Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

In these five periods—periods of superb adolescence, early manhood, magnificent maturity, robust old age, and senility—we can trace the genius of the Greeks putting forth its vigor in successive works of art and literature, concentrating its energy at first upon its own self-culture, then extending its influence in every direction, and controlling the education of humanity, finally contenting itself with pondering and poring on its past, with mystical metaphysics and pedantic criticism. Yet even in its extreme decadence the Hellenic spirit is still potent. It still assimilates, transmutes, and alchemizes what it works upon. Coming into contact with the new and mightier genius of Christianity, it forces even that first-born of the Deity to take form from itself. One dying effort of the Greek intellect, if we may so speak, is to formulate the dogma of the Trinity and to impress the doctrine of the Logos upon the author of the Gospel of St. John. The analogy between the history of a race so undisturbed in its development as the Greek, and the life of a man, is not altogether fanciful. A man like Goethe, beautiful in soul and body, exceedingly strong and swift and active and inquisitive in all the movements of his spirit, first lives the life of the senses and of physical enjoyment. His soul, "immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world," has scarcely begun to think consciously in the first period. But he feels the glory of existence, the strivings of inexhaustible energy, the desire of infinite expansion. The second period is one of Sturm und Drang. New things are learned: much of the beautiful physical activity is sacrificed; he discovers that life involves care and responsibility as well as pleasure; he concentrates his mental faculty on hard and baffling study, in which at first he halts and falters. Then he goes forth to the world and wins great fame, and does the deeds and thinks the thoughts by which he shall be known to all posterity. His physical and mental faculties are now in perfect harmony; together they offer him the noblest and most enduring pleasures. But after a while his productiveness begins to dwindle. He has put forth his force, has fully expressed himself, has matured his principles, has formed his theory of the world. Our fourth period corresponds to the early old age of such a man's life. He now applies his principles, propagates his philosophy, subordinates his fancy, produces less, enjoys with more sobriety and less exhilaration, bears burdens, suffers disappointments, yet still, as Solon says, "learns always as he grows in years." Then comes the fifth stage. He who was so vigorous and splendid now has but little joy in physical life; his brain is dry and withering; he dwells on his old thoughts, and has no faculty for generating new ones; yet his soul contains deep mines of wisdom; he gives counsel and frames laws for younger generations. And so he gradually sinks into the grave. His acts remain: his life is written.

The great name of Homer covers the whole of the first period of Greek literature.[1] It is from the Homeric poems alone that we can form a picture to our imagination of the state of society in prehistoric Hellas. The picture which they present is so lively in its details, and so consistent in all its parts, that we have no reason to suspect that it was drawn from fancy. Its ideal, as distinguished from merely realistic, character is obvious. The poet professes to sing to us of heroes who were of the seed of gods, whose strength exceeded tenfold the strength of actual men, and who filled the world with valiant deeds surpassing all that their posterity achieved. Yet, in spite of this, the Iliad and the Odyssey may be taken as faithful mirrors of a certain phase of Greek society, just as the Niebelungen Lied, the romances of Charlemagne, and the tales of the Round Table reflect three stages in the history of feudalism. We find that in this earliest period of Greek history the nation was governed by monarchs each of whom claimed descent from a god. Thus the kings exercised their power over the people by divine right; but at the same time a necessary condition of their maintaining this supremacy was that they should be superior in riches, lands, personal bravery, and wisdom. Their subjects obeyed them, not merely because they were Διογενεῖς, or because they were fathers of the people, but also, and chiefly, because they were the ablest men, the men fitted by nature to rule, the men who could be depended upon in an emergency. The king had just so much personal authority as he had ability to acquire or to assert. As soon as this ability failed, the sceptre departed from him. Thus Laertes overlives his royalty; and the suitors of Penelope, fancying that Ulysses is dead, take no heed of Telemachus, who ought to rule in his stead, because Telemachus is a mere lad; but as soon as the hero returns, and proves his might by stringing the bow, the suitors are slain like sheep. Again, Achilles, while acknowledging the sway of Agamemnon, quarrels with him openly, proving his equality and right to such independence as he can assert for himself. The bond between the king in the heroic age and his chieftains was founded on the personal superiority of the suzerain, and upon the necessity felt for the predominance of one individual in warfare and council. The chiefs were grouped around the monarch like the twelve peers round Charlemagne, or like the barons whose turbulence Shakespeare has described in Richard II. The relation of the Homeric sovereign to his princes was, in fact, a feudal one. Olympus repeats the same form of government. There Zeus is monarch simply because he wields the thunder. When Herè wishes to rebel, Hephæstus advises her to submit, because Zeus can root up the world, or hurl them all from the crystal parapet of heaven. Such, then, is the society of kings and princes in Homer. They stand forth in brilliant relief against the background, gray and misty, of the common people. The masses of the nation, like the chorus in tragedy, kneel passive, deedless, appealing to Heaven, trembling at the strokes of fate, watching with anxiety the action of the heroes. Meanwhile the heroes enact their drama for themselves. They assume responsibility. They do and suffer as their passions sway them. Of these the greatest, the most truly typical, is Achilles. In Achilles, Homer summed up and fixed forever the ideal of the Greek character. He presented an imperishable picture of their national youthfulness, and of their ardent genius, to the Greeks. The "beautiful human heroism" of Achilles, his strong personality, his fierce passions controlled and tempered by divine wisdom, his intense friendship and love that passed the love of women, above all, the splendor of his youthful life in death made perfect, hovered like a dream above the imagination of the Greeks, and insensibly determined their subsequent development. At a later age, this ideal was destined to be realized in Alexander. The reality fell below the ideal: for rien n'est si beau que la fable, si triste que la vérité. But the life of Alexander is the most convincing proof of the importance of Achilles in the history of the Greek race.

