CHAPTER LXVII. SICILIAN AFFAIRS

AGATHOCLES

While Greece and Macedonia were torn by the disputes of Alexander’s

successors, Sicily was a prey to a tyrant who for energy, audacity, and

complete absence of moral sense, is worthy to be ranked amongst them. It

was the age of adventurers and soldiers of fortune. Agathocles, the son

of a working potter, became famous in his youth by his beauty, strength,

and courage, and also by his immoral life. He enlisted as a soldier, and

men were amazed by his height and the weight of his weapons. He obtained

a command through the influence of a powerful citizen who liked him,

and whose widow he married shortly after. This marriage brought him

riches, but his ambition was not limited by wealth. He wished to gain the

approval of the people by his eloquence, as he had obtained the affection

of the soldiers by his daring.

Tyranny, the natural result of class antagonism in a city, had reappeared

at Syracuse after the death of Timoleon. The tyrant, Sosistratus,

was supported by the aristocrats; Agathocles became the advocate of

the claims of the people. He had also a personal grievance against

Sosistratus, who, after an expedition against the Bruttians, had refused

him the prize for courage which he deserved. Being driven from Syracuse,

he recruited an army among the exiles, whose number was always very great

by reason of the continual revolutions of Sicily and Magna Græcia. He

tried in vain to seize Croton, then served with the Tarentines, who,

a short time after, drove him away because he wished to direct their

government.

[Sidenote: [317-310 B.C.]]

Some time later, a revolution broke out at Syracuse. Sosistratus was

exiled with six hundred men of his faction and asked help of the

Carthaginians. Agathocles returned, distinguished himself in the war

by his courage and skill, and became so popular that the Corinthian

Acestorides, general of the republic, suspected him of aspiring to

the tyranny and wished to have him murdered. He escaped the danger by

changing clothes with a slave and soon after they heard that he was

raising troops. Peace was made with the Carthaginians, who brought back

Sosistratus and his partisans. Agathocles obtained permission to return

also, and swore in the temple of Demeter to respect the constitution.

Soon after, the people, fascinated by his speeches, named him protector

of peace, and charged him with the re-establishment of harmony between

the factions. According to Justin, who seldom agrees with Diodorus,

Agathocles’ usurpation was the result of a treaty with Hamilcar, the

Carthaginian general, who supplied him with African soldiers. Whatever

may be the truth in regard to this, the first use which he made of his

power was to massacre the six hundred senators, their relatives, and

friends. The town was given up to the soldiers, who pillaged the houses,

carried off the women, and killed without discrimination. Those partisans

of the oligarchy who succeeded in escaping the massacre, took refuge at

Agrigentum. Then Agathocles called the people together and declared that

his only wish had been to restore their freedom and that he now intended

retiring to private life. His followers, especially those who had taken

part in the pillage, begged him to remain in power. He consented, but on

condition that he should govern alone, for the colleagues who might be

given him would perhaps attempt to violate the laws, and he would not be

responsible except for his own acts. Votes were taken, and as the rich

were paralysed by fear, and he had promised the poor to cancel debts and

divide lands, he obtained all the votes. But he took neither the crown

nor any of the external signs of power: the reality sufficed; he would

not even have a bodyguard. Having no further enemies to fear, he allowed

himself the luxury of clemency, tactics imitated later by Augustus and

recommended by Machiavelli. He then administered the finances, attended

to the necessities of the army and the navy, and added to the dominion of

Syracuse some of the towns and territory of the interior.

The Syracusan exiles who had taken refuge at Agrigentum stirred up the

people to make war on Agathocles before his rule extended over the whole

of Sicily. The Agrigentines recognised the danger, and joining with the

inhabitants of Gela and Messana sent to Sparta to ask for a general, for

they feared to entrust the command to one of their own citizens who might

make use of it to usurp the tyranny. Acrotatus, son of King Cleomenes,

was detested at Sparta; he seized the opportunity of fighting abroad.

But when he came to Agrigentum, he made himself universally disliked on

account of his insolence, his waste of public funds, his dissolute life,

and his luxury more worthy of a Persian than a Lacedæmonian. He murdered

Sosistratus, the chief of the Syracusan exiles, at a banquet. He was

driven away, they even wished to stone him, but he escaped by night. The

Agrigentines made peace with Agathocles who, having no further foreign

hostility to fear, was able to strengthen and extend his authority.

The Syracusan exiles, being forced to leave Agrigentum, took refuge at

Messana, but the Messanians feared the anger of Agathocles; he offered

to make alliance with them, and persuaded them to grant the freedom of

the city to these exiles. Men were astonished by such noble sentiments,

but some time later he found means to entice them from Messana, to the

number of more than six hundred, and had them put to death. He succeeded

in making his government recognised in most of the towns of Sicily, and

on all sides he caused the death of all who inspired him with fear.

The ever increasing progress of Agathocles awoke the fears of the

Carthaginians and they sent a large army into Sicily under the command

of Hamilcar the son of Gisco. A battle took place near the river Himera

between Gela and Agrigentum. It was said to have been on this spot

that a former tyrant of Agrigentum, Phalaris, put his enemies to death

by shutting them up in a bronze bull under which a fire was lighted;

the hill on which Phalaris’ castle stood was still called Ecnomus.

Agathocles seemed to have won the battle, when unexpected help came to

the Carthaginians and gave them the victory. Then the towns which had

accepted or suffered Syracusan suzerainty submitted successively to the

Carthaginians, and Hamilcar, master of all the rest of Sicily, laid siege

to Syracuse. Agathocles repaired the fortifications of the town and put

it in a state of defence, but these precautions could only delay certain

ruin, for no outside help could be expected. Agathocles then conceived a

singularly daring plan: he resolved to carry the war into Africa. It was

what Scipio did at a later date, but in less difficult circumstances, for

in Agathocles’ case it was first necessary to leave a town besieged by

land and sea.

[Sidenote: [310-307 B.C.]]

He had few soldiers; he set free and enlisted the slaves, and made them

take an oath of fidelity. Although he had been pitiless towards his

political adversaries, he knew that some were still alive, and that

they were ready to capitulate with the enemy. He spoke of his plan to

no one. He told the Syracusans that all he asked of them was a little

patience, and that he had sure means of saving them. In the town he

only left the soldiers requisite for its defence and embarked all the

rest, being careful to take as hostages a member of each of the families

which he mistrusted. He persuaded the rich to avoid the fatigues and

privations of the siege by retiring to their estates, and when they were

scattered he had them killed by his soldiers, and took their money. The

port was blockaded by the Carthaginian fleet; but merchant vessels were

seen bringing provisions to the besieged. The Carthaginians advanced to

capture them. Agathocles seized the opportunity to leave the port, and

the merchant vessels were able to enter while the Carthaginians pursued

Agathocles’ fleet. He escaped by dint of hard rowing and landed with his

army on the coast of Africa.

Then, having offered a sacrifice, he told his soldiers that he had made

a vow if his vessels escaped the enemy to make torches of them for the

principal goddesses of Sicily, Demeter and Core, and taking a brand from

the altar he set fire to his fleet. The soldiers, losing all hope of

return, had no other resource than victory. This act of temerity, which

has become proverbial, was perhaps necessary. Agathocles had too few

soldiers to employ some in protecting the fleet; it would have been taken

by the Carthaginians, who were masters of the sea. They seized a pleasure

town which Diodorus calls the Great Town and the White Tunis. Agathocles

had not sufficient soldiers to leave garrisons; he razed it to the ground

and encamped under the walls of Carthage.

The Carthaginians, seeing their country pillaged, thought that their army

in Sicily had been destroyed. They had no time to collect mercenaries;

they armed to the number of forty thousand and placed Hanno and

Bomilcar at their head. These chiefs belonged to two rival families.

The Carthaginians often took this precaution as a guarantee against

usurpation. But this multitude of new and badly disciplined soldiers

could not resist Agathocles’ little army. Hanno was killed, and Bomilcar,

who aspired to the tyranny, led the troops back to the town. The

terrified Carthaginians attributed their misfortune to the anger of the

gods. For a long time they had sacrificed to Moloch only children whom

they bought; they thought that he demanded more precious victims, and

offered him two hundred children from the most wealthy families. Three

hundred citizens offered themselves to complete the sacrifice. They were

placed on the hands of the bronze statue, and a large fire was lighted;

the victims fell into the burning flames. Diodorus believes that these

human sacrifices, customary among Phœnician nations, possibly gave rise

to the fable of Cronos devouring his children, for the Greeks identified

their Cronos with the Phœnician Moloch.

The Carthaginians ordered Hamilcar to send them some of his troops;

but not wishing to abandon Sicily, they announced the complete ruin of

Agathocles and, as a proof, sent to Syracuse the beaks of his burnt

vessels. Antander, Agathocles’ brother, wished to surrender; the

Ætolian Eurymedon persuaded him not to despair, and a short time later

they received news of the success of the Greeks. The courage of the

besieged was renewed; Hamilcar wished to attempt an assault; he was

taken, his head was cut off and sent to Agathocles, who threw it into

the Carthaginian camp. His success won him the alliance of the Libyan

and Numidian nations. He wrote to Ophellas, governor of Cyrene, who

had fought under Alexander, entreating him to invade the Carthaginian

territory, which should be shared after the victory; he would leave

Africa to Ophellas, and would be content to keep Sicily. This plan

tempted Ophellas; he was in communication with the Athenians, because he

had married a descendant of Miltiades. He raised mercenaries in Greece

and set out to cross the desert with a numerous army, carrying along

with it women and children, for they hoped to found colonies. The army

suffered much from the heat, from thirst, and from the bites of serpents.

Agathocles received his allies warmly, gave them food, then murdered

Ophellas and incorporated his soldiers in his own army; the women and

children were sent to Sicily and perished in a tempest. Cyrene became

part of the dominions of Ptolemy.

[Illustration: GREEK CANDLE STICK]

About the same time, the Carthaginians put Bomilcar to death for

attempting to seize the tyranny. Agathocles might have profited by the

confusion which this event caused in Carthage, but he had received

alarming news. The Agrigentines had endeavoured to profit by Hamilcar’s

death to free Sicily from both Carthaginian and Syracusan rule.

Agathocles, leaving the command of his army to Archagathus, his eldest

son, embarked on open boats which had been hastily built. On landing

at Selinuntium, he was told that his officers had just defeated the

Agrigentine army. He reduced to submission Heraclea, Thermæ, Centuripæ,

Cephalœdium, and Apollonia. It was about this time that, following the

example of the successors of Alexander, he took the title of king, and

had it put on his coins (307). However, he wore no crown, and instead of

imitating the mistrust of Dionysius the Elder, he went to the assembly

without a guard. When he gave banquets, he was often served in an earthen

bowl, and willingly recalled the time when he had begun life as a working

potter. He was easy tempered and gay, so as to encourage his guests to

talk freely, but he took note of all that he heard, and when, by this

means, he had discovered which men were not to be trusted, he invited

them separately and put them to death.

In Africa, his son Archagathus was at first successful; but he found

his army weakened by desertions, in need of the necessities of life,

and inclined to revolt. The soldiers complained of not being paid. He

risked a battle and was defeated. Then he resolved to leave the army,

as Bonaparte did in later times in Egypt. The soldiers, furious at

finding themselves abandoned by their general, murdered his two sons and

surrendered to the Carthaginians, who enrolled them in their army.

[Sidenote: [307-300 B.C.]]

