came Gaia bearing him through the swift black night, to Luktos first; and she took him in her arms and hid him in a lonely cave, withdrawn beneath the goodly land, there where the wild-wood is thick upon the hills of Aigaion. But she wrapped a great Stone in swaddlingclouts, and gave it to the Son of Ouranos so mightily ruling, the Old King of the Gods. And Kronos seized it then with his hands, and put it down in his belly without ruth, nor knew in his own mind that for a Stone his Son was left to him unvanquished and unharmed, that was soon to overcome him by main strength of his hands, and drive him from the sovranty, and be King himself among the Everliving.
For swiftly thereafter mightiness was increased to the Young King and his shining limbs waxed greater, and, as the seasons rounded to their close, great Kronos the Cunning was beguiled by the subtile suggestions of Gaia, and cast up again his offspring; and first he spewed forth the Stone, that he had swallowed last. Zeus planted it where meet the roads of the world in goodly Pytho under the rock-wall of Parnassus, to be a sign and to be a marvel to men in the days to come.
The Stone was there all right, for the French excavators have found it, looking highly indigestible. But it is unfair to treat Hesiod in this spirit. In fact, to read in him such passages as I have quoted is to give oneself quite a different emotion. There is the most curious conflict between one’s moral and one’s æsthetic reactions to them. You have a matter which it is poor to call savage, which is more like some atavistic resurrection of the beast in man; and you find it told in a style which is like some obsolescent litany full of half-understood words and immemorial refrains. The most primitive-minded is also the most literary poet in Greek, if by “literary” one means influenced by a tradition in style. He is full of the epic clichés, and he repeats them in a helpless, joyless way, as if he had no choice in the matter. If you wish to be unkind, you may [(Note 128)]describe his style as the epic jargon. But you will be unjust if you do not admit a certain grandeur arising (it would almost seem) out of its very formalism. Even in its decay the epic style is a magnificent thing. The singing-robes of Homer have faded and stiffened, but they are still dimly gorgeous, and it is with gold that they are stiff. The poet of the Theogony—I call him Hesiod without prejudice—wears them almost like a priest. But if you have to tell a story like those I have quoted, what other manner is possible than just such a conventional, half-ritualistic style, which acts like a spell to move the religious emotions and suspend the critical judgment? I am not quite finished with Hesiod, and I want the reader to have a little more patience with him and with me.
Before he was cast out of his throne, Ouranos, having conceived a hatred of his Sons, Briareos and Kottos and Gyes, strongly bound them, being jealous of their overbearing valour, their beauty and stature, and fixed their habitation under the wide-wayed earth, where they were seated at the world’s end and utmost marge, in great grief and indignation of mind. Natheless the Son of Kronos, and the rest of the immortal Gods that deep-haired Rhea bare in wedlock with Kronos, brought them up to the light again by the counsels of Gaia, who told them all the tale, how they would gain the victory and bright glory with the aid of those. In another place we read that Briareos and Kottos and Gyes were grateful for that good service, and gave Zeus the thunder and the burning bolt and the lightning-flash, that aforetime vast Gaia concealed; in them he puts his trust as he rules over mortals and immortals. [(Note 129)]He required them almost at once in his battle with the Titans. The word “Titans” seems to mean nothing more or less than “Kings.” They were the Old Kings at war with the Young Kings (who, because they lived on Mount Olympus in Thessaly, came to be called the “Olympians”) with Zeus at their head. Naturally the Old Kings took the side of Kronos, but after a ten years’ war they were beaten in a terrific battle, and Zeus reigned supreme. And then how do we find him behaving? Like this. And Zeus King of the Gods took to wife first Metis, that was wisest of Gods and men. And when indeed she was about to bring forth the blue-eyed Goddess Athena, he beguiled her with cunning words, and put her down into his belly, by the counsels of Gaia and starry Ouranos, who counselled him so, lest some other of the ever-living Gods should hold the sovranty in the stead of Zeus, for of her it was fated that most wise children should be born, first the bright-eyed Maid Tritogeneia, of equal might with her Sire and of a wise understanding, and after her I ween she was to bear a high-hearted Son, that would be King of Gods and men. So he clutched her and put her down in his belly, in fear that she would bear a stronger thing than the Thunderbolt.
