Member of Chorus.
Pick up a chip here from the ground and snuff the lamp.
Boy.
No, with my finger thus I choose to snuff the lamp!
Member of Chorus.
What’s got into your head, with hand to shove the wick,
And that when oil’s so scanty? There, you fool, take that!”
The flat-roofed houses were low. Highwaymen could sit on the roofs and jump down on their victims. Burglars, who preferred a change from the conventional method of digging through the soft bricks, could climb over the house-wall. The street-mire and “Apaches” were familiar in violet-crowned Athens. Demosthenes on occasion loads his terrible Gatling gun with details picked up from the street. In his oration “Against Conon” he describes a brawl. The plaintiff recites how the said Conon and his crew had met him near the Leocorion at the Agora, tripped up his legs, trampled him in the mire, cut his lip, and bunged up his eyes; how, finally, as he lay there, Conon was egged on by the others to flap his arms like wings and to crow over him like a victorious rooster.
The Gymnasia of Athens emphasize one of the most characteristic features of Athenian life—the close interrelation of the physical and the intellectual. Here the youths were trained in their naked beauty; here the philosophers collected their data; here they afterwards taught their doctrines. To-day, unhappily, we must content ourselves with recalling the natural beauty surrounding the Academy at Colonus, or reconstructing scenes like those in the “Euthydemus,” the “Charmides,” the “Laches,” or “Lysis” of Plato. At the opening of the “Lysis” Socrates is making his way close under the outside of the north wall of the city, bound from the Academy for the Lyceum, which was probably somewhere east of the present King’s Gardens. Thus the path between Plato’s Academy and the future school of Aristotle was worn by the footsteps of their great predecessor. Socrates on this occasion, however, was deflected by an eager youth to enter a new palæstra just opened near the fountain of Panops, possibly near the gate of Diochares now placed by conjecture near the intersection of the Street of the Muses and Boulè Street. He is persuaded without difficulty and holds a discussion on Friendship with the handsome youths gathered there. In the “Charmides” likewise he goes to another palæstra, Taureas, which was near the Itonian gate, probably not far from the Olympieum. He had just come back the evening before from the engagement at Potidæa, and is eagerly questioned about the battle. As usual, he guides the talk into other channels and there follows a discussion upon Temperance.
Although the sites of the courts are uncertain, we know what went on in them. The Athenian passion for litigation is a commonplace. Lucian’s Icaromenippus, looking down from the moon on the kingdoms of the classic world, characterizes the inhabitants thus: “I could see the nomad Scyths in their wagons; the Egyptian farming; the Cilician buccaneering; the Spartan flogging; and the Athenian pettifogging.” So, in the newly organized Bird-town of Aristophanes, one of the first visitors, following hard after the parricide, is a Law-suit-hatcher. He “cannot dig,” but is not ashamed of his blackmailing trade. He comes to the birds for wings to bear him around among the Isles as “Summoner.”