ATHENS: FROM THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS TO
MENANDER
“Know that our city has the greatest name amongst all men
because she never yields to her misfortunes. And even should we
ever be compelled to yield a little—for it is nature’s way that
all things bloom to suffer loss—there will abide a memory that
we made our dwelling-place to be a city dowered with all things,
and the mightiest of all.”
THUCYDIDES, _Oration of Pericles in the Assembly_.
After the battles of Salamis and Platæa the Athenians brought back their
families to Attica. Athens was a scene of desolation: the walls
destroyed, the dwelling-houses ruined heaps, the sanctuaries burnt, the
statues and other dedicatory offerings broken or carried off by the
Persians. But the invaders had not carried off Athena Nike. Æschylus
puts his own triumphant feeling into the mouth of the Persian messenger
who brings the news of the defeat of Xerxes to Queen Atossa:—
“The city of the goddess Pallas gods preserve.
(QUEEN)
What say’st? The city? Athens? Is it still unsacked?
(MESSENGER)
Yes, in its living men its bulwark stands secure.”
Euripides, also, reëchoes this word of Æschylus and denies the sack of
Athens. As a matter of fact little remained save a few houses used as
Persian headquarters. But the blackened walls of the old temple on the
Acropolis still stood in grim protest against the violation of the
Virgin’s home and as an appeal to the citizens to provide her with a
fairer abode. The appeal was not disregarded. In the fifth century the
city was extended and the Acropolis was adorned with monuments of
sculpture and architecture. The gods and the public needs came first.
Private dwellings in the fifth century were not imposing. The old
Marathon fighters and their immediate descendants were content with
private simplicity. In the fourth century, however, private luxury came
uppermost. Demosthenes contrasts the unequalled splendour of the
temples, statues and public buildings of the old time with the
moderation in private life, which, he says, was so marked “that if any
of you perchance knows what sort of a house was the dwelling of
Aristides or Miltiades or any of those then eminent, he sees that it was
no whit more stately than those next door—while to-day upstarts have
built themselves private houses more stately than the public buildings.”
Systematically to discuss the fifth and fourth century references to
specific sites—buildings public and private, stoas, temples, theatres,
gymnasia, music-halls, courtrooms, sanctuaries and statues, walls and
gates, the place of the Assembly, the market-place and the markets,
fountains, streets, and wards, would require several volumes. And
although it is possible to present by inference a reasonably clear
picture of the environment and daily life of the citizens, yet the exact
identification of the majority of the sites in the remains existing
to-day is either impossible or a matter of conjecture. Apart from the
Acropolis buildings but few conspicuous ruins or memorials of these two
great centuries are left for actual inspection. The continuous
occupation of Athens by successive generations of changing masters has
obliterated or buried (perhaps for future identification) the greater
part of the city that lay around the base of the Acropolis. It is only
surprising that so much remains. It is not meagre except in comparison
with what has disappeared.
Around or over all that is left of Classic, Hellenistic, or Roman Athens
is the modern city, effacing itself in patches at the behest of the
archæologist, or developing slowly in accordance with its own needs.
In this chapter, however, we have to do directly only with the Athens of
the fifth or fourth centuries. If the physical remains from this period
are fragmentary, the literature, although itself but fragments of the
whole, is the great bulk of existing classic Greek literature outside of
the epic, the earlier philosophers, and the lyric. And this _corpus_ of
literature was in large part native Attic. At the same time the talent
from without gravitated also to Athens. Herodotus from the Dorian
Halicarnassus not only wrote in Ionic, but adopted the Athenian attitude
so largely as to vitiate in part his value as an independent historian.
Hippocrates, the great Ionian physician, visited Athens. The Sophists,
though coming from the North, the West, or the islands, found in Athens
the appropriate environment for a “circuit” faculty of an unarticulated
federal university. Prose, seasoned and adorned, became henceforth an
asset of the Athenian intellect and was made ready for the use of
historian, orator, and philosopher. Athens, mistress of the seas, and
herself producer of art and literature, needed no protective tariff
against intellectual imports.
This very wealth of fifth and fourth century literature imposes
limitations, more rigid than our uncertainty about this, that, or the
other site, upon the effort to interpret the external Athens from the
more enduring monuments of her thinkers. Nor is it true that the nexus
between Athens and her literature may be made clear only by definite
localization. We do not wish the conditions reversed. Although, for
example, the courtrooms and the Lyceum have disappeared, we may, as we
wander about Athens to-day, come much nearer the Greeks of the classic
age than if, while the buildings had remained intact, the words of the
orators and of the great Peripatetic could no longer reach our ears. The
so-called “Theseum,” largely perfect as it is and invaluable for
architectural and artistic suggestion, leaves us cold in the lack of
literary association as compared with the Propylæa where many an
old-time Athenian rubs elbows with us as we pass in and out between its
stately columns. But in a wider sense we may “localize,” here on this
Attic plain around the Acropolis and here under this Attic sky, the
poetry and prose of the fifth and fourth centuries.
A brief summary of this poetry and prose will perhaps suggest more
clearly the larger pattern from which, almost arbitrarily, selections
may be made.
In the fifth century, lyric was brought to its perfection by singers not
of Athens. But Ceos, the birthplace of two of them, was moored close to
Attica. Simonides, the poet-laureate of the Persian wars, was much in
Athens, and his nephew Bacchylides took the Attic Theseus for the theme
of two of his extant poems, wrote one of his epinician odes in honour of
an Athenian victor, and composed another poem expressly in laudation of
Athens. Pindar himself studied in Athens, and afterwards, to his own
townspeople’s disgust, praised her in no grudging terms. The Athenian
drama itself, in the chorals of tragedy and of Aristophanes, contributed
much of the greatest lyric extant in Greek literature.