Now, of course, the Greeks once believed this sort of thing; otherwise you would not have Hesiod solemnly repeating it. But they very early repudiated it; and it is just the earliness and the thoroughness of their repudiation wherein they show themselves Greek. For the surrounding Barbarians kept on believing myths hardly less damnable, and kept acting on their faith; whereas as early as Homer you find the Greek protest. In [(Note 130)]Homer it is silent; he simply leaves Hesiod’s rubbish out. But the Ionian philosophers were not silent; indeed they included in their condemnation Homer himself. Heraclitus said that Homer deserved to be scourged out of the assemblies of men, and Archilochus likewise. Xenophanês said, Homer and Hesiod attribute to the Gods all things that are scandals and reproach among men—to thieve, to be adulterers, and to deceive one another. Pindar (a very moral poet) is indignant at the suggestion that an immortal god would eat boiled baby. Naturally, however, the poets and the philosophers approached the myths in a different spirit, which led to what in Plato’s time was already “a standing quarrel.” The philosophers objected to them altogether; the poets made them so beautiful in the telling that they passed beyond the sphere of the moralist. Even the Theogony in parts achieves nobility; even in the Theogony the Hellenizing process is at work on the Barbarian matter.
We shall be better instructed, however, if we observe the process in a later poet and a much greater artist. It so happens that the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, like the Theogony, deals with the relations between the Old King and the New. The drama which we know as the Prometheus Bound is only a part of what ancient scholars called a trilogy, which is a series of three plays developing a single theme; and we cannot even be certain whether it is the first part or the second. Of the other members of the trilogy we possess little more than the titles, which are Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Carrier. Most students are now strongly disposed to believe that the Fire-Carrier received its name from the circumstance that the play had for its theme, or part of its theme, the foundation of the Prometheia or Festival of Prometheus at Athens, the culmination of which was a torch-race engaged in by youthful fire-carriers. Every year the Athenian ephêbi, running with lit torches in relays of competitors, contended which should be the first to kindle anew the fire upon the common altar of Prometheus and Hephaistos in the Academy. If this conjecture regarding the theme of the Fire-Carrier is just, then we may be sure that this play came last in the series, because it celebrates the triumph of the hero. Accordingly it is usual to arrange the trilogy in the order: Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus the Fire-Carrier.
The Prometheus Bound deals with the punishment of Prometheus by Zeus. It is commonly said that the hero of the play is punished because he had stolen fire, which Zeus had hidden away, and bestowed it upon mortals, who are represented as hitherto uncivilized. There is a certain amount of truth in this view, for in the opening scene of the play, when Prometheus is nailed to his rock, the fiend Kratos repeats that the reason for this torture is the theft of fire. But the proper theme of the Prometheus Bound is not so much the binding of the Titan as the keeping him in bonds; and the reason for the prolongation of his torture is quite different from the reason for beginning it. The new reason is the refusal of Prometheus to reveal a secret, known to him but not to Zeus. All that Zeus knows is that one day he is fated to be superseded by his own son. What he does not, and what Prometheus does know, is who must be the mother of that son. On the withholding and the final revelation of this secret revolves the whole plot, not only of the Prometheus Bound, but also of the lost plays of the trilogy. To get the truth Zeus patiently tortures his immortal victim for three myriads of years, himself tortured by the old dynastic terror. It is the recurring situation of the Theogony renewing itself once more.
Such crude material lay before Aeschylus. But his genius and his time alike required from him a different treatment from that which does not dissatisfy us in the archaic chronicle of Hesiod. The genius of the Athenian poet is of course essentially dramatic, and he lived in an age which had woken to the need for what I will simply call a better religion. Therefore he chose the subject of Prometheus, and therefore he treated it dramatically. Now for the poet and his audience what is most dramatic is, or ought to be, what is felt by them as most human; and what is most human is simply what is most alive and real to them; for drama aims at the illusion of reality. So Aeschylus could not handle his matter with the hieratic simplicity of the Theogony. The issues could not be so simple for the dramatist, because they are never so simple in actual life. If Aeschylus was to make Prometheus his hero, he would have to make him “sympathetic.” And so, in Prometheus Bound, he does; Prometheus engages all our sympathy, while Zeus appears a tyrant in the modern, and not merely the ancient, sense of the word. But that is not the conclusion of the matter. We know that in the last play of the trilogy the tormentor and the tormented were reconciled. To the uncompromising Shelley this was intolerable; and so he wrote his “Prometheus Unbound.” And nearly every one who in modern times has written on the subject, whatever explanation or apology he may have put forward in behalf of Aeschylus, has wished in his heart that the Greek had felt like the Englishman.
