STUDIES
OF
THE GREEK POETS
BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
AUTHOR OF "SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN SOUTHERN EUROPE" ETC.
_Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen_
_Resolut zu leben_
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
1880
TO
HENRY GRAHAM DAKYNS
~I Dedicate these Volumes~
IN MEMORY OF COMMON INTERESTS, JOINT STUDIES, AND
SIXTEEN YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
The studies of Greek Poets, now reprinted, appeared in England in two
series, published at an interval of three or four years. In preparing
this edition, I have rearranged the chapters of both series in their
proper order, and have made certain additions, with the view of
rendering the book more complete as a survey of Greek Poetry. Thus I
have inserted several new translations in the chapters on the Lyric
Poets and the Anthology. The criticism of Euripides has been enlarged,
and the concluding chapter has been, in a great measure, rewritten.
Each chapter has undergone such revision and alteration in minor
details as might remove unnecessary repetitions and bring the whole
series of essays into harmony. At the same time I have judged it
inexpedient to introduce radical changes into a book which professes
to be the reprint of volumes already known to the English public. For
this reason the chapters which deal with the Greek Tragedians have been
left substantially in their original form, and bear upon their face the
record of their composition as almost independent essays.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER I.
_THE PERIODS OF GREEK LITERATURE._
Language and Mythology.--The Five Chief Periods of
Greek Literature. The First Period: Homer--Religion and
State of the Homeric Age--Achilles and Ulysses.--Second
Period: Transition--Breaking-up of the Homeric
Monarchies--Colonization--the Nomothetæ--Ionians
and Dorians--Development of Elegiac, Iambic, Lyric
Poetry--Beginning of Philosophy.--Third Period: Athenian
Supremacy--Philosophy at Athens--the Fine Arts--the
Drama--History--Sparta and Athens--Pericles and
Anaxagoras.--Fourth Period: Hegemony of Sparta--Enslavement of
Hellas--Demosthenes--Alexander and Achilles--Aristotle--the
Hellenization of the East--Menander--the Orators.--Fifth
Period: Decline and Decay--Greek Influence upon the
World--Alexandria--the Sciences--Theocritus--the University of
Athens--Sophistic Literature--Byzantium--Hellas and Christendom
Page 13
CHAPTER II.
_MYTHOLOGY._
The Notion of a Systematic Pantheon.--Homer and
Hesiod.--Mythology before Homer.--Supposed Conditions of the
Mythopoeic Age.--Vico.--The Childhood of the World.--Goethe's
Boyhood.--Mythology is a Body of Rudimentary Thought,
Penetrated with the Spirit of the Nation.--Different
Views of the Greek Myths.--Grote.--Relics of a Primitive
Revelation.--The Symbolic Hypothesis.--Rationalism and
Euhemerus.--Fetichism.--Poetic Theory.--The Linguistic
Theory.--Comparative Philology.--Solar Theory.--The
Myth of Herakles: its Solar Interpretation--its Ethical
Significance.--Summary of the Points Suggested with
Regard to Mythology.--Mediæval Myths.--The Action of
the Greek Intelligence upon Mythology: in Art--in
Philosophy.--Persistence of the National Polytheism.--Homer
Allegorized at Alexandria.--Triumph of Christianity.--The Greek
Pantheon in the Middle Ages.--Greek Mythology Recovers Poetic
and Artistic Value in the Renaissance Page 51
CHAPTER III.
_ACHILLES._
Unity of _Iliad_.--Character of Achilles.--Structure of
the whole Poem.--Comparison with other Epics.--Energy
Dividing into Anger and Love.--Personality of
Achilles.--The Quarrel with Agamemnon.--Pallas Athene.--The
Embassy.--Achilles' Foreknowledge of his Death.--The Message
of Antilochus.--Interview with Thetis.--The Shouting
in the Trench.--The Speech of Xanthus.--The Pæan over
Hector's Corpse.--The Ghost of Patroclus.--The Funeral
Obsequies of Patroclus.--Achilles and Priam.--Achilles in
Hades.--Achilles Considered as a Greek Ideal.--Friendship
among the Greeks.--Heroism and Knighthood: Ancient and Modern
Chivalry.--The _Myrmidones_ of Æschylus.--Achilles and
Hector.--Alexander the Great.--The Dæmonic Nature of Achilles
Page 91
CHAPTER IV.
_THE WOMEN OF HOMER._
Helen of Troy--Her Eternal Youth--Variety of Legends
connected with her.--Stesichorus.--Helen in the
_Iliad_.--Helen in the _Odyssey_.--The Treatment of Helen
by Æschylus.--Euripidean Handling of her Romance.--Helen
in Greek Art.--Quintus Smyrnæus.--Apollonius of Tyana and
the Ghost of Achilles.--Helen in the Faust Legend.--Marlowe
and Goethe.--Penelope--Her Home-love.--Calypso and
the Isle Ogygia.--Circe.--The Homeric and the Modern
Circe.--Nausicaa--Her Perfect Girlishness.--Briseis and
Andromache.--The Sense of Proportion and of Relative Distance
in Homer's Pictures.--Andromache and Astyanax.--The Cult of
Heroes and Heroines in Greece.--Artistic Presentation of
Homeric Persons.--Philostratus Page 124
CHAPTER V.
_HESIOD._
The Difference between the Homeric and the Hesiodic
Spirit.--The Personality of Hesiod more Distinct than that of
Homer.--What we Know about his Life.--Perses.--The Hesiodic
Rhapsodes.--_Theogony_ and _Works and Days_.--Didactic
Poetry.--The Story of Prometheus.--Greek and Hebrew Myths
of the Fall.--The Allegorical Element in the Promethean
Legend.--The Titans.--The Canto of the Four Ages.--Hesiodic
Ethics.--The Golden Age.--Flaxman's Illustrations.--Justice
and Virtue.--Labor.--Bourgeois Tone of Hesiod.--Marriage and
Women.--The Gnomic Importance of Hesiod for the Early Greeks
Page 161
CHAPTER VI.
_PARMENIDES._
Greek Philosophical Poetry.--The Emergence of
Philosophy from Mythology.--The Ionian Sages.--The
Pythagoreans.--Anaxagoras.--Democritus.--The
Eleatics.--Heraclitus.--Xenophanes of Colophon.--His
Critique of the Myths.--Assertion of Monotheism.--Fragments
of his Poem on Nature.--Parmenides of Elea.--His Political
Importance.--Parmenides in the Dialogues of Plato.--His
Metaphysic of Being.--His Natural Philosophy.--The Logic
Deduced from him by Zeno and Melissus.--Translation of
the Fragments of his Poem.--The Dualism of Truth and
Opinion.--Impossibility of Obtaining Absolute Knowledge Page 185
CHAPTER VII.
_EMPEDOCLES._
The Grandeur of his Fame.--His Versatility of Genius.--His
Mysticism.--His Supposed Miracles.--Legends about his
Death.--His Political Action.--His Poems.--Estimation in which
the Ancients held them.--Their Prophetic Fervor.--Belief in
Metempsychosis.--Purifying Rites.--Contempt for the Knowledge
of the Senses.--Physical Theories.--The Poem on Nature.--The
Four Elements.--The Sphærus.--Love and Discord.--The
Eclecticism of Empedocles Page 207
CHAPTER VIII.
_THE GNOMIC POETS._
Definition of the Term Gnomic.--The Elegiac Metre.--The
Age of the Despots in Greece.--Three Periods in
Elegiac Poetry: the Martial, the Erotic, the
Gnomic.--Callinus.--Tyrtæus.--Mimnermus.--His Epicurean
Philosophy of Life.--Solon.--The Salaminian Verses.--Doctrine
of Hereditary Guilt.--Greek Melancholy.--Phocylides.--His
Bourgeois Intellect.--Xenophanes.--Theognis.--The Politics
of Megara.--Cyrnus.--Precepts upon Education and Conduct in
Public and Private Life.--The Biography of Theognis.--Dorian
Clubs.--Lamentations over the Decay of Youth and Beauty Page 236
CHAPTER IX.
_THE SATIRISTS._
Invention of the Iambic Metre.--Archilochus.--His Parentage
and Life.--His Fame among the Ancients.--Ancient and Modern
Modes of Judging Artists.--The Originality of Archilochus as a
Poet.--Simonides of Amorgos.--His Satire on Women.--The Ionian
Contempt for Women.--Hipponax.--Limping Iambics.--Differences
between the Satire of the Greeks and Romans Page 274
CHAPTER X.
_THE LYRIC POETS._
The Æsthetic Instinct of the Greeks in their
Choice of Metres.--Different Species of
Lyrical Poetry.--The Fragments in Bergk's
Collection.--Proemia.--Prosodia.--Parthenia.--Pæan.--Hyporchem.--
Dithyramb.--Phallic Hymn.--Epinikia.--Threnoi.--Scolia.--Æolian
and Dorian Lyrists.--The Flourishing Period of
Lesbos.--Sappho.--Alcæus.--Anacreon.--Nationality
of the Dorian Lyrists.--Spartan
Education.--Alcman.--Arion.--Stesichorus.--Ibycus.--Simonides.--Greek
Troubadours.--Style of Simonides.--Pindar.--Later Literary Odes
Page 287
CHAPTER XI.
