BŒOTIA, CONTINUED
“Helicon maidens, the Muses! Their name be my prelude in singing!
They in their keeping have Helicon’s mountain, majestical, sacred.
There they go threading the dances by violet pools of the fountain,
Soft are their feet as they circle the altar of mighty Cronīon.”
HESIOD, _Theogony_.
Epaminondas told the Bœotians that their country was the stage of Ares,
and several battles fought on their soil were of national significance.
At Leuctra Epaminondas defeated Sparta. At Tanagra Athenians and
Spartans first tried their strength against each other. At Delium the
Athenians were defeated by the Bœotians in a struggle in which
Alcibiades and Socrates took part. Alcibiades, who saved his master’s
life, afterwards told their friends that in the retreat Socrates behaved
exactly as he did in the streets of Athens, “turning his eyes
observantly from side to side, though drenched with rain, and calmly
looking about on friend and foe.” Above all, at Chæronea and Platæa
occurred momentous events.
Late in September of the year 479 B. C., one hundred and forty-one years
before Greek liberty was surrendered at Chæronea, there was fought near
Platæa, in the plain between Cithæron and the Asopus, the last of the
battles “wherein the Medes of the crooked bows were overthrown.” The
work begun at Marathon was here completed. “The rest of the army died in
Bœotia” was an Æschylean line calculated to arouse an Athenian audience.
And an exquisite Herodotean story was fostered if not created by the
desire of the Greeks to believe that the Persians had a foreboding of
their disaster. Herodotus had the story from Thersander of Orchomenus. A
Theban gave a dinner to Mardonius and fifty Persian nobles. The Persian
who shared Thersander’s couch said to him:—
“‘Since here at table thou hast shared my food and my libation, I would
leave with thee a memorial of my judgment that thou too, informed
beforehand, mayest know how to plan for thy advantage. Dost see these
Persians feasting here, and that host which we left encamping by the
river? Of all these within brief space of time thou wilt behold a few
survivors only.’ And as the Persian spoke these words he let fall many
tears. Whereat Thersander, struck with wonder at his speech, replied:
‘Well, then, ’t were fitting to say this to Mardonius and to those next
after him in honour.’ To that the other said: ‘My friend, what needs
must happen by the will of God it is not possible for man to turn aside,
and then, too, none is wont to yield to warnings, however credible, and
many of us Persians, although our eyes are opened, follow on,
constrained by necessity. This pang is bitterest of all, for men to know
much and to have power over naught.’”
The battle of Platæa occurred because Mardonius, the general of Xerxes,
undertook to oppose the Spartan Pausanias, commander of the Greek
allies, as he was making his way from the south, over the passes of
Cithæron, to attack disloyal Thebes. The Platæans, true to the
patriotism they had displayed at Marathon and Artemisium, joined the
Greeks. The battle lasted for some days and was, as usual, retarded and
complicated by the inability of the Greeks to coöperate; but it ended in
the defeat and death of Mardonius, the capture of the luxurious Persian
camp, and the final discouragement of the Orient. Herodotus’s account of
the battle not only contains strategic details but is full of episodes
which, even if they are but traditional or the creations of his own
audacious vivacity, illustrate the truth that the conflict was one of
civilizations and of ideals. The Persian cavalry leader, Macistius,
glows in scarlet and gold, and when he is killed his men fill all Bœotia
with the clamour of their grief. The Greek officers show his naked body
to their soldiers because it is “worth seeing for its stature and
beauty.” Mardonius gallops in on his snow-white charger where the fight
is hottest and leads to death the picked guard of one thousand men, the
flower of the Persian army. A Spartan kills him, but Pausanias refuses
to maltreat his dead body even though the Persians had crucified the
body of the Spartan Leonidas at Thermopylæ. In the camp of Mardonius are
found a silver throne, a brass manger for the horses, and countless
utensils of Oriental luxury. Pausanias orders served on the same spot a
Spartan supper.
Modern historians have complained that Herodotus perpetuated and
“consecrated” the illusion of the Athenians that they played a worthy
part in the battle, while in reality they were but half-hearted and the
battle was won by the “discipline and prowess of the Spartan hoplites.”
Herodotus did, however, admit that though the Athenians fought well the
Lacedæmonians fought better, and when, with characteristic Greek
emphasis on individuals, he discussed which single men were most
courageous, he assigned the first four places to Spartans.