Tragedy in the fifth century grew from infancy to maturity at Athens.
When Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had completed their work it had
received its final form for the Greeks, and was so transmitted to the
great actors and the lesser playwrights of the fourth century.
Comedy likewise culminated with Aristophanes in the fifth century. More
flexible than tragedy, however, it could humour successfully the
changing moods of the body politic and retain its vigour through the
whole of the fourth century. Even under Macedon, Menander in the New
Comedy could recast much that Euripides had tried, with varying success,
to embody within the canonized limits of orthodox tragedy.
History was the gift of the fifth century. Herodotus after the Persian
wars bridged with his epic prose the Ægean, and we reach _terra firma_
in Thucydides’s history in the latter part of the century. In the first
part of the fourth century we have Xenophon, the historian, biographer,
essay-writer, and historical novelist. These were precursors of a line
of historians appearing sporadically even down through Byzantine times.
Oratory, an inalienable inheritance of the Hellene even before Athena
coached the crafty Odysseus, received at Athens a certain finality of
form, or forms, that has imposed its influence upon the occidental,
whether Roman or Englishman, lawyer or epideictic speaker. The unwritten
word of statesmen like Pericles, fusing the persuasion of the politician
with the keener rationalism of Anaxagoras and the raucous, but not
wholly unpatriotic, opportunism of demagogues like Cleon or Hyperbolus,
was paired with the more decently draped pragmatism of the Sophists, and
resulted in the selected group of the “ten” orators, of the fifth and
fourth centuries. There was the somewhat archaic Antiphon, the dignified
criminal lawyer; Andocides, who brought his rough and ready style to
bear upon burning questions of contemporary politics; Lysias, the son of
an alien, but truly Attic, the younger friend of Socrates, the lucid
narrator, the relentless prosecutor; Isæus, the capable testamentary
barrister; Isocrates, who both saw the building of the Erechtheum and
outlived the battle of Chæronea, and whose over-finished oratory
transmitted the florid adornment of Gorgias to the schools in which
Cicero was trained; Demosthenes, greatest of all, whether in private
suits or in his arraignment of public foes, whose terrorizing cleverness
was quick to strike or counter like the flashing arms of the athlete
impeded with no ounce of florid superfluity; Æschines, his great
antagonist; Lycurgus; Hyperides; and Dinarchus.
Philosophy as a native Attic product matured last of all. Ionia had
produced the great “physical” philosophers, and Pythagoras had gone in
the sixth century to Italy; but in the first half of the fifth century
the so-called “colonial” philosophers, like the foreign Sophists,
influenced Athenian thought—some of them by personal visits. They came
from the East and from the West. Parmenides came from Italy, and his
influence was felt by Socrates and transmitted to Plato and Aristotle.
The aristocratic Empedocles came on a visit from Sicily. Anaxagoras from
Ionia settled at Athens in his youth. His “chaos-controlling mind”—the
primal force of reason—impregnated the statesmanship of Pericles and
engendered the rationalism of Euripides. The Athenians might banish the
philosopher, but his “primal force of reason” was already busy in
rearranging the chaos of traditional beliefs. It emerges clearly in
Plato as intelligent Mind. Socrates, though not himself a writer, is the
central figure of philosophic literature. Pre-Socratic thought focussed
in him as in a burning-glass. From him shoot out the divergent rays of
the Academics and Peripatetics, the Cynics and the precursors of the
Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics. No one of his disciples reproduced his
views with any exactness, but he stimulated self-examination and
independent thought. Each took from him what he could or would, and
developed differing or mutually exclusive schools. Like the rivers of
Greece, coursing for a time through the underground “katavothras,”
pre-Socratic speculative thought on physics and metaphysics flowed on
beneath the open devotion of Socrates to ethical questions, and
reappears in his successors.
Plato in the fourth century constituted himself the ethical and
philosophic executor of Socrates. Loyalty and a wide vision alike
combined to perpetuate his master’s name in the intellectual output of
the great Platonic dialogues. It has been the work of centuries to
disentangle the real views of this sleeping partner from those of
Plato’s own constructive intellect, which built, pulled down, and reared
anew the dwelling-places for the minds of many men in many generations.
Aristotle, like Anaxagoras, came as an alien and settled in Athens in
his youth. After the death of his master, Plato, he left Athens,
travelled, and became the tutor of Alexander. After the accession of his
royal pupil to the throne, he established at Athens in the Lyceum a
rival school to the Academy.
Antisthenes, half Athenian, half Thracian, the faithful follower of
Socrates, had before this established the Cynic school in another
gymnasium, the Cynosarges, where the victors fresh from Marathon had
encamped. Socrates, the barefoot friar, the new avatar of Heracles, was
his patron saint. Later in the century Zeno the Stoic set up his
eclectic school in the Painted Porch of the Agora, and Epicurus, of an
Attic father though born at Samos, established his school in his own
Gardens near the Dipylon.
Theophrastus, the friend of Epicurus and of Menander, gives us in his
“Characters,” at the close of this period, vivid portraits of Athenian
life which supplement the fragments of Menander and the other writers of
the New Comedy, and also, as pupil and successor of Aristotle, carried
on his master’s teachings in the Lyceum. Thus one pupil busied himself
in transmitting through his intellectual heirs the esoteric thought of
his master, while Alexander, another pupil, had constructed on lines
that paralleled the intellectual imperialism of his teacher a material
_organon_ of Empire (utterly at variance with his master’s conception of
the ideal state) that no successor could wield alone until Rome reached
forth and grasped it in her iron hand.