On his return to Sicily, Agathocles first of all gave vent to his anger

against Segesta, which had refused him subsidies. This expedition was

marked, according to Diodorus, by atrocious cruelty: men were burned

alive, pregnant women made to miscarry, young girls and children sold

to the Bruttians, and the town of Segesta, peopled by new inhabitants,

received the name of Dicæopolis--city of vengeance. At the same time

Agathocles commanded his brother Antander to slay the parents, wives,

and children of the soldiers of the African army, to revenge the murder

of his sons. Diodorus adds that these savage executions produced such

horror that Agathocles, despairing of keeping the power, proposed to

Dinocrates, the general of the exiles, to re-establish the republic at

Syracuse. But Dinocrates had no desire to do so; in the twenty years

during which he had been leader of armed bands, he had acquired a taste

for this kind of regal dignity. Unsuccessful in forming this alliance,

Agathocles purchased Carthaginian help by yielding up certain towns to

them, and beat Dinocrates whose troops surrendered. He had them massacred

but spared Dinocrates, and as they were worthy of each other, he made him

his lieutenant.

[Illustration: NYMPH

(From a statue)]

He undertook, following Dionysius’ example, the conquest of southern

Italy. He began by seizing the Æolian Isles, in order to obtain the

treasure consecrated to Core and to Hephæstus in the prytaneum of Lipara;

then he prepared to cross into Italy. His preparations excited the fears

of the Tarentines, who were already menaced in another direction by the

native populations. They applied to the Spartans, whose king, Cleonymus,

enrolled mercenaries at Cape Tænarum. He formed a considerable army by

uniting with them the forces of Tarentum and the Messapians, with whom

he made an alliance immediately on his arrival. The Lucanians in alarm

made peace with Tarentum, and Cleonymus, not wishing to have come in

vain, turned against Metapontum, which town, however, he had entered as

an ally. He imposed on the town a tribute of six hundred talents, and

took two hundred young girls as hostages, which caused him to be looked

on with suspicion, for, although he was a Spartan, he had the reputation

of a man of dissolute character; however, he was punished later on by

the wicked behaviour of his wife Chelidonis. Then, instead of delivering

Sicily from the tyranny of Agathocles, as he had announced the intention

of doing, he attacked Corcyra, which appeared to him a convenient post

for watching Greek affairs, raised a tribute, and established a garrison.

Then, returning to Italy, without troubling either about the Tarentines

who had summoned him, or about the Messapians whose alliance he had

demanded, he began to fight and pillage indiscriminately, under pretext

of punishing those whom he called rebels. He carried on this piratical

war to the remotest part of the Adriatic Sea. The Italians killed some

of his troops, a tempest destroyed part of his fleet, but he escaped and

wound up his series of adventures by calling Pyrrhus against his country

to avenge his matrimonial troubles.

[Sidenote: [300-289 B.C.]]

Agathocles conducted an expedition against Corcyra, in pursuit of

Cleonymus, but found Cassander besieging the town by land and by sea.

He burned the Macedonian fleet, and seized Corcyra, which he gave as

a dowry to his daughter Lanassa, whom he married to Pyrrhus, king of

Epirus. On his return he found that a number of his mercenaries were in

revolt against his grandson Archagathus, who had not given them their

pay; he had two thousand of them killed. According to Diodorus, they were

Ligurians and Etruscans, but it seems probable that there were Bruttians

among them, for this punishment led to a war between the Bruttians and

Agathocles. He was defeated and revenged himself on the inhabitants of

Croton, who had done him no injury. He told them not to be troubled by

his advance, he was only travelling through the country to take his

daughter into Epirus. They made no preparations for defence; he took

the town, sacked it, and massacred the inhabitants. Then he attacked

Hipponium, which was in the hands of the Bruttians, took it, and placed a

garrison there which was massacred a short time later.

In his old age he suffered from a very painful illness of the joints, and

his son and grandson disputed his succession during his life-time. The

latter caused him to be poisoned by his favourite, Mænon, by means of a

corrosive placed in a toothpick. This Mænon was a Segestan and had become

the tyrant’s slave; in this manner he avenged his country’s ruin. It is

said that Agathocles, to put an end to the torture he was suffering, had

himself placed, while still alive, on the funeral pyre; this was believed

to be a punishment for the sacrilege which he had committed in the Æolian

Isles in stealing the sacred treasure of Hephæstus.

After the death of Agathocles, his son and grandson were killed by Mænon,

who tried to seize the power with the help of the Carthaginians. The

Syracusans chose Hicetas for their general, and it was agreed that they

should give hostages and recall the exiles. But at the first election of

the magistrates Agathocles’ mercenaries claimed that they were wronged,

the citizens armed, a fight was imminent; at last it was agreed that the

mercenaries should leave Sicily. They were mostly Campanians, known by

the name of Mamertines.

Agathocles had taken a great number into his pay. When it was agreed

that they were to leave Sicily, they went to Messana to embark, and were

hospitably received; but during the night they killed the inhabitants

and seized their wives and possessions. This settlement of Mamertines at

Messana was a fresh element of trouble for Sicily, and later on became

the cause of the first war between the Romans and the Carthaginians.

PYRRHUS AND THE ROMANS

[Sidenote: [282-272 B.C.]]

The absence of federal union between the Greek cities of Italy made them

incapable of resisting the native populations, the Samnites, Lucanians,

and Bruttians. They were therefore naturally induced to ask aid of the

great Roman Republic, which alone was able to protect them. The earliest

relations which Rome had with the Greek towns of Italy were friendly.

Tarentum alone preferred having the Romans as enemies to having them

as friends. By an act of mad provocation the Tarentines put themselves

entirely in the wrong and caused war with Rome to become inevitable.

Then, as was their custom, they called to their assistance a foreign

prince, and although this time they chose the bravest and most skilful

captain of the period, the struggle in which they engaged had as a

consequence the final establishment of Roman government over all Italy.

[Illustration: HYGEIA

(From a statue)]

The Lucanians and the Bruttians having attacked the town of Thurii, the

ally of Rome, an army, commanded by the consul Fabricius was sent to

its rescue, while at the same time a squadron of ten galleys cruised in

the Gulf of Tarentum. The Tarentines, assembled in the theatre which

overlooked the sea, perceived some of these vessels at the entrance of

the port. Immediately an orator named Philochares, who was known by the

name of the famous courtesan Thais because of his shameful immorality,

exclaimed that the presence of these ships was an act of hostility, and

that by the terms of a treaty, the Romans were not allowed to pass Cape

Lacinium. The people hurried to the port, sank or captured the vessels,

the duumvir who commanded them was killed, the rowers were reduced to

slavery. The Roman senate sent an embassy to demand reparation. The

ambassadors had scarcely entered the theatre where the people were

assembled than they were greeted by insulting laughter. They wished to

speak, but their pronunciation of Greek was ridiculed and they were

driven out. A drunkard soiled the toga of the principal ambassador; the

laughter increased. The Roman turned round and said: “Laugh! you will

soon weep, for my robe shall be washed in your blood.”

They summoned Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, promising him the support of

the Lucanians and Samnites. An account of his exploits and death has

previously been given.

[Sidenote: [272-216 B.C.]]

All the natives of southern Italy who had greeted Pyrrhus as a saviour,

were finally subdued to Roman rule. It was the rescue of the Greek

towns which were still in existence, but they were only shadows of

their former selves. Although free under the protection of Rome, they

vanished obscurely from history. In the time of Strabo the name of Magna

Græcia was already an ancient recollection, and the Greek language was

only spoken at Naples, Rhegium, and Tarentum. For want of federal union

between the autonomous cities, the Hellenic race with its brilliant

civilisation had disappeared gradually from Italian soil. The Romans were

about to reap its inheritance and transmit it to Gaul and Spain. They

repeopled some of the former Greek colonies which had become barbarous,

especially Posidonia and Hipponium, which had long been inhabited, the

latter by the Campanians, the former by the Bruttians, and which had

changed their Greek names for those of Pæstum and Vibo-Valentia.

The Roman peace did not restore to the Greek towns of Italy the glory

which had radiated from their art and literature during the stormy

period of their political independence. The innumerable painted vases

which are admired in our museums, and the coins of infinite variety

suffice to mark their place in the history of civilisation. Not rich

Tarentum only, but towns of no importance, Terina, Velia, Metapontum,

Heraclea in Lucania, made coins of inimitable perfection. The production

of these works of art ceased abruptly with that communal autonomy of

which the coin was the visible symbol. In 268, Rome, who, till then, had

only had moulded copper coinage, for the first time made silver coins,

and at the same time withdrew the right of coining from all her Italian

subjects. Few laws have been more disastrous to art.

The beautiful iconic coins of King Hiero and his wife, Queen Philistis,

mark the last period of Sicilian autonomy. After a victory gained over

the Mamertines of Messana, Hiero was proclaimed king by the Syracusans

who no longer felt capable of supporting the disturbances of freedom

(269). On leaving Sicily Pyrrhus had said: “What a fine battle-field we

leave the Romans and Carthaginians!” The fulfilment of this prophecy was

not delayed, and the First Punic War, which broke out in 263, had Sicily

for a stage. At the beginning Hiero, the ally of Carthage, was defeated

by the Romans, and passed over to their side. His reign, a long and

peaceful one, was a transition for the Syracusans between their stormy

autonomy and the inevitable dominion of Rome.[b]

[Illustration]

GREECE

Clime of the unforgotten brave!

Whose land from plain to mountain-cave

Was Freedom’s home or Glory’s grave!

Shrine of the mighty! can it be

That this is all remains of thee?

Approach, thou craven, crouching slave;

Say, is not this Thermopylæ?

These waters blue that round you lave,

O servile offspring of the free,

Pronounce what sea, what shore is this?

The gulf, the rock of Salamis!

These scenes, their story not unknown,

Arise and make again your own;

Snatch from the ashes of your sires

The embers of their former fires;

And he who in the strife expires

Will add to theirs a name of fear

That Tyranny shall quake to hear,

And leave his sons a hope, a fame,

They too will rather die than shame;

For Freedom’s battle once begun,

Bequeathed by bleeding sire to son,

Though baffled oft is ever won.

Bear witness, Greece, thy living page,

Attest it, many a deathless age:

While kings, in dusty darkness hid,

Have left a nameless pyramid,

Thy heroes, though the general doom

Have swept the column from their tomb,

A mightier monument command,

The mountains of their native land!

There points thy muse to stranger’s eye

The graves of those that cannot die!

’Twere long to tell, and sad to trace,

Each step from splendour to disgrace:

Enough,--no foreign foe could quell

Thy soul, till from itself it fell;

Yes! self-abasement paved the way

To villain-bonds and despot sway.

--BYRON; _The Giaour_.

[Illustration]

CONCLUDING SUMMARY

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HELLENIC SPIRIT

WRITTEN SPECIALLY FOR THE PRESENT WORK

BY DR. ULRICH VON WILAMOWITZ-MÖLLENDORFF

PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN, ETC.

Homer stands at the beginning of Greek history; nothing before him,

nothing beside him, a great gulf fixed between him and everything after;

yet there is nothing Greek on which his light or shadow does not fall.