_PINDAR._
His Life.--Legends connected with him.--The Qualities of
his Poetry.--The Olympic Games.--Pindar's Professional
Character.--His Morality.--His Religious Belief.--Doctrine of a
Future State.--Rewards and Punishments.--The Structure of his
Odes.--The Proemia to his Odes.--His Difficulty and Tumidity of
Style Page 340
CHAPTER XII.
_ÆSCHYLUS._
Life of Æschylus.--Nature of his Inspiration.--The
Theory of Art in the _Ion_ of Plato.--Æschylus and
Sophocles.--What Æschylus accomplished for the Attic
Drama.--His Demiurgic Genius.--Colossal Scale of his
Work.--Marlowe.--Oriental Imagery.--Absence of Love
as a Motive in his Plays.--The Organic Vitality of
his Art.--Opening Scenes.--Messenger.--Chorus.--His
Theology.--Destiny in Æschylus.--The Domestic Curse.--His
Character-drawing.--Clytemnestra.--Difficulty of Dealing
with the _Prometheus_.--What was his Fault?--How was
Zeus justified?--Shelley's Opinion.--The Last Trilogy of
_Prometheus_.--Middle Plays in Trilogies.--Attempt to
Reconstruct a _Prometheis_.--The Part of Herakles.--Obscurity
of the Promethean Legend.--The Free Handling of Myths
Permitted to the Dramatist.--The _Oresteia_.--Its
Subject.--The Structure of the Three Plays.--The
_Agamemnon_.---Its Imagery.--Cassandra.--The Cry of the
King.--The Chorus.--Iphigeneia at the Altar.--Menelaus
abandoned by Helen.--The Dead Soldiers on the Plains of
Troy.--The _Persæ_.--The Crime of Xerxes.--Irony of the
Situation.--Description of the Battle of Salamis.--The Style of
Æschylus.--His Religious Feeling 372
CHAPTER XIII.
_SOPHOCLES._
The Personal Beauty of Sophocles: his Life; Stories about
him.--Athens in the Age of Pericles.--Antique Criticism
on his Style: its Perfect Harmony.--Aristotle's Respect
for Sophocles.--Character in Greek Tragedy.--Sophocles
and Æschylus.--The Religious Feeling of Sophocles.--His
Ethics.--Exquisite Proportion observed in his Treatment
of the _Dramatis Personæ_.--Power of Using Motives.--The
_Philoctetes_.--Comparison of the _Choëphoroe_ and the
_Electra_.--Climax of the _Oedipus Coloneüs_.--How Sophocles
led onward to Euripides.--The _Trachiniæ_.--Goethe's
Remarks on the _Antigone_.--The Tale of Thebes.--_Oedipus
Tyrannus_, _Oedipus Coloneüs_, and _Antigone_ do not make up
a Trilogy.--Story of Laius.--The Philosophy of Fate contained
in it.--The Oracle.--Analysis of _Oedipus Tyrannus_.--Masterly
Treatment of the Character of Oedipus.--Change of
Situation in the _Coloneüs_.--Emergence of Antigone into
Prominence.--Analysis of the Antigone.--The Character of
Antigone: its Beauty.--Contrast afforded by Ismene and by
Creon.--Fault in the Climax of the _Antigone_.--The Final
Solution of the Laian Curse.--Antigone is not Subject to
Nemesis Page 436
THE GREEK POETS
CHAPTER I.
_THE PERIODS OF GREEK LITERATURE._
Language and Mythology.--The Five Chief Periods of Greek
Literature. The First Period: Homer--Religion and State
of the Homeric Age--Achilles and Ulysses.--Second
Period: Transition--Breaking-up of the Homeric
Monarchies--Colonization--the Nomothetæ--Ionians
and Dorians--Development of Elegiac, Iambic, Lyric
Poetry--Beginning of Philosophy.--Third Period:
Athenian Supremacy--Philosophy at Athens--the Fine
Arts--the Drama--History--Sparta and Athens--Pericles
and Anaxagoras.--Fourth Period: Hegemony of
Sparta--Enslavement of Hellas--Demosthenes--Alexander
and Achilles--Aristotle--the Hellenization of the
East--Menander--the Orators.--Fifth Period: Decline and
Decay--Greek Influence upon the World--Alexandria--the
Sciences--Theocritus--the University of Athens--Sophistic
Literature--Byzantium--Hellas and Christendom.
The most fascinating problems of history are veiled as closely from
our curiosity as the statue of Egyptian Isis. Nothing is known for
certain about the emergence from primitive barbarism of the great
races, or about the determination of national characteristics.
Analogies may be adduced from the material world; but the mysteries
of organized vitality remain impenetrable. What made the Jew a Jew,
the Greek a Greek, is as unexplained as what daily causes the germs of
an oak and of an ash to produce different trees. All we know is that
in the vague and infinitely distant past races were nourished into
form and individuality by the varied operation of those unreckoned
sympathies which attach man to nature, his primitive mother. But the
laws of that rudimentary growth are still unknown; "the abysmal deeps
of personality" in nations as in men remain unsounded: we cannot even
experimentalize upon the process of ethnical development.
Those mighty works of art which we call languages, in the construction
of which whole peoples unconsciously co-operated, the forms of which
were determined not by individual genius, but by the instincts of
successive generations, acting to one end, inherent in the nature of
the race--those poems of pure thought and fancy, cadenced not in words,
but in living imagery, fountain-heads of inspiration, mirrors of the
mind of nascent nations, which we call Mythologies--these surely are
more marvellous in their infantine spontaneity than any more mature
production of the races which evolved them. Yet we are utterly ignorant
of their embryology: the true science of Origins is as yet scarcely in
its cradle.
Experimental philologers may analyze what remains of early languages,
may trace their connections and their points of divergence, may
classify and group them. But the nature of the organs of humanity
which secreted them is unknown, the problem of their vital structure
is insoluble. Antiquarian theorists may persuade us that myths are
decayed, disintegrated, dilapidated phrases, the meaning of which had
been lost to the first mythopoeists. But they cannot tell us how these
splendid flowers, springing upon the rich soil of rotting language,
expressed in form and color to the mental eye the thoughts and
aspirations of whole races, and presented a measure of the faculties to
be developed during long ages of expanding civilization. If the boy is
father of the man, myths are the parents of philosophies, religions,
polities.
To those unknown artists of the prehistoric age, to the
language-builders and myth-makers, architects of cathedrals not raised
with hands, but with the spirit of man, for humanity to dwell therein,
poets of the characters of nations, sculptors of the substance of the
very soul, melodists who improvised the themes upon which subsequent
centuries have written variations, we ought to erect our noblest
statues and our grandest temples. The work of these first artificers
is more astonishing in its unconsciousness, more effective in its
spontaneity, than are the deliberate and calculated arts of sculptor,
painter, poet, philosopher, and lawgiver of the historic periods.
Some such reflections as these are the natural prelude to the study of
a literature like that of the Greeks. Language and mythology form the
vestibules and outer courts to Homer, Pheidias, Lycurgus.
It is common to divide the history of Greek literature into three chief
periods: the first embracing the early growth of poetry and prose
before the age in which Athens became supreme in Hellas--that is,
anterior to about 480 B.C.; the second coinciding with the brilliant
maturity of Greek genius during the supremacy of Athens--that is,
from the termination of the Persian war to the age of Alexander; the
third extending over the decline and fall of the Greek spirit after
Alexander's death--that is, from B.C. 323, and onwards, to the final
extinction of Hellenic civilization. There is much to be said in favor
of this division. Indeed, Greek history falls naturally into these
three sections. But a greater degree of accuracy may be attained by
breaking up the first and last of these divisions, so as to make five
periods instead of three. After having indicated these five periods in
outline, we will return to the separate consideration of them in detail
and in connection with the current of Greek history.
The first may be termed the Heroic, or Prehistoric, or Legendary
period. It ends with the first Olympiad, B.C. 776, and its chief
monuments are the epics of Homer and Hesiod. The second is a period
of transition from the heroic or epical to that of artistic maturity
in all the branches of literature. In this stage history, properly
so called, begins. The Greeks try their strength in several branches
of composition. Lyrical, satirical, moral, and philosophical poetry
supplant the epic. Prose is cultivated. The first foundations of the
drama are laid. The earliest attempts at science emerge from the
criticism of old mythologies. The whole mind of the race is in a
ferment, and, for the moment, effort and endeavor are more apparent
than mastery and achievement. This period extends from B.C. 776
to B.C. 477, the date of the Athenian league. The third period is
that of the Athenian supremacy. Whatever is great in Hellas is now
concentrated upon Athens. Athens, after her brilliant activity during
the Persian war, wins the confidence and assumes the leadership of
Greece. Athens is the richest, grandest, most liberal, most cultivated,
most enlightened state of Hellas. To Athens flock all the poets and
historians and philosophers. The drama attains maturity in her theatre.
Philosophy takes its true direction from Anaxagoras and Socrates.