In any case the Spartans did not fail to receive full credit for the
victory from their contemporaries. Pindar called Platæa the glory of the
Lacedæmonians as Salamis was the glory of the Athenians. And Æschylus,
even within the Dionysiac theatre, attributed the Persian defeat to the
“Dorian spear.” Perhaps no one regretted that both the Athenian and
Spartan dead who were buried on the battlefield were honoured in
epitaphs by Simonides. For the Athenians he wrote with dignity:—
“If valour’s best apportionment
Be noble death,
To us, elect, hath Fortune lent
This victor wreath.
For Hellas Freedom’s crown to gain
We made the quest,
And ageless glory we attain
Here laid to rest.”
But the Spartans inspired his finer eloquence:—
“Glory unquenchable their country
Hath on her brow,
But death’s pale cloud the men who crowned her
Enfoldeth now.
Yet, dead, they die not. Glory’s herald
Descends the dome
And from the halls of Death, triumphant,
Now leads them home.”
When Platæa next appears in a great passage of literature she is shorn
of her glory, the helpless prey of a foreign enemy and a hostile
neighbour. During the Peloponnesian War, in 431 B. C., the Spartans
conquered the city and, to please the Thebans, razed it to the ground.
Thucydides’s account of the tragic occurrence includes the speeches made
to the Spartans by the Platæans, who prayed for their lives, and by the
Thebans, who urged their murder. That no speeches in Thucydides are more
dramatic has been generally conceded from the time of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus. They have made it bitter even now to remember that the
selfish opportunism and merciless rancour of the Thebans prevailed
against the memories of “the great days of old,” invoked by the
Platæans: “Look yonder to the sepulchres of your fathers slain by the
Medes and buried in this land. Them we have honoured year by year with
public offerings of raiment and such other things as usage calls for....
Pausanias gave them burial here because he felt that he was placing them
with friends and in a friendly land. But you, if you shall slay us and
shall make Platæa Theban land, what do you else in this than leave your
fathers and your kinsmen, bereft of honours that are theirs, among
murderers and in a hostile land? Nay more, you will actually enslave a
country in which the Hellenes won their liberty and bring to desolation
sanctuaries of the gods in which they prayed before they gained mastery
over the Medes.”
The desolation fell. Later the little town was rebuilt, destroyed once
more, and finally restored, though somewhat meanly, in the time of
Alexander. Now not even a modern village brings life to the ancient
site. Only ruins of the Alexandrian walls remain.
Bœotia had several important religious centres outside of Thebes. More
penetrating than the trumpet of war were the voices that called the
Greeks of north and south, and even the barbarians of the east, to the
sanctuary of oracular Apollo on the slopes of Mount Ptoön, or to the
oracle of Trophonius (a local deity probably to be identified with Zeus)
at Lebadeia, which is beautifully situated on the western side of the
Copaic plain looking toward Helicon and Parnassus. The Ptoön precinct
was already abandoned in Plutarch’s time, and even more deserted than it
is to-day when archæologists outnumber the occasional shepherds in
search of mountain pasture. But the oracle of Lebadeia retained its
sanctity into Roman times and was consulted by both Plutarch and
Pausanias. In our day the same river in which the suppliants used to
bathe, in preparation for the difficult sacred rites, turns the mills
and factories of one of the busiest industrial centres of northern
Greece.
Religion in Bœotia, as everywhere in Greece, furnished an artistic
impulse. Contests of poetry and music were held at almost every centre.
Architecture, sculpture, and painting were represented by the most
famous masters. A temple renowned for its beauty was that of the Graces
at Orchomenus. Within it, on a happy day in the fifth century, a chorus
of boys lustily sang an ode written by Pindar for one of their fellows
who had won a foot-race in Pisa’s famous valley. The young champion had
doubtless illustrated the influence of his native divinities whom the
poet celebrates:—
“O ye who have your dwelling in the land of goodly steeds that shares
the waters of Cephisus, Queens of radiant Orchomenus, O Graces famed
in song, ye Guardians of the Minyans in ages gone, give ear! To you I
pray! For by your gift come all things sweet and pleasant unto man—his
wisdom, beauty, and the sheen of victory. Nay, not the gods themselves
can lord it over dance or festival without the Graces pure, for as
comptrollers of all heaven’s deeds they have their thrones beside
Apollo, Python-slayer with the golden bow, and reverence th’ Olympian
Father’s majesty eterne.”