Homer is a world in himself, and what a world he is! In the eyes of many,

even to this day, he stands for the sum total of the Greek spirit; in the

eyes of some, for the whole body of poetry. What the two epics set before

us is so complete, so individual, that in spite of all concessions in

detail, the oneness of the poem and of the author is constantly obtruding

itself upon our notice anew. Homer is so little antiquated that he seems

to be of no age; we place him in a sunnier morning-time of mankind,

that is all; but to range him in the sequence of history, to conceive

of him as under conditions of time and place seems like profanation;

this, like so much else, he has in common with the Old Testament. And

yet to classify him thus is the first necessity of real comprehension.

The Greeks themselves have not done much to help us. About the time of

Socrates a school of æsthetic criticism restricted the sacred name of the

poet Homer, certainly not without some show of reason, to the _Iliad_

and the _Odyssey_; and thus these poems have come down to us, but the

price we pay is the loss of all others of equally Homeric origin; and

hence Homer stands more than ever alone. The last word of the philology

of antiquity was that Homer ought to be explained only by himself. Modern

philology seemed on the way to the same conclusion.

By the discoveries of the last generation the ban of this isolation

has been broken. Only by wilful blindness can the Ilium of Homer be

dissociated from the Ilium restored to light on Hissarlik, though the

remains of the latter go far back beyond the time of Homer and Priam. Not

the age of the Homeric poets alone, but the age of the Homeric heroes

rises up before us from these strongholds and tombs. The links that bind

it to the older civilisation of Asia and of Egypt lie revealed, positive

chronological data already enable us to determine the certainty of this

or that. From these actual remains we begin to gain some conception of

the history and the peoples whose poetic reflection shines for us in the

_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

On the shores of the Ægean Sea, in the second half of the second thousand

years before Christ, there existed a sumptuous civilisation which had

received impulses from the East and from the South, but in which we

nevertheless recognise the spirit of the Greece immortalised in the

Homeric poems; and in the Asiatic home of Homer the connecting threads do

not break off short as we trace them back. In the mother-country, on the

other hand, other savage Greek tribes, whom we name after the Dorians,

forced their way in; they destroyed the ancient superior civilisation,

reduced some of its representatives to slavery, and drove the rest over

into Asia. There was another immigration into Asia, this time of the

Phrygio-Thracian tribes, the ancestors of the Armenians; such of the

earlier population as were not reduced to slavery being driven south.

These tribes we are wont to call after the Carians. There was a time when

they reached out towards Europe, and in a few islands they continued for

centuries to struggle against the Hellenising influence to which in the

long run they completely succumbed. But as the study of this long and

important period is still in its infancy, our main object should still

be the collection of material; it will be one of the principal tasks of

the next generation to sift and elaborate what has been accumulated. At

the present time it is more important than any amount of detail for us to

understand what is the historic background both for the subject-matter

of the Homeric epics and for the practice of this form of poetry and the

existence of the poets who used it.

The Homeric poems are a legacy from the first great period of Greek

history. We may approximately fix the year 800 B.C. as their latest

possible date. The subject-matter of the Epos, the Heroic legend, is

the deposit of historical reminiscences of that earlier time. It was

wholly fit that men should see in the epic heroes the founders of their

own nation and of their own civilisation; but in point of fact it was

through Homer that the Greek nation first acquired consciousness of

itself, of its individuality and of the common blood in its veins. Not

in the time of the heroes alone, but in that of the poets of the Epos,

the Greeks had no national unity and less than no national feeling, and

the same holds good of their civilisation. The tales which Homer tells

are laid to a great extent in Argos, Thebes, and Sparta; all the heroes

come from the country which we call Hellas and distinguish from Asia as

their mother-country. Nearly all the Homeric gods have their homes there

likewise. But now gods and heroes, like Agamemnon’s Achæan host, are

taken across to the northwestern angle of Asia. Achilles has conquered

Lesbos; the descendants of Agamemnon rule in Mytilene and Cyme. Cyme,

Smyrna, and Chios are the reputed birth-places of Homer. Here, where

later the Æolian dialect comes into collision with the mightier Ionian,

was perfected the artificial dialect of the epic,--a dialect spoken in

this form at no time and in no place,--and the heroic verse that was at

no time and in no place a really popular form, and was first imported

into Lesbos itself by the Ionian Epos. Here, side by side with the

ruling class which claimed descent from the Homeric gods and heroes, was

evolved a class of professional bards, and amongst them arose the gifted

poets whose names have been forgotten in the fame of the one and only

Homer. Let us hope that the real Homer was worthy of this pre-eminence.

By these Homerides the Epos, first sung to the lute, and then recited,

was carried farther and farther among the islands and along the coast.

The subject-matter awakened interest everywhere; being, as it were,

national history, the form won for itself an ever widening circle of

appreciation. Gradually in the mother-country there were found native

bards who learned from wandering rhapsodists the art of making poetry

in the Homeric style, that is to say, of using a foreign language and

a foreign art-form, but to express new matter, which was nevertheless

invariably linked in some fashion with the world of Homeric heroes.

Accordingly, the production of epic poems, ever based upon Homeric

legend, was maintained in the mother-country for centuries after it had

died out in Ionia, continuing into the sixth century. It is through these

circles, in the main, that Homer has been preserved.

The cardinal point was that, in the Homeric Epos, the Greeks acquired an

organ of speech capable of expressing all that men could say and hear.

It was a well-defined and yet highly elastic style, not by any means

exclusively adapted to narrative; on the contrary they never abandoned

the practice of casting instruction of all kinds into this form, which

was popularised and made generally intelligible by the school from the

time there were schools at all. It was also used in incantations, in

monumental inscriptions, and in the fleeting jest. The most abstract

philosophy, the description of the starry heavens, the dogmatic side

of astrology, nay even the Psalms and the Gospel of St. John, have

been clothed in Homeric garb. In like manner it is characteristic of

the genius of Greece that it begins its evolution by creating such a

mode of expression, and for a thousand years does not grow weary of

it. The instinct for form and the adherence to a form once discovered

are likewise Greek; their combination begets at first an unparalleled

achievement, but for centuries long it has to drudge in the service of

imitative facility and orthodox formalism.

Homer, moreover, created for the Greeks their heroic legend. The whole

wealth of scattered and desultory reminiscence and tradition among the

various tribes and families, combined with all that occupied the memory

and imagination of man, was gathered together in one by the art of the

Epic poets. Thus another and more beautiful domain was built up in the

imaginations of men, from which a light fell on the present so brilliant

that the present paled before it, while even as children men began to

make themselves at home in that domain. Here it was that the Greeks found

their common fatherland, proud and united, whilst they were still at

daggers drawn with one another upon earth, and once more when they were

all subject to foreign lords; to this day all those of us who have drunk

a draught from Homer’s spring, feel at home in this region. Their gods

the Greeks, likewise, received from Homer; not the faith by which the

heart is made heavy and light, rendered contrite and redeemed, but the

names and the histories, the relations and the amours of their celestial

host--that is to say, their mythology.

The name itself implies how far it was from anything like divine

revelation and holiness. The muse has much to say that is untrue

but resembles truth. Homeric art, however, understood the secret of

humanising the stories of the gods as effectually as the stories of

tribes and kings. And this Homeric art took captive the fancy of the

listeners, that is, the fancy of the whole nation as soon as it gave

ear to the poetry of Homer. Homer gave to the Greek his gods, and all

the Greek gods turned into men with the gift. He gives us a complete

picture of nature too, he teaches us to see what surrounds us, and the

sorrows and joys that condition our brief life under the sun. The roseate

flush of dawn, the twinkling of the dog-star, the rush of the hurricane,

the babble of the mountain stream, the tops of the fir trees in the

highland forest, and the clumps of asphodel on untilled ground; the lions

and wolves in the Asiatic mountain country, the horse and the hound,

the companions of man, he sees everything, shows everything, loves

everything; above all, the sea, eternal, ever new, that has become a home

to the Ionian in lieu of mother-earth. In the light in which he viewed

Nature and set her forth the Greeks accustomed themselves to look upon

her. Not only so, but whole generations took pleasure in the reproduction

of what had once been done, and turned their eyes aside from the

contemplation of the Real, the infinitude whereof no Homer can exhaust.

In fine, the judgment passed upon Homer by Horace, who repeats the

verdict of the stoics, contains a large measure of truth:

_“Qui, quid sit pulcrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,_

_Planius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.”_

He gives us a complete picture of the doings of man, shows us princes

and beggars, old men and boys, the budding maiden and the perfection of

dæmonic beauty. So rich is this completeness, so profound the poet’s

knowledge of life, that the thing we most clearly realise is the utter

preposterousness of any attempt to compare Homer with any popular poetry

whatsoever. Rather does Plato rightly name him the grandsire of tragedy,

and only one picture of the world can claim a birthright equal to that of

Homer--the picture set forth on the stage of William Shakespeare.

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.

Under the auspices of these great times Attic tragedy arose as the most

perfect expression of the union of Western with Eastern Hellenism,

stamped with the features of the great period of its birth; for not until

Æschylus, the warrior of Marathon, took the Homeric Heroic legend for

the groundwork of the ancient ecstatic Dionysian festivals; not until he

substituted the solemn Doric chorus for the satyrs, and reduplicated the

Ionian reciter, was the drama discovered which, sublime beyond the scope

of mere humanity, and still remaining a part of the worship of the god,

yet bore within it the germ of development into a picture of human life,

making an appeal more direct and more effective than the narrative of the

rhapsodist or the song of the bard. An abundance of talent turned to this

new form, which remained Athenian even when the poets came from abroad,

and became more and more Athenian, human, and modern. Yet no one ventured

to abandon the Homeric subject-matter and go direct to contemporary life

for material. And so it continued to be, although with the decay of the

Attic empire and its great poets, tragedy (whether as Attic drama or as a

part of worship), no longer had any intrinsic claim to the subject-matter

of the Heroic legend. Here again the authority of a great achievement

condemned posterity to the depths of imitation. The form of drama known

at Athens as comedy was regarded as quite another thing; and it had

certainly gone far from its source in the same masquerade and the same

Dionysian ecstasy by the time it was cast into shape by witty Athenian

poets, and promoted to be species of literature. Comedy became drama, and

followed the lines of tragedy by centring about a definite action; it

was no less wonderful than the latter so long as it served the purpose

of the moment and of the necessarily circumscribed circle of Athenian

society; but for this very reason it exercised no universal influence,

and was destined to fall to pieces with the collapse of the political and

social fabric. The last literary achievement of Athens was to transform

it, about the time of Alexander, into a refined, purely recitative play

which occupied exactly the same relation to contemporary life as later

tragedy occupied to the Heroic legends. This new comedy deserved and

received the same classic _imprimatur_ as tragedy; but the same slavish

subjection to a model ensued; the figures of Menander, so infinitely

commonplace and provincial, alas! were doomed to make their appearance

on the comic stage, like Medea and Orestes on the tragic, whether the

play were written and acted in Rome or Alexandria. In this petrified

and haphazard form the theory rather than the poetry of the drama was

conveyed to the West. Aristotle, in particular, failed to advance from

the chance illustration of actual performances to a formulated statement

of the truth, and modern writers have still an unwholesome habit of

tossing about the terms “tragedy” and “comedy,” at all events in theory.

We have the will to admire and the capacity to understand both what has

been achieved by the Athenians and the causes that led inevitably to that

achievement: but the foundation of modern dramatic art is Shakespeare--or

Plato, who recognised in theory that tragedians and comedians are

anything but contradictory terms, and who, like Shakespeare, combined

both in himself.