If Achilles be the type of the Hellenic genius—radiant, adolescent, passionate—as it still dazzles us in its artistic beauty and unrivalled physical energy, Ulysses is no less a true portrait of the Greek as known to us in history—stern in action, ruthless in his hatred, pitiless in his hostility, subtle, vengeful, cunning; yet at the same time the most adventurous of men, the most persuasive in eloquence, the wisest in counsel, the bravest and coolest in danger. The Græculus esuriens of Juvenal may be said to be the caricature in real life of the idealized Ulysses. And what remains to the present day of the Hellenic genius in the so-called Greek nation descends from Ulysses rather than Achilles. If the Homeric Achilles has the superiority of sculpturesque and dramatic splendor, the Homeric Ulysses excels him on the ground of permanence of type.

Homer, then, was the poet of the heroic age, the poet of Achilles and Ulysses. Of Homer we know nothing, we have heard too much. Need we ask ourselves again the question whether he existed, or whether he sprang into the full possession of consummate art without a predecessor? That he had no predecessors, no scattered poems and ballads to build upon, no well-digested body of myths to synthesize, is an absurd hypothesis which the whole history of literature refutes. That, on the other hand, there never was a Homer—that is to say, that some diaskeuast, acting under the orders of Pisistratus, gave its immortal outline to the colossus of the Iliad, and wove the magic web of the Odyssey—but that no supreme and conscious artist working towards a well-planned conclusion conceived and shaped these epics to the form they bear, appears to the spirit of sound criticism equally untenable. The very statement of this alternative involves a contradiction in terms; for such a diaskeuast must himself have been a supreme and conscious artist. Some Homer did exist. Some great single poet intervened between the lost chaos of legendary material and the cosmos of artistic beauty which we now possess. His work may have been tampered with in a thousand ways, and religiously but inadequately restored. Of his age and date and country we may know nothing. But this we do know, that the fire of moulding, fusing, and controlling genius in some one brain has made the Iliad and Odyssey what they are.[2]