To moderns the most familiar of all the shrines of Bœotia is that of the
Muses on Mount Helicon. So familiar, indeed, has it become through
tradition and poetry that its geographical position is as unimportant as
that of Raphael’s Parnassus. It almost perplexes us to localize Helicon
as the eastern peak, now called Zagora, of the southern portion of the
group of mountains that lie between the Copaic plain and the Gulf of
Corinth; and to know that at the northern foot of this peak still
nestles the valley, green and shady and traversed by a mountain stream,
where once foregathered the iris-haired, golden-snooded Muses.
Hippocrene even, struck out by the hoof of Pegasus as he flew toward
heaven, is identified with the modern Kryopegadi, a very cold and clear
perennial spring high up on the eastern side of the mountain within a
little green glade encircled by fir trees. Helicon is still the home of
fir-woods, oak groves and strawberry shrubs. Pausanias said that nowhere
else could the goats find sweeter berries, and nowhere else could be
found so many healing herbs. Hellebore, the ancient cure for madness,
grew here in abundance.
In spite of the almost incalculable importance of the worship of the
Muses and their pervasive presence in poetry, Greek literature scarcely
concerns itself with their localized abode. Sophocles breaks the strain
of the “Œdipus Tyrannus” by a fleeting vision of the nymphs sporting
with Dionysus on the far-off heights of Helicon. And Hesiod was inspired
to write his “Theogony” by a vision of the Muses that came to him as he
slept on the mountain “majestical, sacred:”—
“High on the summit of Helicon chorals they sing to their dancing,
Lovely, desire-enchaining, yet strong and with supple feet glancing.
Thence in tumultuous riot, with veils of the darkness enringing,
Onward they fare in the night, and lovely the voice of their singing.”
For the most part it is only in Alexandrian poetry, from which Roman
poetry derived a large part of the material which it passed on to modern
poetry, that we find Helicon and Hippocrene figuratively used as sources
of inspiration.
Certain Bœotian towns illustrate other traditions of culture. Thespiæ,
in the territory of Platæa, was used by Cicero to illustrate what was so
little understood and so greatly scorned by the Romans—the Greek love of
art. Nothing could so embitter the conquered people of Greece as to take
from them or pretend to buy from them their works of art. “Believe me,”
Cicero urges, “no community in the whole of Greece or Asia ever sold of
its own accord to anybody any statue or picture or civic ornament. For
the Greeks take marvellous delight in things which we despise. What
would the Thespians take for their Eros, the only thing that attracts
visitors to their town?” This was the Praxitelean statue which the
sculptor himself ranked with his Faun as his best work and which Phryne
obtained from him and presented to her native city. Eros was the tutelar
divinity of the place, originally worshipped in the form of an unwrought
stone. The statue, called forth by the æsthetic taste of a later age and
passionately appreciated by the people, was taken to Rome by Caligula,
returned by Claudius, stolen again by Nero. Pausanias saw only a copy
when he was at Thespiæ. Now no copy like the familiar Capitoline copy of
the Faun supplies us with half knowledge. But a visible symbol of
Thespiæ’s other claim to remembrance has been left to us, to enrich the
fragmentary wall and the few foundations that alone at present mark the
ancient site. Not only did the city share in the victory of Platæa, but
more daringly in earlier years, when the struggle with Persia was on the
“razor’s edge” of uncertainty, she had sent her strongest men to die
with Leonidas at Thermopylæ. The fragments of a stone lion similar to
the lion of Chæronea are thought to mark the grave of these sons of
Thespiæ who were inspired by—
“An ardour not of Eros’ lips.”
In the eastern valley of the Asopus, or Vourieni, lie the not
inconsiderable remains of ancient Tanagra, a city more popularly known
to-day for its artistic taste than any other Greek city, except Athens.