In the Athenian art of the fifth century, as in Æschylean tragedy,

the elements of Eastern and Western Greece interpenetrate, and each

heightens the effect of the other. The Parthenon is a Doric temple

with an Ionic frieze. To Ionic monumental fresco painters is given the

task of painting Homeric stories on the broad surfaces of Athenian

and Delphic porticoes; the capacity to immortalise the deeds of

contemporary life is its own contribution. From the devout spirit that

inspires the poet of the Oresteia, Phidias, with all the wealth and

all the art at his command, tries to create images of the gods that

will satisfy the religious feeling of his time. To the Greeks they were

the greatest for all time. Precisely as in the case of tragedy, such a

high strain of endeavour lasts but a short time. Then the Ionic element

becomes preponderant; the human, subjective aspect thrusts itself into

prominence. It is inevitable, and the thing it created is worthy of

admiration. But in the _pathos_ and _ethos_ of the divine types created

by Praxiteles and Scopas there is nothing but the mythological character

of Homer’s gods; they are immortal men, and no more; to Scopas and

Praxiteles they were nothing higher than this. And it was right that it

should be so; for in the meantime the comprehension of the truly divine

had so far progressed that its circumscription in a person was merely

symbolical, and implied no idea of physical incarnation.

Ionia’s greatest and most important contribution was that provided by

the audacity of the great thinkers and observers of the sixth century,

that indeed which, by setting the whole conception of the world on a

new basis, was bound to destroy the fair illusion of gods in the form

of men which Æschylus and Phidias might still have regarded as a truth.

It was only on Ionian soil, on the soil of Homer, that man had courage

and strength to fling aside all convention, all tradition, to step into

the centre of the universe himself and say “Thou art naught but what I

recognise as thee, thou signifiest what I discover in thee.” The idea was

not at the outset formulated with this precision, but such is the spirit

in which the Ionians early went to work--not the philosophers alone, but

the reckless natures who in the world of action took themselves for the

standard of conduct--men like Archilochus the poet, whose subjectivism

combined with his brutal outspokenness and license aroused the delight

and horror of his contemporaries and of posterity. A terrible moral

danger lurked in this attitude, and Ionia, which changed nothing but its

masters, brought an infection into the mother-country which neither the

state nor society availed to overcome. But for strong natures it also

provided the remedy, and the world, for its part, owes to this Ionic

element the best of what the Greeks have bequeathed to her--science,

philosophy, natural science, and history, though it is true that they had

first to be ennobled by the Athenians. This is most easily seen in the

case of history.

_Historia_ is subjective inquiry; Herodotus, not a man of powerful

intellect, gives us, as he himself says, the sum of his own

investigations. This includes what he has seen, heard, read, and thought,

all in close juxtaposition. The subjective mind determines how and what

he can and may narrate. Thucydides, the Athenian, on the other hand,

writes the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians; here it is the object

which is the determining factor. The writer renders both himself and the

reader account of his subject and of his method, indicates the degree of

credibility for his various statements and adds his own interpretations

and conclusions for what they are worth; the scientific method has thus

been reached. Man has not lost his independence, but he consciously

places his whole strength at the service of an idea, in this case the

idea of truth; and, clear as it is to him that he cannot reach the point

of presenting it pure and complete, he has no doubt that an objective

truth exists and is accessible to human knowledge.

Natural science had begun, at a stroke, to explain genesis (das Werden)

in general and particular by a bold hypothesis. The investigator made the

laws. Natural science, in its turn, came to test its laws by a thousand

patient, minute, independent observations of nature, to accumulate

the facts from which the rule might be deduced in its turn. Most

important for this purpose is the cultivation of that domain in which

pure abstraction permits of an unbroken series of proofs, the domain

of numbers and geometrical concepts. Here we have a genuine process

of learning from which, in time, mathematics takes its name; here the

deceptive character of sensuous perceptions is as clear as the existence

of knowable laws; here are revealed the necessity and possibility of

many to collaborate and continue the work. It was not by means of his

religious brotherhood, which, if it had lasted, would have ultimately

become a sect, that Pythagoras exercised a beneficent influence, but by

the methodical organisation of study, which became scientific in so far

as it turned its attention to mathematics. At the same time, in spite

of all premature hypotheses, medicine, the branch of observation most

closely in touch with actual life, discovered by keen observation and

continuous experiment the right way to gain a knowledge of the human

body, its nature, its sufferings, how to keep it healthy, or if necessary

how to cure it. In astronomy and medicine we have the difference between

the East and Hellas most clearly manifest. Thousands of years before, the

Babylonians had already observed the heavens; thousands of years before,

the Egyptians had compounded prescriptions from all kinds of drugs

and simples. But this was sorcery, and even the Greeks had to pay for

allowing themselves to be imposed upon by it.

In the sphere of morals the breach with that _Nomos_ of which we have

spoken was a great danger: the whole edifice of the Apolline organisation

fell to pieces. Democracy fairly challenged man to translate his theory

into practice, and the mental attitude of the time was so political

that people thought Anaxagoras a crank, because of his own free will he

devoted himself to the _vita contemplativa_ and refused to mingle in the

political hurly-burly. They declined to believe in his good faith, and

political suspicion allied with the principle of established authority,

which always naturally opposes a tendency so novel, banished him from

Athens. And from the very fact that, in all other fields, this principle

was so strong among the Greeks, the age that dared express and pursue

every thought that rose in the mind acquires its peculiar significance.

The activity, inventiveness, and audacity of the period of the sophists,

with its superabundance of talent, sowed seeds without number, many of

which, unproductive at the time, have been left for the modern world

rightly to appreciate. Thus a science of jurisprudence would have been

developed, had not the fall of the empire destroyed the sphere in which

alone a uniform system of law could prevail: the practice of the legal

profession thus falling into the hands of pettifoggers, while the theory

of jurisprudence was left to philosophers, who were honest in their quest

of the principle of justice.

Modern speculation has gradually outgrown the tendency to regard the

sophists through the eyes of Plato, and to impute to them moral and

intellectual indifferentism. One thing, however, is incontestable:

the whole movement, coming, as it does, from Ionia, is rationalistic

through and through; the intellect will acknowledge nothing on a par

with itself. A prophet like Empedocles, who was a doctor, a philosopher,

and a poet to boot, besides cherishing the proud conviction of being as

good a sophist as any other, could go about extolling his revelation in

the Peloponnesus; in Athens he would have found no place. The port of

Athens, on the other hand, was laid out by a Milesian diagrammatically

in the dreary chess-board style then in vogue for buildings on new

sites, although it can only be satisfactory on paper, inasmuch as it

neither takes account of the character of the landscape nor consists

with the artistic feeling of the Greeks. Rationalistic in his teaching,

again, was the only Athenian whose sophist doctrines gave offence to his

compatriots, especially because instead of making a fortune like the

teachers of wisdom from abroad, he neglected his affairs. We, ourselves,

should hardly except Socrates from the category of sophists on account

of his merits as a dialectician, had not the reactionary democracy of

the restoration executed him as a person dangerous to the common weal.

He chose to die rather than do the least thing that ran counter to his

consciousness of rectitude, his Logos, the belief in the reality of the

Good which he was not able to demonstrate by rationalistic methods; and

the moral grandeur of his death has reared for the faith of the human

race an image which bears eternal witness that man is free and happy if

he can but base his actions on belief in the Good; he needs no future

world of punishment and reward. This eccentric Silenus-faced Athenian did

not aspire to become a god like Hercules, he would have been more at home

in a pedantic than a heroic atmosphere: he merely did nothing which he

did not think right. The claim that the will obeys the reason--in most

cases such a pitiful brag!--was a truth with him. Socrates was Athenian

to the core, and therefore a loyal citizen of the democratic state; but,

like Solon, he combines the Ionian and the Doric temperament; and, in

common with the law-giver, he is devoid of feeling for mysticism and

the whole sphere of the Unknown. His life is only intelligible as an

outgrowth of the history of Athens; his death makes him a type of man as

he can and should be. So long as the human race survives on our planet it

will be a master experience of our moral education to live through the

dying hours of this old and ugly plebeian.

That we can so do, that we can have Socrates as our master, we owe wholly

and solely to the loyalty and poetic genius of the man (Plato) who set

himself in the days of that agony to show that--hard as it may be to

define uprightness, courage, piety and what other virtues there may

be--the upright and courageous and therefore happy man has demonstrated

in his own person the reality of these abstractions. This alone would

have sufficed to make Plato a benefactor to mankind; but this is only

a small part of his labours. With all that Socrates and the school

of sophistry taught him, he combines mathematics and the mysticism

of Pythagoras. He founded the school which was destined to serve the

purposes of organised scientific work for nearly a thousand years, and

which is the prototype of all such organisations. He lays down the

fundamental lines of every philosophical science, constructing, and,

where he thinks he has found a better way, demolishing the foundations

he himself has laid. Many of his intuitions have only been verified

after the lapse of centuries and tens of centuries; others still await

verification. The force inherent in him is best proved by the energy

of those who assure us that he has had his day. He has set Eros as the

mediator between heaven and earth; this Eros has no worthier abode than

the writings of Plato; through them, even to-day, Psyche is learning the

road heavenwards. But Plato is a Greek in every fibre, he can only be

understood through his people, and his people through him.

Plato was a poet; and though he fixed his mind wholly on the eternal

type, unduly despising the individual phenomenon, and thrusting his own

individuality completely into the background, yet this individuality with

its poetic genius cast light and shade in bewildering alternation over

every field of contemplation, like the full moon as she fleets over the

mountains and plains of Attica.

Science needed the cool judgment and caution of the systematiser. She

found it in the person of Aristotle, the master-builder among men

(_baumeisterlicher Mann_), as Goethe calls him. At his hands science

first received systematic treatment and method--the tools of her craft.

The existence of the man and his work attest for all time the unnatural

character of a division of the one and indivisible body of science though

it be only into natural and abstract sciences. For even in the collection

of material, he laboured for all branches alike. It is idle to inquire

which were the greater, his personal achievements or those which owed

their birth to his example. For his successors carried on the work in

his spirit, even more truly when, often after vehement controversy, they

advanced beyond him, than when they rested content with merely working

out the plan of the master-builder. Sprung of a family of physicians,

and endowed with the Ionian temperament, the natural science of Ionia is

the most substantial contribution he made to the legacy bequeathed by

Plato. But he had likewise made himself familiar with all the accepted

tricks of oratory at Athens, he speaks with authority on logic, rhetoric,

and poetry, and he is capable of treating all literary forms with the

hand of a master. Yet he did not discover his own peculiar style until

he combined the bald simplicity of Ionian scientific phraseology with

Attic balance and Attic elegance. Thus he became the father of scientific

prose, of the text-book no less than the lecture and the practical

investigation. Even in halting translations he afforded nutriment to

powerful intellects. His own words will have a modern ring to the end of

time.

It is a characteristic distinction between the two philosophers that

Plato, the incomparable artist in words, fiercely attacked rhetoric,

while Aristotle made it a cardinal item in his programme of education.

