Greek Lands and Letters

by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; Anne C. E. Allinson

Plato in the fourth century constituted himself the ethical and philosophic executor of Socrates. Loyalty and a wide vision alike combined to perpetuate his master’s name in the intellectual output of the great Platonic dialogues. It has been the work of centuries to disentangle the real views of this sleeping partner from those of Plato’s own constructive intellect, which built, pulled down, and reared anew the dwelling-places for the minds of many men in many generations.

Aristotle, like Anaxagoras, came as an alien and settled in Athens in his youth. After the death of his master, Plato, he left Athens, travelled, and became the tutor of Alexander. After the accession of his royal pupil to the throne, he established at Athens in the Lyceum a rival school to the Academy.

Antisthenes, half Athenian, half Thracian, the faithful follower of Socrates, had before this established the Cynic school in another gymnasium, the Cynosarges, where the victors fresh from Marathon had encamped. Socrates, the barefoot friar, the new avatar of Heracles, was his patron saint. Later in the century Zeno the Stoic set up his eclectic school in the Painted Porch of the Agora, and Epicurus, of an Attic father though born at Samos, established his school in his own Gardens near the Dipylon.

Theophrastus, the friend of Epicurus and of Menander, gives us in his “Characters,” at the close of this period, vivid portraits of Athenian life which supplement the fragments of Menander and the other writers of the New Comedy, and also, as pupil and successor of Aristotle, carried on his master’s teachings in the Lyceum. Thus one pupil busied himself in transmitting through his intellectual heirs the esoteric thought of his master, while Alexander, another pupil, had constructed on lines that paralleled the intellectual imperialism of his teacher a material organon of Empire (utterly at variance with his master’s conception of the ideal state) that no successor could wield alone until Rome reached forth and grasped it in her iron hand.

But to understand at all the meaning of the literature, it is also necessary to remind ourselves of some of the more striking features of the history of these two centuries. They are crowded with conspicuous figures and with events significant to the philosophic student of political institutions.

In general the fifth century exhibits the rise and downfall of the imperialistic policy, the fourth century the rehabilitation of a chastened democracy, with sporadic echoes of a federalizing ideal. But no one policy can be predicated of the fifth century. It varied with the great leaders, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, and others—the old in conflict with the new; conservative, aristocratic democracy against imperialism; democracy against oligarchy; ochlocracy against democracy. When the Persian peril was thrust back, the irrepressible conflict between Sparta and Athens emerged. The struggle for the hegemony between them, or between varying combinations of the Greek states, was to continue at intervals until the time when all the old powers of Greece were to succumb to Macedon.

Themistocles, the hero of Salamis, was ostracized from Athens within eight years of the great sea-fight, but his spirit still animated his countrymen, and his policies were afterwards revived or expanded. His rival Aristides guided affairs at home, and Cimon, the son of Miltiades, sailed with the conquering Athenian navy. His victory at Eurymedon in 468 B. C. made it possible to fortify Athens and Piræus and to merge the Confederacy of Delos in the Athenian Empire. In seven years more Cimon in turn was ostracized, but at the end of another seven years the rich treasure of Delos could be transferred to Athens and the empire formally established. It was to last until the disaster at Ægospotami, in 405 B. C. Pericles, after successfully competing with the reactionary patriotism of statesmen like Thucydides, obtained, at the ostracism of the latter in 442 B. C., the controlling power at Athens, which he guided by his regal persuasion for the next fifteen years. The imperialism of Pericles realized the policy of Themistocles on the seas, reaped the harvest of the great Cimon’s victories, and transmuted the treasure of Delos into the sinews of war and the monuments of the glorified Acropolis. He reshaped the civic life, even curtailing the sacred powers of the Areopagus, and by popular changes in the complexion of Council, Assembly, and Law Courts, prepared the way for the uneven rule of demagogues after his own strong hand should be withdrawn. He had great odds to contend with. After the renewal of the Peloponnesian wars in 431 B. C., with the succession of victories and reverses, the Great Plague came to assert an unlooked-for hegemony. On the suffering and disasters of the city followed the trial and condemnation of Pericles himself. He was indeed reinstated as indispensable, but his death in the following year left Athens at the mercy of the demagogues—with Alcibiades to follow. The Sicilian expedition, the crowning venture of imperialism, issued—as was to be expected with no real successor of Pericles to direct it—in the disaster of 413 B. C., when the brave Syracusans, with the willing help of Sparta, dissipated the Athenian dream of vast colonial expansion.

The next ten years was for Athens a losing struggle at home and abroad. The short-lived oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 B. C., the strenuous but vain efforts of Theramenes to reconcile oligarchy and democracy, the civic strife and war with the powerful Lysander, the crushing defeat at Ægospotami, the intervention of Sparta, the brief but terrible régime of the Thirty Tyrants, completed, in 404 B. C., the final overthrow of imperial Athens. But Sparta, with politic generosity, while doing away with the empire, left Athens free to establish a more stable democracy that was to last through the greater part of the fourth century. Oligarchy could no more find a hearing, and, although Hellenic federations were eloquently advocated by the orators and actually formed, despotic empire was no longer feasible for the Athenians. Their new leader, Conon, however, the foe of Sparta, could succeed after Lysander’s death in making Athens independent and strong. We come upon his work now and again in Athens and in Piræus, and in the renascent civic life the intellectual life went on with new vigour. The imperial dream finally came true, but from the outside. The Macedonian, though sneered at as barbarian by Demosthenes, confirmed at the Olympic games the validity of his Hellenic claim that he had asserted at Chæronea. The fitful struggle against the sway of Macedon only resulted, under a successor less philhellenic than Philip, in the forced suicide of the great Demosthenes and the execution of Hypereides, whose funeral oration, pronounced over the dead heroes of the “lost cause,” carries us beyond the great speech of Pericles—pronounced on a similar but less hopeless occasion—back to the heroes of Marathon and Salamis. Speaking of the dead leader Leosthenes, he says: “In the dark under-world—suffer us to ask—who are they that will stretch forth a right hand to the captain of our dead?... There, I deem, will be Miltiades and Themistocles, and those others who made Hellas free, to the credit of their city, to the glory of their names.”[^[8]]

We sit to-day beneath a Greek sky on the rising tiers of the modern centuries, and the drama of Athenian life is reproduced before our eyes. The greater protagonists of literature and life play out their rôles. Many another actor plays his less prominent but essential part. The “mutes” contribute. The chorus of democracy is seldom absent from the scene. The binoculars of modern historians penetrate behind paint and mask and robe, and the squalor of the real actor is at times laid bare. We may choose, however, to ignore minutiæ and to give ourselves up to the more satisfying perspective of the literature, and to let sweep before us the bright procession of form and colour, the song and saga, the Dionysiac revel and tragic mimicry that fill out the real drama of life.

Æschylus connects the old and the new Athens. Before Marathon he produced his first play; in the interval before Salamis he gained a first prize; and he brought out his greatest dramas in the time of the Renascence, of which he was a great part.