_The Literary Expression of the Plot_
And now, after having suggested a reading of the plot, it is time to let
the actors speak for themselves. There is only space to quote half a
dozen passages, but they have been chosen to illustrate the critical
scenes and situations in the drama as it has been sketched out, and they
may persuade the reader that there is something to be said for the
present interpretation.
We shall not dwell on the period I have called the first act--that is,
the period before 431 B. C. But the reader is recommended, again, not to
lay aside the Greek poets when he takes up the Greek historians. Homer
will reveal more of the opening scenes than Herodotus; and the
exaltation of spirit produced by the repulse of the Persians, and
expressed institutionally in the foundation of the Delian League, can
hardly be realized emotionally without the poetry of Aeschylus. But the
philosophers and scientists are indispensable too. Professor Burnet's
_Early Greek Philosophy_, or his _Greek Philosophy from Thales to
Plato_, throws light on history and not merely on the Greek theory of
knowledge. And the reader should make acquaintance with the little work
on 'Atmospheres, Waters, and Localities' emanating from the Hippokratean
school of medicine. It is only thirty-eight pages in the Teubner text
(Hippocratis _Opera_, vol. i), and it gives clearer expression than
Herodotus to the fifth-century scientific point of view. Here is one
passage which might have been written in Victorian England. The writer
is describing a peculiar disease prevalent among the nomads of southern
Russia. 'The natives', he remarks, 'believe that this disease is sent by
God, and they reverence and worship its victims, in fear of being
stricken by it themselves. I too am quite ready to admit that these
phenomena are caused by God, but I take the same view about all
phenomena and hold that no single phenomenon is more or less divine in
origin than any other. All are uniform and all may be divine, but each
phenomenon obeys a law, and natural law knows no exceptions.'
It is hard to leave this first act of the tragedy. It is a triumph of
youth, and the phrase in which Herodotus sums up the early history of
Sparta expresses the prevailing spirit of early Hellenic civilization.
Ανα τε εδραμον και ευθενηθησαν {Ana te edramon kai euthenêthêsan}: 'They
shot up and throve.' But there is another phrase in Herodotus which
announces the second act--an ominous phrase which came so natural to him
that one may notice about a dozen instances of it in his history. Εδει
γαρ τω δεινι γενεσθαι κακως {Edei gar tô deini genesthai kakôs}: 'Evil
had to befall so-and-so, and therefore'--the story of a catastrophe
follows in each case. The thought behind the phrase is expressed in
Solon's words to Croesus (Herodotus, Bk. I, ch. 32): 'Croesus, I know
that God is ever envious and disordering' (ταραχωδες {tarachôdes}), 'and
you ask me about the destiny of man!'
Note the epithet translated 'disordering'; we shall meet the word ταραχη
{tarachê} again. It is the bitter phrase of a man who lived on from the
great age into the war, but not so bitter as the truth which the writer
could not bring himself wholly to express. 'No single phenomenon', as
contemporary Greek science realized, 'is more or less divine than any
other', and the 'envious and disordering' power, which wrecked Greek
civilization, was not an external force, but the very spirit of man by
which that civilization had been created. There is a puzzling line in
Homer which is applied once or twice to features in a landscape--for
instance, to a river: 'The gods call it Xanthos, mankind Skamandros.' So
we might say of the downfall of Greece: the Greeks attributed it to the
malignity of God, but the divine oracles gave a different answer.
Why did the Confederacy of Delos break down and Greece lose her youth in
a ruinous war? Because of the evil in the hearts of men--the envy
aroused by the political and commercial greatness of Athens in the
governing classes of Sparta and Corinth; and the covetousness aroused by
sudden greatness in the Athenians, tempting their statesmen to degrade
the presidency of a free confederacy into a dominion of Athens over
Greece, and tempting the Athenian proletariat, and the proletariat in
the confederate states, to misuse democracy for the exploitation of the
rich by the poor. Envy and covetousness begat injustice, and injustice
disloyalty. The city-states, in their rivalry for dominion or their
resentment against the domineering of one state over another, forgot
their loyalty to the common weal of Greece and fought each other for
empire or liberty. And the wealthy and well-born citizens forgot their
loyalty to the city in their blind, rancorous feud against the
proletariat that was stripping them of property and power, and betrayed
their community to foreign enemies.