The epic poet merges his personality in his poems, the words of which he ascribes to the inspiration of the muse. The individual is nowhere, is forgotten in the subject and suppressed, while the luminous forms of gods and heroes move serenely across the stage, summoned and marshalled by the maidens of Helicon. In no other period of Greek literature shall we find the same unconsciousness of self, the same immersion in the work of art. In this respect the poetry of the heroic age answers to the condition of prehistoric Hellas, where as yet the elements of the Greek race remain still implicit in the general mass and undeveloped. We hear in Homer of no abrupt division between Dorians and Ionians. Athens and Sparta have not grown up into prominence as the two leaders of the nation. Argos is the centre of power; but Phthiotis, the cradle of the Hellenes, is the home of Achilles. Ulysses is an islander. In the same way in Homer the art of the Greeks is still a mere potentiality. The artistic sentiment, indeed, exists in exquisite perfection; but it is germinal, not organized and expanded as it will be. We hear of embroidery for royal garments, of goldsmith's work for shields and breastplates, of stained ivory trappings for chariots and horses. But even here the poet's imagination had probably outrun the fact. What he saw with his fancy, could the heroic artisans have fashioned with their tools? Is not the shield of Achilles, like Dante's pavement of the purgatorial staircase, a forecast of the future? Architecture and sculpture, at any rate, can scarcely be said to exist. Ulysses builds his own house. The statues of the gods are fetiches. But, meanwhile, the foundation of the highest Greek art is being laid in the cultivation of the human body. The sentiment of beauty shows itself in dances and games, in the races of naked runners, in rhythmic processions, and the celebration of religious rites. This was the proper preparation for the after-growth of sculpture. The whole race lived out its sculpture and its painting, rehearsed, as it were, the great works of Pheidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise before it learned to express itself in marble or in color. The public games, which were instituted in this first period, further contributed to the cultivation of the sense of beauty which was inherent in the Greeks.

The second period is one of transition—in politics, in literature, in the fine arts. Everywhere the old landmarks are being broken up, and the new ones are not yet fixed. The heroic monarchies yield first of all to oligarchies, and then to tyrannies; the tyrannies in their turn give place to democracies, or to constitutional aristocracies. Argos, the centre of heroic Hellas, is the first to change. Between 770 and 730 B.C. Pheidon usurps the sovereign power, and dies, leaving no dynasty behind him.[3] Between 650 and 500 we find despots springing up in all the chief Greek cities. At Corinth the oligarchical family of the Bacchiadæ are superseded by the tyrants Cypselus and Periander. At Megara the despot Theagenes is deposed and exiled. At Sicyon the Orthagoridæ terminate in the despot Cleisthenes, whose reign is marked by an attempt to supersede the ancient Doric order of government by caste. At Mitylene, Pittacus becomes a constitutional autocrat, or dictator, for the public safety. At Samos, Polycrates holds a post of almost Oriental despotism. At Athens we find the great family of the Pisistratidæ, who supersede the dynastic tyranny in commission of the house of Codrus. What is the meaning of these changes? How does the despot differ from the heroic monarch, who held, as we have seen, his power by divine right, but who also had to depend for his ascendency on personal prowess? Gradually the old respect for the seed of Zeus died out. Either the royal families abused their power or became extinct, or, as in the case of Athens and Sparta, retained hereditary privileges under limitations. During this decay of the Zeus-born dynasties the cities of Greece were a prey to the quarrels of great families; and it often happened that one of these obtained supreme power—in which case a monarchy, based not on divine right, but on force and fear, was founded; or else a few of the chief houses combined against the State to establish an oligarchy. The oligarchies, owing their authority to no true, legal, or religious fount of honor, were essentially selfish, and were exposed to the encroachments of the more able among their own families. The cleverest man in an oligarchy tended to draw the power into his own hands; but in this he generally succeeded by first flattering and then intimidating the people. Thus in one way or another the old type of dynastic government was superseded by despotisms, more or less arbitrary, tending to the tyranny of single individuals, or to the coalition of noble houses, and bringing with them the vices of greed, craft, and servile cruelty. The political ferment caused a vast political excitement. Party strove against party; and when one set gained the upper hand, the other had to fly. The cities of Hellas were filled with exiles. Diplomacy and criticism occupied the minds of men. Personal cleverness became the one essential point in politics. But two permanent advantages were secured by this anarchy to the Greeks. The one was a strong sense of the equality of citizens; the other, a desire for established law, as opposed to the caprice of individuals and to the clash of factions in the State. This, then, is the first point which marks the transitional period. The old monarchies break up, and give place to oligarchies first, and then to despotism. The tyrants maintain themselves by violence and by flattering the mob. At last they fall, or are displaced, and then the states agree to maintain their freedom by the means of constitutions and fixed laws. The despots are schoolmasters, who bring the people to Nomos as their lord.