The ideal of history is realized by Thucydides. Oratory flourishes
under the great statesmen and the demagogues of the republic. During
the brief but splendid ascendency of Athens, all the masterpieces
of Greek literature are simultaneously produced with marvellous
rapidity. Fixing 413 B.C. as the date of the commencement of Athenian
decline, our fourth period, which terminates in B.C. 323 with the
death of Alexander, is again one of transition. The second period was
transitional from adolescence to maturity. The fourth is transitional
from maturity to old age. The creative genius of the Greeks is now
less active. We have, indeed, the great names of Plato, Aristotle, and
Demosthenes to give splendor to this stage of national existence;
but the sceptre has passed away from the Greek nation proper. Their
protagonist, Athens, is in slavery. The civilization which they
had slowly matured, and which at Athens had been reflected in the
masterpieces of art and literature, is now spread abroad and scattered
over the earth. Asia and Egypt are Hellenized. The Greek spirit is
less productive than it has been; but it is not less vigorous. It
still asserts itself as the greatest in the world; but it does so
relying more upon its past acquirements than on any seeds of power that
remain to be developed in the future. The fifth period, the longest
of all, is one of decline and decay. It extends from B.C. 323 to the
final extinction of classical civilization. Two chief centres occupy
our attention--Athens, where the traditions of art and philosophy
yet linger, where the Stoics and Epicureans and the sages of the New
Academy still educate the world and prepare a _nidus_ for the ethics
of Christianity; and Alexandria, where physical science is cultivated
under the Ptolemies, where mystical theology flourishes in the schools
of the Neoplatonists, where libraries are formed and the labor of
literary criticism is conducted on a gigantic scale, but where nothing
new is produced except the single, most beautiful flower of idyllic
poetry and some few epigrams. In this fifth period, Rome and Byzantium,
where the Greek spirit, still vital, overlives its natural decay upon a
foreign soil, close the scene.
In these five periods--periods of superb adolescence, early manhood,
magnificent maturity, robust old age, and senility--we can trace the
genius of the Greeks putting forth its vigor in successive works of
art and literature, concentrating its energy at first upon its own
self-culture, then extending its influence in every direction, and
controlling the education of humanity, finally contenting itself
with pondering and poring on its past, with mystical metaphysics and
pedantic criticism. Yet even in its extreme decadence the Hellenic
spirit is still potent. It still assimilates, transmutes, and
alchemizes what it works upon. Coming into contact with the new and
mightier genius of Christianity, it forces even that first-born of
the Deity to take form from itself. One dying effort of the Greek
intellect, if we may so speak, is to formulate the dogma of the
Trinity and to impress the doctrine of the Logos upon the author of
the Gospel of St. John. The analogy between the history of a race so
undisturbed in its development as the Greek, and the life of a man,
is not altogether fanciful. A man like Goethe, beautiful in soul and
body, exceedingly strong and swift and active and inquisitive in all
the movements of his spirit, first lives the life of the senses and of
physical enjoyment. His soul, "immersed in rich foreshadowings of the
world," has scarcely begun to think consciously in the first period.
But he feels the glory of existence, the strivings of inexhaustible
energy, the desire of infinite expansion. The second period is one
of _Sturm und Drang_. New things are learned: much of the beautiful
physical activity is sacrificed; he discovers that life involves care
and responsibility as well as pleasure; he concentrates his mental
faculty on hard and baffling study, in which at first he halts and
falters. Then he goes forth to the world and wins great fame, and
does the deeds and thinks the thoughts by which he shall be known to
all posterity. His physical and mental faculties are now in perfect
harmony; together they offer him the noblest and most enduring
pleasures. But after a while his productiveness begins to dwindle.
He has put forth his force, has fully expressed himself, has matured
his principles, has formed his theory of the world. Our fourth period
corresponds to the early old age of such a man's life. He now applies
his principles, propagates his philosophy, subordinates his fancy,
produces less, enjoys with more sobriety and less exhilaration, bears
burdens, suffers disappointments, yet still, as Solon says, "learns
always as he grows in years." Then comes the fifth stage. He who was
so vigorous and splendid now has but little joy in physical life; his
brain is dry and withering; he dwells on his old thoughts, and has no
faculty for generating new ones; yet his soul contains deep mines of
wisdom; he gives counsel and frames laws for younger generations. And
so he gradually sinks into the grave. His acts remain: his life is
written.
The great name of Homer covers the whole of the first period of Greek
literature.[1] It is from the Homeric poems alone that we can form
a picture to our imagination of the state of society in prehistoric
Hellas. The picture which they present is so lively in its details,
and so consistent in all its parts, that we have no reason to suspect
that it was drawn from fancy. Its ideal, as distinguished from merely
realistic, character is obvious. The poet professes to sing to us of
heroes who were of the seed of gods, whose strength exceeded tenfold
the strength of actual men, and who filled the world with valiant
deeds surpassing all that their posterity achieved. Yet, in spite of
this, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ may be taken as faithful mirrors
of a certain phase of Greek society, just as the _Niebelungen Lied_,
the romances of Charlemagne, and the tales of the Round Table reflect
three stages in the history of feudalism. We find that in this
earliest period of Greek history the nation was governed by monarchs
each of whom claimed descent from a god. Thus the kings exercised
their power over the people by divine right; but at the same time a
necessary condition of their maintaining this supremacy was that they
should be superior in riches, lands, personal bravery, and wisdom.
Their subjects obeyed them, not merely because they were #Diogeneis#,
or because they were fathers of the people, but also, and chiefly,
because they were the ablest men, the men fitted by nature to rule,
the men who could be depended upon in an emergency. The king had
just so much personal authority as he had ability to acquire or to
assert. As soon as this ability failed, the sceptre departed from
him. Thus Laertes overlives his royalty; and the suitors of Penelope,
fancying that Ulysses is dead, take no heed of Telemachus, who ought
to rule in his stead, because Telemachus is a mere lad; but as soon
as the hero returns, and proves his might by stringing the bow, the
suitors are slain like sheep. Again, Achilles, while acknowledging
the sway of Agamemnon, quarrels with him openly, proving his equality
and right to such independence as he can assert for himself. The bond
between the king in the heroic age and his chieftains was founded on
the personal superiority of the suzerain, and upon the necessity felt
for the predominance of one individual in warfare and council. The
chiefs were grouped around the monarch like the twelve peers round
Charlemagne, or like the barons whose turbulence Shakespeare has
described in _Richard II._ The relation of the Homeric sovereign to his
princes was, in fact, a feudal one. Olympus repeats the same form of
government. There Zeus is monarch simply because he wields the thunder.
When Herè wishes to rebel, Hephæstus advises her to submit, because
Zeus can root up the world, or hurl them all from the crystal parapet
of heaven. Such, then, is the society of kings and princes in Homer.
They stand forth in brilliant relief against the background, gray and
misty, of the common people. The masses of the nation, like the chorus
in tragedy, kneel passive, deedless, appealing to Heaven, trembling at
the strokes of fate, watching with anxiety the action of the heroes.
Meanwhile the heroes enact their drama for themselves. They assume
responsibility. They do and suffer as their passions sway them. Of
these the greatest, the most truly typical, is Achilles. In Achilles,
Homer summed up and fixed forever the ideal of the Greek character. He
presented an imperishable picture of their national youthfulness, and
of their ardent genius, to the Greeks. The "beautiful human heroism"
of Achilles, his strong personality, his fierce passions controlled
and tempered by divine wisdom, his intense friendship and love that
passed the love of women, above all, the splendor of his youthful life
in death made perfect, hovered like a dream above the imagination of
the Greeks, and insensibly determined their subsequent development. At
a later age, this ideal was destined to be realized in Alexander. The
reality fell below the ideal: for _rien n'est si beau que la fable, si
triste que la vérité_. But the life of Alexander is the most convincing
proof of the importance of Achilles in the history of the Greek race.
If Achilles be the type of the Hellenic genius--radiant, adolescent,
passionate--as it still dazzles us in its artistic beauty and
unrivalled physical energy, Ulysses is no less a true portrait of the
Greek as known to us in history--stern in action, ruthless in his
hatred, pitiless in his hostility, subtle, vengeful, cunning; yet at
the same time the most adventurous of men, the most persuasive in
eloquence, the wisest in counsel, the bravest and coolest in danger.
The _Græculus esuriens_ of Juvenal may be said to be the caricature in
real life of the idealized Ulysses. And what remains to the present
day of the Hellenic genius in the so-called _Greek nation_ descends
from Ulysses rather than Achilles. If the Homeric Achilles has the
superiority of sculpturesque and dramatic splendor, the Homeric Ulysses
excels him on the ground of permanence of type.
Homer, then, was the poet of the heroic age, the poet of Achilles and
Ulysses. Of Homer we know nothing, we have heard too much. Need we ask
ourselves again the question whether he existed, or whether he sprang
into the full possession of consummate art without a predecessor? That
he had no predecessors, no scattered poems and ballads to build upon,
no well-digested body of myths to synthesize, is an absurd hypothesis
which the whole history of literature refutes. That, on the other hand,
there never was a Homer--that is to say, that some diaskeuast, acting
under the orders of Pisistratus, gave its immortal outline to the
colossus of the _Iliad_, and wove the magic web of the _Odyssey_--but
that no supreme and conscious artist working towards a well-planned
conclusion conceived and shaped these epics to the form they bear,
appears to the spirit of sound criticism equally untenable. The very
statement of this alternative involves a contradiction in terms; for
such a diaskeuast must himself have been a supreme and conscious
artist. Some Homer did exist. Some great single poet intervened between
the lost chaos of legendary material and the cosmos of artistic beauty
which we now possess. His work may have been tampered with in a
thousand ways, and religiously but inadequately restored. Of his age
and date and country we may know nothing. But this we do _know_, that
the fire of moulding, fusing, and controlling genius in some one brain
has made the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ what they are.[2]
The epic poet merges his personality in his poems, the words of which
he ascribes to the inspiration of the muse. The individual is nowhere,
is forgotten in the subject and suppressed, while the luminous forms of
gods and heroes move serenely across the stage, summoned and marshalled
by the maidens of Helicon. In no other period of Greek literature shall
we find the same unconsciousness of self, the same immersion in the
work of art. In this respect the poetry of the heroic age answers to
the condition of prehistoric Hellas, where as yet the elements of the
Greek race remain still implicit in the general mass and undeveloped.