But to understand at all the meaning of the literature, it is also
necessary to remind ourselves of some of the more striking features of
the history of these two centuries. They are crowded with conspicuous
figures and with events significant to the philosophic student of
political institutions.
In general the fifth century exhibits the rise and downfall of the
imperialistic policy, the fourth century the rehabilitation of a
chastened democracy, with sporadic echoes of a federalizing ideal. But
no one policy can be predicated of the fifth century. It varied with the
great leaders, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, and others—the old in
conflict with the new; conservative, aristocratic democracy against
imperialism; democracy against oligarchy; ochlocracy against democracy.
When the Persian peril was thrust back, the irrepressible conflict
between Sparta and Athens emerged. The struggle for the hegemony between
them, or between varying combinations of the Greek states, was to
continue at intervals until the time when all the old powers of Greece
were to succumb to Macedon.
Themistocles, the hero of Salamis, was ostracized from Athens within
eight years of the great sea-fight, but his spirit still animated his
countrymen, and his policies were afterwards revived or expanded. His
rival Aristides guided affairs at home, and Cimon, the son of Miltiades,
sailed with the conquering Athenian navy. His victory at Eurymedon in
468 B. C. made it possible to fortify Athens and Piræus and to merge the
Confederacy of Delos in the Athenian Empire. In seven years more Cimon
in turn was ostracized, but at the end of another seven years the rich
treasure of Delos could be transferred to Athens and the empire formally
established. It was to last until the disaster at Ægospotami, in 405 B.
C. Pericles, after successfully competing with the reactionary
patriotism of statesmen like Thucydides, obtained, at the ostracism of
the latter in 442 B. C., the controlling power at Athens, which he
guided by his regal persuasion for the next fifteen years. The
imperialism of Pericles realized the policy of Themistocles on the seas,
reaped the harvest of the great Cimon’s victories, and transmuted the
treasure of Delos into the sinews of war and the monuments of the
glorified Acropolis. He reshaped the civic life, even curtailing the
sacred powers of the Areopagus, and by popular changes in the complexion
of Council, Assembly, and Law Courts, prepared the way for the uneven
rule of demagogues after his own strong hand should be withdrawn. He had
great odds to contend with. After the renewal of the Peloponnesian wars
in 431 B. C., with the succession of victories and reverses, the Great
Plague came to assert an unlooked-for hegemony. On the suffering and
disasters of the city followed the trial and condemnation of Pericles
himself. He was indeed reinstated as indispensable, but his death in the
following year left Athens at the mercy of the demagogues—with
Alcibiades to follow. The Sicilian expedition, the crowning venture of
imperialism, issued—as was to be expected with no real successor of
Pericles to direct it—in the disaster of 413 B. C., when the brave
Syracusans, with the willing help of Sparta, dissipated the Athenian
dream of vast colonial expansion.
The next ten years was for Athens a losing struggle at home and abroad.
The short-lived oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 B. C., the
strenuous but vain efforts of Theramenes to reconcile oligarchy and
democracy, the civic strife and war with the powerful Lysander, the
crushing defeat at Ægospotami, the intervention of Sparta, the brief but
terrible régime of the Thirty Tyrants, completed, in 404 B. C., the
final overthrow of imperial Athens. But Sparta, with politic generosity,
while doing away with the empire, left Athens free to establish a more
stable democracy that was to last through the greater part of the fourth
century. Oligarchy could no more find a hearing, and, although Hellenic
federations were eloquently advocated by the orators and actually
formed, despotic empire was no longer feasible for the Athenians. Their
new leader, Conon, however, the foe of Sparta, could succeed after
Lysander’s death in making Athens independent and strong. We come upon
his work now and again in Athens and in Piræus, and in the renascent
civic life the intellectual life went on with new vigour. The imperial
dream finally came true, but from the outside. The Macedonian, though
sneered at as barbarian by Demosthenes, confirmed at the Olympic games
the validity of his Hellenic claim that he had asserted at Chæronea. The
fitful struggle against the sway of Macedon only resulted, under a
successor less philhellenic than Philip, in the forced suicide of the
great Demosthenes and the execution of Hypereides, whose funeral
oration, pronounced over the dead heroes of the “lost cause,” carries us
beyond the great speech of Pericles—pronounced on a similar but less
hopeless occasion—back to the heroes of Marathon and Salamis. Speaking
of the dead leader Leosthenes, he says: “In the dark under-world—suffer
us to ask—who are they that will stretch forth a right hand to the
captain of our dead?... There, I deem, will be Miltiades and
Themistocles, and those others who made Hellas free, to the credit of
their city, to the glory of their names.”[8]
Footnote 8:
Translated by Jebb, _Attic Orators_.
We sit to-day beneath a Greek sky on the rising tiers of the modern
centuries, and the drama of Athenian life is reproduced before our eyes.
The greater protagonists of literature and life play out their rôles.
Many another actor plays his less prominent but essential part. The
“mutes” contribute. The chorus of democracy is seldom absent from the
scene. The binoculars of modern historians penetrate behind paint and
mask and robe, and the squalor of the real actor is at times laid bare.
We may choose, however, to ignore minutiæ and to give ourselves up to
the more satisfying perspective of the literature, and to let sweep
before us the bright procession of form and colour, the song and saga,
the Dionysiac revel and tragic mimicry that fill out the real drama of
life.
Æschylus connects the old and the new Athens. Before Marathon he
produced his first play; in the interval before Salamis he gained a
first prize; and he brought out his greatest dramas in the time of the
Renascence, of which he was a great part.
