In this Homeric delineation of mankind, which includes immortal men, to wit, the gods, and has the portrayal of nature for its complement, lies that specifically Homeric quality which casts a spell over every unspoilt mind, and which the finest art-critics of all times and nations never grow weary of praising. It bears witness to a high psychological culture in both poets and listeners. No state of primitive barbarism such as Tacitus depicts in the Germani, none but an old and richly developed civilisation, could lead up to this. The fresh observation of nature in the pictures of Knossos, the rigid stylistic convention of the cuttle-fish on the golden platter of Mycenæ, for example, the bold ornament on painted vessels, like the pitcher of Marseilles, the architecture of the beehive tombs, show the Homeric sense of art in other regions and at a pre-Homeric period.
This Homeric art is certainly in the main Hellenic. But for all that, it is only one side of the Hellenic spirit, which is not even remotely understood by those who identify it with Homer. A great danger is already threatening this form of art in the shape of conventionalism, of stereotyped beauty. It grows too easy to be a Homerides, and he who rests satisfied with such an achievement thereby renounces all aspiration to become a Homer. And the life depicted by Homer conceals beneath its brilliant surface much not only of hollowness but of evil. There is a total lack of national sentiment; there is no state; properly speaking there is no religion. These gods will vanish into thin air like vapours at the advent of a true god who wins men’s hearts to serve him. These men and women enjoy and suffer—to what end? To blossom and wither like the leaves of the woodland. What is the end of this brilliant world? The horrors of devastation for Ilium, and for the Achæans, returning home in their fleet—shipwreck.
The Ionians had just been torn from their native mountains and springs, from their ancestors and from their gods; in dire distress they had fought for and conquered new settlements on a foreign coast and among foreign races. They had been constrained to turn away from their mother-earth: the sea cannot take its place, for the earth alone is θεσμοφόρος. So it is that the legitimate heirs of the Homeric poets are the very men who shake off Homeric ideals—the Milesian merchant who traverses all seas, founds factories and cities, mingles with all nations, gathers information and wealth from all sides; the Ionian artist who abandons the excrescences of conventional style with the conventional Heroic legend, in his search for what is characteristic and individual; the subjective thinker of Ionia who seeks in his own breast the solution of the world’s enigma, and whether he discovers cosmic law there or in the contemplation of the heavens, ruthlessly thrusts away from him the fair illusions of Homer.
Meanwhile, in obscurity and gloom another Greece slowly arose in the mother-country. The immigrants, before whom the peoples of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Nestor—in so far as they were not enslaved by their rough masters—fled across the sea, had to begin from the beginning. The remains of the old civilisation stood in their midst, uncomprehended and mysterious as the Roman strongholds in the countries inundated by the flood of the Germani of the great migration. Where, as in Sparta, the forms of life fitted for migratory conditions were preserved in art, that primitive rudeness survived which (to take an instance) permitted the use of the axe only and not of the plane in the fashioning of a door-post. We recognise everywhere the oldest and lowest forms of religion—fetich-worship, totemism, a gloomy form of ancestor-worship; human sacrifice is frequent. Ornament has lost the sensuous delight in form proper to the Heroic period; it begins with lines and dots. The influence of the East must for a while have been totally arrested. How ill at ease an Asiatic Greek must have felt in this world is shown by Hesiod, who inveighs against his Heliconian village-home. He was the son of an immigrant Æolian. A large part of the country, not only the whole of the west coast, but also Thessaly the home of Hellen, i.e., of the whole nation, never again played an active part in civilisation. This, of course, had to come from the Greeks of Asia; and the cities of the eastern border in which the remains of the original population preponderated, Athens and Eubœa, to which the maritime city of Corinth was added from the Dorian cities, were the entrance gates to this civilisation. But the process of receiving and assimilating it was carried on in the main under the pressure of new modes of life, which we name after the Dorians. With regard to the older period we lack not direct evidence merely but credible information at almost every step: not till the beginning of the sixth century does it become possible to some extent to grasp this civilisation; but the institutions, their reflection in Heroic legend, and the character of the religion (not mere mythology) permit of a few inferences. The times were hard; for the most part a ruling class alone raised itself above the miserable, restless, joyless struggle for daily bread, and below it bondmen in many cases wore out a wretched existence. Not until the end of the period do men advance beyond the stage of primitive husbandry, and then not everywhere. Agriculture and cattle rearing remain the chief means of livelihood. The ruling class is warlike; where the mountains permit it, they pursue the sport of horse-racing, but for purposes of war horsemen are of little account. Highest in public esteem stands the physical exercise which in time of peace takes the place of military service; Greek gymnastics, of which Homer knows little, become hallowed by the competitive games which by degrees not only become the culminating moments of life but also evoke the first glimmer of public spirit.