We hear in Homer of no abrupt division between Dorians and Ionians.
Athens and Sparta have not grown up into prominence as the two
leaders of the nation. Argos is the centre of power; but Phthiotis,
the cradle of the Hellenes, is the home of Achilles. Ulysses is an
islander. In the same way in Homer the art of the Greeks is still a
mere potentiality. The artistic sentiment, indeed, exists in exquisite
perfection; but it is germinal, not organized and expanded as it will
be. We hear of embroidery for royal garments, of goldsmith's work for
shields and breastplates, of stained ivory trappings for chariots
and horses. But even here the poet's imagination had probably outrun
the fact. What he saw with his fancy, could the heroic artisans have
fashioned with their tools? Is not the shield of Achilles, like Dante's
pavement of the purgatorial staircase, a forecast of the future?
Architecture and sculpture, at any rate, can scarcely be said to exist.
Ulysses builds his own house. The statues of the gods are fetiches.
But, meanwhile, the foundation of the highest Greek art is being laid
in the cultivation of the human body. The sentiment of beauty shows
itself in dances and games, in the races of naked runners, in rhythmic
processions, and the celebration of religious rites. This was the
proper preparation for the after-growth of sculpture. The whole race
lived out its sculpture and its painting, rehearsed, as it were, the
great works of Pheidias and Polygnotus in physical exercise before it
learned to express itself in marble or in color. The public games,
which were instituted in this first period, further contributed to the
cultivation of the sense of beauty which was inherent in the Greeks.
The second period is one of transition--in politics, in literature, in
the fine arts. Everywhere the old landmarks are being broken up, and
the new ones are not yet fixed. The heroic monarchies yield first of
all to oligarchies, and then to tyrannies; the tyrannies in their turn
give place to democracies, or to constitutional aristocracies. Argos,
the centre of heroic Hellas, is the first to change. Between 770 and
730 B.C. Pheidon usurps the sovereign power, and dies, leaving no
dynasty behind him.[3] Between 650 and 500 we find despots springing
up in all the chief Greek cities. At Corinth the oligarchical family
of the Bacchiadæ are superseded by the tyrants Cypselus and Periander.
At Megara the despot Theagenes is deposed and exiled. At Sicyon the
Orthagoridæ terminate in the despot Cleisthenes, whose reign is marked
by an attempt to supersede the ancient Doric order of government by
caste. At Mitylene, Pittacus becomes a constitutional autocrat, or
dictator, for the public safety. At Samos, Polycrates holds a post of
almost Oriental despotism. At Athens we find the great family of the
Pisistratidæ, who supersede the dynastic tyranny in commission of the
house of Codrus. What is the meaning of these changes? How does the
despot differ from the heroic monarch, who held, as we have seen, his
power by divine right, but who also had to depend for his ascendency on
personal prowess? Gradually the old respect for the seed of Zeus died
out. Either the royal families abused their power or became extinct,
or, as in the case of Athens and Sparta, retained hereditary privileges
under limitations. During this decay of the Zeus-born dynasties the
cities of Greece were a prey to the quarrels of great families; and
it often happened that one of these obtained supreme power--in which
case a monarchy, based not on divine right, but on force and fear, was
founded; or else a few of the chief houses combined against the State
to establish an oligarchy. The oligarchies, owing their authority to
no true, legal, or religious fount of honor, were essentially selfish,
and were exposed to the encroachments of the more able among their
own families. The cleverest man in an oligarchy tended to draw the
power into his own hands; but in this he generally succeeded by first
flattering and then intimidating the people. Thus in one way or another
the old type of dynastic government was superseded by despotisms, more
or less arbitrary, tending to the tyranny of single individuals, or
to the coalition of noble houses, and bringing with them the vices of
greed, craft, and servile cruelty. The political ferment caused a vast
political excitement. Party strove against party; and when one set
gained the upper hand, the other had to fly. The cities of Hellas were
filled with exiles. Diplomacy and criticism occupied the minds of men.
Personal cleverness became the one essential point in politics. But
two permanent advantages were secured by this anarchy to the Greeks.
The one was a strong sense of the equality of citizens; the other, a
desire for established law, as opposed to the caprice of individuals
and to the clash of factions in the State. This, then, is the first
point which marks the transitional period. The old monarchies break up,
and give place to oligarchies first, and then to despotism. The tyrants
maintain themselves by violence and by flattering the mob. At last they
fall, or are displaced, and then the states agree to maintain their
freedom by the means of constitutions and fixed laws. The despots are
schoolmasters, who bring the people to _Nomos_ as their lord.
Three other general features distinguish this period of transition.
The first is colonization. In the political disturbances which attend
the struggle for power, hundreds of citizens were forced to change
their residence. So we find the mother cities sending settlers to
Italy, to Sicily, to Africa, to the Gulf of Lyons, to Thrace, and to
the islands. In these colonies the real life and vigor of Hellas show
themselves at this stage more than in the mother states. It is in
Sicily, on the coast of Magna Græcia, on the seaboard of Asia Minor,
in the islands of the Ægean, that the first poets and philosophers and
historians of Greece appear. Sparta and Athens, destined to become
the protagonists of the real drama of Hellas, are meanwhile silent and
apparently inert. Secondly, this is the age of the Nomothetæ. Thebes
receives a constitution from the Corinthian lovers and law-givers
Philolaus and Diocles. Lycurgus and Solon form the states of Sparta
and Athens. It is not a little wonderful to think of these three great
cities, successively the leaders of historic Hellas, submitting to the
intellect each of its own lawgiver, taking shape beneath his hands,
cheerfully accepting and diligently executing his directions. Lastly,
it is in this period that the two chief races of the Greeks--the
Ionians and the Dorians--emerge into distinctness. Not only are Athens
and Sparta fashioned to the form which they will afterwards maintain;
but also in the colonies two distinct streams of thought and feeling
begin to flow onward side by side, and to absorb, each into its own
current, those minor rivulets which it could best appropriate.
What happens to literature in this period of metamorphosis, expansion,
and anarchy? We have seen that Homer covers the whole of the first
period of literature; and in the Homeric poems we saw that the
interests of the present were subordinated to a splendid picture of the
ideal past, that the poet was merged in his work, that the individual
joys and sorrows of the artist remained unspoken, and that his words
were referred immediately to the Muse. All this is now to be altered.
But meanwhile, between the first and second period, a link is made by
Hesiod. In his _Works and Days_ he still preserves the traditions of
the epic. But we no longer listen to the deeds of gods and heroes; and
though the Muse is invoked, the poet appears before us as a living,
sentient, suffering man. We descend to earth. We are instructed in
the toils and duties of the beings who have to act and endure upon
the prosaic stage of the world, as it exists in the common light of
the present time. Even in Hesiod there has therefore been a change.
Homer strung his lyre in the halls of princes who loved to dwell on the
great deeds of their god-descended ancestors. Hesiod utters a weaker
and more subdued note to the tillers of the ground and the watchers of
the seasons. In Homer we see the radiant heroes expiring with a smile
upon their lips as on the Æginetan pediment. In Hesiod we hear the low,
sad outcry of humanity. The inner life, the daily loss and profit, the
duties and the cares of men are his concern. Homer, too, was never
analytical. He described the world without raising a single moral or
psychological question. Hesiod poses the eternal problems: What is
the origin and destiny of mankind? Why should we toil painfully upon
the upward path of virtue? How came the gods to be our tyrants? What
is justice? How did evil and pain and disease begin? After Hesiod the
epical impulse ceases. Poets, indeed, go on writing narrative poems
in hexameters. But the cycle, so called by the Alexandrian critics,
produced about this time, had not innate life enough to survive the
wear and tear of centuries. We have lost the whole series, except in
the tragedies which were composed from their materials. Literature had
passed beyond the stage of the heroic epic. The national ear demanded
other and more varied forms of verse than the hexameter. Among the
Ionians of Asia Minor was developed the pathetic melody of the elegiac
metre, which first apparently was used to express the emotions of love
and sorrow, and afterwards came to be the vehicle of moral sentiment
and all strong feeling. Callinus and Tyrtæus adapted the elegy to
songs of battle. Solon consigned his wisdom to its couplets, and used
it as a trumpet for awakening the zeal of Athens against her tyrants.