It was a power and he reckoned with it accordingly, not without yielding

more to contemporary taste than we can approve. To the modern mind

rhetoric is the least congenial element in the culture and literature

of antiquity. We can understand that in the political agitation which

pervaded the Attic empire, oratory, which was a daily necessity in

parliamentary debate and in the law courts, was bound to develop into

an art, and that a literature should have arisen corresponding to

that of our daily press. So, too, we can understand that the manifold

intellectual activity of the age of the sophists, and the tentative

efforts of science, needed an organ which should not only convey

practical information but have an eye to effect. That this prose should

become Attic, in spite of the fact that the language of Athens had

barely passed through its first phase of development in tragedy, was

inevitable from the time when Athens took the lead in Greece. In the

sphere of language, at all events, the country attained to national

unity. But to us there is at first sight something monstrous in the

fact that in the age of Pericles a set form of oratory should arise

which not only consciously competes with poetry but seeks to supplant

it--and which actually succeeded in preventing the development of any new

poetic method. The whole classic world, including the Latins, devoted no

trifling labour and skill to this art of eloquence, and its art-theory

ended by making poetry a mere subdivision of it. We are now coming to

recognise more and more how much modern poetry in particular owes to this

prose-poetry and its methods: the modern connecting-link of the rhyme

was discovered beyond all dispute by that Gorgias whom Plato attacked as

the champion of rhetoric; the intermediate links lie before us in an

unbroken chain. Our astonishment subsides, if we so far rid ourselves

of prejudice as to realise how arbitrary is every line of demarcation

between poetry and prose. Not only the poems of Walt Whitman, but a great

many of Goethe’s finest poems would be regarded by every Greek art-critic

as prose. Prose really implies that the language proceeds on foot; the

reverse,--that it soars aloft by means of this device or that,--applies

to every conventionalised form of speech; whether it is cast into a

regular measure or not is irrelevant in comparison with the fact that

it is informed by measure. The Hellenic bias towards style manifests

itself here in the creation of a definite form, and we cannot question

the fact that the development of the period demanded a new style and one

unhampered by the laws of metre. For at such a high point of civilisation

the poetic form does not suffice for what the world has to say and wishes

to hear. Empty and conventional jingle, relying on tricks of style,

undoubtedly attained a bad eminence in Greek and Latin oratory; but a

similar spectacle has been afforded by poetry and the arts of chisel

and brush. If a man had something to say, like Aristotle, Polybius,

and Plutarch, it did him no harm to clothe his thoughts in a form, the

effect of which we perceive agreeably even without understanding the art

to which it is due. It is the same artistic conventionality which to

this day lends to French prose, whether it be that of literature or of

polite conversation, the charm which the Teuton does not possess in equal

measure. And the French have attained to it by a rhetorical schooling

traditionally derived from the method of antiquity. That elegance is not

an inborn quality with them is shown by the formlessness of so great a

writer as Rabelais. Were we in a position to read the laws of Solon we

should perceive that Attic elegance was likewise no gift of heaven. An

art which we find still dominant in the sermons and hagiography of the

Byzantines is a power not to be despised, even apart from its historical

value.

[Illustration: THE ACROPOLIS TO-DAY]

Again, it was not to these conventional tricks, in the first instance,

that Plato was averse. He was logician enough to appreciate the high

educational value of making thought move in regulated periods (a thing

that many people overlook nowadays); but the heaven-born poet felt that

this intellectual mechanism was antagonistic to the direct unconscious

self-revelation of emotional experience. The thing that roused him to

passionate protest was the claim laid by rhetoric to the formation

of youth. This had to be begun on a fresh system, the old training

in music and gymnastics being no longer adequate. The question was

between a scientific and philosophical education (Plato was thinking

particularly of mathematics, to which we also devote attention) and a

conventional and mechanical training of the mind. There is no question

that the rhetoricians provided the latter. It is rhetoric that our own

schools desire to achieve by the practice of speaking and writing in

the mother-tongue, and rhetoric that they formerly aimed at by speaking

and writing in Latin. This Plato repudiated because it was no genuine

knowledge, while the fact that the rhetorician took upon himself to talk

of everything, irrespective of how much he knew of his subject, and never

attempted to conceal that he aimed at effect and nothing else, appeared

to the disciple of Socrates wantonly immoral. And when Isocrates, the

most successful and systematic teacher of rhetoric, called his form of

instruction philosophy, it must have sounded like mockery in the ears

of the genuine philosopher. In youth, Plato had experienced in his own

case that no poetic form was suited to portray what was to him the

noblest of all visions--Socrates in converse with his pupils and with

the sophists. He felt within himself the capacity to embody this vision

directly by the reproductive power of imagination without any other

stylistic conventionality than that of his own poetic fire. Thus in the

divine madness of the poet, of which he speaks later in his _Phædrus_, he

found the form to suit him. This form he perfected, and created, in the

height of his power, works in which we find all the merits of all kinds

of poetry and rhetoric, but which are, nevertheless, something utterly

apart and unique. In his old age he probably felt that the form was no

longer adequate to the substance; but he did not care to abandon it;

and he who has glowed with enthusiasm with the youthful Plato, in his

elder years willingly gives ear to the style of his old age, because the

soul within has not grown old. Great writers like Aristotle and Cicero,

having safely stored this characteristic form, which was natural to

one period and one person alone, in the pigeon-holes of their æsthetic

system, have indeed produced admirable dialogues. They are counterfeits

none the less, and it is a wholly anti-Platonic classicism which holds

or would hold the dialogue to be the true, or even a particularly good,

method of scientific investigation and statement. Plato’s dialogue is

a miracle which will edify the world to the end of time, like Athenian

tragedy and the comedy of Aristophanes; but it is specifically Athenian.

This is why Aristotle at his best abandoned dialogue in favour of a

plain statement of ideas. Had the efforts of Aristotle been attended

with success, the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy would have

been adjusted, inasmuch as rhetorical training would have received its

proper and subordinate place in the philosophical education of youth. But

the unforeseen expansion of Hellenic civilisation did not allow of such

root-growth, and at a later period the power was wanting. In the dialogue

_De Oratore_, that work which has most of the Platonic character, Marcus

Cicero, though himself of the rhetorical school, renews the attempt to

subordinate rhetoric to scientific training. In so doing he reproduced

the ideas of his contemporaries, the successors of Plato in the Academy.

The attempt succeeded neither in Rome nor in Greece. One of the strongest

signs of decadence in the time of the empire is the fact that philosophy,

except where it holds its own in narrow scholastic circles, has to

yield precedence to rhetoric. Where the Latin language prevailed more

especially, philosophy becomes no more than a part of general education;

while rhetoric, thanks to an adherence to Attic models of style that

grows ever closer and more difficult, becomes more and more an empty

game of words that only serves to mask the internal decay which it

precipitates. And yet the sight of the clinging ivy on the trunk of the

dead oak is a fair one.

For centuries the great model of all rhetoricians was Demosthenes. His

inimitable greatness is most plainly manifest in their imitations,

even though they be those of Cicero. He, too, is intelligible only in

connection with his age and his city, the only time and place which could

have brought him forth as their natural fruit. The statesmen of the

great epoch of Athens had wrought with the living word, prisoned in no

written document--thus, Pericles. Gradually the political pamphlet began

to make its way, choosing amongst other forms that of the δημηγορία, or

parliamentary speech. The leading statesmen, indeed, wrote very seldom;

but the literati, whom they made their mouthpiece, in time became a

power in the formation of public opinion. Pre-eminent among these was

Isocrates; he too made use of the form of the δημηγορία amongst others,

his studied arts of speech giving it a character which must have formed

a singular contrast to the words dictated by the passion of the moment

in the Pnyx. It was a result of existing conditions that the speech in

the law courts was sometimes suited to produce its effect as a pamphlet

pretty much in the form in which it had been delivered. The popularity

of rhetoric also preserved many speeches in the courts which had no

particular tendency, and thus, curiously enough, special pleading made

its way into literature. But Demosthenes was the first to rise to the

position of a leading statesman by the publication of orations to the

people or to the courts which he had either actually made or else had

reduced to this form. Simultaneously his works took their place among

the most distinguished classics of his nation. His only education had

been that of an advocate, which included, it must be admitted, all the

arts of speech; nothing that may even remotely be called science ever

touched him. In our moral judgment of him we should apply no standard but

that which he recognised; he took the license which had been taken by

patriotic Athenian statesmen even in the days of Themistocles. Possibly

this did not tally with the Platonic standard, but then, neither did

the state of Athens. The charm of Demosthenes lies in his faith in

the democratic imperialistic ideals of the Athens of Pericles. That

these had long been past hope, was the key to his fate; he himself was

ruined by the fact. That by the power of the spoken word and the faith

that alone makes the word powerful, he almost succeeded in inspiring

his worn-out and selfish nation with his own patriotism, and, that in

spite of everything, Athens once again entered the arena to champion

liberty against Philip with the lives of her citizens--therein lies his

greatness. The tragic side of this greatness heightens its fascination

for one who sees through the illusions of Demosthenes and perceives the

better right, historically speaking, on the side of Philip; but the fire

of the passion of Demosthenes will carry even such a one away. This is

not the charm to which the rhetoricians were susceptible. What held

them spell-bound is what at first alienates our sympathies. Hellenic

art restrained all wildness and passion, reducing it to the smoothest,

most harmonious form. Demosthenes did not speak like this, of that we

are sure. As a writer he practises the art of conventionalisation with

the soundest judgment and the most cautious intelligence--we discover

that this speaker can do whatever he pleases, his power knows no

bounds; but he himself defines the narrow limits consistent with the

growth of harmonious beauty; beauty, if you will, of the style in which

contemporary art adorned its mausoleums; for in the case of Scopas and

Leochares, too, vast pathos slumbers beneath the sweep of the beautiful

line.

Athenian independence and power and that Greek liberty in opposition to

which Philip looked a barbarian and a tyrant in the eyes of Demosthenes,

had in truth long been but a phantom. The attempt made by Athenian

statesmen, from Aristides to Pericles, to transform into an Athenian

empire the confederation of cities which the repulse of the Persians

had called into existence, was the greatest act of the Hellenes in the

sphere of politics. The concentration of their civilisation into a unit

under the hegemony of Athens was achieved. But the issue which the young

Thucydides foresaw when, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war, he

determined to write his history, fell out otherwise than he perhaps

anticipated or than was in all human probability to be anticipated.

Athens had not strength to subdue the Peloponnesus; Sparta subdued Athens

and destroyed the empire--but with the help of the Persians, who were the

real victors. The result was not only the desolation and brutalisation

incident to a long civil war, but a despair of any kind of favourable

issue--indeed of any issue at all. The restoration of the Athenian

democracy, the catastrophe of Sparta, which after Leuctra has as much

as it can do in fighting for its own existence, the ephemeral rise of

Thebes, due to the pre-eminence of a single man, all this has no further

significance in the history of the nation except to emphasise the fact

that none of these little cities could maintain a sovereignty either at

home or over their neighbours; that they existed only in virtue of the

general weakness. Even the Persian might, which imposes its will on the

Greeks so frequently even without the aid of armed force, subsists only

because no one attacks it. What this whole world lacks is a dominant

will to coerce it to its own advantage. It lacks a master. Many are

aware of this, many give voice to it; that state in particular,--founded

in violence and yet powerful,--which Dionysius of Syracuse carved out

for himself by overcoming the Carthaginians in the hour of their need,

widely disseminated this feeling. The fall of his dynasty brought about a

reaction, and the spirit of ancient municipal independence owed its power

to the fact that the monarchy seemed to place even the personal freedom

of the individual in jeopardy. How Philip would have solved the problem

put in his hands on the day of Chæronea, it is idle to speculate. Long

before that, the aged Isocrates had called upon him to take his place as

general of the Hellenic confederacy against the Persians. And now it came

to pass that his son was confronted with this same problem. He it was who

solved it. He is and was the master of whom the Hellenic nation stood in

need.