The umpires at the Olympian games are the first to apply the name of Hellenes to the nation—more exactly speaking, to the class. For here it has come to pass that, though politically divided into numberless cantons, though involved in perpetual feuds and irreconcilable local animosities, the members of this class recognise one another, intermarry, call a truce for the festivals, and find a common interest in maintaining their class supremacy against the encroachments of the lower orders. The protection of the patriarchal organisation places Sparta at the head of a loose federation. The spirit of the age is masculine. The loin-cloth is laid aside at gymnastic exercises, the nude male form is the fairest of objects. The love of boys becomes not only a national institution but the sole province in which love claims the co-operation of the soul. Everything presents the sharpest contrast to Homer. Gymnastics require self-control and training; military service requires obedience; class supremacy is not favourable to the predominance of the individual man, but demands his subordination to the class. Thus, then, these men trained themselves strictly and austerely, and gained control over themselves, body and soul. They set up an ideal of the perfect man, who by training and obedience earns the right to be free and to rule. And they held out to him the prospect of becoming equal with the gods, even as Hercules entered heaven; but on earth they kept him within bounds by raising above him the other Greek ideal, that of the free self-governing community—the aggregate of equally worthy and therefore equally privileged free men. However much the reality may have altered, these two ideals remained inviolate, and they are the specifically European element which the Greeks have to show as against the East—the Greeks of the mother-country, be it understood, for Homer knows of nothing but an unbridled individualism; he does homage to the hero who, in good and evil alike, knows no bounds. These nobles are not licensed to aspire beyond the limits of their class nor do they wish to do so. They invented an ideal of happiness that could be realised on earth; all that was required was to keep within bounds. Hercules, the ideal hero of this society, had nothing but toil upon earth, but in return he made the step from human to divine by his own strength. This grand conception betrays the lengths to which Doric self-reliance believed itself able to go.
The free man has come into being; the power above him, which we call society or the state, has also come; at that time it was called Law or Custom—Nomos; and this power is sanctified by the existence of an exponent of the divine revelation, the god (i.e. the Apollo) of Delphi. The authority of this god, and of the oracles by which he answers through his priests, is undisputed. He addresses the mortal with the warning “Know thyself,” that is, as a creature that is mortal. He enjoins self-control and self-restraint; the numerous Greek adages recommending moderation, the praise of the mean and of equality, the encomiums on sophrosyne, belong to this period and to this world. No doubt, so much would not have been said of this virtue if it had not been so rare, but erroneous as it is to conceive of the Greeks as examples of the virtues they recommend, the establishment of this moral ideal is significant; a complement to their faith in the power of man to gain admittance into heaven by force. Under Apollo’s direction music takes its place by the side of gymnastics; music also masters the wild instincts; it includes every kind of intellectual culture known to this society. The boy learns to sing, to strike the lute, to keep time in the dance; and the consecration of worship rests upon it all. Harmony must reign in the deportment and movement of the body, and of the soul likewise. The piper takes his place in the column on the march; it marks an important advance that the line of battle now marches to meet the enemy in step and in serried ranks; it is thought a fit subject for the painter’s art, and not without justice. The ruling caste does not often produce a poet who is a musician at the same time; the poets are for the most part brought from the East: but the nobles must be able to sing the songs, to dance, and even to improvise a verse to a set tune over the wine. The female sex also takes its part in music; choirs of maidens are popular, and native poetesses occur more frequently than native poets. Side by side with solemn gravity we get, at stated times of the ceremonial year, the most unbridled enjoyment, ecstatic revelry, the grossest kind of burlesque; but this is curbed; it appeals more to the lower social strata, and does not find expression in art until a late period.
Like all institutions, this worship and the whole system of the cult of Apollo was not established without fierce struggles; and it incorporated into itself, and thus rendered innocuous, many things which it was unable to cast forth. This was true more particularly of ecstasy. There had been a time when the nation was thrilled by a mighty religious movement having its source in the Phrygio-Thracian religions; the great god Dionysus came, he who walks the earth demanding faith and followers, who possesses men with his spirit and enables a man to experience what he himself experienced, and is ever experiencing afresh—divine madness, death and resurrection. The movement naturally laid hold upon the Greeks of the East also, but it did not take souls captive there; the Homeric Greeks have no appreciation of mysticism. Here, on the contrary, within the religion that was gradually being Homerised, a counter-current set in, capable, indeed, of becoming a sub-current, but only if its course were directed into the bed of the official religion, and if Apollo effected a compromise with Dionysus. In narrower circles, outside the state religion, this doctrine and practice based upon the ecstasy, the redemption of man, have always held their own; the old religion of Demeter passed through similar crises, and the incorporation into the state cult of secret rites such as were practised at Eleusis, did not suffice to stifle the longing for an individual religion. But for the time the Apolline system is triumphant.