'Strange how mortals blame the gods. They say that evil is our
handiwork, when in truth they bring their sufferings on themselves. By
their own folly they force the hand of fate. See, now, how Aigisthos
forced it in taking the wedded wife of Atreides and slaying her lord
when he returned, yet he had sheer destruction before his eyes, for we
ourselves had forewarned him not to slay the king nor wed his wife, or
vengeance would come by Atreides' son Orestes, whene'er he should grow
to manhood and long for his home. So spake our messenger, but with all
his wisdom he did not soften the heart of Aigisthos, and now he has paid
in full' (_Odyssey_, _a_ 32-43).
These lines from the first canto of the _Odyssey_ were imagined by a
generation which could still afford to err, but as Greece approached her
hour of destiny, her prophetic inspiration grew clearer. The poets of
the sixth century were haunted more insistently than the Homeridai by
the possibilities of disaster inherent in success of every kind--in
personal prosperity, in military victory, and in the social triumph of
civilization. They traced the mischief to an aberration of the human
spirit under the shock of sudden, unexpected attainment, and they
realized that both the accumulated achievement of generations and the
greater promise of the future might be lost irretrievably by failure at
this critical moment. 'Surfeit (κορος {koros}) breeds sin ὑβρις {hubris}
when prosperity visits unbalanced minds.' In slightly different words,
the proverb recurs in the collections of verses attributed to Theognis
and to Solon. Its maker refrained from adding what was in his and his
hearers' thoughts, that ὑβρις {hubris}, once engendered, breeds αιη
{aiê}--the complete and certain destruction into which the sinner walks
with unseeing eyes. But the whole moral mystery, to its remorseless end,
was uttered again and again in passionate words by Aeschylus, who
consciously discarded the primitive magical determinism in which
Herodotus afterwards vainly sought relief.
Φιλει δε τικτειν ὑβρις
μεν παλαια νεα--
ζουσαν εν κακοις βροτων
ὑβρις τοτ' η τóθ', ὁτε το κυριον μολη
φαος τοκου,
δαιμονα τ' εταν, αμαχον, απολεμον,
ανιερον θρασος, μελαι--
νας μελαθροισιν Ατας,
ειδομενας τοκευσιν.
{Philei de tiktein hubris
men palaia nea--
zousan en kakois brotôn
hubris tot' ê tóth', hote to kyrion molê
phaos tokou,
daimona t' etan, amachon, apolemon,
anieron thrasos, melai--
nas melathroisin Atas,
eidomenas tokeusin.}
But Old Sin loves, when comes the hour again,
To bring forth New,
Which laugheth lusty amid the tears of men;
Yea, and Unruth, his comrade, wherewith none
May plead nor strive, which dareth on and on,
Knowing not fear nor any holy thing;
Two fires of darkness in a house, born true,
Like to their ancient spring.
(_Agamemnon_, vv. 763-71, Murray's transl.)
The poet of the crowning victory over Persia was filled with awe, as
well as exultation, at the possibilities for good or evil which his
triumphant generation held in their hands. Were they true metal or base?
The times would test them, but he had no doubt about the inexorable law.
Ου γαρ εστιν επαλξις
πλουτου προς κορον ανδρι
λακτισαντι μεγαν δικης
βωμον εις αφανειαν.
{Ou gar estin epalxis
ploutou pros koron andri
laktisanti megan dikês
bômon eis aphaneian.}
Never shall state nor gold
Shelter his heart from aching
Whoso the Altar of Justice old
Spurneth to night unwaking.
(_Agamemnon_, vv. 381-4, Murray's transl.)