Three other general features distinguish this period of transition. The first is colonization. In the political disturbances which attend the struggle for power, hundreds of citizens were forced to change their residence. So we find the mother cities sending settlers to Italy, to Sicily, to Africa, to the Gulf of Lyons, to Thrace, and to the islands. In these colonies the real life and vigor of Hellas show themselves at this stage more than in the mother states. It is in Sicily, on the coast of Magna Græcia, on the seaboard of Asia Minor, in the islands of the Ægean, that the first poets and philosophers and historians of Greece appear. Sparta and Athens, destined to become the protagonists of the real drama of Hellas, are meanwhile silent and apparently inert. Secondly, this is the age of the Nomothetæ. Thebes receives a constitution from the Corinthian lovers and law-givers Philolaus and Diocles. Lycurgus and Solon form the states of Sparta and Athens. It is not a little wonderful to think of these three great cities, successively the leaders of historic Hellas, submitting to the intellect each of its own lawgiver, taking shape beneath his hands, cheerfully accepting and diligently executing his directions. Lastly, it is in this period that the two chief races of the Greeks—the Ionians and the Dorians—emerge into distinctness. Not only are Athens and Sparta fashioned to the form which they will afterwards maintain; but also in the colonies two distinct streams of thought and feeling begin to flow onward side by side, and to absorb, each into its own current, those minor rivulets which it could best appropriate.

What happens to literature in this period of metamorphosis, expansion, and anarchy? We have seen that Homer covers the whole of the first period of literature; and in the Homeric poems we saw that the interests of the present were subordinated to a splendid picture of the ideal past, that the poet was merged in his work, that the individual joys and sorrows of the artist remained unspoken, and that his words were referred immediately to the Muse. All this is now to be altered. But meanwhile, between the first and second period, a link is made by Hesiod. In his Works and Days he still preserves the traditions of the epic. But we no longer listen to the deeds of gods and heroes; and though the Muse is invoked, the poet appears before us as a living, sentient, suffering man. We descend to earth. We are instructed in the toils and duties of the beings who have to act and endure upon the prosaic stage of the world, as it exists in the common light of the present time. Even in Hesiod there has therefore been a change. Homer strung his lyre in the halls of princes who loved to dwell on the great deeds of their god-descended ancestors. Hesiod utters a weaker and more subdued note to the tillers of the ground and the watchers of the seasons. In Homer we see the radiant heroes expiring with a smile upon their lips as on the Æginetan pediment. In Hesiod we hear the low, sad outcry of humanity. The inner life, the daily loss and profit, the duties and the cares of men are his concern. Homer, too, was never analytical. He described the world without raising a single moral or psychological question. Hesiod poses the eternal problems: What is the origin and destiny of mankind? Why should we toil painfully upon the upward path of virtue? How came the gods to be our tyrants? What is justice? How did evil and pain and disease begin? After Hesiod the epical impulse ceases. Poets, indeed, go on writing narrative poems in hexameters. But the cycle, so called by the Alexandrian critics, produced about this time, had not innate life enough to survive the wear and tear of centuries. We have lost the whole series, except in the tragedies which were composed from their materials. Literature had passed beyond the stage of the heroic epic. The national ear demanded other and more varied forms of verse than the hexameter. Among the Ionians of Asia Minor was developed the pathetic melody of the elegiac metre, which first apparently was used to express the emotions of love and sorrow, and afterwards came to be the vehicle of moral sentiment and all strong feeling. Callinus and Tyrtæus adapted the elegy to songs of battle. Solon consigned his wisdom to its couplets, and used it as a trumpet for awakening the zeal of Athens against her tyrants. Mimnermus confined the metre to its more plaintive melodies, and made it the mouthpiece of lamentations over the fleeting beauty of youth and the evils of old age. In Theognis the elegy takes wider scope. He uses it alike for satire and invective, for precept, for autobiographic grumblings, for political discourses, and for philosophical apophthegms. Side by side with the elegy arose the various forms of lyric poetry. The names of Alcæus and Sappho, of Alcman, Anacreon, Simonides, Bacchylides, Stesichorus, Arion, instantly suggest themselves. But it must be borne in mind that lyric poetry in Greece at a very early period broke up into two distinct species. The one kind gave expression to strong personal emotion, and became a safety-valve for perilous passions; the other was choric and complex in its form; designed for public festivals and solemn ceremonials, it consisted chiefly of odes sung in the honor of gods and great men. To the former, or personal species, belong the lyrics of the Ionian and Æolian families; to the latter, or more public species, belong the so-called Dorian odes. Besides the elegy and all the forms of lyric stanza, the iambic, if not invented in this period, was now adapted of set purpose to personal satire.[4] Archilochus is said to have preferred this metre, as being the closest in its form to common speech, and therefore suited to his unideal practical invective. From the lyric dithyrambs of Arion, sung at festivals of Dionysus, and from the iambic satires of Archilochus, recited at the feasts of Demeter,[5] was to be developed the metrical structure of the drama in the third period. As yet, it is only among the Dorians of Sicily and of Megara that we hear of any mimetic shows, and these of the simplest description.