Mimnermus confined the metre to its more plaintive melodies, and made
it the mouthpiece of lamentations over the fleeting beauty of youth and
the evils of old age. In Theognis the elegy takes wider scope. He uses
it alike for satire and invective, for precept, for autobiographic
grumblings, for political discourses, and for philosophical
apophthegms. Side by side with the elegy arose the various forms of
lyric poetry. The names of Alcæus and Sappho, of Alcman, Anacreon,
Simonides, Bacchylides, Stesichorus, Arion, instantly suggest
themselves. But it must be borne in mind that lyric poetry in Greece at
a very early period broke up into two distinct species. The one kind
gave expression to strong personal emotion, and became a safety-valve
for perilous passions; the other was choric and complex in its form;
designed for public festivals and solemn ceremonials, it consisted
chiefly of odes sung in the honor of gods and great men. To the former,
or personal species, belong the lyrics of the Ionian and Æolian
families; to the latter, or more public species, belong the so-called
Dorian odes. Besides the elegy and all the forms of lyric stanza, the
iambic, if not invented in this period, was now adapted of set purpose
to personal satire.[4] Archilochus is said to have preferred this
metre, as being the closest in its form to common speech, and therefore
suited to his unideal practical invective. From the lyric dithyrambs of
Arion, sung at festivals of Dionysus, and from the iambic satires of
Archilochus, recited at the feasts of Demeter,[5] was to be developed
the metrical structure of the drama in the third period. As yet, it
is only among the Dorians of Sicily and of Megara that we hear of any
mimetic shows, and these of the simplest description.
In this period the first start in the direction of philosophy was made.
The morality which had been implicit in Homer, and had received a
partial development in Hesiod, was condensed in proverbial couplets
by Solon, Theognis, Phocylides, and Simonides. These couplets formed
the starting-points for discussion. Many of Plato's dialogues turn on
sayings of Theognis and Simonides. Many of the sublimer flights of
meditation in Sophocles are expansions of early gnomes. Even the ethics
of Aristotle are indebted to their wisdom. The ferment of thought
produced by the political struggles of this age tended to sharpen
the intellect and to turn reflection inward. Hence we find that the
men who rose to greatest eminence in state-craft as tyrants or as
law-givers are also to be reckoned among the primitive philosophers of
Greece. The aphorisms of the Seven Sages, two of whom were Nomothetæ,
and several of whom were despots, contain the kernel of much that
is peculiar in Greek thought. It is enough to mention these: #mêden
agan; metron ariston; gnôthi seauton; kairon gnôthi; anankêi d' oude
theoi machontai#--which are the germs of subsequent systems of ethics,
metaphysics, and theories of art.[6] Solon, as a patriot, a modeller of
the Athenian constitution, an elegiac poet, one of the Seven Sages, and
the representative of Greece at the court of Croesus, may be chosen as
the one most eminent man in a period when literature and thought and
politics were, to a remarkable extent, combined in single individuals.
Meanwhile philosophy began to flourish in more definite shape among
the colonists of Asia Minor, Italy, and Sicily. The criticism of
the Theogony of Hesiod led the Ionian thinkers--Thales, Anaximenes,
Anaximander, Heraclitus--to evolve separate answers to the question
of the origin of the universe. The problem of the physical #archê#,
or starting-point, of the world occupied their attention. Some more
scientific theory of existence than mythology afforded was imperatively
demanded. The same spirit of criticism, the same demand for accuracy,
gave birth to history. The Theogony of Hesiod and the Homeric version
of the Trojan war, together with the genealogies of the heroes, were
reduced to simple statements of fact, stripped of their artistic
trappings, and rationalized after a rude and simple fashion by the
annalists of Asia Minor. This zeal for greater rigor of thought was
instrumental in developing a new vehicle of language. The time had come
at length for separation from poetry, for the creation of a prose style
which should correspond in accuracy to the logical necessity of exact
thinking. Prose accordingly was elaborated with infinite difficulty
by these first speculators from the elements of common speech. It was
a great epoch in the history of European culture when men ceased to
produce their thoughts in the fixed cadences of verse, and consigned
them to the more elastic periods of prose. Heraclitus of Ephesus was
the first who achieved a notable success in this new and difficult art.
He for his pains received the title of #ho skoteinos#, the obscure--so
strange and novel did the language of science seem to minds accustomed
hitherto to nothing but metre. Yet even after his date philosophy
of the deepest species was still conveyed in verse. The Eleatic
metaphysicians Xenophanes and Parmenides--Xenophanes, who dared to
criticise the anthropomorphism of the Greek Pantheon, and Parmenides,
who gave utterance to the word of Greek ontology, #to on#, or being,
which may be significantly contrasted with the Hebrew I am--wrote
long poems in which they invoked the Muse, and dragged the hexameter
along the pathway of their argument upon the entities, like a pompous
sacrificial vestment. Empedocles of Agrigentum, to whom we owe the
rough-and-ready theory of the four elements, cadenced his great work on
Nature in the same sonorous verse, and interspersed his speculations on
the cycles of the universe with passages of brilliant eloquence.
Thus the second period is marked alike by changes in politics and
society, and by a revolution in the spirit of literature. The old
Homeric monarchies are broken up. Oligarchies and tyrannies take their
place. To the anarchy and unrest of transition succeeds the demand for
constitutional order. The colonies are founded, and contain the very
pith of Hellas at this epoch: of all the great names we have mentioned,
only Solon and Theognis belong to Central Greece. The Homeric epos has
become obsolete. In its stead we have the greatest possible variety
of literary forms. The elegiac poetry of morality and war and love;
the lyrical poetry of personal feeling and of public ceremonial; the
philosophical poetry of metaphysics and mysticism; the iambic, with its
satire; prose, in its adaptation to new science and a more accurate
historical investigation--are all built up upon the ruins of the epic.
What is most prominent in the spirit of this second period is the
emergence of private interests and individual activities. No dreams of
a golden past now occupy the minds of men. No gods or heroes fill the
canvas of the poet. Man, his daily life, his most crying necessities,
his deepest problems, his loves and sorrows, his friendships, his
social relations, his civic duties--these are the theme of poetry. Now
for the first time in Europe a man tells his own hopes and fears, and
expects the world to listen. Sappho simply sings her love; Archilochus,
his hatred; Theognis, his wrongs; Mimnermus, his _ennui_; Alcæus, his
misfortunes; Anacreon, his pleasure of the hour; and their songs find
an echo in all hearts. The individual and the present have triumphed
over the ideal and the past. Finally, it should be added that the
chief contributions to the culture of the fine arts in this period are
architecture, which is carried to perfection; music, which receives
elaborate form in the lyric of the Dorian order; and sculpture, which
appears as yet but rudimentary upon the pediments of the temples of
Ægina and Selinus.
Our third period embraces the supremacy of Athens from the end of the
Persian to the end of the Peloponnesian war. It was the struggle with
Xerxes which developed all the latent energies of the Greeks, which
intensified their national existence, and which secured for Athens, as
the central power on which the scattered forces of the race converged,
the intellectual dictatorship of Hellas. No contest equals for interest
and for importance this contest of the Greeks with the Persians. It was
a struggle of spiritual energy against brute force, of liberty against
oppression, of intellectual freedom against superstitious ignorance,
of civilization against barbarism. The whole fate of humanity hung
trembling in the scales at Marathon, at Salamis, at Platæa. On the one
side were ranged the hordes of Asia--tribe after tribe, legion upon
legion, myriad by myriad--under their generals and princes. On the
other side stood forth a band of athletes, of Greek citizens, each one
himself a prince and general. The countless masses of the herd-like
Persian host were opposed to a handful of resolute men in whom the
force of the spirit of the world was concentrated. The triumph of the
Greeks was the triumph of the spirit, of the intellect of man, of
light-dispersing darkness, of energy repelling a dead weight of matter.
Other nations have shown a temper as heroic as the Greeks. The Dutch,
for instance, in their resistance against Philip, or the Swiss in their
antagonism to Burgundy and Austria. But in no other single instance has
heroism been exerted on so large a scale, in such a fateful contest
for the benefit of mankind at large. Had the Dutch, for example, been
quelled by Spain, or the Swiss been crushed by the House of Hapsburg,
the world could have survived the loss of these athletic nations.
There were other mighty peoples who held the torch of liberty and of
the spirit, and who were ready to carry it onward in the race. But if
Persia had overwhelmed the Greeks upon the plains of Marathon or in the
straits of Salamis, that torch of spiritual liberty would have been
extinguished. There was no runner in the race to catch it up from the
dying hands of Hellas, and to bear it forward for the future age. No;
this contest of the Greeks with Persia was the one supreme battle of
history; and to the triumph of the Greeks we owe whatever is most great
and glorious in the subsequent achievements of the human race.
Athens rose to her full height in this duel. She bore the brunt of
Marathon alone. Her generals decided the sea-fight of Salamis. For
the Spartans it remained to defeat Mardonius at Platæa. Consequently
the olive-wreath of this more than Olympian victory crowned Athens.
Athens was recognized as Saviour and Queen of Hellas. And Athens, who
had fought the battle of the spirit--by spirit we mean the greatness
of the soul, liberty, intelligence, civilization, culture--everything
which raises men above brutes and slaves, and makes them free beneath
the arch of heaven--Athens, who had fought and won this battle of the
spirit, became immediately the recognized impersonation of the spirit
itself. Whatever was superb in human nature found its natural home and
sphere in Athens. We hear no more of the colonies. All great works of
art and literature now are produced in Athens. It is to Athens that
the sages come to teach and to be taught. Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato,
the three masters of philosophy in this third period, are Athenians.
It is, however, noticeable and significant that Anaxagoras, who forms
a link between the philosophy of the second and third period, is a
native of Clazomenæ, though the thirty years of his active life are
spent at Athens. These thinkers introduce into speculation a new
element. Instead of inquiries into the factors of the physical world
or of ontological theorizing, they approach all problems which involve
the activities of the human soul--the presence in the universe of a
controlling spirit. Anaxagoras issues the famous apophthegm: #nous
pantôn kratei#, "intelligence disposes all things in the world."