As early as 1874 excavations of its necropolis began to yield in
extraordinary abundance the small terra-cotta figures which now adorn
many museums, and in copies, more or less successful, have become a
staple article of modern trade. These figurines, rough in finish but
scrupulously lovely in shape, were objects of familiar use to the
Tanagrians, being thrown into graves at burials. Other things in the
city implied more civic pride. Pausanias mentions approvingly the
unusually good taste of the inhabitants in separating their religious
buildings from the business and residence portions of the city. And
Dicæarchus is enthusiastic over their fine houses, adorned with
porticoes and encaustic paintings. Literature also had its place, for
here lived Corinna, a woman of no mean poetic talent. Pausanias saw her
tomb in an honoured place in the city and a picture of her in the
Gymnasium binding on her head a fillet to celebrate a victory over
Pindar at Thebes. With unexpected acumen he remarks that she probably
owed her victory partly to the fact that she wrote in a dialect
intelligible to the Bœotians, and partly to her beauty. Moderns know her
through the story that she advised Pindar to use mythological allusions,
and after his first experiment told him that she had meant him to sow
with the hand, not with a sack; and through her own haunting fragment of
song: “Among the white-armed women of Tanagra, a city made famous by
sweet soprano voices.” Such evidences of culture are the more surprising
when we learn from Dicæarchus that Tanagra was a town of farmers. Their
bluff straightforwardness, their kindliness and their simple living
greatly impressed him in comparison with the insolence and dissipation
of the Thebans.
Dicæarchus describes also with a few graphic words the inhabitants of
Anthedon, a fishing town on the Gulf of Eubœa: “They are almost all
fishermen, earning their livelihood by their hooks, by the purple shell,
and by sponges. They grow old on the beach, among the seaweed and in
their huts. They are all men of ruddy countenance and spare figure;
their nails are worn away by reason of working constantly in the
sea.”[32] This town,—still lovely, it is said, when the sunset illumines
the lilac hills of Eubœa and rose-colour clouds float above the little
fishing-boats in the bay,—furnished to literature an important character
in Glaucus, a fisherman who, by eating a certain grass, became a sea-god
with the gift of prophecy. Many tales were told of him from time to
time, especially by seafaring men. Æschylus wrote two plays, not now
extant, with him as the central figure, and thence the subject passed
into the poetic storehouse of the Alexandrian playwrights. Plato made
use of the legend in one of his noblest presentations of idealism. The
soul marred by its association with the body and with the evils of human
life is like the old sea-god, overgrown with shellfish and seaweed,
wounded and broken by the action of the waves. But if the soul would
always love wisdom and pursue the divine, it would be lifted out of the
sea in which it now is and be forever disencumbered of its rocky
covering.
Footnote 32:
Translated by Frazer.
South of Anthedon, on the strait of Euripus, lies Aulis, of stately
memory. To us as to Odysseus it is, as it were, but “yesterday or the
day before” that the Achæan ships were gathering in Aulis freighted with
trouble for Priam and the Trojans, and hecatombs were being offered on
the altars beneath a beautiful plane tree by a stream of bright water.
Here too Iphigeneia was sacrificed at the altar of Artemis. The story is
told by Euripides, in the “Iphigeneia in Aulis,” in a way to bring out
the latent heroism of the young. Iphigeneia grieves to leave the
sunlight and clings to her mother, but in the end with splendid daring
offers herself a willing sacrifice: “Mother, hear my words,” she cries,—
“Not for thyself alone, but for the Hellenes all
Thou barest me.”
In the lyric recital of Æschylus she is pathetically the victim:—
“Father, father! thus she prayed them,
But nor tears nor girl’s youth stayed them,
Umpire captains keen for war.
To his helpers showed her sire
How, like kid, above the altar
Fainting in her robes, still higher
They should hold her, should not falter,
And, lest curse his house should blight,
Ward the fair lips, guard aright,
With the mouth-gag’s muzzling might.
“Her saffron robe letting sweep to the ground,
She smote in turn her slayers round
With bolt from her eyes, as in picture plain,
Asking for grace. And to speak she was fain,
For aforetimes oft at the tables laden
In her father’s halls she would sing as maiden,
And with virginal voice in his fortune rejoice
When the happy triple libation was poured,
With her loving father in loving accord.
“What came thereafter I nor saw nor do I say,
But arts of Calchas knew nor let nor stay.
Justice freights the scale with woe
And taught by suffering we know.”