The _Agamemnon_ was written when Athens stood at the height of her glory
and her power, and before her sons, following the devices of their
hearts, 'like a boy chasing a wingèd bird', had set a fatal
stumbling-block in the way of their city, or smirched her with an
intolerable stain. The generation of Marathon foreboded the catastrophe
of the Peloponnesian War, yet the shock, when it came, was beyond their
powers of imagination, and the effect of it on the mind of Greece was
first expressed by the generation which was smitten by the war in early
manhood. This is how it was felt by Thucydides (iii. 82):
'So the class-war at Korkyra grew more and more savage, and it made a
particular impression because it was the first outbreak of an upheaval
that spread in time through almost the whole of Greek society. In every
state there were conflicts of class, and the leaders of the respective
parties now procured the intervention of the Athenians or the
Lakedaimonians on their side. In peace-time they would have had neither
the opportunity nor the inclination to call in the foreigner, but now
there was the war, and it was easy for any party of violence to get
their opponents crushed and themselves into power by an alliance with
one of the belligerents. This recrudescence of class-war brought one
calamity after another upon the states of Greece--calamities that occur
and will continue to occur as long as human nature remains what it is,
however they may be modified or occasionally mitigated by changes of
circumstance. Under the favourable conditions of peace-time, communities
and individuals do not have their hands forced by the logic of events,
and can therefore act up to a higher standard. But war strips away all
the margins of ordinary life and breaks in character to circumstance by
its brutal training. So the states were torn by the class-war, and the
sensation made by each outbreak had a sinister effect on the next--in
fact, there was something like a competition in perfecting the fine art
of conspiracies and atrocities....
(iii. 83) 'Thus the class-war plunged Greek society into every kind of
moral evil, and honesty, which is the chief constituent of idealism, was
laughed out of existence in the prevailing atmosphere of hostility and
suspicion. No argument was cogent enough and no pledge solemn enough to
reconcile opponents. The only argument that appealed to the party
momentarily in power was the unlikelihood of their remaining there long
and the consequent advisability of taking no risks with their enemies.
And the stupider the combatants, the greater their chances of survival,
just because they were terrified at their deficiencies, expected to be
outwitted and outmanœuvred, and therefore plunged recklessly into
action, while their superiors in intellect, who trusted to their wits to
protect them and disdained practical precautions, were often caught
defenceless and brought to destruction.'
There is the effect of the great Greek war upon the first generation.
Thucydides, of course, had a sensitive and emotional temperament. He is
always controlling himself and reining himself in. But one is struck by
an outburst of the same feeling in a younger man, Xenophon, who was
ordinarily in harmony with his age and was probably rather unimaginative
and self-complacent by nature. The war had given Xenophon his
opportunity as a soldier and a writer. He was not inclined to quarrel
with the 'envious and disordering' powers that had ruined Greek
civilization. But in the last paragraph of the History of his Own Times
he is carried away, for he has just been describing the battle of
Mantinea (362 B. C.), in which he had lost his son.
'The result of the battle', he writes, 'disappointed every one's
expectations. Almost the whole of Greece had mobilized on one side or
the other, and it was taken for granted that if it came to an action,
the victors would be able to do what they liked and the vanquished would
be at their mercy. But Providence so disposed it that both sides ...
claimed the victory and yet neither had gained a foot of territory, a
single city or a particle of power beyond what they had possessed before
the battle. On the contrary, there was more unsettlement and disorder
(ταραχη {tarachê}) in Greece after the battle than before it. But I do
not propose to carry my narrative further and will leave the sequel to
any other historian who cares to record it.' (_Hellenica_, vii. 5 fin.)
Space forbids quotation from Plato, but the reader is recommended, while
studying his metaphysics for his philosophy, to note his moods and
emotions for the light they throw upon the history of his lifetime.
Plato's long life--427 to 347 B. C.--practically coincided with the
first phase of the second act of the tragedy--the series of wars that
began in 431 B. C., and that had reduced the Greek city-states to
complete disunion and exhaustion by 355. Plato belonged to the cultured
governing class which was hit hardest by these first disasters. At the
age of twenty-nine, after witnessing the downfall of Athens, he had to
witness the judicial murder of Sokrates--the greatest man of the older
generation, who had been appreciated and loved by Plato and his
friends. Plato's own most promising pupil, whom he had marked out for
his successor, was killed in action in a particularly aimless
recrudescence of the war. Plato's political disillusionment and
perversity are easy to understand. But it is curious and interesting to
watch the clash between his political bitterness and his intellectual
serenity. In the intellectual and artistic sphere--as a writer,
musician, mathematician, metaphysician--he stood consciously at the
zenith of Greek history; but whenever he turned to politics he seems to
have felt that the spring had gone out of the year. He instinctively
antedated the setting of his dialogues. The characters nearly all belong
to the generation of Sokrates, which had grown to manhood before the war
and whose memories conjured up the glory that the war had extinguished.