Socrates founds his ethical investigation upon the Delphian precept:
#gnôthi seauton#; or, "the proper study of mankind is man." Plato,
who belongs chronologically to the fourth period, but who may here
be mentioned in connection with the great men of the third, as
synthesizing all the previous speculations of the Greeks, ascends to
the conception of an ideal existence which unites truth, beauty, and
goodness in one scheme of universal order.
At the same time Greek art rises to its height of full maturity.
Ictinus designs the Parthenon, and Mnesicles the Propylæa; Pheidias
completes the development of sculpture in his statue of Athene, his
pediment and friezes of the Parthenon, his chryselephantine image of
Zeus at Olympia, his marble Nemesis upon the plain of Marathon. These
were the ultimate, consummate achievements of the sculptor's skill; the
absolute standards of what the statuary in Greece could do. Nothing
remained to be added. Subsequent progression--for a progression there
was in the work of Praxiteles--was a deflection from the pure and
perfect type.
Poetry, in the same way, receives incomparable treatment at the hands
of the great dramatists. As the epic of Homer contained implicitly
all forms of poetry, so did the Athenian drama consciously unite them
in one supreme work of art. The energies aroused by the Persian war
had made action and the delineation of action of prime importance to
the Greeks. We no longer find the poets giving expression to merely
personal feeling, or uttering wise saws and moral precepts, as in the
second period. Human emotion is indeed their theme; but it is the
phases of passion in living, acting, and conflicting personalities
which the drama undertakes to depict. Ethical philosophy is more than
ever substantive in verse; but its lessons are set forth by example
and not by precept--they animate the conduct of whole trilogies. The
awakened activity of Hellas at this period produced the first great
drama of Europe, as the Reformation in England produced the second. The
Greek drama being essentially religious, the tragedians ascended to
mythology for their materials. Homer is dismembered, and his episodes
or allusions, together with the substance of the Cyclic poems, supply
the dramatist with plots. But notice the difference between Homer and
Æschylus, the epic and the drama. In the latter we find no merely
external delineation of mythical history. The legends are used as
outlines to be filled in with living and eternally important details.
The heroes are not interesting merely as heroes, but as the types and
patterns of human nature; as representatives on a gigantic scale of
that humanity which is common to all men in all ages, and as subject
to the destinies which control all human affairs. Mythology has
thus become the text-book of life, interpreted by the philosophical
consciousness. With the names of Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
must be coupled that of Aristophanes. His comedy is a peculiarly
Athenian product--the strongest mixture of paradox and irony and broad
buffoonery and splendid poetry, designed to serve a serious aim, the
world has ever seen. Here the many-sided, flashing genius of the Ionian
race appears in all its subtlety, variety, suppleness, and strength.
The free spirit of Athens runs riot and proclaims its liberty by
license in the prodigious saturnalia of the wit of Aristophanes.
It remains to be added that to this period belong the histories of
Herodotus, the Halicarnassean by birth, who went to Thurii as colonist
from Athens, and of Thucydides, the Athenian general; the lyrics
of Pindar the Theban, who was made the public guest of Athens; the
eloquence of Pericles, and the wit of Aspasia. This brief enumeration
suffices to show that in the third period of Greek literature was
contained whatever is most splendid in the achievements of the genius
of the Greeks, and that all these triumphs converged and were centred
upon Athens.
The public events of this period are summed up in the struggle for
supremacy between Athens and Sparta. The race which had shown itself
capable of united action against the common foe now develops within
itself two antagonistic and mutually exclusive principles. The age
of the despots is past. The flowering-time of the colonies is over.
The stone of Tantalus in Persia has been removed from Hellas. But it
remains for Sparta and Athens to fight out the duel of Dorian against
Ionian prejudices, of oligarchy against democracy. Both states have
received their definite stamp, or permanent #êthos#--Sparta from
semi-mythical Lycurgus; Athens from Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles.
Their war is the warfare of the powers of the sea with the powers
of the land, of Conservatives with Liberals, of the rigid principle
of established order with the expansive spirit of intellectual
and artistic freedom. What is called the Peloponnesian war--that
internecine struggle of the Greeks--is the historical outcome of
this deep-seated antagonism. And the greatest historical narrative
in the world--that of Thucydides--is its record. To dwell upon the
events of this war would be superfluous. Athens uniformly exhibits
herself as a dazzling, brilliant, impatient power, led astray by the
desire of novelty, and the intoxicating sense of force in freedom.
Sparta proceeds slowly, coldly, cautiously; secures her steps; acts
on the defensive; spends no strength in vain; is timid, tentative,
and economical of energy; but at the decisive moment she steps in
and crushes her antagonist. Deluded by the wandering fire of the
inspiration of Alcibiades, the Athenians venture to abandon the
policy of Pericles and to contemplate the conquest of Syracuse. A
dream of gigantic empire, in harmony with their expansive spirit, but
inconsistent with the very conditions of vitality in a Greek state,
floated before their imaginations. In attempting to execute it, they
overreached themselves and fell a prey to Sparta. With the fall of
Athens faded the real beauty and grandeur of Greece. Athens had
incarnated that ideal of loveliness and sublimity. During her days of
prosperity she had expressed it in superb works of art and literature,
and in the splendid life of a free people governed solely by their own
intelligence. Sparta was strong to destroy this life, to extinguish
this light of culture. But to do more she had no strength. Stiffened
in her narrow rules of discipline, she was utterly unable to sustain
the spiritual vitality of Hellas, or to carry its still vigorous energy
into new spheres. It remained for aliens to accomplish this.
Just before passing to the fourth period of comparative decline, we
may halt a moment to contemplate the man who represents this age of
full maturity. Pericles, called half in derision by the comic poets
the Zeus of Athens, called afterwards, with reverence, by Plutarch,
the Olympian--Pericles expresses in himself the spirit of this age.
He is the typical Athenian who governed Athens during the years in
which Athens governed Greece, who formed the taste of the Athenians
at the time when they were educating the world by the production
of immortal works of beauty. We have seen that the conquest of the
Persians was the triumph of the spirit, and that after the conquest
the spirit of humanity found itself for the first time absolutely and
consciously free in Athens. This spirit was, so to speak, incarnated in
Pericles. The Greek genius was made flesh in him, and dwelt at Athens.
In obedience to its dictates, he extended the political liberties
of the Athenians to the utmost, while he controlled those liberties
with the laws of his own reason. In obedience to the same spirit, he
expended the treasures of the Ionian League upon the public works
which formed the subsequent glory of Hellas, and made her august even
in humiliation. "That," says Plutarch, "which now is Greece's only
evidence that the power she boasts of and her ancient wealth are no
romance or idle story was his construction of the public and sacred
buildings." It was, again, by the same inspiration that Pericles
divined the true ideal of the Athenian commonwealth. In the Funeral
Oration he says: "We love the beautiful, but without ostentation or
extravagance; we philosophize without being seduced into effeminacy;
we are bold and daring, but this energy in action does not prevent us
from giving to ourselves a strict account of what we undertake. Among
other nations, on the contrary, martial courage has its foundation in
deficiency of culture. We know best how to distinguish between the
agreeable and the irksome; notwithstanding which we do not shrink
from perils." In this panegyric of the national character, Pericles
has rightly expressed the real spirit of Athens as distinguished from
Sparta. The courage and activity of the Athenians were the result of
open-eyed wisdom, and not of mere gymnastic training. Athens knew that
the arts of life and the pleasures of the intellect were superior to
merely physical exercises, to drill, and to discipline.
While fixing our thoughts upon Pericles as the exponent of the
mature spirit of free Hellas, we owe some attention to his master,
the great Anaxagoras, who first made reason play the chief part in
the scheme of the universe. Of the relations of Anaxagoras to his
pupil Pericles, this is what Plutarch tells us: "He that saw most
of Pericles, and furnished him most especially with a weight and
grandeur of sense superior to all arts of popularity, and in general
gave him his elevation and sublimity of purpose and of character, was
Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, whom the men of those times called by the
name of Nous--that is, mind or intelligence; whether in admiration
of the great and extraordinary gift he displayed for the science of
nature, or because he was the first of the philosophers who did not
refer the first ordering of the world to fortune or chance, nor to
necessity or compulsion, but to a pure, unadulterated intelligence,
which in all other existing mixed and compound things acts as a
principle of discrimination, and of combination of like with like."
Thus we may say, without mysticism, that at the very moment in history
when the intelligence of mankind attained to freedom, there arose
a philosopher in Anaxagoras to proclaim the freedom and absolute
supremacy of intelligence in the universe; and a ruler in Pericles to
carry into action the laws of that intelligence, and to govern the most
uncontrollably free of nations by reason. When Pericles died, Athens
lost her Zeus, her head, her real king. She was left a prey to parties,
to demagogues, to the cold encroaching policy of Sparta. But Pericles
had lived long enough to secure the immortality of what was greatest in
his city--to make of Athens in her beauty "a joy forever."