Demosthenes and all those who were pledged to the old ideals of sovereign

cities, whether oligarchies or democracies, were naturally incapable of

understanding the great king and his empire, but even Aristotle seems to

have thought much as they did, although he had been Alexander’s tutor and

saw clearly the need of reform in society and the petty states, and was

strongly inclined to translate his political theories into practice. His

historical compilations ignore the Macedonian monarchy, and his theories

reveal no suspicion of what Alexander designed and executed. This ought

not to astonish us, even if we see in Alexander the crowning figure of

Hellenic civilisation. For all truly great men in history seem to the

reflective eye of posterity like providential agents appearing at the

right moment to accomplish what has long ago been augured as a need,

prophesied and prepared for. As a matter of fact they accomplish the

result in quite another fashion, a fashion of their own, often contrary

to all anticipation, filled as they justly are with the sense that they

are contributing something new and original. But contemporaries who have

no power of reading history backwards from the event (even if their

interpretation were likely to be sound), experience the clash of this

novel contribution with all the more violence the higher they stand over

the common herd, which after all only takes up the catchword, crying,

“Hosannah!” on Sunday, and on Friday, “Crucify!” Even now it counts

itself singularly sage for taking its catchword from Demosthenes or

Aristotle for the condemnation of Alexander.

Alexander went to Asia with the intention of seizing upon the empire of

the Persian king. This he accomplished, not in a wild orgy of victory but

with the tenacious perseverance which took three years for the conquest

and organisation of the Eastern provinces, but did not overleap itself

by extravagant ambitions. It is only legend that makes him the conqueror

of the world. He was a Macedonian, the hereditary king of a feudal state

which the energy of his father had transformed into a military monarchy.

He was a Greek in the sense which even the journalists had long since

learned to express by saying that it was not race but education that made

the Greek. But he was also recognised as the legitimate successor of the

Achæmenides, and was himself willing to employ the Persians, side by side

with Macedonians and Hellenes, in the service of the empire. His empire

was accordingly not to be based on nationality, it was to rear itself

over the heads of nations and states. He granted self-government in the

widest interpretation of the term to kingdoms, half-civilised tribes,

Hellenic and other towns; he not only respected all local peculiarities

of manners and religion, he even went so far in this direction as to

deliver peoples from a foreign yoke--as for instance in the case of the

Egyptians. But his empire was to be more than a confederacy, it was to

be an effective entity with the imperial rule supreme over all, with the

imperial army a ready instrument of war in the hands of the sovereign,

to compel the Universal Peace, as he called his empire, and with the

king’s officers able to exercise sufficient authority for the protection,

not only of the constituent parts of the empire against one another but

also of the individual against the arbitrary action of the individual

community. Finally, he realised the civilising mission of the state as

fully as any prince has ever realised it; he took in hand the irrigation

of Mesopotamia, founded cities, built harbours, and set about the

scientific exploration of his newly discovered world in a style to which

even the present furnishes few parallels.

The imperial government, like the imperial army, was centred, head and

heart, in the king. On his person everything depended. Absolute monarchy

was the only possible form for the empire. The founder of this empire,

who bore as many wounds on his body as anyone among his veterans, who

commanded in all battles in person, who himself, by ceaseless toil,

carried on the business of administration, might well regard himself as

the true king whose right to rule, even his master, Aristotle, did not

dispute, though he questioned the possibility of such a man’s existence.

But Alexander in no way regarded himself as a sovereign because he had

the power. He regarded himself as a king by the grace of God, not in the

sense of a more or less dubious legitimacy, which many great and petty

sovereigns are apt to advance as sole proof of their title, but in the

sense in which the genuine artist and the prophet may claim to be the

depositaries of the divine spirit. It was the reverse of presumption when

Alexander set the divine element in himself in the foreground. During his

lifetime he exhibited the most scrupulous piety, and it is contemptible

to tax him with hypocrisy; he had far more faith in miracles and oracles

than we are willing to ascribe to the pupil of Aristotle, though we can

readily understand it in the Macedonian and the soldier. To him it was a

revelation from heaven when the Libyan god greeted him as his son. Had

not his ancestor, Heracles, been the son of Zeus and of Amphitryon? For

him personally it was the confirmation of his faith in his own mission,

and the divinity of its ruler gave his empire a religious consecration.

It was consistent with this idea that the worship of Alexander took

its place above the innumerable special cults of tribes and towns, of

families and communities, as the religion of the empire as a whole. There

are many instances of the worship of the sovereign being assigned a place

in the pantheon, side by side with that of the godhead figured under a

thousand different names and shapes; for the worship of defunct monarchs,

the ancient and hallowed practice of ancestor-worship offers a precedent.

The adoration paid to Plato and Epicurus was of a precisely similar

character. Thus, the abuses of which weaklings and miscreants on the

throne, and flatterers and sycophants among subjects, have been guilty,

must not be allowed to neutralise the historical and spiritual authority

of the institution of the worship of the sovereign, which is inseparably

bound up with the institution of the monarchy of Alexander. This monarchy

is the highest phase of political and social organisation attained by

antiquity. For the much-lauded Roman Empire is nothing else than this

kind of monarchy, _imperium et libertas_. Cæsar actually grasped at the

crown of the Greek king. So far as Italy and the West were concerned,

Augustus certainly wished to be the first citizen and no more--the

confidential agent of the sovereign people. But to the Greek half of his

empire he was from the first both king and god, and he owed his victory

not least to his own belief and that of others in the divinity of his

adoptive father. From the time of Hadrian the Augustan theory was in the

main exploded even in the West.

This Hellenistic state allowed Alexander’s scheme to drop; he would have

granted the Persians full rights of citizenship. From henceforth these

rights pertain only to the man who has been Hellenised--the legal stamp

of such a condition being membership of an Hellenic community. This is

clearly manifest in Egypt, where even the Roman emperor bestows Roman

citizenship on no Egyptian who has not been adopted into one of the Greek

cities of the country. (In this connection we may leave institutions

specifically Roman out of account.) For the rest, the king strives to

preserve the ideals of the elder age of Greece, the free man and the

free state. Personal and economic liberty, legal redress, and liberty

of emigration are for the most part secured, not only to the subjects

of a single kingdom, but to all Greeks. In like manner the cities enjoy

a very considerable liberty of action, in degrees ranging from nominal

sovereignty down to the government by royal officials which is presently

established in Alexandria. The ancient Greek municipalities of Asia,

in particular, enjoyed as subjects much greater privileges than, for

example, the cities of Latin countries at the present day. The country,

on the contrary, was almost everywhere allotted to some municipal

community; that tendency with which we are familiar in the Roman Empire,

to convert nations which did not take kindly to town settlements (like

the Celts, for instance) from tribes into towns, if only on paper, is

equally perceptible in Syria. Egypt remained “the country,” _Chora_, but

likewise remained barbarous and enslaved. One of the rocks on which the

civilisation of antiquity made shipwreck was the fact that the farmer

was kept in tutelage or even in bondage by the city, and that he lagged

behind it in education. Slavery, as an institution, has to be reckoned

with only in the western half of the empire; not in Egypt, Palestine,

and large districts of Asia. A community which holds property of its

own, imposes its own taxes, which has its own laws and law courts, its

own constitution and elective magistrates, is free to all intents and

purposes; the fact that it pays a fixed tribute to the king, and leaves

to his decision or award all questions of peace and war, intercourse

with foreign states, or even with communities of its own political

status, and is in many respects practically subject to his control,

does not materially detract from its liberty. The danger of such a

situation lurks in the circumstance that it minimises interest in their

own city among the most capable of its citizens. It offers no career

for effective political action. Worse still, the citizen ceases to bear

arms. The army consists of the royal troops, official rank goes by royal

appointment, and the monarchy alone has great resources at its command.

To this centre, and to courts and capitals, the stir of life and every

kind of talent is drawn. Very few of the free cities, mainly those which

still retained their sovereign rights, like Rhodes, remained centres of

civilisation. Not one of the new settlements became such, unless it was

a royal capital. Doubtless there can be no genuine patriotism when the

citizen takes no part in public life either by counsel or act. Doubtless

a government which rests entirely upon the capacity of the sovereign

can neither he stable, nor in the long run endure. But, on the whole,

we must confess that the Hellenes lived at ease under this kind of

government. The ancient petty states alone chose rather to bleed to death

than to forego the empty name of liberty. We may regard with sympathy the

attempts at confederacies made by Crete, the Peloponnesus and Ætolia; but

we cannot deny that politically they are of little importance; they are

matters of no moment in the history of civilisation.

About the year 330 there were three men who stood forth as the

representatives of the great ideals of life--Alexander, Aristotle, and

Demosthenes. Demosthenes perishes; the time is gone by for his kind of

Greek liberty and greatness; the future is for the heroes of the _vita

activa_ and the _vita contemplativa_, men of action who passionately

assail the Doric ideal of the _sophrosyne_, as Alexander did in taking

the Achilles of Homer for his model. In many cases they are inspired

solely by personal ambition, and the lust of pleasure joins hands with

the love of power. The end is contempt for man and the nausea of satiety.

Of such are Demetrius, the conqueror of cities, and Pyrrhus. But not a

few have learned from Aristotle and Alexander what the duty of a king

is. The first sovereigns of the dynasties of the Seleucids and the

Ptolemies, Antigonus Gonatas and Hiero of Syracuse, devoted a lifetime of

toil and pains to the high duty of sovereignty. Cleomenes of Sparta, the

socialistic dreamer on the throne, perishes in the attempt to renew the

youth of Sparta and the Peloponnesus.

The men of contemplative life vanish from public and often from social

life; they make a habit of living celibate lives in small circles and

communities; doctrine alone, and that often esoteric, takes its place

side by side with research. Those who translate into action what they

have learned from the masters generally contribute little to scientific

inquiry. Philosophy is compelled to an inevitable step, the several

sciences disengage themselves from her. What remains,--metaphysical and

logical speculation,--nevertheless maintains its supreme ascendancy in

virtue of the fact that from this time forward the active, effective

potency of philosophy shines forth, the potency which she exercises as

_magistra vitæ_, as the religion of the heart and the assurance of the

intellect in life and conduct. This power extends its sway over ever

widening circles even though it cannot reach down to the lower classes;

and the gulf between the cultured and the illiterate grows broader and

broader. Athens remains the capital city of this philosophy; this is

its only title to distinction. Wide as are the differences between the

schools, they are agreed in this, that their ideal is the sage, the man

apart, who takes his stand not only above the world but outside it--the

reverse of the kingly type. The historic continuity of the ancient

ideals, Ionian no less than Dorian, is unmistakable.

The various sciences flourish where the necessary means are at their

disposal, that is to say, at the courts. This does not make them courtly

in character, although Eratosthenes and Aristarchus were tutors of

princes; not mathematics alone but all serious learning knows no royal

road for kings. The library, the observatory, the scientific collections,

and the medical school of Alexandria, which far surpass all others, must

be looked upon as directly due to the school of Aristotle; the first

two Ptolemies honoured learning, and for that reason gave it nothing

but means and liberty. In the second century, their unworthy successors

banished the company of scholars, who then found liberty at least in

Rhodes. By tracing the course of mathematics and astronomy we can see

how the scholars of the few places where they laboured with enthusiasm

keep in constant touch with one another by their writings; but splendid

as is the progress made by individuals, the number of those who can

really follow is very small, and we feel that a general stagnation must

set in if this correspondence were to die out and the few scientific

institutions perish. Without the study of pure science that of the

applied sciences will never make progress; it will soon lose ground.

