Thucydides has preserved for all time the memory of what Athens was in her greatest days, and the ideals of one of her great statesmen.[[26]] But the claim of his book to be an "everlasting possession" is justified not because of the actual history he recorded, but because of the critical and scientific way in which he made his enquiry which has become a model for all later historians.
Thucydides left the story of the Peloponnesian War unfinished; he never even finished the last sentence. The story was completed by Xenophon. He was not a great historian like his predecessors, but he has left us valuable information about the later events of the war in the Hellenica, the romantic tale of adventure which tells how a band of Ten Thousand Greeks found their way home from the heart of Mesopotamia,[[27]] and the Economist, a delightful picture of a Greek household.[[28]]
There is one other Greek writer, who, though he did not write history, has left us much valuable historical information. This was Plutarch (A.D. 46-120) who lived long after the great days of Greece had passed. He was a Greek from Boeotia, a well-educated man who had many friends with whom he was wont to discuss all kinds of subjects: Philosophy, history, literature, or politics, and he was also a writer. The great work for which his name is remembered is the Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans. These are the biographies, arranged in pairs of a Greek and a Roman, each pair followed by a comparison between the two. Plutarch never imagined that he was writing history, and in these Lives there is no wide view over a whole period, but in each life there is a vivid picture of a personality and a character. Plutarch knew how to choose picturesque details and anecdotes, and he was attracted by simple, upright, honourable, patriotic characters, which makes his book a storehouse of stories about such men. Few biographies in the world have been read so widely or have achieved such immortality as have the Lives of Plutarch, and probably none have done more to encourage manliness and the spirit of good sportsmanship.
V. GREEK LITERATURE: THE DRAMATISTS
A classic is a work of art or of literature that never dies, a book that will be read forever, no matter when or by whom it was written. We have said that when the history of a nation is recorded in language we call it literature, but by such literature is meant not only historical writing, but whatever takes the form of letters. The history of a nation is an enquiry into how that nation thinks as well as into what it does, and its philosophers, historians and dramatists are as much a part of its history as its statesmen and men of action. The great Greek dramatists were men living the life of their time, and it was a time when stirring things were happening. The dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were written during the period which began with the repulse of the Persians, which included the golden days of Pericles, and which saw the tragic changes which came over Athens during the long-drawn-out misery of the Peloponnesian War.
Now the great Greek dramas are among the classics of the world.[[29]] There are various reasons for this, but one, and not the least, is that they are the outward expression of that love of beauty and of self-control that is one of the priceless gifts of Greece to the world. To the Greek, beauty meant perfection in all that he did, the association of beautiful words and forms with beautiful deeds and scenes. To him beauty was the same as goodness, and ugliness was evil. And beauty meant self-control, the absence of all excess and exaggeration. The Greek dramatists had no models to guide them, yet they produced works that almost perfectly attained this Greek ideal of Beauty.
The oldest of these dramatists was Aeschylus. He took an active part in the Persian Wars, and he thought this of so much greater importance than any literary success he had achieved, that his epitaph, said to have been written by himself, saying nothing about his poetry, states only that he fought the Persians. His name and birthplace were inscribed and then that "the grove of Marathon can bear witness to his good soldierhood, and the long-haired Mede who felt it." One of the few Greek plays of which the plot was not taken from ancient Greek legend was the Persians of Aeschylus,[[30]] interesting because it is the first historical play written by a poet who took part himself in the events of which it tells.
The greatest work of Aeschylus was a Trilogy, (i.e., three consecutive plays bearing on the same subject): the Agamemnon, the greatest of all his plays; the Libation-Bearers, and the Furies. These tell the tale, so often told in the Greek drama, of the murder by his wife of Agamemnon on his return from Troy, of Orestes who avenged his father's death, of the Furies who followed him as a result of his deed, and of how in the end he found release. These plays are haunted throughout by the belief that over certain families hangs a curse, that the sins of their fathers are visited on their children, and that from this punishment there is no escape. Aeschylus was filled with the realization of the power of the great unseen forces that move the world, but he believed that if on one side there were the Furies demanding blood for blood, on the other were Apollo and Athena, symbols of the self-control that could overcome the heritage of anger and of passion.