Note, also, his 'other-worldliness', for it is a feature that comes into
Greek civilization with him and gradually permeates it. He turns from
science to theology, from the world of time and change to the world of
archetypes or ideas. He turns from the social religion of the city-state
to a personal religion for which he takes symbols from primitive
mythology. He turns from politics to utopias. But Plato only lived to
see the first phase of the catastrophe. As we watch the remainder of
this second act--those four terrible centuries that followed the year
431 B. C.--there come tidings of calamity after calamity, like the
messages of disaster in the Book of Job, and as the world crumbles,
people tend more and more to lay up their treasure elsewhere. In the
_Laws_, Plato places his utopia no farther away than Crete. Two
centuries later the followers of Aristonikos the Bolshevik, outlawed by
the cities of Greece and Asia, proclaim themselves citizens of the City
of the Sun. Two centuries later still, the followers of Jesus of
Nazareth, despairing of this world, pray for its destruction by fire to
make way for the Kingdom of Heaven.
Plato's state of mind gives the atmosphere of the first phase after the
catastrophe. For the second phase--the conquest of the East and the
struggle for the spoils--the reader may be referred to Mr. Edwyn Bevan's
_Lectures on the Stoics and Sceptics_ and to Professor Gilbert Murray's
Conway Memorial lecture on _The Stoic Philosophy_. They will show him a
system of philosophy which is no longer a pure product of speculation
but is primarily a moral shelter erected hastily to meet the storms of
life. The third phase--the rally of civilization in the middle of the
third century B. C.--is mirrored in Plutarch's lives of the Spartan
kings Agis and Kleomenes. Any one who reads them will feel the gallantry
of this rally and the pathos of its failure. And then comes the fourth
phase--the Roman wars against the other great powers of the
Mediterranean world. The Hannibalic war in Italy was, very probably, the
most terrible war that there has ever been, not excepting the recent war
in Europe. The horror of that war haunted later generations, and its
mere memory made oblivion seem a desirable release from an intolerable
world.
Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.
et velut anteacto nil tempore sensimus aegri,
ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris,
in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum
omnibus humanis esset terraque marique,
sic, ubi non erimus, cum corporis atque animai
discidium fuerit quibus e sumus uniter apti,
scilicet haud nobis quicquam, qui non erimus tum,
accidere omnino poterit sensumque movere,
non si terra mari miscebitur et mare caelo.
That is a passage of Lucretius (iii. 830-842) which follows upon an
elaborate argument to prove that death destroys personality and that the
soul is not immortal. Here is an attempt at a translation:
'So death is nothing to us and matters nothing to us, since we have
proved that the soul is not immortal. And as in time past we felt no
ill, when the Phoenicians were pouring in to battle on every front, when
the world rocked with the shock and tumult of war and shivered from
centre to firmament, when all mankind on sea and land must fall under
the victor's empire and victory was in doubt--so, when we have ceased to
be, when body and soul, whose union is our being, have been parted, then
nothing can touch us--we shall not be--and nothing can make us feel, no,
not if earth is confounded with sea and sea with heaven.'
Lucretius wrote that about a hundred and fifty years after Hannibal
evacuated Italy, but the horror is still vivid in his mind, and his
poetry arouses it in our minds as we listen. The writer will never
forget how those lines kept running in his head during the spring of
1918.
But the victors suffered with the vanquished in the common ruin of
civilization. The whole Mediterranean world, and the devastated area in
Italy most of all, was shaken by the economic and social revolutions
which the Roman wars brought in their train. The proletariat was
oppressed to such a degree that the unity of society was permanently
destroyed and Greek civilization, after being threatened with a violent
extinction by Bolshevik outbreaks--the slave wars in Sicily, the
insurrection of Aristonikos and the massacres of Mithradates in
Anatolia, the outbreaks of Spartakos and Catilina in Italy--was
eventually supplanted by a rival civilization of the proletariat--the
Christian Church. The revolutionary last phase in the second act--the
final phase before the foundation of the Empire--has left its expression
in the cry of the Son of Man: 'The foxes have holes and the birds of the
air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.' It
was one of those anonymous phrases that are in all men's mouths because
they express what is in all men's hearts. Tiberius Gracchus used it in
his public speeches at Rome; two centuries later it reappears in the
discourses of Jesus of Nazareth.