Thus it was, even in the department in which observation and practice

most go hand in hand, in medicine. From his geographical, botanical, and

zoölogical survey, Alexander had left behind an enormous mass of material

which was at first augmented by many additions. Eratosthenes, in his map

of the world, could use some of the astronomical definitions of locality

which had evidently been made for the purpose. This is the origin of the

network of degrees with which the globe is overlaid, and one would have

thought that other scholars would have hastened to verify and complete

it by further measurements of shadows. Not so. True, Eratosthenes stands

at the end of the third century, when the great period of advance is

over, and the evil genius of Greece gathers strength to rest satisfied

with the great things achieved and, by canonising them, to put a stop

to further progress. The criticism of Hipparchus, well grounded as it

was in the abstract, contributed something to this end by repudiating

the good attained and setting hindrances in the way of a greater

attainable good, for the sake of a greatest good that was unattainable.

Every department of natural science presents much the same spectacle.

What has been gained by the labours of the third century, is here and

there carried farther by the few (in many cases, as was inevitable, by

quantitative amplification), but in the main the scientific thinking had

been done; and by no means all the old ideas were transmitted, even in

this petrified form. It was left for the nineteenth century, which in its

own strength has advanced to an incomparable height of knowledge, to look

back and appreciate at its just value the achievements and intuitions of

the earlier age.

In the department of abstract science the accumulation of material,--not

only of the whole heritage of literature, but also of all that was

preserved in the memory of man,--was taken in hand on a scale amazingly

vast. The Ionians had already taken note of the traditions of barbarous

nations; the study was prosecuted in the spirit of Alexander, and

presently Hellenised barbarians, such as Manetho, Berosus, and Apollonius

of Caria, took part in it. Grammar, with philology, lexicography, textual

criticism, and minute exegesis, likewise becomes a genuine science,

the importance of which, again, the nineteenth century has been the

first to realise, when, in the pride of its own strength, it soared

beyond the achievements of this early period. Towards a real science of

history, however, no step had been taken, even in dealing with Homer,

who constituted the centre and culminating point of these studies.

Nor did the Greeks attempt to gain a scientific conception of any

foreign language, not even of Latin. This one-sided view hampered their

historical judgment. Not one of them tried to see from the point of view

of another mind, and their philology and their science of history have

therefore remained rationalistic.

The students in the sphere of language and literature were principally

poets, men whose interest was æsthetic; and the poetry of the time, in so

far as it has come down to us, is either actually erudite or has the airs

and graces of erudition, in that it employs the art-forms of an earlier

period, particularly those of the Ionic school. It displays a vast amount

of taste and elegance; it twines about the stately life of the courts

and the seats of learning, the quiet peristyles of the town houses and

country villas by shore and stream; as rich and ornate as the grotesques

of the loggias in the Vatican and the frescoes of the Farnesina,

obtrusively magnificent as the allegories of the Doges’ palace and of the

Luxembourg. But it no longer brought forth anything that fired the spirit

of the whole nation, and spoke to all mankind. Moreover, it disdained to

seek new forms, and soon prohibited the search for them. No doubt in the

lower and numerically larger classes of society there continued to exist

a poetry which satisfied their needs, a poetry which would probably have

a powerful charm for us by reason of its popular character; but the fatal

evil was that the nation was now altogether incapable of renewing its

youth by the upspringing of fresh elements.

Prose was more national in character and more lucid. Our terminology is

incommensurable with that of the period, and the works themselves have

all fallen victims to the later tendencies of style, but when we see that

the historical novel, the love-story, the _roman comique_, the romance of

travel, and so forth, are Hellenic products, we suspect that intellectual

activity was no less marked in this sphere than in others.

In the third century the bias towards mysticism seems to have been

completely repressed, we find no trace of a popular religious movement

that seizes upon the hearts of men and takes their senses captive. The

Ionian spirit prevails throughout. The gorgeous ritual of worship, the

temple-building and festivals, all bear the stamp of superficiality.

Even the disciples of Plato hark back to Socratic criticism: the

result being the most important scientific work of the age, though to

the uninitiated it looks like pure scepticism. It has its complement,

however, in Plato’s own writings and in the practical recognition of his

moral idealism. The deficiency is none the less unmistakable. Even with

the noblest representatives of active as of intellectual life we breathe

a thin rationalistic air. In the second century mysticism begins to come

slowly to the surface, frequently associated with the ancient name of

Pythagoras, not seldom heralding the irruption of the barbarian element

and barbarian religions. And astrology, with its vain superstitions, has

already made its appearance, having tortured into its service a hideously

shallow pseudo-science.

Even the man in whom the intellectual culture of the Hellenistic period

as a whole is once more grandly embodied at its close does not escape

the contagion of this false doctrine; I mean Posidonius, who, in the

spirit of Aristotle, strove, by voyages of discovery, observations, and

calculations of his own, to unite that side of philosophy which touched

upon natural science with metaphysics and ethics, primarily and mainly on

the basis of the old Stoic school, though strongly influenced by Plato

and Aristotle. Apart from these merits, he was a brilliant portrayer of

manners and chronicler of contemporary history, a loyal adherent of the

Roman oligarchy, even though he preferred to live in Rhodes, the most

independent of free cities. By his monotheism, which was a heart-felt

religion with him, by the mixture of mysticism and reason, the abundance

of his encyclopædic learning and his advocacy of encyclopædic education,

he affected the succeeding age more powerfully than any other man;

especially among the Romans, for Varro and Cicero, Sallust and Seneca

are under his influence. For all our admiration we must confess that he

himself is not free from gross superstition, and that scholarship with

him is in danger of being attenuated to general culture. We can judge

of the change when we remember that he was the pupil of Panætius, the

shallow and shrewd-minded friend of Scipio Æmilianus, who drew up for

the Romans a handbook of the Ciceronian doctrine of duty, afterwards

compiled by Cicero in his _Di Officiis_, and who athetised the _Phædo_,

because the doctrine of immortality appeared to him unworthy of the

admired dialectician.

Posidonius came from Apamea in Syria, and countries in which the bulk of

the population was Semitic furnish a large number of contemporary poets

and writers of all sorts. But the best witness to the power of Hellenism

is supplied by those circles which oppose it, in the front rank the Jews,

concerning whom we have the fullest information. Their independence

in matters of detail is of far less importance than their community

of thought and feeling. In writings like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and

Wisdom, the influence of Greek thought is unmistakable. Before and

during the Maccabæan reaction the subject-matter of the Old Testament

was worked up by Greek methods into novels, epics, and dramas. Prophecy

and apocalypse linked themselves with the poetic oracles of Greece, and

the nationalist movement, the leaders of which soon became Hellenistic

princes themselves, goes but a little way towards severing the threads

of connection. In the early days of the empire, Philo is no less subject

than Cicero to the influence of Posidonius and of Plato. The Pharisees

of Jerusalem, and, still more, the populations of mixed districts, could

not disown the Hellenistic atmosphere they breathed. Without Alexander,

without Hellenism, we cannot imagine the Gospels coming into existence.

The great task of Hellenism was the education of the nation that ruled

it. This was begun in times out of mind, when the Greek character

and Greek weights and measures were adopted on the Tiber, and the

first temples in the Greek style arose in Roman market-places to the

gods of Greece. The Latins had nevertheless preserved their national

characteristics and had tolerated no Greek settlement on their shores.

Now the question was no longer one of ousting the Greek language, but

rather of adopting the whole of Greek civilisation. Greek scholars,

hearing Marcus Cicero speak, lamented that the last advantage of their

nation had been taken from them, not without justice. And yet through the

winning of this soul the West was won for Greek civilisation, even though

it was no less determined that the Hellenes should one day be called

Romæi.

It was of cardinal importance to the history of the world that the

Hellenistic kingdoms were too weak to enter into the decisive struggle

carried on between Rome and Carthage, first for Sicily, (which was

utterly lost to the Greeks,) and then for the mastery of the West.

Rome had already banished Greek influence from Italy. This momentous

fact of the weakness of Greece was the result of Alexander’s untimely

death and of the impossibility of maintaining the unity of the empire,

the struggle for which had lasted fifty years and allowed of the rise of

three great powers which mutually held one another in check. By the time

Rome had overcome Hannibal, Egypt had been so enfeebled by misgovernment

that it put itself, ingloriously but prudently, under the protection of

the Roman republic. Macedonia succumbed, not without honour. The king

of Asia no longer had the power to extend his influence to Europe; he

forfeited to Rome the countries to which he owed that title. But the

fall of the empire, now called Syria, involved the strengthening of that

nationality which Alexander, rightly estimating its value, had desired

to gain over by a share in the government. With the Arsacid monarchy,

Philhellenes though they called themselves, a foreign nationality and

an intolerant religion flung Hellenism back beyond the Euphrates. The

Roman senate undertook the government of the Greek provinces reluctantly,

rightly thinking that the result would be as detrimental to their own

people as to the subject provinces. It is none the less true that a more

ruthless set of blood-suckers has hardly ever fallen upon a defenceless

prey. Despair made the Asiatics see a deliverer even in that savage

Cappadocian Mithridates, thus bringing disaster upon disaster. Rome

herself was utterly out of joint, and finally Greece had to furnish a

stage for the decisive struggles of the Roman revolution. Rhodes, the

last city that had enjoyed some degree of immunity, was pillaged by

the liberators who had murdered Cæsar. How hardened men were to such

catastrophes we have recently learnt when it became known that, in the

time of Sulla, northern barbarians burned the temple at Delphi; a thing

that had been entirely forgotten in the traditions handed down to us.

It has also come to light that probably at that time the whole amount

of capital accumulated and secured in countless institutions was lost,

the festivals of the gods, the games, the banquets all came to an end;

the guilds collapsed, even those of the musicians and actors, who had

provided themselves with charters from all the powers; wide stretches of

the country lay desolate. Some few individuals acquired property which

in the sequel became enormously valuable, and this fact in itself was a

hindrance to any healthy revival.

Augustus was the deliverer who ultimately brought peace and order: and

the Greeks did extravagant homage to their saviour. He deserved it, no

doubt, but fresh sap could no longer rise in the decrepit and mutilated

tree. Hellenism had seen everything perish that fire and sword could

destroy; the sole thing left intact was the intellectual heritage of her

forefathers. With them she took refuge, they proved themselves victorious

even over the Romans, her lords. Thus was consummated the process which

determined the future of the world, the process by which the nation not

only resigned all political aspirations, but blotted out the whole of

the last three centuries, insisted on speaking as Plato or Demosthenes

spoke, or even like Herodotus and Lysias, forgot even the deeds of

Alexander in contemplating Salamis and Marathon, and actually went so

far as to dispute the possibility of progress in poetry and philosophy

(inclusive of the several sciences) beyond that of the classic age,

which it chose to conclude with the Attic period. Imitation was now the

only safe way, the very principle of progress was challenged. This was

the case even more in theory than in practice; the plastic arts, for

example, still continued to do original work, because artists are seldom

burdened with literary culture. But in the whole sphere of language

the results could not fail to be disastrous, for the gulf between the

educated classes,--who, by virtue of schooling and study, could twist

their speech into the mode of three centuries ago and more,--and the

populace,--whose speech, thus deprived of all ennobling influences,

rapidly degenerated,--presently became so wide that they hardly attempted

to arrive at a common understanding. The difficulty of artificial modes

of speech made it necessary for rhetoric and the art of style to take the

first place in the schools, and words gradually stifled ideas. Nor was

novelty in the latter thought desirable, they were all the more welcome

if they were as classic as the words. The whole object of life was really

nothing more than a repetition of forms, and of substance (so far as

there was any substance), hallowed by antique usage. Even so obsolete an

institution as the gymnastic games was revived, the old religious worship

was laboriously restored; in the second century after Christ, Apollo

began once more to dispense oracles in verse. The authority of Homer

was exalted to an extravagant pitch; every one knew him who had been to

school at all. In extensive circles the use of Homeric phrases passed for

poetry, the Homeric Olympus for religion, and now, for the first time, he

took the place held to-day by the Old Testament among those who have no

other book. This is most plainly manifest in Christian polemics.