The bare hill of the Areopagus claims attention as we descend from the
Propylæa. It rises as a physical barrier between the deserted site of
the old city of Theseus and that of Classic or of Modern Athens. With
the sanctity attaching to the time-honoured prerogatives of its
venerable court it was also a moral barrier between the old and the new
in the days when Pericles was reshaping the civic life. And Æschylus in
his “Eumenides,” the third play of his great trilogy, strove as best he
could to reconcile old traditions with the inevitable readjustment to
the life of imperial Athens. He spoke with the authority of a Hebrew
prophet. Whatever else was changed, blood-guiltiness must be judged.
Only within the mysterious gloom of the cleft beneath the Areopagus
could the dread and ancient Furies, spawn of Night, be transformed into
willing coadjutors of the goddess of Wisdom.
[Illustration: AREOPAGUS]
The Furies in hot haste have pursued from Delphi Orestes, the
mother-murderer. Confidently anticipating the verdict, they cry:—
“Over the victim thus we chaunt,
A frenzy and madness his mind to daunt,
A hymn of the Furies to fetter the mind,
A withering blight to human kind.”
The god Apollo himself appears for the defendant, and when the decision
goes against the Furies by Athena’s casting vote in the Areopagus Court,
their bitterness against the “new” gods shoots forth like the serpents
uncoiling in their hair:—
“Ah upstart gods and parvenu!
My ancient laws your hoof-beats spurn.
Ye wrested them from out my hand,
Alas for you!
I, though dishonoured and distressed,
Upon this land
The grievous weight of my wrath shall turn
And from my breast
Shoot venom on venom, woe for woe,
Drop upon drop of a poison flow
For Earth unbearable, unblest.”
Athena pacifies the Furies by promising them a local sanctuary and the
reverence of the citizens for all time. The old order is reconciled with
the new, and the Furies, now the Eumenides—the Propitious Ones—are
escorted to their dwelling in the cleft of the Areopagus by Athena’s own
attendants, boys, maidens, and matrons, with ceremonious honour equal to
the Panathenaic procession:—
“Fare ye on to your home in your emulous might
With our loyal attendance, ye children of Night.
(O my countrymen, bless them and praise them!)
“In the caverns of eld, in the womb of the Earth
With the offerings of honour befitting your worth.
(O my demesmen, now bless them and praise them!)
“Nay, then, righteous and gracious in mind to our land,
Come, come, O ye Dread Ones, take joy in our band.
(Cry aloud now! Exult in your singing!)
“As the torches attend, let libations be poured,
Thus the all-seeing Zeus and the Moiræ as ward
To the people of Pallas their presence afford.
(Cry aloud now! Exult in your singing!)”
The great mass broken off from the east end of the Areopagus rock has
partially blocked the cleft into which the chorus conducts home the
Dread Goddesses. As the procession, chanting its hymn, sweeps around the
shoulder of the hill, the faded picture of ancient Athens regains its
outlines as if under some powerful reagent. Wine-press and fountain,
precincts and temples, rise again from their ruins; the throbbing life
of the eager citizens reappears. But the gaily-dressed people have
hushed jest and carping under the sense of awe evoked by Æschylus. The
Athenians were then, as St. Paul on this same Areopagus called them long
afterwards, “very scrupulous,” and it was no unworthy superstition that
made it imperative to harmonize the cruder conceptions of the immutable
laws of Retribution with the new and expansive wisdom of Athena.
Swinburne, with keen insight into the universal application of the great
drama, brings the “shadows of our deeds” under wisdom’s searching but
not unkindly light:—
“Light whose law bids home those childless children of eternal night,
Soothed and reconciled and mastered and transmuted in men’s sight
Who behold their own souls, clothed with darkness once, now clothed with
light.”
The visitor who takes his stand to-day immediately in front of the south
side of the Areopagus is completely sequestered from the modern city.
Here the Acropolis and the Areopagus rock make practically a continuous
barrier to the close-built streets that on the northern side come
crowding up their slopes. He is encircled with hills, and this ancient
quarter of the city of Theseus lies waste and silent around him. The
ground is harrowed and scarred by the spade of the archæologist. Only
the foundations of sanctuaries and fountains, houses and cisterns, may
be distinguished.
The rock-chambers opposite, called by courtesy the “Prison of Socrates,”
will, however, recall us to classic Athens. While waiting for the return
of the mission-ship from Delos to bring the day of execution, Crito and
the rest listened to Socrates’s demonstrations of immortality. Plato
sent his reason out as far into the invisible as reason can go. In the
“Phædo,” after his half-playful periegesis of the underworld, Socrates
is made to say: “Whosoever seem to have excelled in holy living, these
are they who are set free and released from these earthly places as from
prisons and fare upward to that pure habitation and make their
dwelling-place in yonder land.... Therefore we must do our utmost to
gain in life a share in virtue and wisdom. For the prize is noble and
the hope is great!” or, as he adds presently, “The risk is fair.” And
Socrates, like Pindar before him, finds the crowning joy of a blessed
immortality neither in the unlaborious sunlit life by night and day, nor
in the ocean breezes, nor in the flowers of gold blooming on trees of
splendour, but in the company of the great and noble dead with whom to
live “’twere more of happiness than tongue can tell.”
On the Pnyx hill we may recall the Athenian Assembly, and may turn in
fancy the voluminous pages of Congressional Records filled with
patriotism and jealousy; we listen to Pericles and his persuasive
schemes for imperial expansion; or to Socrates, president for the day,
refusing, amidst the clamours of _demos_ and demagogues, to put to vote
the illegal proposition to condemn in a body the ten generals; or to
Demosthenes pleading, denouncing, planning for the welfare of the city.