Ergo inter sese paribus concurrere telis
Romanas acies iterum videre Philippi,
nec fuit indignum superis bis sanguine nostro
Emathiam et latos Haemi pinguescere campos....
Di patrii, Indigetes, et Romule, Vestaque mater
quae Tuscum Tiberim et Romana Palatia servas,
hunc saltem everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo
ne prohibete. satis iam pridem sanguine nostro
Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae....
vicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes
arma ferunt; saevit toto Mars impius orbe;
ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,
addunt in spatio, et frustra retinacula tendens
fertur equis auriga neque audit currus habenas.
(_Georgics_, i. 489 seqq.)
'Therefore Philippi saw Roman armies turn their swords against each
other a second time in battle, and the gods felt no pity that Emathia
and the broad plains of Haemus should twice be fattened with our
blood....
'Gods of our fathers, gods of our country, god of our city, goddess of
our hearths who watchest over Tuscan Tiber and Roman Palatine, forbid
not this last saviour to succour our fallen generation. Our blood has
flowed too long. We have paid in full for the sins of our
forefathers--the broken faith of ancient Troy....
'The bonds are broken between neighbour cities and they meet in arms.
Ungodly war rages the world over. The chariots launched on the race
gather speed as they go; vainly dragging on the reins the driver is
swept away by his steeds and the team heeds not the bridle.'
It is a prayer for the lifting of the curse, and this time the 'envious
and disordering' powers gave ear. The charioteer regained control, and
we are carried on to the third act of the tragedy, in which no small
part of its beauty and a very great part of its significance is to be
found. The imperial peace could not save the body of Greek
civilization--the four centuries of war had inflicted mortal wounds; but
possibly it saved its soul. Although Augustus had not the abilities of
Caesar, he felt and pitied the sorrows of the world, and he succeeded in
expressing the pity and repentance, the ruthfulness for and piety
towards the past, which were astir in the spirits of his generation. But
what phrase is adequate to characterize the Empire? The words 'Decline
and Fall' suggest themselves, but how should they be applied? Gibbon
took the second century of the Empire, the age of the Antonines, as the
Golden Age of the Ancient World, and traced the decline and fall of the
Empire from the death of Marcus Aurelius. On the other hand, if the
present reading of the plot is right, the fatal catastrophe occurred six
centuries earlier, in the year 431 B. C., and the Empire itself was the
decline and fall of Greek civilization. But was it only that? One is apt
to think so when one reads the diary of Marcus Aurelius, and pictures
him in his quarters at Carnuntum, fighting finely but hopelessly on two
fronts--against the barbarians on the Danube and the sadness in his own
soul.
'Human life! Its duration is momentary, its substance in perpetual flux,
its senses dim, its physical organism perishable, its consciousness a
vortex, its destiny dark, its repute uncertain--in fact, the material
element is a rolling stream, the spiritual element dreams and vapour,
life a war and a sojourning in a far country, fame oblivion. What can
see us through? One thing and one only--philosophy, and that means
keeping the spirit within us unspoiled and undishonoured, not giving way
to pleasure or pain, never acting unthinkingly or deceitfully or
insincerely, and never being dependent on the moral support of others.
It also means taking what comes contentedly as all part of the process
to which we owe our own being; and, above all, it means facing death
calmly--taking it simply as a dissolution of the atoms of which every
living organism is composed. Their perpetual transformation does not
hurt the atoms, so why should one mind the whole organism being
transformed and dissolved? It is a law of nature, and natural law can
never be wrong.' (Μáρκος Αντωνινος εις εαυτóν {Márkos Antôninos eis
eautón}, ii fin.)
But after quoting Marcus Aurelius, the first citizen of the Empire, it
is necessary to add a quotation from Paul of Tarsos, a citizen who has
as good a claim as any other to be heard:
'"How are the dead raised up? With what body do they come?" Thou fool,
that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die.... It is sown in
corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is
raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.' ...