That he did not, is just the curious and disconcerting thing we should like explained.
The tradition, of course, counts for much. Aeschylus did not invent his story. He found it already in existence, and he found it ending in a certain way. We cannot tell if it ended precisely in the way that Aeschylus represented. But we can be perfectly sure that it did not end in an unqualified victory for Prometheus. The tradition appears to be dead against him. Aeschylus therefore was so far bound by that. Then the problem presented itself to him with this further complication, that as a matter of knowledge Zeus was reigning now. So the justification of Zeus against the rebel Titan becomes a justification of the moral governance of the universe. Yet although Aeschylus felt the restraint of the myth and the restraint of the moral issue, it is to be believed that he submitted to them with full, and even passionate, acceptance. Like the great artist, like the great dramatic poet he is, he begins by stating the case for Prometheus as strongly as he can—more strongly, it would seem, than the existing legends quite allowed—and even in the end the Titan is not shorn of his due honour. But as against the Olympians, Aeschylus argues (with the Greek poets in general), the Titans were in the wrong. The sin of the Titans was lawlessness. Prometheus, in bringing to mortals the gift of fire, broke the law which forbade them its use. The question whether the dealings of God with man were “just” or no, was not to be decided by your feelings (as Prometheus judged), but by cool and measured reflection as to what was best in the end for mankind, or rather for the universe, of which they formed after all so small a part.
Such doctrine falls chillingly on the modern spirit. But that is largely because we realize so ill what it means. The Prometheus-trilogy was a dramatization of the conflict of Pity and Justice embodied in two superhuman wills. Before you condemn the solution of Aeschylus, perhaps you are bound to answer the question if this is not the conflict which the modern world is trying with blood and tears to solve. In the end (so the old poet fabled) Zeus the rigid Justicer learned mercy, while his passionate enemy came to recognize the sovereignty of Law. A compromise, if you like; but if you are sorry for it, it only means that you are sorry for human life. I daresay Aeschylus was sorry too, but then he was not going to be sentimental. Life is after all governed by a compromise between Justice and Pity. And if it comes to a mere question of emotional values, does not one love Prometheus all the more because at the last he had, like any man, to give up a little of his desire?
Even so we shall not have done complete justice to the Greek position, until we have renewed in our minds the Greek emotion about law, order, measure, limitation—the things we are engaged in criticizing and, most of us, in disparaging. We must for our purpose accept the Hellenic paradox. We must see with the Greek that it was not the wilderness, but the ploughed field and the ordered vineyard that was truly romantic. And in the moral reign it was Temperance, Self-Discipline, Sophrosyne; in the sphere of art the strict outline, the subjugation of excess, that filled the Greek with the pleasurable excitement we find in the exotic, the crude, the violent, the bizarre. The explanation is engagingly simple. To the ancient world law and order were the exception—the wild, romantic, hardly attainable exception; while us they interest about as much as a couple of boiled potatoes. We are for the Open Road and somewhere east of Suez. But the attraction then and now is exactly the same. It is the attraction of the unfamiliar.
We could understand the Hellenic paradox better if we had to live in an unsettled country. We should then receive the thrill which words like Nomos and Thesmos and Kosmos, the watchwords of civilization, awakened in the Greek bosom. We should understand the longing for a clue in the maze of the lawless, a saving rule to guide one through the thickets of desperate and degrading confusion. But as it is we are so hedged about by the barbed-wire entanglements of Government regulations and social conventions that our desires are chiefly concentrated on breaking through—breaking through, let us admit, at but a little point and for but a little time, for we are really rather fond of our prison-house and care not to be too long out of it. Yes, I think with a little effort we can understand. We can believe that the sense of home is strongest in the wanderer. He wanders to find [(Note 136)]his home, and when he has found it, he cannot make it “home-like” and conventional enough.