Under the liberal and Philhellenic government of the dynasty that came

to the throne with Nerva, the world prospered; in a material sense Asia

has never been happier. The age could boast of orators who spoke like

Demosthenes and Plato in one. A certain amount of philosophical training

prevailed among educated men; lovable and able individuals are not

lacking; such men as Plutarch, who paints that copy of real Hellenism

which the heroes of the French revolution adopted instead of the

original, and who transmits to Montaigne, for example, a large portion

of the worldly wisdom of the Greeks. The work of compilation by which

astronomy and geography are summed up by Ptolemy, grammar by Herodian,

and medicine by Galen, is of the utmost value from the standpoint of

history. A shallow Semitic pamphleteer like Lucian copies the graceful

forms of antiquity with such skill, that in the Renaissance and the

days of the Éclaircissement he passes for a leading representative of

the Greek spirit. But the age is in its dotage for all that; there is

natural science without experiment, abstract science without unbiassed

examination, knowledge without philosophy. The deeper souls have reached

a point at which their strength lies in resignation. Hope, the only

treasure of all those in Pandora’s box to remain with man in the youth

of the nation, has now fled. None have now a living faith save those

who renounce the world. The Platonic Eros is no longer a force, and the

Agape is known only to those to whom Paul has revealed it. Men’s souls

are weary; presently their bodies too begin to sicken. Æsculapius is the

only god of heaven whose worship flourishes side by side with that of the

emperors, the gods of the empire; the feeble health of the individuals

of whom we hear most becomes a disquieting factor; under Marcus Aurelius

the first great wave of mortality sweeps over the empire. From this point

the downward course is rapid, especially when, with Severus, the empire

falls into the hands of barbarian generals. Nor must it be forgotten that

Augustus greatly circumscribed the eastern half of the empire, which he

permitted to remain Greek. He romanised the Danube provinces, Illyria,

Africa, and even Sicily. Every year the East sent a strong contingent

to the West, and though the fact contributed the largest share to the

assimilation of Greek culture by the West (in Rome, for example, the

language of the Christian congregations was Greek until some time after

this), these emigrants were none the less permanently lost to the Greek

nation. In the East the ancient nations were astir; as early as the

second century an Aramaic literature begins, in Phrygia inscriptions

appear in the vulgar tongue; in spite of Longinus, the Palmyra of Zenobia

is not a Greek city any more; there is an alarming increase of spiritual

force in barbarian religions; even in that which came across the frontier

from the Parthians. In those circles into which Gnosis, so-called, leads

us, which did not consist wholly of ignorant persons, the Greek element

is only one of many. The imperial army becomes more and more a force that

makes for barbarism. No wonder that civilisation collapses, with the

empire out of joint, and the ravages of the Germans--whom the classicism

of the age dubs Scythians, in the phrase of Herodotus--just beginning.

By their misdeeds at this period the Goths and Vandals richly earned the

secondary sense attached to their name, though it has been mistakenly

associated with the devastation of Italy and Africa. They reduced Greece

to a desert, they destroyed Olympia; worse still, they annihilated the

prosperity of Asia. The athletic games which had taken the place of the

gymnastic contests of antiquity, but had always retained something of

the spirit of the latter, practically came to an end. All that peace

had allowed to come into being--temples, monuments, and theatres--was

destroyed to build inadequate walls. Far and wide the thin stratum of the

educated classes that overlaid a people half estranged from civilisation

perished entirely. Some sort of order was restored by Diocletian and

Constantine, but the place of the Greek king had now been taken by

the oriental sultan; the free man had died out. Then came the church,

which presently forbade freedom of thought. Origen was a thinker and

philological student almost without peer among his contemporaries.

Eusebius had no equal among the scholars of his day. It was therefore not

the fault of Christianity if these two men had no successors, but gave

place to the purblind, and barely honest superstition of Athanasius and

the vulgar abuse of Epiphanius. On the contrary, Christianity showed its

affinity with Hellenic civilisation by the very fact that they withered

together. Its earthly victory should dazzle the eyes of those least of

all who believe in the kingdom of God that Jesus preached. Of this there

is hardly a trace at the council of Nicæa.

The qualities that were at work in the decay of civilisation were

essentially Greek--satisfaction in present achievement, and reverence

for authority. The classicist movement allowed them to gain exclusive

sway. Hand in hand with them went a fine sense of form; the imitative

faculty has never attained greater triumphs. Christianity also submitted

to the yoke of classicist rhetoric; the impressive sermons of the great

Cappadocians bear witness to this, no less than the childish _Symposium

of the Virgins_ of Methodius. In league with the church, this formal

culture has the great merit of having preserved a large portion of the

literature of antiquity as an aid to education. The Greek faculty of

abstract thought showed itself mighty for good and evil. In the midst

of the terrible third century, it was able to take refuge in the purer

air of immaterial conceptions, though at the cost of the delight in the

visible world characteristic of the Ionic school.

There was little of Plato but his name and the mysticism of his old age

in this last great philosophical movement which called itself after

him; and it was never more alien to the Greek spirit than when it tried

by fantastic necromancy to hold fast the ancient system of religion.

The same mode of thought practically prevailed to the same extent on

Christian soil, not only in the many circles which the church had

repudiated; orthodox dogma is itself but one of these systems, though

one that was canonised and preserved for centuries together with the

whole body of classical civilisation. This torpor is naturally repellent

to us, especially when we contrast it with the active progress of the

Roman church which takes the task of civilising the West out of the hands

of imperial Rome and surpasses all she has done. Nevertheless, there

is a certain grandeur in the spectacle of this ancient and mummified

civilisation preserving the Greek nation from utter wreck, in the face,

ultimately, of enslavement to a barbarous race and a stern and aggressive

religion. But if such a great political and intellectual future as

we should wish them is ever to smile upon the Greeks, or rather, the

Romæi, it will not come by way of the repristination of any obsolete

form whatsoever, it will not be brought about directly by the spirit of

antiquity, whether Greek or Christian; but the whole nation must become

new by the assimilation of the modern culture of the West. The West, it

must be borne in mind, did not imitate the Hellenes, it made a right use

of its heritage from them to liberate itself and renew its youth. This

service they still render, and will continue to render, to the individual

man. By lifting their eyes to the glory of Greece, whether it be Homeric

or Doric, Athenian or Hellenistic, men will evermore gain strength to be

free and to enter willingly into the service of the Idea, and thus, if

they have strayed from the right path, will learn to find their way back

to nature and to God.

Politically the Greeks did not gain the mastery of the world, they

did not even attain to national unity; but a homogeneous civilisation

for the whole world, nevertheless, came into being through them. In

such a civilisation for the future we too believe, and we labour to

realise it because we desire and advocate the fellowship and concord

of many nations, countries, and languages. But the civilisation of the

world knows no stronger tie than the groundwork common to all genuine

civilisations; and that is our heritage from Greece.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS

[The letter[a] is reserved for Editorial Matter.]

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE REIGN OF TERROR IN ATHENS

[b] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _History of Greece_.

[c] XENOPHON, _Hellenics_.

CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE DEMOCRACY RESTORED

[b] GEORGE GROTE, _History of Greece_.

[c] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._

[d] ARISTOPHANES’ _Plays_.

[e] EURIPIDES’ _Plays_.

[f] LYSIAS’ _Orations_.

[g] THUCYDIDES, _History of the Grecian War_.

[h] PLUTARCH, _Lives of Illustrious Men_.

CHAPTER XXXIX. SOCRATES AND THE SOPHISTS

[b] WILLIAM MITFORD, _History of Greece_.

[c] PLATO’S _Phædo_ (translated by Henry Carey).

[d] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._

[e] XENOPHON, _Memorabilia_ and _Apologia Socrates_.

[f] CLAUDIUS ÆLIANUS, _Varia Historia_ (translated by A. Fleming).

[g] DIODORUS SICULUS, _Historical Library_.

CHAPTER XL. THE RETREAT OF THE TEN THOUSAND

[b] WILLIAM MITFORD, _op. cit._

[c] XENOPHON, _Anabasis_ and _Catabasis_.

[d] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._

[e] FRIEDRICH D. SCHLOSSER, _Weltgeschichte_.

CHAPTER XLI. THE SPARTAN SUPREMACY

[b] KARL O. MÜLLER, _The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race_

(translated by Tuffnell and Lewis).

[c] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._

[d] JOHN B. BURY, _History of Greece_.

[e] ARISTOTLE, _Politics_.

[f] VICTOR DURUY, _Histoire des Grecs_.

CHAPTER XLII. SPARTA IN ASIA

[b] WILLIAM MITFORD, _op. cit._

[c] XENOPHON, _op. cit._

[d] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._

[e] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._

CHAPTER XLIII. THE CORINTHIAN WAR

[b] WILLIAM MITFORD, _op. cit._

[c] XENOPHON, _op. cit._

[d] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._

[e] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._

[f] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._

[g] GEORGE W. COX, _The Athenian Empire_.

[h] JOHN B. BURY, _op. cit._

[i] BARTHOLD G. NIEBUHR, _Lectures on Ancient History_.

CHAPTER XLIV. THE RISE OF THEBES

[b] ERNST VON STERN, _Geschichte der Spartanischen und Thebanischen

Hegemonie_.

[c] XENOPHON, _op. cit._

[d] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._

[e] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._

[f] JOHN GILLIES, _History of Ancient Greece_.

[g] JULIUS BELOCH, _Griechische Geschichte_.

[h] ADOLF HOLM, _History of Greece_.

[i] JOHN B. BURY, _op. cit._

[j] GEORGE W. COX, _op. cit._

[k] GEORG BUSOLT, _Griechische Geschichte_.

CHAPTER XLV. THE DAY OF EPAMINONDAS

[b] BARTHOLD G. NIEBUHR, _op. cit._

[c] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._

[d] GEORGE W. COX, _op. cit._

[e] WILLIAM MITFORD, _op. cit._

[f] ERNST CURTIUS, _Griechische Geschichte_.

[g] ERNST VON STERN, _op. cit._

[h] CONNOP THIRLWALL, _op. cit._

[i] PLUTARCH, _op. cit._

[j] DIODORUS SICULUS, _op. cit._

[k] XENOPHON, _op. cit._

[l] PAUSANIAS, _A general description of Greece_.

CHAPTER XLVI. WHEN THEBES WAS SUPREME

[b] GEORG WEBER, _Weltgeschichte_.

[c] XENOPHON, _op. cit._

[d] GEORGE GROTE, _op. cit._

[e] ISOCRATES, _Archidamus_.

[f] CICERO, _Tusculanarum Disputationum Libri V._ and _De Oratore_.