Or in the half-light before dawn we may see the suffragettes of
Aristophanes’s “Ecclesiazusæ” filing up the hill. More wily than their
modern sisters, they have disguised themselves with beards and have
dressed in the shoes and cloaks distrained from their husbands,
imprisoned at home by naked necessity. With no man to oppose, the women
quickly transfer the whole control of the State to themselves, and
institute reforms that would put to shame the most radical of modern
socialists. A slave, in the “Wasps” of Aristophanes, once had a dream by
no means respectful to the Athenian legislature. Some sheep, with cloaks
and staves, sat huddled together like just so many Athenians on the
seats of the Pnyx, holding an Assembly. To-day the hill is left lonely,
and the wandering goats, with their solemn faces and long beards, might
renew the sittings unmolested.
In the face of the hill fronting towards the Acropolis, the rock-chamber
of the Callirrhoë spring, with its sloping entrance and the parapet
within, has been suggested as the original of the famous cave in Plato’s
“Republic.” The Vari Cave, on the south side of Hymettus, might have
made less of a strain, as has been urged, upon Plato’s imagination.
However faint the resemblance of the Callirrhoë cave to Plato’s complex
setting, it is enough to emphasize the vitality of this realistic
figure, which has become typical, in modern poetry and prose, of the
denizens of earth watching and naming the shadows thrown by the
fire-light upon the cave’s wall, unable by reason of fetters to look
around at the objects moving behind them, much less to rise and climb
the long ascent to the brighter light above.
The innocent-looking ravine west of the Hill of the Nymphs is identified
with the Barathrum. In antiquity its fame had penetrated to the
underworld, where the innkeeper’s maid threatened to pitch the
Pseudo-Heracles “into the Barathrum.” And Herodotus’s apocryphal story
is at least _ben trovato_. He relates that, when the ambassadors of
Darius came asking tokens of submission from the Greeks: “Some [the
Athenians] took the messengers and threw them into the Barathrum, others
[the Spartans] into a well, and bade them take earth and water from
there to their King.” Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, if we are to
believe the allusion in the “Gorgias,” barely escaped with a fine and
banishment instead of the criminal’s end in this same pit.
If even the skeleton of the Athenian Market-place could be resurrected,
like that of the Roman Forum, many scores of allusions would take on a
local habitation. The Agora was the centre of life. In classic times it
probably lay in the depression west of the “Theseum” hill, and extended,
from the slopes of the Areopagus, northward about to the modern Hadrian
street. Pindar, with no idle flattery, spoke of the “fair-famed Agora,
in sacred Athens, inlaid with cunning workmanship.” Sculptor, painter,
and architect gave of their best. The Prytaneum, close to, or in the
Agora, was the city’s fireside. Distinguished foreigners and citizens
here and in the Tholus enjoyed, temporarily or for life, the public
hospitality. Socrates ironically suggests to his judges that the
sentence really fitting his case would be: “Maintenance in the
Prytaneum, much more so indeed than if any one of you has come off
victor at Olympia with a race horse, a pair, or a four-horse team.”
Plutarch relates that Aristides, far from enriching himself from the
public purse, left not even enough for his funeral expenses, and that
the Athenians “married off his daughters from the Prytaneum at the
public cost—voting a dowry of three thousand drachmas to each.” In the
stoas that faced upon the Agora the citizens heard and discussed many a
new thing, from the days when the great painting of the battle of
Marathon was fresh in the Painted Porch, to the time when the Stoics
appropriated this colonnade. In time of war a man would look fearfully
at the bulletin board near by, to see if his name was posted for
military duty; or in time of truce would feel that yonder beautiful
group of Peace with the child Wealth best reproduced to the eyes the
blessings so often absent during the wearisome Peloponnesian
wars,—blessings which Bacchylides, the admiring neighbour of Athens, had
celebrated:—
“And now for mortals Peace, the mighty mother, giveth birth
To Wealth and bears culled flowers of honey’d minstrelsy.
She makes on sculptured altars of the gods to blaze
Thigh pieces, in the yellow flame, of bullocks and of thick-fleeced
lambs,
And lets the youths give thought to athletes’ toil and flutes and
revelry.
Now in the steel-bound hand-loops of the shield
Are stretched the dusk-red spiders’ woven tapestries;
The barbèd spears, the two-edged swords are cankered o’er;
The trumpet’s brazen blare is still.”
To be near the Agora was a desideratum. The cripple, in Lysias’s
oration, asking the Senate to continue his pension, refers to the fact
that every one in Athens has his favourite lounging place: “One
frequents the perfume-seller’s, another the barber’s, another the
cobbler’s; and as a rule the most of them lounge into the shops set up
nearest the Agora, and the very fewest resort to those most remote from
it.” Socrates, too, seeking his audience where the crowds gravitated,
was often heard talking “in the Market-place near the bankers’ tables.”
Aristophanes, together with the other comic writers, and Lysias and
Theophrastus tell not only of other resorts—like the fuller’s shop, the
shield-and-spear-maker’s—but of many special sub-markets. Thus there
were by the Agora the “Pottery” and the “Vegetable” Market, and,
somewhere near, the “Green-cheese,” the “Garlic,” the “Wine,” the “Oil,”
the “Fish” markets. Of the Bird-market we hear in some detail in
Aristophanes,—the live pigeons in cages, strings of ortolans, thrushes
abnormally inflated, and blackbirds with “feathers shamefully inserted
in their nostrils”! In time of war the country folk thronged into town
to escape the armies that were devastating Attica. In times of peace,
too, they came trooping in on the first of the month, and to the
oft-recurring festivals. Menander, with his blended Stoicism and
Epicureanism, looks around in the crowded Agora and compares human life
to a festival or market-fair:—
“That man, O Parmeno, I count most fortunate
Who quickly whence he came returns, when he, unvexed,
Has looked on these majestic sights—the common sun,
Water and clouds, the stars and fire. If thou shalt live
An hundred years, or if a very few, thou’lt always see
These same sights present, grander ones thou’lt ne’er behold.