Doric architecture is now added to the solemn rendering of Doric music. The temple, the house of the image of the god, made, not for congregational worship, but for solemn procession or devout meditation, is the consummate expression of this piety. That the gods should take the form of men is an outcome of the Homeric temper; but Zeus as a naked man hurling lightning, Apollo as a naked youth, the calm, majestic matrons and maidens—these are the Doric ideal of divinity. In addition to these we get the statues of men, the male image (ἀνδριάς) and the virginal image (κόρη). The inspiration of these arts certainly came from the East, but what interests and delights us in archaic sculpture and in those very examples which seem to us typical, as so genuinely Greek, is the Doric element; it reveals itself to us not only in the Æginetæ and the statues of nude youths who are just as much gods as men, but also in the Idolino and the Delphic charioteer, the Hestia Giustiniani and the female prize-runner, in the works of Polyclitus and again in those of Myron; for Athens long shares in this culture, the chief prophet of which at the twelfth hour was the Theban Pindar, with his gift for showing us both its splendour and its remoteness from modern sentiment. To this day Homer and the Athenians produce a vivid impression on every unsophisticated mind; Pindar requires arduous historical study, like Virgil, Dante, and Calderon.
By its situation, and the close ties of consanguinity between its population and the Ionians, Athens was destined to unite the civilisations of East and West. The comparatively large peninsula of Attica, so shut off that it is almost insular, had already developed into a political unit at an earlier stage. Aristocratic rule had, it is true, reduced the less wealthy of the peasant population to a condition of servitude, but by introducing the olive it had made agriculture profitable; and, like the Dorians in Corinth, it had recognised trade as an occupation not derogatory to men of rank. Material conditions for amelioration were far more favourable than in the neighbouring island of Ægina, where commerce concerned only the ruling class, who farmed their lands with purchased slaves. But the rapid rise of Athens from obscurity to the first rank is due to one man, in whom the union of East and West was first consummated—the wise Solon. Of noble birth and in sympathy with Dorian modes of life, he had, for all that, travelled to distant shores as a merchant, had laid aside among the Ionians all prejudice, superstition, and mysticism; above all, had acquired the power of using poetry not only for political but also for moral exhortation. He was inspired by the fullest confidence in the might, wisdom, and justice of God, and in the goodness of human nature; all it needed was liberty to exercise itself without let or hindrance,—a need which found its complement in the social order,—that other men might likewise obtain the liberty that was their right. His people had faith in him, and placed the organisation of the state in his hands. He gave the power to the whole people, i.e., to the changing majority of free and upright Athenians, and he gave them all access to the national assembly, to the executive committee, the deliberative council, and the national court of justice. In principle, democracy was established. And the principle of freedom and of equality can be obscured neither by abuse nor by inadequate use; the only limitation to which it is subject is due to the higher principle which Solon himself placed above it, and which never disappears, at least, in theory, from the politics of the Greeks—the principle of justice. Whatever modification it underwent, with Solon there came into existence the municipal constitution, not of Athens alone, but of Greece, which endures as long as the Greek spirit can be traced in historical continuity—the free state of free men. At the time, as a matter of fact, freedom could not be maintained in Athens. But the struggles of the great families, which for another hundred years wrestled together for supremacy, only gave the city time to absorb the Ionian spirit more fully, to develop industry and trade side by side with agriculture, to exploit that economic freedom which was never again encroached upon, and so to accumulate strength in every direction for the decisive moment. This came with the question whether Europe was to be swallowed up in the despotic world-empire of Asia, to which Homeric Greece had already ingloriously succumbed. The issue was not a question of national differences, but simply one of freedom or servitude; a servitude, too, such as the wise man often accepts, because it does not seem to threaten individual liberty. But the free state or class, the democracy of Athens, no less than the Peloponnesian aristocracy, refused to brook it. The Athenian line of battle won the victory at Marathon—it was the triumph of the Doric element. The weapon for the maritime victory of Salamis had been rapidly forged by the genius of Themistocles, a modern Ionian in every sense of the word. In defiance of all human calculations, Xerxes was defeated and compelled to renounce his pretensions to the whole of Europe.
The spirit of Greece now became a national idea; the kinsmen of the Greeks in Asia not only came over, but they made Athens,—Sparta being so tardy,—the presidial centre of a confederation unprecedented in power and extent by anything Greek; the conception of a vast Greek empire in the future, a national confederation, seemed capable of realisation at that moment, since it was possible for the first thought of it to take shape. Politically, too, Athens seemed destined to unite the Greeks of the East and of the West; and if she did so, the Greeks were bound to possess the world.