In this period the first start in the direction of philosophy was made. The morality which had been implicit in Homer, and had received a partial development in Hesiod, was condensed in proverbial couplets by Solon, Theognis, Phocylides, and Simonides. These couplets formed the starting-points for discussion. Many of Plato's dialogues turn on sayings of Theognis and Simonides. Many of the sublimer flights of meditation in Sophocles are expansions of early gnomes. Even the ethics of Aristotle are indebted to their wisdom. The ferment of thought produced by the political struggles of this age tended to sharpen the intellect and to turn reflection inward. Hence we find that the men who rose to greatest eminence in state-craft as tyrants or as law-givers are also to be reckoned among the primitive philosophers of Greece. The aphorisms of the Seven Sages, two of whom were Nomothetæ, and several of whom were despots, contain the kernel of much that is peculiar in Greek thought. It is enough to mention these: μηδὲν ἄγαν· μέτρον ἄριστον· γνῶθι σεαυτόν· καιρὸν γνῶθι· ἀνάγκῃ δ' οὐδὲ θεοὶ μάχονται—which are the germs of subsequent systems of ethics, metaphysics, and theories of art.[6] Solon, as a patriot, a modeller of the Athenian constitution, an elegiac poet, one of the Seven Sages, and the representative of Greece at the court of Crœsus, may be chosen as the one most eminent man in a period when literature and thought and politics were, to a remarkable extent, combined in single individuals.

Meanwhile philosophy began to flourish in more definite shape among the colonists of Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily. The criticism of the Theogony of Hesiod led the Ionian thinkers—Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Heraclitus—to evolve separate answers to the question of the origin of the universe. The problem of the physical ἀρχή, or starting-point, of the world occupied their attention. Some more scientific theory of existence than mythology afforded was imperatively demanded. The same spirit of criticism, the same demand for accuracy, gave birth to history. The Theogony of Hesiod and the Homeric version of the Trojan war, together with the genealogies of the heroes, were reduced to simple statements of fact, stripped of their artistic trappings, and rationalized after a rude and simple fashion by the annalists of Asia Minor. This zeal for greater rigor of thought was instrumental in developing a new vehicle of language. The time had come at length for separation from poetry, for the creation of a prose style which should correspond in accuracy to the logical necessity of exact thinking. Prose accordingly was elaborated with infinite difficulty by these first speculators from the elements of common speech. It was a great epoch in the history of European culture when men ceased to produce their thoughts in the fixed cadences of verse, and consigned them to the more elastic periods of prose. Heraclitus of Ephesus was the first who achieved a notable success in this new and difficult art. He for his pains received the title of ὁ σκοτεινός, the obscure—so strange and novel did the language of science seem to minds accustomed hitherto to nothing but metre. Yet even after his date philosophy of the deepest species was still conveyed in verse. The Eleatic metaphysicians Xenophanes and Parmenides—Xenophanes, who dared to criticise the anthropomorphism of the Greek Pantheon, and Parmenides, who gave utterance to the word of Greek ontology, τὸ ὄν, or being, which may be significantly contrasted with the Hebrew I am—wrote long poems in which they invoked the Muse, and dragged the hexameter along the pathway of their argument upon the entities, like a pompous sacrificial vestment. Empedocles of Agrigentum, to whom we owe the rough-and-ready theory of the four elements, cadenced his great work on Nature in the same sonorous verse, and interspersed his speculations on the cycles of the universe with passages of brilliant eloquence.