So reckon thou this time I’m speaking of as though
Some market-fair or trip to town, where one may see
The crowd, the market, dice and loungers’ haunts;
Then, if thou’rt first unto thy lodgings, with more gold
Thou’lt go upon thy travels and shalt pick no brawl;
While he that tarries longer, worn, his money gone,
Grows old and wretched, and forever knows some lack,
A wandering vagrant finding enemies and plots,
And gains no death that’s easy, staying out his time.”
A broad avenue, flanked with porticoes, ran from the Market-place
northwest to the Dipylon gate. This double gateway, impressive even from
the remains of its foundations, quickens the memory to recall the
generations of citizens and foreigners that have passed this way. Along
the roads from Colonus and the Academy and the Sacred Way from Eleusis,
converging outside the gates, will come a motley throng of Athenian
ghosts, gay or scurrilous, militant or philosophic, to blot out the
consciousness of the modern city. Outside the Dipylon, in the “Outer
Cerameicus,” is “the Street of the Tombs.” Some of the beautiful
monuments are still _in situ_ to stimulate a detailed study of the rich
material in the National Museum. It was here that the Athenians usually
buried their dead. The roll-call of great names stirs the imagination
here as in Westminster Abbey. This is no exclusive privilege of one
place or people. But there is often an appropriate _genius loci_. As one
lingers along the Appian Way, for example, deciphering inscriptions and
pausing before the weather-beaten faces on the monuments, there is a
lurking pessimism and an insidious melancholy that flow in from the
beauty of the Roman Campagna. Here, however, in this _proastion_ of
Athens, this Suburb of the Dead, the memorials still in place, with
their unpretentious sincerity, give rather a sensation of beauty and
hope in perpetuating scenes from actual life. Even a scene of parting
has less of hopeless finality. The warrior on his horse, the woman with
her jewel-box, suggests life and love, not death and lamentation. Along
yonder road from Eleusis came many an initiate fresh from the Mysteries,
and some may well have been ready to listen with hope to Pindar’s
“trumpet-blast for immortality”:—
“For them the night all through,
In that broad realm below,
The splendour of the sun spreads endless light;
’Mid rosy meadows bright,
Their city of the tombs with incense-trees,
And golden chalices
Of flowers, and fruitage fair,
Scenting the breezy air,
Is laden. There with horses and with play,
With games and lyres, they while the hours away.”[9]
Footnote 9:
Translated by J. A. Symonds.
Whether or no we choose to identify with Charon the old man in the boat,
represented on one of the stelæ still standing, Death and Life here
confront each other. Æschylus, in his early allusion to Charon’s boat,
draws the contrast by an antithesis of the black sails of the ship of
Theseus to the god of Light, and speaks of the “rowing” of the mourners’
arms causing—
“that dark-sailed mission-ship, upon whose deck Apollo treads not and
the sunlight falls not, through Acheron to pass unto that shore unseen
where all must lodging find.”
And Euripides prepares his audience for the pathetic departure of
Alcestis to the underworld by a sharp dialogue between Apollo and Death,
who is at once as old and as lusty as Death in the Morality plays.
[Illustration:
STREET OF THE TOMBS
Monument of Hegeso
]
After the battle of Chæronea Philip sent back the ashes of the dead
Athenians, and Demosthenes counted it the highest honour to deliver
their funeral oration. But the noblest association with this spot is the
great oration of Pericles, who was chosen in the course of the
Peloponnesian War to pronounce the public eulogy over the dead warriors.
These were borne along in cypress chests, with one empty litter to
represent those whose bodies had not been recovered. The long speech is
the incarnation of the Athenian spirit and of Pericles’s own undaunted
policy. Thucydides represents him as saying:—
“They received praise that grows not old and a most illustrious tomb;
not that in which they here are laid but wherever, as occasion arises,
there remaineth the ever-living glory of their word and work. For the
whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men, and not only in their own
land does an inscription upon columns tell of it, but in other lands an
unwritten memory dwells within the mind of all.”
The “Cerameicus” was soon to receive Pericles. The great plague carried
off the orator’s sons, and, overcome by grief and the shipwreck of his
plans, he died himself in the next year.
Thucydides describes the plague with appalling vigour. The misery and
danger were aggravated by the congestion of the country folk crowding in
to escape the Peloponnesian invaders. Bivouacked in stifling “shacks”
during the hot summer, they died uncared-for and lay where they fell,
dying upon one another, at home, in the streets, or by the fountains
where they had tried in vain to quench their fever.
In the “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles the plague at Thebes is pictured
in terms certainly reminiscent, at least here and there, of what must
have been the most awful memory of the poet’s life. The blight that has
fallen alike on the land and on its inhabitants is described by the
Chorus:—
“Nay, for no longer the glorious Earth
Yieldeth her young; nor by ever a birth
Of a child do our women change sorrow to mirth.
You may see how they’re flocking like birds of unrest
Or swifter than fire’s unquenchable quest,
Afar to the shore of the God in the West.
“They are unnumbered, dead and dying,
The city’s children, unpitied they’re lying,
With no one to mourn them, outstretched on the ground,
Death and pestilence spreading around.”
