Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

Around or over all that is left of Classic, Hellenistic, or Roman Athens is the modern city, effacing itself in patches at the behest of the archæologist, or developing slowly in accordance with its own needs.

In this chapter, however, we have to do directly only with the Athens of the fifth or fourth centuries. If the physical remains from this period are fragmentary, the literature, although itself but fragments of the whole, is the great bulk of existing classic Greek literature outside of the epic, the earlier philosophers, and the lyric. And this corpus of literature was in large part native Attic. At the same time the talent from without gravitated also to Athens. Herodotus from the Dorian Halicarnassus not only wrote in Ionic, but adopted the Athenian attitude so largely as to vitiate in part his value as an independent historian. Hippocrates, the great Ionian physician, visited Athens. The Sophists, though coming from the North, the West, or the islands, found in Athens the appropriate environment for a “circuit” faculty of an unarticulated federal university. Prose, seasoned and adorned, became henceforth an asset of the Athenian intellect and was made ready for the use of historian, orator, and philosopher. Athens, mistress of the seas, and herself producer of art and literature, needed no protective tariff against intellectual imports.

This very wealth of fifth and fourth century literature imposes limitations, more rigid than our uncertainty about this, that, or the other site, upon the effort to interpret the external Athens from the more enduring monuments of her thinkers. Nor is it true that the nexus between Athens and her literature may be made clear only by definite localization. We do not wish the conditions reversed. Although, for example, the courtrooms and the Lyceum have disappeared, we may, as we wander about Athens to-day, come much nearer the Greeks of the classic age than if, while the buildings had remained intact, the words of the orators and of the great Peripatetic could no longer reach our ears. The so-called “Theseum,” largely perfect as it is and invaluable for architectural and artistic suggestion, leaves us cold in the lack of literary association as compared with the Propylæa where many an old-time Athenian rubs elbows with us as we pass in and out between its stately columns. But in a wider sense we may “localize,” here on this Attic plain around the Acropolis and here under this Attic sky, the poetry and prose of the fifth and fourth centuries.

A brief summary of this poetry and prose will perhaps suggest more clearly the larger pattern from which, almost arbitrarily, selections may be made.

In the fifth century, lyric was brought to its perfection by singers not of Athens. But Ceos, the birthplace of two of them, was moored close to Attica. Simonides, the poet-laureate of the Persian wars, was much in Athens, and his nephew Bacchylides took the Attic Theseus for the theme of two of his extant poems, wrote one of his epinician odes in honour of an Athenian victor, and composed another poem expressly in laudation of Athens. Pindar himself studied in Athens, and afterwards, to his own townspeople’s disgust, praised her in no grudging terms. The Athenian drama itself, in the chorals of tragedy and of Aristophanes, contributed much of the greatest lyric extant in Greek literature.

Tragedy in the fifth century grew from infancy to maturity at Athens. When Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had completed their work it had received its final form for the Greeks, and was so transmitted to the great actors and the lesser playwrights of the fourth century.

Comedy likewise culminated with Aristophanes in the fifth century. More flexible than tragedy, however, it could humour successfully the changing moods of the body politic and retain its vigour through the whole of the fourth century. Even under Macedon, Menander in the New Comedy could recast much that Euripides had tried, with varying success, to embody within the canonized limits of orthodox tragedy.

History was the gift of the fifth century. Herodotus after the Persian wars bridged with his epic prose the Ægean, and we reach terra firma in Thucydides’s history in the latter part of the century. In the first part of the fourth century we have Xenophon, the historian, biographer, essay-writer, and historical novelist. These were precursors of a line of historians appearing sporadically even down through Byzantine times.

Oratory, an inalienable inheritance of the Hellene even before Athena coached the crafty Odysseus, received at Athens a certain finality of form, or forms, that has imposed its influence upon the occidental, whether Roman or Englishman, lawyer or epideictic speaker. The unwritten word of statesmen like Pericles, fusing the persuasion of the politician with the keener rationalism of Anaxagoras and the raucous, but not wholly unpatriotic, opportunism of demagogues like Cleon or Hyperbolus, was paired with the more decently draped pragmatism of the Sophists, and resulted in the selected group of the “ten” orators, of the fifth and fourth centuries. There was the somewhat archaic Antiphon, the dignified criminal lawyer; Andocides, who brought his rough and ready style to bear upon burning questions of contemporary politics; Lysias, the son of an alien, but truly Attic, the younger friend of Socrates, the lucid narrator, the relentless prosecutor; Isæus, the capable testamentary barrister; Isocrates, who both saw the building of the Erechtheum and outlived the battle of Chæronea, and whose over-finished oratory transmitted the florid adornment of Gorgias to the schools in which Cicero was trained; Demosthenes, greatest of all, whether in private suits or in his arraignment of public foes, whose terrorizing cleverness was quick to strike or counter like the flashing arms of the athlete impeded with no ounce of florid superfluity; Æschines, his great antagonist; Lycurgus; Hyperides; and Dinarchus.

Philosophy as a native Attic product matured last of all. Ionia had produced the great “physical” philosophers, and Pythagoras had gone in the sixth century to Italy; but in the first half of the fifth century the so-called “colonial” philosophers, like the foreign Sophists, influenced Athenian thought—some of them by personal visits. They came from the East and from the West. Parmenides came from Italy, and his influence was felt by Socrates and transmitted to Plato and Aristotle. The aristocratic Empedocles came on a visit from Sicily. Anaxagoras from Ionia settled at Athens in his youth. His “chaos-controlling mind”—the primal force of reason—impregnated the statesmanship of Pericles and engendered the rationalism of Euripides. The Athenians might banish the philosopher, but his “primal force of reason” was already busy in rearranging the chaos of traditional beliefs. It emerges clearly in Plato as intelligent Mind. Socrates, though not himself a writer, is the central figure of philosophic literature. Pre-Socratic thought focussed in him as in a burning-glass. From him shoot out the divergent rays of the Academics and Peripatetics, the Cynics and the precursors of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics. No one of his disciples reproduced his views with any exactness, but he stimulated self-examination and independent thought. Each took from him what he could or would, and developed differing or mutually exclusive schools. Like the rivers of Greece, coursing for a time through the underground “katavothras,” pre-Socratic speculative thought on physics and metaphysics flowed on beneath the open devotion of Socrates to ethical questions, and reappears in his successors.