"If the army of Nicias had not been defeated under the walls of
Syracuse; if the Athenians had, acquiring Sicily, held the balance
between Rome and Carthage, sent garrisons to the Greek colonies in
the south of Italy, Rome might have been all that its intellectual
condition entitled it to be, a tributary, not the conqueror, of Greece;
the Macedonian power would never have attained to the dictatorship of
the civilized states of the world." Such is the exclamation of Shelley
over the fall of Athens. But, according to the Greek proverb, to
desire impossibilities--in the past as in the present--is a sickness
of the soul. No Greek state could have maintained its #êthos# while it
ruled a foreign empire; nor is the right to govern measured by merely
intellectual capacity. The work of Greece was essentially spiritual
and not political. The chief sign of weakness which meets us in the
fourth period is in the region of politics. After the humiliation of
Athens, Sparta assumed the leadership of Greece. But she shamefully
misused her power by betraying the Greek cities of Asia to the
Persians, while her generals and harmosts made use of their authority
for the indulgence of their private vices. Nothing in the previous
training of the Spartan race fitted them for the control of nations
with whose more liberal institutions and refined manners they could
not sympathize. Their tyranny proved insupportable, and was at last
reduced to the dust by the Thebans under Pelopidas and Epaminondas.
But Thebes had neither the wealth nor the vigor to administer the
government of Hellas. Therefore the Greek states fell into a chaos
of discord, without leadership, without a generous spirit of mutual
confidence and aid; while at the same time the power of the Macedonian
kingdom was rapidly increasing under the control of Philip. An occasion
offered itself to Philip for interfering in the Greek affairs. From
that moment forward forever the cities of Greece became the fiefs of
foreign despots. The occasion in question was a great one. The Phocians
had plundered the Delphian temple, and none of the Greeks were strong
enough to punish them. The act of the Phocians was parricidal in its
sacrilege, suicidal in short-sightedness. Defiling the altar of the
ancestral god, on whose oracles the states had hitherto depended for
counsel, and destroying, with the sanctity of Delphi, the sacred symbol
of Greek national existence, they abandoned themselves to desecration
and dishonor. With as little impunity could a king of Judah have robbed
the temple and invaded the holiest of holies. But neither Spartans nor
Athenians nor yet Thebans arose to avenge the affront offered to their
common nationality. The whole of Greece proper lay paralyzed, and the
foreigner stepped in--Philip, whom in their pride they had hitherto
called the Barbarian. He took up the cause of Phoebus and punished
the children of the Delphian god for their impiety. It was clearly
proved to the states of Hellas that their independence was at an end.
They submitted. Greece became the passive spectator of the deeds of
Macedonia. Hellas, who had been the hero, was now the chorus. It was
Alexander of Macedon who played the part of Achilles in her future
drama.
One man vindicated the spirit of Greek freedom against this despotism.
The genius of Athens, militant once more, but destined not to triumph,
incarnates itself in Demosthenes. By dint of eloquence and weight of
character he strives to stem the tide of dissolution. But it is in
vain. His orations remain as the monuments of a valiant but ineffectual
resistance. The old intelligence of Athens shines, nay, fulminates, in
these tremendous periods; but it is no longer intelligence combined
with power. The sceptre of empire has passed from the hands of the
Athenians.
Still, though the states of Greece are humiliated, though we hear no
more of Ionians and Dorians, but only of Macedonians, yet the real
force of the Greek race is by no means exhausted in this fourth period.
On the contrary, their practical work in the world is just beginning.
Under the guidance of Alexander, the Greek spirit conquers and attempts
to civilize the East. The parallel between Alexander and Achilles,
as before hinted, is more than accidental. Trained in the study of
Homer as we are in the study of the Bible, he compared his destinies
with those of the great hero, and formed himself upon the type of
Pelides. At Troy he pays peculiar reverence to the tomb of Patroclus.
He celebrates Hephæstion's death with Homeric games and pyres up-piled
to heaven. He carries Homer with him on war-marches, and consults the
_Iliad_ on occasions of doubt. Alexander's purpose was to fight out
to the end the fight begun by Achilles between West and East, and
to avenge Greece for the injuries of Asia. But it was not a merely
military conquest which he executed. Battles were the means to higher
ends. Alexander sought to subject the world to the Greek spirit, to
stamp the customs, the thoughts, the language, and the culture of the
Greeks upon surrounding nations. Poets and philosophers accompanied
his armies. In the deserts of Bactria and Syria and Libya he founded
Greek cities. During the few years of his short life he not only swept
those continents, but he effaced the past and inaugurated a new state
of things throughout them; so that, in subsequent years, when the
Romans, themselves refined by contact with the Greeks, advanced to
take possession of those territories, they found their work half done.
The alchemizing touch of the Greek genius had transformed languages,
cities, constitutions, customs, nay, religions also, to its own
likeness. This fourth period, a period of transition from maturity to
decay, is the period of Alexander. In it the Greek spirit, which had
been gathering strength through so many generations, poured itself
abroad over the world. What it lost in intensity and splendor, it
gained in extension. It was impossible, even for Greeks, while thus
impressing their civilization on the whole earth, to go on increasing
in the beauty of their life and art at home.
Some of the greatest names in art, philosophy, and literature
still belong to this fourth period. The chief of all is Aristotle,
_il maestro di color che sanno_, the absorber of all previous and
contemporary knowledge into one coherent system, the legislator for
the human intellect through eighteen centuries after his death. It is
worth observing that Aristotle, unlike Socrates and Plato, is not a
citizen of Athens, but of the small Thracian town Stageira. Thus, at
the moment when philosophy lost its essentially Hellenic character and
became cosmopolitan in Aristotle, the mantle devolved upon an alien.
Again Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander. The two greatest men of
the fourth period are thus brought into the closest relations. In pure
literature the most eminent productions of this period are the orations
of Æschines, Demosthenes, Isocrates, and the comedies of Menander. It
is not a little significant that we should have retained no authentic
fragment of the speeches of Pericles--except in so far as we may trust
Thucydides--while the studied rhetoric of these politically far less
important orators should have been so copiously preserved. The reign of
mere talk was imminent. Oratory was coming to be studied as an art,
and practised, not as a potent instrument in politics, but as an end in
itself. Men were beginning to think more of how they spoke than of what
they might achieve by speaking. Besides, the whole Athenian nation,
as dikasts and as ecclesiasts, were interested in rhetoric. The first
masters of eloquence considered as a fine art were therefore idolized.
Demosthenes, Æschines, Isocrates, combined the fire of vehement
partisans and impassioned politicians with the consummate skill of
professional speech-makers. After their days rhetoric in Greece became
a matter of frigid display--an #agônisma es to parachrêma#. In the
comedies of Menander, as far as we may judge of them from fragments
and critiques, and from their Latin copies, a very noticeable change
in the spirit of literature is apparent. The so-called New Comedy, of
which he was the representative, is the product of a meditative and
inactive age. The great concerns of the world, and of human life seen
in its profoundest depth, which formed the staple of Aristophanes, have
been abandoned. We are brought close to domesticities: the events of
common life occupy the stage of Menander. The audience of Aristophanes
listened with avidity to comedies of which politics upon the grandest
scale were the substance. Menander invited his Athenians to the
intrigues of young men, slaves, and hetairai, at warfare with niggardly
parents. Athens has ceased to be an empress. She has become a garrulous
housewife. She contents herself with studious analysis and refined
amusements--still splendid with intelligence and dignified with wisdom,
but not weighty with the consciousness of power, nor throbbing with the
pulses of superabundant youthfulness and vigor.
In the fine arts this fourth period was still inventive. Under
Alexander painting, which had received its Hellenic character from
Polygnotus and Zeuxis, continued to flourish with Apelles. Indeed, it
may be fairly said that while art in the heroic period was confined
to the perfecting of the human body, in the second period it produced
architecture, in the third sculpture, and in the fourth painting--this
being apparently the natural order of progression in the evolution
of the fine arts. Lysippus, meanwhile, worthily represents the craft
of the statuary in Alexander's age; while the coins and gems of this
time show that the glyptic and numismatic arts were at their zenith
of technical perfection. Of Greek music, in the absence of all sure
information, it is difficult to speak. Yet it is probable that the age
of Alexander witnessed a new and more complex development of orchestral
music. We hear of vast symphonies performed at the Macedonian court.
Nor is this inconsistent with what we know about the history of art;
for music attains independence, ceases to be the handmaid of poetry or
dancing, only in an age of intellectual reflectiveness. When nations
have expressed themselves in the more obvious and external arts, they
seek through harmonies and melodies to give form to their emotions.
The fifth, last, and longest period is one of decline and decay. But
these words must be used with qualification when we speak of a people
like the Greeks. What is meant is, that the Greeks never recovered
their national vigor or produced men so great as those whom we have
hitherto been mentioning. The Macedonian empire prepared the way for
the Roman: Hellenic civilization put on the garb of servitude to Rome
and to Christianity. Henceforth we must not look to Greece proper for
the more eminent achievements of the still surviving spirit of the
Greeks. Greek culture in its decadence has become the heritage of
the whole world. Syrians, Egyptians, Phrygians, Romans, carry on the
tradition inherited from Athens. Hellas is less a nation now than an
intellectual commonwealth, a society of culture holding various races
in communion. The spiritual republic established thus by the Greek
genius prepares the way for Christian brotherhood: the liberty of the
children of the Muses leads onward to the freedom of the sons of God.
In this period, the chief centres are first Alexandria and Athens, then
Rome and Byzantium. The real successors of Alexander were his generals.
But the only dynasty founded by them which rises into eminence by its
protection of the arts and literature was the Ptolemaic. At Alexandria,
under the Ptolemies, libraries were formed and sciences were studied.