So to the ancients Greek civilization had the flavour of a high and rare adventure. It was a crusade, the conquest of the Barbarian—the Barbarian without and within. Viewed in this light, the conflict between Zeus and Prometheus assumes an aspect novel enough to us. Zeus represents the Law—unjust in this instance if you will, unjust as perhaps Zeus himself came in the end partly to admit—but still the Law. Prometheus represents Anarchy. In this he shows himself truly a Titan, for the Titans embodied the lawless forces of nature and an undisciplined emotionality. Our fatigued spirits love to gamble a little with these excitements. But the Greeks had just escaped from them, and were horribly afraid of them. There is nothing their art loved to depict like the victory of the disciplined will—fairly typified in Zeus, perfectly in Athena—over unchained passion. Hence those endless pictures of Olympians warring against Titans, against Giants—of Greeks against Amazons—of Heracles, of Theseus against the monsters. They are records of a spiritual victory won at infinite cost.
The true theme of the Prometheus-trilogy is the Reign of Law. Law in the realm of affairs, Sophrosyne in morals, form in art. There is nothing tame or negative about the doctrine. The Greek spirit was not tame or negative; it would be difficult to say how much it was not that! Indeed the inspiration of their creed was just the desire of the Greeks to extract the full value of their emotions. None knew better the danger lest one
should lose distinction in his joys
As doth a battle when they charge on heaps,
The enemy flying.
And, from the point of view of art—always so important for them—the rule of “measure” becomes the art of concentration. So Law stands revealed as Beauty. As Keats says, the final condemnation of the Titans was that, compared with the Olympians, they failed in Beauty:
For first in Beauty shall be first in Might.
The evolution of Greek religion is thus largely an artistic process. It would be obstinate to deny that the process may have been carried, at last, too far. Greek art begins as almost a form of religion; Greek religion ends as almost a form of art. Yet it would certainly be still more obstinate to deny that more was gained than lost. There was gained, for instance, the Greek mythology. And what simplicity and sincerity that were lost were not more than made up for by that Greek religion—no longer of the State but of the individual—which we find in Plato and (as we have begun to see) in so much of the New Testament?
How much, and with what immense justification, the Greek religious spirit was a spirit of beauty transforming Barbarism, could hardly be more aptly illustrated than by a story in Herodotus. It is the tale of Atys the son of Croesus. How beautiful it is, every reader will confess. But how instructive it is, hardly any but the special student will recognize. For he finds in it the unmistakable features of an ancient myth. Atys, the brilliant, early-dying prince whom Herodotus, repeating the legend as he heard it, calls the son of the historical Croesus, is no other than Attis, brother and son and spouse—the ambiguity is in the myth—of the Mountain Mother of Phrygia. Atys, slain in hunting the boar, is Attis, who was a hunter, and scarcely distinguishable from Adonis. The matter is explained at length by Sir James Frazer in his Attis, Adonis and Osiris. The myth arose out of the worship of the Asiatic goddess variously named by the Greeks Kybelê, Kybêbê, Rhea, and other titles, though in reality a nameless deity, a holy Mother and Bride wedded at the right season of the year to her son, Attis, that its fruits might be renewed through the magic of that ritual. There was a temple of “Kybelê” near Sardis—still stand a column or two—where the Paktôlos rushes from its mountain gorge. That helps to explain why a prince of Sardis has entered into her myth. It is even possible that actual princes of Sardis, did anciently personate once a year the consort of the great goddess of the region. This at least accords with analogy, and best explains the origin of the story in Herodotus. For the rest it is a Phrygian tale. Olympus, where the fabled boar is hunted, was in Mysia, which was in Phrygia. Adrastos, “He from whom there is no Escape,” is certainly connected with the goddess Adrasteia, much worshipped in the Phrygian Troad. Above all it was in Phrygia that the Mountain Mother was chiefly worshipped. In spring the Phrygians fashioned an image of the young Attis, and mourned over it with ritual dirges, recalling his doom. Thus gradually we may dig down to the roots of the myth.
What we find there is a thing of horror. Nana, daughter of the River Sangarios, saw an almond-tree, which had sprung from the blood of a son of Kybelê, whom the gods in fear of his strength had mutilated. (Here is the Hesiodic motif again.) She conceived and bare a child, which she exposed. At first the wild goats nurtured him; then shepherds of the mountain. At last Attis was grown so beautiful that Agdistis (who is but a form of Kybelê) loved him, and when he would not answer her love, drove him mad, so that he fled to the hills and there under a pine-tree unmanned himself. From his blood sprang violets to hang about the tree.
But for the unexpected sweetness of wild violet and mountain pine at the close, the story is curiously unlovely. But what really gives one a shudder is the reflection that the story mirrors a fact. The priests of Kybelê ... what I would say is that they behaved like Attis.