It startles us to be reminded that these two actors appeared on the
stage in the same act of the drama, and that Paul actually played his
part a century before Marcus played his. Paul's voice suggests not only
a younger generation but quite a different play. His thought in the
lines just quoted is inspired by a predecessor whom Marcus regarded as
one of the innumerable prophets of the proletariat. 'Except a corn of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit.' The saying was included in the miscellaneous
traditions about Jesus of Nazareth which were passing from mouth to
mouth among the illiterate masses, but which had not begun to excite the
curiosity of the educated classes in Marcus's day. What would the
scholar have made of it if a collection of these traditions had fallen
under his eye, scrawled on bad paper in barbarous Greek? Little enough,
for he would have missed the whole background of his own sentiment and
thought, which was nothing less than the background of Greek
civilization. Great literary memories crowd the brief passage of his
diary quoted above--Epiktetos and Lucretius and the Stoa, Plato and
Sokrates, Demokritos and the Hippokratean school of medicine from which
we took our first quotation, and simpler minds and more primitive
artists in the dim generations behind. We are carried right back through
the tragedy at which we have been looking on. The two men are worlds
apart, in spite of the fact that their propositions, when we strip them
naked, are much the same. 'The organism is transformed and
dissolved.'--'That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.'
They are both representing death as a phase in the process of nature,
but it is not till we grasp the similarity of the thought that we fully
realize the difference in the outlook and the emotion.
Under the smooth surface of the Empire there was a great gulf fixed
between the 'bourgeois' society of the city-states and the descendants
of the slaves imported during the Roman Wars; but the Empire, by
gradually alleviating the material condition of the proletariat,
insensibly affected their point of view. The development of their
religion--the one inalienable possession carried by the slaves from
their Oriental homes--is an index of the psychological change. In the
last phase of the Second Act, the 'Red Guards' of Sicily and Anatolia
had been led by prophets and preachers of their Oriental gods. Their
religion had lent itself to their revolutionary state of mind. But under
the Empire, as descendants of the plantation-slaves succeeded in
purchasing their freedom and forming a new class of shopkeepers and
clerks, their religion correspondingly reflected their rise in the
world. They remained indifferent, if not hostile, to the Imperial
Hellenic tradition, but they began to aspire to a kingdom of their own
in this world as well as in the next. The force which had broken out
desperately in the crazy wonder-working of Eunous of Enna and had then
inspired the 'other-worldly' exaltation of Paul of Tarsos, was soon
conducted into the walls of chapels, and the local associations of
Christian chapel-goers were steadily linked up into a federation so
powerfully organized that the Imperial federation of city-states had
eventually to choose between going into partnership with it or being
supplanted. Thus the empire of which Marcus and Paul were citizens was
more than the third act in the tragedy of Ancient Greece. While it
retarded the inevitable dissolution of one civilization it conceived its
successor, and when, after Marcus's death, imperial statesmanship
failed, and the ancient organism long preserved by its skill at last
broke down, the shock did not extinguish new and old together, but
brought the new life to birth. By the seventh century after Christ, when
Ancient Greek civilization may be said finally to have dissolved, our
own civilization was ready to 'shoot up and thrive' and repeat the
tragedy of mankind.
The writer can best express his personal feeling about the Empire in a
parable. It was like the sea round whose shores its network of
city-states was strung. The Mediterranean seems at first sight a poor
substitute for the rivers that have given their waters to make it. Those
were living waters, whether they ran muddy or clear; the sea seems just
salt and still and dead. But as soon as we study the sea, we find
movement and life there also. There are silent currents circulating
perpetually from one part to another, and the surface-water that seems
to be lost by evaporation is not really lost, but will descend in
distant places and seasons, with its bitterness all distilled away, as
life-giving rain. And as these surface-waters are drawn off into the
clouds, their place is taken by lower layers continually rising from the
depths. The sea itself is in constant and creative motion, but the
influence of this great body of water extends far beyond its shores. One
finds it softening the extremes of temperature, quickening the
vegetation, and prospering the life of animals and men, in the distant
heart of continents and among peoples that have never heard its name.