Thucydides relates, too, that the Athenians discussed an ancient oracle
which told how a “Dorian war will befall and a pestilence come as
companion”; and that in the midst of their despair they could debate
whether the oracle said “pestilence” (λοιμός) or “famine” (λιμός),
either word being appropriate enough. History repeats itself. At Athens
in 1906, during a virulent outbreak of smallpox, with the pest-houses
overflowing, the newspapers calmly turned to the really vital question
of the proper Greek word for the disease—whether it should be evloyiá
(εὐλογιά), or effloyiá (εὐφλογιά).
Amidst the splendour of the public buildings the dwelling-houses long
remained insignificant. The streets were dark at night. The houses had
few windows to let out such light as might come from the “dim and stingy
wick” of some miser watching his hoards, or from that of a perplexed
father reckoning up his son’s horse-racing debts, as we find old
Strepsiades doing in the “Clouds” of Aristophanes:—
“The month’s end’s coming and the interest rolling up.
I say, slave, light a lamp and bring my ledger here.
. . . . . . . . .
SLAVE (_entering_).
There’s scarce a drop of oil in this here lamp of ours.
STREPSIADES.
O my! Why did you, tell me, light that thirsty lamp?
Come here that you may get a weeping!
SLAVE.
And why so?
STREPSIADES.
Because you put in one of those fat, greedy wicks.”
In the “Wasps” the jurors, out before dawn to secure a job at the
court-room, pick their way along the dark streets with only the
link-boys to guard them against stumbling-stones and refuse.
MEMBER OF CHORUS.
“Let’s march by the lamp and everywhere look well about, around us,
Lest here or there should be some stone to trip us and confound us.
BOY.
Watch out there, father, father, for this dirt, watch out!
MEMBER OF CHORUS.
Pick up a chip here from the ground and snuff the lamp.
BOY.
No, with my finger _thus_ I choose to snuff the lamp!
MEMBER OF CHORUS.
What’s got into your head, with hand to shove the wick,
And that when oil’s so scanty? There, you fool, take that!”
The flat-roofed houses were low. Highwaymen could sit on the roofs and
jump down on their victims. Burglars, who preferred a change from the
conventional method of digging through the soft bricks, could climb over
the house-wall. The street-mire and “Apaches” were familiar in
violet-crowned Athens. Demosthenes on occasion loads his terrible
Gatling gun with details picked up from the street. In his oration
“Against Conon” he describes a brawl. The plaintiff recites how the said
Conon and his crew had met him near the Leocorion at the Agora, tripped
up his legs, trampled him in the mire, cut his lip, and bunged up his
eyes; how, finally, as he lay there, Conon was egged on by the others to
flap his arms like wings and to crow over him like a victorious rooster.
The Gymnasia of Athens emphasize one of the most characteristic features
of Athenian life—the close interrelation of the physical and the
intellectual. Here the youths were trained in their naked beauty; here
the philosophers collected their data; here they afterwards taught their
doctrines. To-day, unhappily, we must content ourselves with recalling
the natural beauty surrounding the Academy at Colonus, or reconstructing
scenes like those in the “Euthydemus,” the “Charmides,” the “Laches,” or
“Lysis” of Plato. At the opening of the “Lysis” Socrates is making his
way close under the outside of the north wall of the city, bound from
the Academy for the Lyceum, which was probably somewhere east of the
present King’s Gardens. Thus the path between Plato’s Academy and the
future school of Aristotle was worn by the footsteps of their great
predecessor. Socrates on this occasion, however, was deflected by an
eager youth to enter a new palæstra just opened near the fountain of
Panops, possibly near the gate of Diochares now placed by conjecture
near the intersection of the Street of the Muses and Boulè Street. He is
persuaded without difficulty and holds a discussion on Friendship with
the handsome youths gathered there. In the “Charmides” likewise he goes
to another palæstra, Taureas, which was near the Itonian gate, probably
not far from the Olympieum. He had just come back the evening before
from the engagement at Potidæa, and is eagerly questioned about the
battle. As usual, he guides the talk into other channels and there
follows a discussion upon Temperance.
Although the sites of the courts are uncertain, we know what went on in
them. The Athenian passion for litigation is a commonplace. Lucian’s
Icaromenippus, looking down from the moon on the kingdoms of the classic
world, characterizes the inhabitants thus: “I could see the nomad Scyths
in their wagons; the Egyptian farming; the Cilician buccaneering; the
Spartan flogging; and the Athenian pettifogging.” So, in the newly
organized Bird-town of Aristophanes, one of the first visitors,
following hard after the parricide, is a Law-suit-hatcher. He “cannot
dig,” but is not ashamed of his blackmailing trade. He comes to the
birds for wings to bear him around among the Isles as “Summoner.”
The “Wasps” is a comedy directed against this frailty of the Athenians.
The old Philocleon (demagogue-lover), on account of his inordinate
passion for sitting on juries, is forcibly detained at home by his son
who, to console his father, arranges a trial of the dog Labes (Snap) who
has rushed into the kitchen and devoured a Sicilian cheese. The trial is
conducted with detailed and rigorous conventionality. The defendant is
finally acquitted, thanks to the puppies, who are brought into court and
“whining beg him off, entreat and weep!”—a parody on the common but
illegal method of influencing a jury, which Socrates scorned to adopt
when on trial for his life.
With the exception of the Acropolis itself, the great Dionysiac Theatre
perhaps offers most to allure the visitor. Although in its present
state, with the later disfigurements of Roman times, we can only with
difficulty form a detailed picture of its structure even in the fourth
century, yet the slight traces of the circular orchestra, now identified
beneath it, entitle the visitor to associate with this site the classic
drama and to give free play to not unnatural sentiment. It is an epitome
of the Athenian drama. It interprets, and is interpreted by, a wide
range of literature. Here, too, in later times were gathered popular
assemblies. Here, looking over plain and sea, sat generations of
citizens and guests to be moved to laughter or to tears. Here the
“Shameless Man” of Theophrastus managed to get himself and his children
in for nothing by manipulating the places which he had purchased for his
foreign visitors.