You would guess none of these things from Herodotus. What has happened to the myth that it is transmuted to the exquisite and piteous tale he has related? We can only say that it has suffered the Greek magic. The Hellenic spirit, dreaming on the old dark fantasy, robs it a little of its wild, outrageous beauty (which was to reappear later in the Attis of Catullus), but keeps much of its natural magic, and by introducing the figure of the father adds overwhelmingly to the dramatic value of the story. Most of all it steeps the whole in a wonderful rightness of emotion. The gift which has achieved this is, as I have hinted, a dramatic gift; the magic is the same as that which pervades the Attic Tragedy. So much is this the case that the Tale of Atys in Herodotus reads like a Greek tragic drama in prose. The explanation is that ancient Tragedy arose out of just such a ritual as that from which sprang the Atys story. That story, so far as I know, was never made the subject of an actual drama. It seems a pity. What a subject it would have been for Euripides!
It seems to me a legitimate procedure, in an essay of this kind, to indicate the affinity between the tale in Herodotus and the normal structure and method of Attic Tragedy by treating the narrative portions of the tale as so many stage-directions, and the dialogue as we treat the dialogue in a play, assigning every speech to its proper speaker. Let me only add that all the dialogue, and practically all of the stage-directions, are literally translated.
THE DEATH OF ATYS
[The scene is Sardis in Lydia. It is a populous settlement of reed-thatched houses clustering about a wonderful, sheer, enormous rock crowned by the great walls of the Citadel. Over against it, to the south, rises the neighbouring range of Tmôlos, whence issues the famous little stream of the Paktôlos, which, emerging from a gorge, rolls its gold-grained sand actually through the market-place of Sardis into the Hermos. Some miles away, by the margin of a lake, appear the vast grave-mounds of the Lydian kings. Within the Citadel is the ancestral Palace of Croesus. Any one entering the palace would observe its unwonted splendour—silver and gold and electrum everywhere. He would also be struck by the circumstance that the walls of the great Hall are bare of the swords and spears and quivers, which it was customary to hang there. At present the weapons are piled in the women’s chambers.
Croesus is seen clad in a great purple-red mantle, and carrying a long golden sceptre tipped with a little eagle in gold. He is surrounded by his bodyguard of spearmen, who wear greaves and breastplates of bronze, and helmets crested with the tails of horses.
A Stranger in the peaked cap, embroidered dress, and tall boots of a Phrygian noble enters with drawn sword, and with looks of haste and horror. Seeing Croesus, he utters no word, but, running forward, sits down by the central hearth of the house, strikes his sword into the floor, and covers his face. By this proceeding he confesses at once that he is a homicide, and that he desires absolution from his sin. In silence also the King approaches and gazes on the man. Then he goes through the elaborate and displeasing ritual of purification from bloodshed, calling aloud on the God of Suppliants to sanctify the rite. At last he is free to question the Stranger.]
Croesus. Man sitting at my hearth, who art thou and whence comest thou out of Phrygia? What man or what woman hast thou slain?
Stranger. O King, I am the son of Gordias the son of Midas, and my name is Adrastos. Behold here one that by unhappiness hath slain his own brother, and my father hath driven me out, and all hath been taken from me.
Croesus. Now art thou among friends, for there is friendship between our houses. Here wilt thou lack nothing, so long as thou abidest in my house. Strive to forget thy mischance; that will be best for thee.
[The man Adrastos enters the Palace with Croesus. Meanwhile arrive certain messengers. They are mountaineers, dressed in skins and carrying staves hardened at the point by fire. They come from Mount Olympus in Mysia.]
Mysians. Lord, a very mighty boar hath revealed himself in our land, the which layeth waste our tillage, neither can we by any means slay him. Now therefore we beseech thee, send thy son with us, and chosen young men, and dogs, that we may destroy him out of the land.
Croesus. As for my son, make ye no mention of him hereafter; I will not send him with you; for he hath lately married a wife, and is occupied with this. Yet will I send chosen men of the Lydians, and all the hunt, and straitly charge them very zealously to aid you in destroying the beast out of the land.
[Enters now the young man, Atys, the son of Croesus. He is dressed much in the Greek fashion, but with such ornaments of gold and embroidery of flowers upon him as beseem a prince of the House of the Mermnadae. He has heard of the prayer of the Mysians, and now pleads with his father that he may be permitted to go with them.]