Euclid the geometer, Aratus the astronomer, Ptolemy the cosmographer,
add lustre to the golden age of Alexandrian culture. Callimachus
at the same time leads a tribe of learned poets and erudite men of
letters. Dramas meant to be read, like Lycophron's _Cassandra_; epics
composed in the study, like the _Argonautica_ of Apollonius Rhodius,
form the diversion of the educated world. Meanwhile the whole genus of
parasitic _littérateurs_ begin to flourish: grammarians, who settle
and elucidate texts with infinite labor and some skill; sophists
and rhetoricians, whose purpose in life it is to adorn imaginary
subjects and to defend problematical theses with conceits of the
fancy and ingenious subtleties of reasoning. A young man writing to
his mistress, a dinner-seeker who has failed to get an invitation,
Themistocles at the Persian court, celebrated statues, philosophical
puzzles--everything that can be wordily elaborated is grist for their
mill. The art of writing without having anything particular to say,
the sister art of quarrying the thoughts of other people and setting
them in elaborate prolixities of style, are brought to perfection. At
the same time, side by side with these literary moths and woodlice,
are the more industrious ants--the collectors of anecdotes, compilers
of biographies, recorders of quotations, composers of all sorts of
commonplace books, students of the paste-brush and scissors sort, to
whom we owe much for the preservation of scraps of otherwise lost
treasures. Into such mechanical and frigid channels has the life
of literature passed. Literature is no longer an integral part of
the national existence, but a form of polite amusement. The genius
of Hellas has nothing better to do than to potter about like a
_dilettante_ among her treasures.
The only true poets of this period are the Sicilian idyllists. Over
the waning day of Greek poetry Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus cast the
sunset hues of their excessive beauty. Genuine and exquisite is their
inspiration; pure, sincere, and true is their execution. Yet we agree
with Shelley, who compares their perfume to "the odor of the tuberose,
which overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness." In
the same way the erotic epigrammatists, though many of them genuine
poets, especially the exquisite Meleager of Gadara, in the very
perfection of their peculiar quality of genius offer an unmistakable
sign of decay. It is the fashion among a certain class of modern
critics to extol the art of decadence, to praise the hectic hues of
consumption, and even the dull livors of corruption, above the roses
and the lilies of health. Let them peruse the epigrams of Meleager and
of Straton. Of beauty in decay sufficient splendors may be found there.
While Alexandria was thus carrying the poetic tradition of Hellas to
its extremity in the idyl and the epigram--carving cherrystones after
the sculptor's mallet had been laid aside--and was continuing the
criticism which had been set on foot by Aristotle, Athens persisted in
her function of educating Europe. She remained a sort of university, in
which the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle were adequately developed,
though not in the most comprehensive spirit, by a crowd of peripatetic
and academic sages, and where the founders of the Epicurean and Stoic
schools gave a new direction to thought. It was during the first vigor
of the Epicurean and Stoic teaching that the spirit of Hellas came
into contact with the spirit of Rome. Hence Lucretius, Cicero, the
satirists--whatever, in fact, Rome may boast of philosophy, retains the
tincture of the ethics of her schoolmasters. Rome, as Virgil proudly
said, was called to govern--not to write poems or carve statues, but
to quell the proud and spare the abject. Still she caught, to some
extent, the æsthetic manners of her captive. Consequently, long after
the complete political ascendency of Rome was an established fact,
and geographical Greece had become an insignificant province, the
Hellenic spirit led the world. And some of its latest products are
still dazzling in beauty, marvellous in ingenuity, Titanic in force. A
few names selected from the list of Græco-Roman authors will be more
impressive than much description. Plutarch of Chæronea, in the first
century, the author of the great biographies; Lucian, the Syrian, in
the second century, the master of irony and graceful dialogue and
delicate description; Epictetus, the Phrygian slave, in the second
century, who taught the latest form of Stoicism to the Romans, and
had for his successor Marcus Aurelius; Philostratus of Lemnos, the
rhetorician and author of the life of Apollonius; Plotinus, Porphyrius,
and Proclus, the revivers of Platonic philosophy under a new form
of mysticism at Alexandria during the third and fourth centuries;
Longinus, the critic, who adorned Palmyra in the third century;[7]
Heliodorus of Emesa, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Musæus, the erotic
novelists and poets of the fourth and fifth centuries--these, not to
mention the Christian fathers, are a few of the great men whom Greece
produced in this last period. But now notice how miscellaneous in
nationality and in pursuit they are. One only is a Greek of the old
stock--Plutarch, the Boeotian. One is a slave from Phrygia. Another is
a Roman emperor.
A fourth is a native of the desert city of Tadmor. Two are Syrians.
One is a Greek of the Ægean. Another is an Egyptian. From this we may
see how the genius of the Greeks had been spread abroad to embrace all
lands. No fact better illustrates the complete leavening of the world
by their spirit.
But considering that this fifth period may be said to cover six
centuries, from the death of Alexander to about 300 after Christ--for
why should we continue our computation into the dreary regions of
Byzantine dulness?--it must be confessed that it is sterile in
productiveness and inferior in the quality of its crop to any of the
previous periods. Subtle and beautiful is the genius of Hellas still,
because it _is_ Greek; strong and stern it is in part, because it has
been grafted on the Roman character; its fascinations and compulsions
are powerful enough to bend the metaphysics of the Christian faith.
Yet, after all, it is but a shadow of its own self.
After the end of the fourth century the iconoclastic zeal and piety
of the Christians put an end practically to Greek art and literature.
Christianity was at that time the superior force in the world; and
though Clement of Alexandria contended for an amicable treaty of peace
between Greek culture and the new creed, though the two Gregories and
Basil were, to use the words of Gibbon, "distinguished above all their
contemporaries by the rare union of profane eloquence and orthodox
piety," though the bishops of the Church were selected from the ranks
of scholars trained by Libanius and other Greek sophists, yet the
spirit of Christianity proved fatal to the spirit of Greek art. Early
in the fifth century the Christian rabble at Alexandria, under the
inspiration of their ferocious despot Cyril, tore in pieces Hypatia,
the last incarnation of the dying beauty of the Greeks. She had turned
her eye backward to Homer and to Plato, dreaming that haply even yet
the gods of Hellas might assert their power and resume the government
of the world, and that the wisdom of Athens might supplant the folly
of Jerusalem. But it was a vain and idle dream. The genius of Greece
was effete. Christianity was pregnant with the mediæval and the modern
world. In violence and bloodshed the Gospel triumphed. This rending
in pieces of the past, this breaking-down of temples and withering
of illusions, was no doubt necessary. New wine cannot be poured into
old bottles. No cycle succeeds another cycle in human affairs without
convulsions and revolutions that rouse the passions of humanity. It is
thus that
God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Yet even in this last dire struggle of the spirit of pagan art with the
spirit of Christian faith, when beauty had become an abomination in the
eyes of the Holiest, on the ruins, as it were, of the desecrated fanes
of Hellas, weeds lovely in their rankness flourished. While Cyril's
mobs were dismembering Hypatia, the erotic novelists went on writing
about Daphnis, and Musæus sang the lamentable death of Leander. Nonnus
was perfecting a new and more polished form of the hexameter. These
were the last notes of Greek poetry. In these faint and too melodious
strains the Muse took final farewell of her beloved Hellas. And when,
after the lapse of a thousand years, the world awoke upon the ruins of
the past, these were among the first melodies which caught its ear.
One of the three first Greek books issued from the Aldine press about
the year 1493, and called by Aldus the "precursors," was the poem of
Hero and Leander. It was reprinted at Paris in 1507 by De Gourmont,
at Alcala in Spain in 1514, and at Cologne in 1517 by Hirschhorn. Our
Marlowe in the sixteenth century translated Musæus. The French Amyot
translated Longus, and bequeathed to his nation a voluminous literature
of pastorals founded upon the tale of Chloe. Tasso and Guarini, in
Italy, caught the same strain; so that the accents of the modern
Renaissance were an echo of the last utterances of dying Greece. The
golden age of pastoral innocence, the _bell' età dell' oro_, of which
the Alexandrians had been dreaming in the midst of their effete and
decaying civilization, fascinated the imagination of our immediate
ancestors, when, three centuries ago, they found the sun of art and
beauty shining in the heavens, new worlds to conquer, and indefinite
expansions of the spirit to be realized.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] My special debt to Hegel's _Philosophy of History_ in this
paragraph ought to be acknowledged.
[2] I do not mean by this that _one_ poet must have composed both
epics, but that each bears upon it the mark of unity in conception and
execution. Whether the same poet produced both is a different question,
and I am inclined to accept the _Odyssey_ as a later work.
[3] The date of Pheidon is in truth unfixed. According to recent
calculations, he may have celebrated the 28th and not the 8th Olympiad.
The involved alteration in his date would bring him into closer
connection with the other despots.
[4] The _Margites Eiresione_, attributed by the Greeks to Homer,
contain possibly the earliest fragments of iambic verses.
[5] Satire, it is well known, was permitted at some of the festivals of
Demeter; and the legend of the maid Iambé, who alone could draw a smile
from Demeter, after she had lost Persephone, seems to symbolize the
connection of iambic recitations with the cultus of this goddess.
[6] Nothing overmuch; measure is best; know thyself; know the right
moment; against necessity not even gods fight.
[7] Recent criticism renders the age and country of the critic Longinus
doubtful.