Pausanias saw the temple of Artemis, and within it as a revered relic a
piece of the wood from the Homeric plane tree. The spring was also
pointed out to him, and on a neighbouring hill the threshold of
Agamemnon’s hut. Those were happy days for sight-seers. To-day a
traveller can find only a few remains of the temple, near the ruined
chapel of St. Nicholas, a little distance up the valley which stretches
inland from the shore. But he may stand on the beach and watch tides as
strange and irregular as they were when Æschylus described the Achæan
host, troubled and held fast—
“where tide ’gainst tide comes surging back near by the shores of
Aulis opposite to Chalkis.”
The heart of Bœotia’s literature lies in the Hesiodic poetry. Hesiod has
a dual personality. As a half mythical “titulary president” of a school
of poetry localized near Mount Helicon and rivalling the epic school, in
Asia Minor and the islands, whose eponymous hero was Homer; as
traditional author of the “Theogony,” which was the manual of mythology
for the Greeks, ranking in educational value almost with the Iliad and
Odyssey, and of the “Works and Days,” which was a collection of widely
accepted ethical maxims, he seems to lose his home in Bœotia and to
belong like Homer to the whole of Greece. But unlike Homer he is
universally believed to have existed, and to have written a definite
body of poetry which only later came to include many additions by
unknown hands. We may, then, for our purposes, justly consider him as an
individual with local habitation and a name. His family, either before
his birth or while he was a child, immigrated from an Æolian colony in
Asia Minor to Æolian Bœotia. They were farmers and lived in the little
town of Ascra, which was perched on a conical hill opposite the larger
mass of Helicon, to the north of the entrance to the valley of the
Muses. It was destroyed by Thespiæ, and was deserted in Pausanias’s
time. But “the tower” was standing which is still a conspicuous landmark
and gives to the entire hill the name of Pyrgaki. Modern travellers are
attracted by the wide and beautiful view which the hill commands.
Ascra itself, in Hesiod’s peevish opinion, was a miserable village, bad
in winter, abominable in summer, good at no time. He could, however,
when a boy, tend his sheep on the slopes of Helicon and see the Muses in
his dreams. At some time he had a lawsuit with his brother about his
inheritance, and became embittered by disappointment. This and the
difficulties of his life as a husbandman led him to see the world in the
hard colours of uncorrected realism. Only a few enthusiasts pretend to
find in his “Works and Days” the beauty of the “Georgics,” in which
Virgil was his avowed imitator. The Roman poet combined with a delicate
temperament the education of his age, and tried to show to his
countrymen, the already weary masters of the world, the victims of an
over-luxurious civilization, that in farming lay a potent charm and a
remedial grace. But Hesiod lived in the eighth century B. C. and farmed
for his living. To us, grown more democratic than the later Greeks and
Romans, his chief appeal is that of the “mouthpiece of obscure
handworkers in the earliest centuries of Greek history, the poet of
their daily labours, sufferings and wrongs, the singer of their doubts
and infantine reflections on the world in which they had to toil.”
As agricultural life is concerned with certain permanent factors in
human experience and is also proverbially conservative, Hesiod’s picture
of it is probably true, in its broad outlines, of after centuries and of
many another place than Bœotia. Later Greek writers were not attracted
by the homely subject, and the “Works and Days” is the sole specimen in
Greece of a kind of literature which is practically born out of the soil
and out of nature’s varied processes.
In this didactic poem we are introduced to a community whose work and
pleasures were governed by the seasons. The white blossoms of the
spring, the swallow lifting her wing at dawn, the song of the cuckoo,
the tender green of the fig tree, the early rains, all meant the
planting and nursing of the seeds. The summer heat that brought the
cicada’s shrill cry brought, too, a little leisure for picnicking in the
shade of a rock by a stream, off creamy cake and goat’s milk and wine.