Atys. Father, aforetime when I would be going to battle and the chase and winning honour therein, that was brave and beautiful. But now hast thou shut me out alike from war and from the hunt, albeit thou hast not espied in me any cowardice or weakness of spirit. And now with what countenance must I show myself either entering or departing from the assembly of the people? What shall be deemed of me by the folk of this city and my newly married wife? What manner of husband will she suppose is hers? Therefore either suffer me to go upon this hunting, or else persuade me that thy course is better.
Croesus. O son, I do not this because I have espied cowardice or any unlovely thing in thee at all. But the vision of a dream came to me in sleep, and said that thy life was not for long; by an iron edge thou wouldest perish. Therefore I was urgent for thy marrying, because I had regard unto this vision, and therefore I will not send thee upon this emprise, being careful if by any means I may steal thee from death, while I am living. For thou art mine only son, not counting the other, the dumb.
Atys. I blame thee not, father, that having beheld such a vision thou keepest ward over me. But what thou perceivest not neither understandest the significance thereof in thy dream, meet is it that I tell thee. Thou sayest that the dream told that I should be slain by an iron edge. But a boar—what hands hath it, or what manner of iron edge which thou fearest? Had the dream made mention of a tusk or the like, needs must thou do as now thou doest; but it said an edge. Seeing therefore that it is not against men that I go to fight, let me go.
Croesus. My son, herein thou dost convince my judgement by thine interpretation of the dream. Wherefore being thus persuaded by thee I do now change my thought and suffer thee to go to the hunting.
[The King now sends for Adrastos and they speak as follows.]
Croesus. Adrastos, when a foul mischance smote thee (I reproach thee not therewith), I cleansed thee of thy sin, and received thee in my house, and have furnished thee with abundance of all things. Now therefore (for thou owest me a kindness) keep ward over my son that goeth forth to the chase, lest evil thieves appear to your hurt. Moreover for thyself also it is right that thou go where thou shalt win glory by thy mighty deeds; for so did thy fathers before thee; and moreover thou art a mighty man.
Adrastos. For another reason, O King, I would not have gone on such a venture. For neither is it seemly, nor do I wish, that one so afflicted mingle among his fortunate peers; yea, for manifold reasons I would have refrained. But now, since thou art urgent thereto and I am bound to perform thy pleasure—for I owe thee return of kindness—I am ready to do this thing: thy son, whom thou straitly chargest me to guard, expect thou to return home without hurt, so far as I am able to guard him.
In this manner, continues Herodotus, did he then make answer to Croesus. And after that they set forth with service of chosen young men and of dogs. And when they had come to the mountain Olympus, they began to quest for the beast; and having found him they stood round about him, and cast their javelins at him. Then the stranger, the man that had been purged of the stains of blood, even he that was named Adrastos, cast his spear at the boar, and missed him, and smote the son of Croesus instead. And he so smitten by the edge of the spear fulfilled the saying of the nightly vision. But one ran to tell Croesus that which had befallen; and when he was come to Sardis he declared to him the manner of the fight and the slaying of his son. And Croesus being mightily troubled by the death of the young man complained the more vehemently for that he had been killed by that very one whom he had purified of a manslaying. And in the passion of his grief he cried aloud with a great and terrible voice on Zeus of Purification, calling him to bear witness what recompense he had received at the hands of the stranger; and he named him moreover God of the Hearth and God of Companionship, naming him by the former name because receiving the stranger into his house he had unwittingly given meat and drink to the slayer of his child, and by the latter name because having sent him with his son to guard him he now found him his greatest enemy.
And now the Lydians came bearing the dead body, and behind them followed the slayer. And he standing before the dead yielded himself up to Croesus, stretching forth his hands, bidding him slay him over the body, making mention of his former calamity, and how now he had besides brought destruction upon the man that had purified him, neither was it meet that he should live. Croesus hearing has pity on Adrastos, albeit in so great sorrow of his own, and says to him: Guest, I have all I may claim of thee, since thou dost adjudge thyself to death. Not thee I blame for this ill, save as thou wert the unwilling doer thereof; nay but some god methinks is the cause, who even aforetime showed me that which should come to pass.
Then did Croesus honourably bury his son. But Adrastos the son of Gordias the son of Midas, even the man that had killed his own brother, and had killed the son of him that washed away his offence, after the people had left the tomb and there was silence, deeming in his own heart that of all men that he knew himself was most calamitous, slew himself upon the grave.