Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

The ride from the Cleft Way to Chæronea, winding through the valley of the Platania, a tributary of the Bœotian Cephisus, is rich in interest and variety. A little to the west of Chæronea, on the border between Phocis and Bœotia, lies Hagios Vlasis, a miserable village, known to fame only because of its position under the ancient acropolis of Panopeus. The importance of Panopeus was the subject of legend and poetry rather than of history. From its clay Prometheus fashioned the human race, and from its people sprang Epeios, the inventor at Troy of the wooden horse. Here also the giant Tityos lived and died. He had violated Leto as she went up to Delphi through Panopeus “of the fair dancing places,” and for this sin Odysseus found him in Hades sprawling over nine roods of levelled ground, his liver gnawed by vultures. Pausanias was perplexed by the Homeric epithet for the town until the inhabitants explained to him that the Mænads on their way to Parnassus stopped at Panopeus for preliminary dances. Dionysus may have passed this way with his mysterious quickening, as Apollo did with his ordered inspiration. Thus the insignificant town was the legendary scene of man’s birth and of important episodes in his mental and moral development.

Beyond Hagios Vlasis lies another modern village in the shadow of an ancient acropolis. Between Phocis and Bœotia there is no natural boundary, but the large plain of Chæronea sweeps westward into Phocis and eastward into Bœotia to what used to be the Copaic lake. On the north and south the plain is enclosed by barren mountains, and the town of Chæronea, unlike Panopeus, spread out from the base of its acropolis at the foot of the southern and lower hills. Its modern representative is the hamlet of Kapræna, which displays a few legacies of antiquity and from which can be seen the two peaks of Petrachus, the sharp and steep acropolis. The chapel of Panagia (the Virgin) contains a chair of white marble called the chair of Plutarch. The great biographer was born in Chæronea, and the worshipful preservation of his name in the little Christian church reminds one of the appearance of the equally respectable Plinies on the exterior of the cathedral of their native Como.

But the dominant interest of Chæronea is the battle which, in 338 B. C., was lost by the forces of Greece united against Philip of Macedon. No single account of the terrible defeat has been handed down by dramatist or historian, as Æschylus and Herodotus immortalized the victories of Salamis and Marathon, and only general facts in the struggle are known to us from lesser writers. Before the march to Chæronea Demosthenes had risen in the Assembly, at a terrified meeting in the cold and hopeless dawn, and persuaded the Athenians to make a hasty alliance with Thebes against the encroachments of Philip. In the battle the Athenians held the left wing while the right, the post of honour, was given to the famous Sacred Band of the Thebans. Between them were gathered the other allies. Against the Thebans at the crucial moment Philip turned his cavalry under the command of the young Alexander. As the struggle became hopeless the Athenians retreated, but the members of the Sacred Band fought until they fell, raising one last memorial to their great founder, Epaminondas, and offering one last atonement for the cowardice of Thebes in the Persian wars.

The victory of Macedon was not so much wrested from the Greek arms as it was due to ineradicable defects in the Greek political character. It was characteristic of all Greek history that the allies should have formed no united and harmonious army under one fully empowered leader. The intense individualism which made Greece supreme in the arts and in science and philosophy left her at the mercy of peoples able to subordinate single wills to a national purpose. In the presence of the architecture, sculpture, and literature of the Greeks it is impossible to deplore their unthwarted intellectual freedom, their keen sensibilities, their genius for personal development. But at Chæronea it is easy to see not only the disintegration, but also the demoralization of a national life which lacked the heroic sacrifice of self and the persistence of a common controlling ideal as much as it lacked administrative genius and political wisdom.

But it must be remembered that such inclusive strictures on the Greek character can be made only when we follow the prejudices of Philip’s enemies in excluding Macedon from the Greek states. In the perspective of history it is clear that Chæronea opened the way for a new Hellenic state to create a new national life in which discord should give way to unity and individualism to a world empire. Nevertheless the rise of Macedon was not continuous with the former life of Greece as were the successive hegemonies of the older states. The monarchy of Philip obliterated not only the existing commonwealths but their modes of government. Politically the loss was swallowed up in gain. Aristotle’s polity has rightly been called provincial in comparison with his pupil’s empire in which there was neither Greek nor barbarian. But in the world of ideas no substitution was an adequate atonement. The ideals of liberty which the older states had cherished and in which their intellectual and artistic life had been nurtured were lost at Chæronea. In this sense the Athenians were right in saying that here ended the freedom of Greece.

More than two centuries later a lesser victory was won at Chæronea by Sulla over the forces of Mithridates, king of Pontus. Two trophies were erected by the Roman general, and were afterwards seen by Pausanias. “But Philip, the son of Amyntas, set up no trophy, neither at Chæronea, nor for any other victory that he won over barbarians or Greeks, for it was not a Macedonian custom to erect trophies.” On this field the only trophy was the one erected by the defeated to the dead. The Athenians who fell were buried in the Cerameicus, and Demosthenes, who had fought in the ranks, pronounced over them a funeral oration. The Thebans were buried on the field. “No inscription,” says Pausanias, “is carved on the tomb, but a lion is placed on it, perhaps in allusion to the spirit of the men. The reason why there is no inscription I take to be that their fortune did not match their valour.”

This lion may be seen to-day about a quarter of a mile beyond Kapræna, just before one turns toward the modern railroad station of Chæronea. For centuries it had lain in fragments, but in 1902 the broken pieces were fitted together with a result extraordinarily impressive. Upon a pedestal ten feet high sits erect a great beast of gray stone, lifting into the free air a massive unbowed head, and rivalling in the guardianship of Chæronea the greater Inspector who, possibly after this same battle, was invoked by an unknown poet:—

“O guardian Time, Inspector General

Of mortals’ doings manifold,

Be herald of our fate to men, to all,