But in the cooler hours the corn had to be threshed on the stone floors,
and the hay stored in the barns. In the autumn the falling leaves and
the crane’s migratory call showed that wood must be cut, ploughshares
made, the proper servants and steers procured, and the grapes gathered
and pressed. In the winter the industrious man had to look after his
household store, much as he was tempted to linger by the forge and
saunter in the warm porticoes. For in January the whirlwind of the north
often swept down from Thrace, the Earth howled and long and loud the
forests roared. The oaks and pines were hurled from hilltops. The beasts
of the wild wood crept low to escape the drifting snow, the oxen and
goats cowered in their stalls. Only the young daughter in her pretty
chamber under her mother’s roof was safe. The farmer had to put on
thicker underclothing and a woollen coat and oxhide shoes lined with
thick socks, and pull his cap down over his ears as he hurried home at
nightfall. Thus intertwined in Hesiod’s Bœotian mind were poetry and
prudence. And prudence predominated in his catalogue of the lucky and
unlucky days which next to the seasons regulated the farmer’s life. From
sheep-shearing to marriage everything must have its proper day. This was
true also of seafaring life, for which Hesiod gives rather grudging
directions. Sailors and fishermen, potters and smiths mingled in
friendly intercourse with the husbandmen. Beggars and vagrants came and
went. And news of the distant world and a kindling of dull fancy came
with the wandering minstrels. Standards in such a world were simple. Men
ate asphodel and mallows and had a creed as pleasing and as natural: to
work hard and save a little every year, to be hospitable and
neighbourly, to be good to one’s parents and faithful to one’s wife,
never to abuse a trust and to sacrifice to the gods with clean hands and
a pure heart.
Hesiod has little to say of holidays, but as Bœotia grew older
celebrations of all kinds seem to have flourished conspicuously, even
for Greece, which took so kindly to the bright colours, lively crowds,
and stately processions of feast days. Many of these, occurring
quadrennially, attracted delegates and visitors from other states, even
from contemptuous Athens. Such were the Musæa, the great national
contests in poetry and music on Mount Helicon in the valley of the
Muses; the games and literary competitions at Apollo’s sanctuary on
Mount Ptoön; and the Eleutheria, the Games of Freedom, at Platæa. More
local festivals, also, like the athletic and musical contests at Thespiæ
known as the Games of Love, and the Royal Games at Lebadeia in honour of
King Zeus, often drew crowds of visitors. But many of us, could we have
known ancient Bœotia, would have chosen homelier occasions for our
visits. We would have sought out Tanagra on the feast day of Hermes, the
Ram-bearer, when the handsomest boy of the town, in memory of a similar
service rendered by Hermes at the time of a plague, bore a lamb on his
shoulders about the city walls. And in the autumn at Platæa we would
have attended the annual memorial service for those who died in the
great battle. At daybreak myrrh and garlands were carried to the tombs,
young boys chosen for their free birth bore jars of oil and precious
ointment and of wine and milk, and the chief magistrate put on a purple
robe and poured out a libation, saying, “I drink to those who lost their
lives for the liberty of Greece.” Or at the sanctuary of Demeter at
Mycalessus we would have watched the people from the surrounding farms
lay at the feet of her image all kinds of autumn fruits, which they knew
would keep fresh the whole year through.
This festival of Thanksgiving was doubtless of very ancient origin, as
was also the spring festival of the Little Dædala, celebrated every few
years in many Bœotian communities. The peasants and townspeople poured
into the woods and chose, from certain signs, an oak tree out of which
they made an image; and this image they set up and worshipped to the
accompaniment of festal merriment. The custom originated in Platæa, if
we may judge from the story believed by the common people. Hera, in a
not unwonted fit of temper, had withdrawn to Eubœa, and Zeus could not
persuade her to come back. But old Cithæron, lord of Platæa, advised him
to play on her jealousy by dressing up a wooden image and telling her
that he was going to marry Platæa, the wife of Asopus. Hera flew back,
and in memory of the divine reunion the “Little Dædala” was instituted.
Every sixty years all Bœotia, its big and little cities, its farmsteads
and fishing towns, united in the Great Dædala. The crowds gathered at
Platæa. Long processions, representing each town, bore their own wooden
images to the summit of Cithæron, seeking a narrow plateau where the
snows had melted. Here altars were built and victims burned. And at
night the great flames rose into the sky and were seen from afar, so
that the young men in Attica and beyond the Gulfs doubtless said to each
other, “Bœotia is celebrating as our fathers said,” and the old men
shook their heads and remembered brighter fires.
Zeus and Hera have been long forgotten, nor are the feet of Dionysus
heard upon the mountain, but still winter gives way to spring and the
heart of man is glad. The hard-working people of modern Bœotia keep
holiday when spring blooms anew, and Mount Cithæron gives them as of old
the soft green of its budding oak leaves, the vivacious laughter of its
loosened waters.