It is the same in Greek literature, from first to last. In the Homeric poems fighting is the normal business of man. There are fairy-lands, the poet can imagine, where fighting is not the common rule of life, the land of the lotus-eaters, the orchards of the Phæacians, the island realms of Circe and Calypso: but these are all uncanny magic places where decent everyday rules do not hold good. In Homer it is a man’s function to fight, by sea and land, in a chariot or on foot, to use spear and sword, to attack and plunder, or to defend himself from the enemy’s raids. So also with the lyric poets of the next era, from Archilochus downwards; they are men of battle first and men of letters afterwards, squires of the War god, as Archilochus cries:
‘My spear is bread, white kneaded bread,
My spear’s Ismarian wine,
My spear is food and drink and bed,
With it the world is mine.’
We get the same refrain in Hybrias the Cretan, the verses known to English musicians by Campbell’s translation:
‘My wealth’s a burly spear and brand
And a right good shield of hides untanned
Which on my arm I buckle.
With these I plough, I reap, I sow,
With these I make the sweet vintage flow
And all around me truckle.
But your wights that take no pride to wield
A massy spear and well made shield,
Nor joy to draw the sword,
Oh I bring those heartless hapless drones
Down in a trice on their marrow bones
To call me king and lord.’
‘King and lord’—they are the only words that the lyrists have for the soldier, and the elegiac poets repeat the idea in the more serious fashion appropriate to their poetical form. Tyrtæus, for example, the lame schoolmaster lent by Athens to Sparta, in those poems which the Spartans regarded as one of the chief causes of their military success, emphasizes the supreme importance of martial valour:
‘I would never remember a man nor hold him of any account because of his speed of foot, or skill in wrestling, his bigness, or his strength, his beauty, or his wealth. He might be more kingly than Pelops, more eloquent than Adrastus; but all his fame would avail him naught unless he were a man of mettle in fight. This is the supreme virtue, the best sport, the highest prize that a young man can win.’
Tyrtæus, as we see in his verses, regarded the art of poetry as ancillary to the art of war, and the greatest of the Athenian dramatists shared his views. The real gravamen of Æschylus’ attack upon Euripides in the Frogs is that the latter did not sufficiently exalt the martial spirit among a nation, of whom the old poet says:
‘Their life was in shafts of ash and of elm, in bright plumes fluttering wide,
In lance and greaves and corslet and helm and heart of seven bulls hide.’
Prose literature gives us the same evidence as poetry. Thucydides and Xenophon look upon history chiefly as a succession of battles and campaigns. Of the social history of their time they tell us scarcely anything, but they will dilate with the most intense interest on the smallest details of a skirmish. To them, as to most of their contemporaries, war was the one thing that mattered, the great business and the great sport of life, and our historians have only in comparatively recent times escaped from their point of view.