And not only could the philosopher Theophrastus find subjects for his
character sketches among the theatre-goers, and turn the critics into
material for his critique, but his friend, the playwright Menander,
could in his comedy use the dramatic troupe as matter for his
sententious characterization. Already in the time of Aristophanes the
chorus was unequally constituted: some members trained as star
performers to take a more active part, others to move as mutes in the
background. Menander utilizes this custom to illustrate, in a fragment
preserved to us, the workers and the drones of life:—
“Just as in choruses not every one doth sing,
But certain two or three mere speechless dummies stand
Filling the rows, so here ’tis somehow similar:
_These_ fill a space, while these, to whom God grants it, _live_!”
The precinct of the Asclepieum, adjoining the Theatre, was a Sanatorium
where religion and faith-cures were combined with actual medical skill.
In the “Plutus” of Aristophanes the blind god, Wealth, is restored to
discriminating vision. His head was covered by “Panacea” with a purple
cloth, and two expert snakes operated upon his eyes.[10] This comic
scene is not, it may easily be credited, too much of a burlesque upon
some of the practices at such places. Magic miracles, including the
“absent treatment” of recalcitrant lovers, are not unknown in other
ages. But a visit to the famous health-resort of the great school of
Hippocrates, on the island of Cos, will tend to inspire a respect for
Greek therapeutics. The “open-air” treatment on the mountain terrace
overlooking the sea may have been modern enough, and, along with the use
of the sulphur spring, suggests both technical knowledge and common
sense.
Footnote 10:
See Gardner, _Ancient Athens_, pp. 429 ff., for a vivid account of
this scene and subject.
Close by the Theatre to the east, hemmed in by modern houses, the
beautiful little circular shrine, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates,
reminds us of the cost and rivalry attendant upon bringing out the
dramas. The weathered sculpture around the top speaks once again of the
inseparable connection of Athenian life and literature. It carries us
back to the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus. The pirates who kidnapped the god
are here undergoing punishment; some, already half changed into
dolphins, are diving into the sea. In the hymn the pirates, who have
carried off the youth in his purple robe, deem him a rich prize for
ransom. But the vine with clustering grapes that presently entwines sail
and yards proclaims the god. He transformed himself into a bear, then a
lion, and they at the sight,—
“All of them shunning the doom that was on them, together out-springing,
Leaped to the water divine and, leaping, were turned into dolphins.”
The combination at Athens of natural beauty and material splendour with
moral and intellectual worth called forth praise from both guests and
citizens. To Bacchylides of Ceos the city is “spacious Athens,”
“splendour-loving.” The Graces “wreath-winning and violet-eyed” are to
dower his songs with honour when he addresses himself to its specific
praise:—
“Brooding thought of the Cean isle
Poet’s care men praised erst-while,
Weave me now a web of song
Resplendent, fit for Athens strong
Where love and loveliness belong.”
And Pindar, fresh from the gardens of Thebes, was impressed by the
beauty of Athens at the vernal Dionysia:—
“The portals of the chamber of the Hours open wide, and growing
plants, now nectar sweet, perceive the advent of the fragrant Spring;
then, then on earth immortal shower the lovely tufts of violets, then
in the hair the roses are entwined.”
A guest-present most highly prized by the Athenians is preserved in
another fragment from Pindar:—
“Radiant, violet-crowned, by minstrels sung,
Bulwark of Hellas, Athens illustrious.”
But Aristides the Just might have as easily escaped ostracism as could
this overworked epithet, “violet-crowned,” escape the irreverence of
Aristophanes. Whenever foreign envoys, he says, wish to cheat us
Athenians, they call us “violet-crowned,” and forthwith we are all
attention.
Among all the native poets no one has given freer expression to his
feeling for the beauty of Athens than Euripides, unhappy in his personal
life and iconoclastic in his attitude towards old traditions. He
breathes the air, stainless and of a more ethereal violet than the sea,
and sings of the concord of Wisdom and the Heavenly Aphrodite:—
“Blest are the children of Erechtheus of the olden time, the children
of the happy gods, who from a land inviolate and sacred feed on wisdom
famed afar, and go upon their way forever, daintily enfolded by that
bright, bright air.
“And Cypris, drawing water from Cephīsus flowing fair, breathes down
upon the land the gentle breath of winds with sweetness laden and ever
with her hair encompassed with blown roses’ fragrant coronals keeps
sending down the Loves who have their seat by side of Wisdom,
coadjutors they of Virtue manifold.”
Through the transparent candour of the philosopher’s robe the soul of
the poet Plato is ever shining. But like Æschylus he is a poet militant.
If he walks by the Ilissus he interprets in terms of the spiritual the
physical charm of tree and water and the chirping insect; if he goes
down to Phaleron, the Ægean does not bring in for him “the eternal note
of sadness,” but his soul has “sight of that immortal sea which brought
us hither”; and in the heaven’s vault, overarching Attica, he sees “many
ways to and fro” where drive the chariots of the gods whom “he who will
and can” may follow, “for from the choir divine all grudging stands
aloof!” If to Plato the Athens of the fourth century seemed imperfect,
if he was even embittered by the judicial murder of his master, it was
with the truest patriotism that he turned to construct an ideal state.
His sense of law and order was deep-rooted. It was with lofty optimism
that he urged his hearers not to rest content with politics as they are,
but to look to “the pattern that is laid up in heaven for him who wills
to see and, seeing, so to plant his dwelling.”