But in course of time Periandros came to be old, and knew himself no longer capable of watching over and administering affairs. Wherefore he sent to Corcyra and recalled Lykophron to the tyranny; for he saw nothing in his elder son, but looked upon him as somewhat dull of wit. But Lykophron would not even answer the messenger. But Periandros, who was bound up in the young man, made a second attempt, sending his own daughter, Lykophron’s sister, thinking he would most readily listen to her. And when she had come she said, “Dear Lykophron, is it your desire that our lordship should fall to others and thy father’s substance be scattered abroad, rather than come away and have it thyself? Come home; cease punishing thyself. A proud heart is poor profit. Do not cure one evil with another. Many prefer mercy to justice; and many ere now in seeking what was their mother’s have lost what their father had. A tyranny is a slippery thing, and many there be that long for it; and he is now an old man and past his prime. Give not away what is thine own to others.” These were her words, which her father had taught to her as the most persuasive. But Lykophron answered that he would on no account come to Corinth so long as he knew his father was alive. When she had brought back this answer, Periandros sends a third messenger, a herald, to propose that he should go himself to Corcyra, and bidding Lykophron come to Corinth to succeed him in the tyranny. The young man agreed to these terms, and Periandros was setting out for Corcyra and the prince to Corinth, when the Corcyraeans, becoming aware of all this, in order that Periandros might not come to their land, put the lad to death. Therefore Periandros took vengeance on the Corcyraeans.
The revenge of the old man was to send three hundred boys of the chief Corcyraean families to the great Lydian king, Alyattes, to be made eunuchs.... He was cheated of his revenge by a humane stratagem of the Samians. The lonely old man, with that touch of original nobleness all gone now, black frustrate rage in his heart, love turned to an inhuman hate of all the world, wearing this Nessus shirt of remorse and despair! Such is tyranny, says Sosikles at the end of his speech, Such is tyranny, O Lacedaemonians, and such its consequences.
Periandros, you see, has already become a type. There is a curious fitness in the application to these old “tyrants” of the worn quotation from The Vanity of Human Wishes—they do very specially point a moral and adorn a tale. The moral they point is the danger of losing Sophrosyne. There is a wonderful description in Plato’s Republic of the tyrant’s genesis, a description which may startle us by the intensity of feeling which one touches in it. It is a story of the gradual loss of Sophrosyne, ending in perfect degeneration and the loss of all the other virtues as well. This Sophrosyne (one of the cardinal Greek virtues and the most characteristic of all) confronts us at the outset of any study of the Hellenic temperament. To understand the one is to understand the other. Complete understanding is of course impossible, but we may get nearer and nearer to the secret.
Sophrosyne is the “saving” virtue. That means little—or nothing—until it is steeped in the colours of the Greek temperament, and viewed in the Greek attitude to life. Well then, the Greek attitude to life—how shall we describe that? I am going to describe it in a phrase which is at least accurate enough to help on our discussion greatly: it looks upon life as an Agon, and by an Agon is meant the whole range of activities from the most to the least heroic, from the most to the least spiritual, contest or competition. The reader will forgive an appearance of pedantry in this, since the word needs careful translation. Now my suggestion is that this agonistic view of life, if I may so call it, pervades and characterizes all Classical antiquity. To understand clearly the nature of an Agon we must keep firmly in mind its origin. It would be misleading surely to call its origin religious—as if men needed to be religious to fight!—but it is undeniable that its roots are embedded in that primitive life which is so largely mastered by religion and magic. In consequence an ancient Agon was nearly always a religious ceremony. That seems curious enough to a modern mind, yet nothing is more certain. The great national Games like the Olympic, the rhapsodic and musical contests, the Attic Drama (which was specifically an Agon)—all had this religious or supernatural aura investing them. And when one looks into Greek religion itself, one finds everywhere as its characteristic expression a choric dance, which normally takes the form of an actual or mimic contest between two sides or “semi-choruses.”
The motive then of an Agon differed from that of an ordinary modern contest. It was normally a ritual contest, and its motive a religious motive. It was not held for its own sake, like a football match, but for a definite object. This object the Greeks called Nikê, which we translate—inadequately enough, as is plain from the facts we have been considering—as “victory.” It was felt to be not so much a personal distinction as a blessing upon the whole community. It possessed a magical virtue. There was even a sense in which in an ancient Agon everybody won. Nor does it seem extravagant to say that Greek society, like a primitive society, only in a far richer, more complex, more significant and spiritual way, was organized for the production of Nikê.
That is a large matter. There is, to be sure, no need of accumulated detail to prove that the Agon was the most characteristic institution of ancient life; it only requires to be pointed out; everywhere we find these competitions. What may chiefly interest us for the moment is that the Agon was simply the outward expression of the characteristic Greek outlook upon life and upon the whole human [(Note 120)]scene. For the Greek looked upon life itself as a struggle, an Agon, an opportunity for the production of Nikê. Mr. Wells gives to one of his essays the title of “The Human Adventure.” Life as the Human Adventure very well expresses the Greek feeling about it. Only let us not forget that the Nikê which is the object and justification of every Agon is—I have already remarked it—something utterly, qualitatively different from mere success. It is the triumph of the Cause. “Success”—“the successful business man”—not that kind of success.
The most successful man in Greece, every one remembers, was rewarded with a little garland of wild olive. God help us, Mardonios, said a noble Persian when he heard this, what men are these thou hast brought us to fight against!—men that contend not for money but for merit. The individual Greek could want money badly enough, as may be gathered from the amusing, but satirical, Characters of Theophrastus. Yet in the soul of Hellas, for all its strong sense of reality and despite some inclination to avarice, one finds at last something you might almost call quixotic. Is there not some element of quixotry in every high adventure? And what adventure could be higher than to fight for “the beautiful things,” Ta Kala, against the outnumbering Barbarian?
Sophrosyne is the virtue that “saves” in this battle. Understand it so, and you must share some part of the ardour this word inspired. It means the steady control and direction of the total energy of a man. It means discipline. It means concentration. It is the angel riding the whirlwind, the charioteer driving the wild horses. There is no [(Note 121)]word for it in English, and we must coldly translate “moderation,” “temperance,” “self-restraint.” “Moderation” as a name for this strong-pulsed, triumphant thing! Why even the late-born, unromantic Aristotle, even while he is describing Sophrosyne as a “mean” between excessive and deficient emotionality, turns aside to remark, as a thing almost too obvious to need pointing out, that “there is a sense in which Sophrosyne is an extreme.” This is She whom Dante beheld on the Mountain of Purgatory such that “never were seen in furnace glasses or metals so glowing and red”:
giammai non si videro in fornace
vetri o metalli sì lucenti e rossi.