who ate more than her share of the laboriously prepared bread, would be
a great grief to her lord and master, who was himself too busy with the
higher work of politics to attend to such things, and that the machinery
of the household would be put very much out of gear. It may well be that
Simonides was unfortunate in his choice of a helpmate, for as Hipponax,
the third of this company, mournfully complains, ‘_It is hard to get a
wife who will both bring you a good dowry and then do all the work_.’
Hipponax, if we may judge him by some forty short fragments, was a
thoroughly disagreeable person; he is always asking and being refused; he
varies complaints with abuse or downright threats.
‘_Hold my coat_,’ he cries, ‘_and I will knock out his eye. I’ve got two
right hands, and I never miss when I throw_.’ On the subject of women he
does not say so much as the other two, for the range of his thought is
almost confined to carnal delights. A fair sample of his style is this
fragment: ‘_There are only two days in your life that your wife gives you
pleasure: the day you marry her and the day you bury her_.’
This insistence on the physical side of love runs through all the elegiac
and lyric poetry of the age. Love to Mimnermus is a thing of secret
kisses, of chambering and wantonness, and it depends alone on physical
attractions. A young man is happy, for he is handsome and desirable; an
old man is wretched, to women an object of scorn. The satiety that comes
from excess of sensual pleasure is the main cause of the melancholy
pessimism that broods over much of Ionian literature. Of Alcæus and his
Lycus, Anacreon and his Bathyllus, Theognis and Cyrnus, it is unnecessary
now to speak, but it is difficult to believe such amiable apologists
as Mr. Benecke when they try to show that a fine idealism was the
inspiration of these relationships. Neither the character of the men’s
writings nor that of their time and country give much ground for such
confidence, and if we seek the purity of love’s passion we must turn to
Sappho.
Among all the foulness of her time Sappho shines out like a star. No loss
in literature is so lamentable as the loss of the nine books of her poems
that the Alexandrian library possessed; no treasure in literature is
quite so precious as the fragments that various chances have preserved
for us. And, luckily, the number of those fragments is still increasing,
as will be seen by a comparison of the two best studies of Sappho in
recent years, the exquisite collection of translations issued by Mr.
Wharton in 1886, and the brilliant monograph on the new fragments by Mr.
J. M. Edmonds in 1912. Even since that date fresh poems have come to
light, and we do not know what Egypt may have yet in store.
In all the fragments, new or old, there is an indefinable quality of
personal feeling. Sappho, it has been said, has left us only a fragment
of her work, but it is a fragment of her soul. Her friend and rival,
Alcæus, is a great poet, but he lacks the fiery intensity of her
inspiration, which gives life even to the briefest phrase that some
grammarian has quoted for a rare word. Take the lines that Rossetti
adapted:
Like the sweet apple which reddens upon topmost bough,
A-top on the topmost twig—which the pluckers forget somehow,
Forget it not—nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.
Like the wild hyacinth flower, which on the hills is found,
Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,
Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground.
Or, again, this other:
Dead, dead.—In death,
Below the ground, bereft of breath,
Silent, alone, the close-shut tomb enfoldeth thee.
To my songs thou wouldst not hearken, and songless shalt thou be;
Thou wouldst not love me here on earth,
In death thou shalt loveless be.
Mr. Edmonds, in his translations, has kept much of the simple charm of
the Greek:
I have a little daughter rare,
That’s like the golden flowers fair,
My Cleis.
I would not take all Lydia wide,
No, nor lovely Greece beside,
For Cleis.
And this, a portion of a new fragment:
And often as her way she wanders,
And on gentle Attis ponders,
With sad longing love opprest,
Her heart devours her tender breast
Till she cries, in pain,
‘Oh, come to me,’ for you and I
Know the burden of her cry,
Since Night, which hath the myriad ears,
Sends her word of what she hears
Across the severing main.
This tender simplicity is the soul of Sappho, and in her verse even a few
words will suggest a picture:
Come to me, O Love:
O Love, the inheritor, enter in.
Everywhere is swept and garnished,
Everything is prepared.
The fire of my heart burns brightly,
All my body is food for thee,
And on my bosom thou shalt sleep the long night through.
ἐπὶ δὲ στήθεος ἐννυχεύσεις. Surely no one save Sappho has touched so
closely the heart of love and poetry.
IV.—THE MILESIAN TALES
The chief characteristic of Ionian literature is a certain softness,
a kind of laxity of morals corresponding to a looseness of political
organisation. The Ionian man was a convinced believer in freedom—for
himself; but he was by no means a believer in the discipline which
alone makes freedom possible. Both in sexual matters and in politics,
his desire for freedom and his desire for pleasure were constantly at
cross-purposes. He wished to be independent of women; but he was not
meant by nature to be a monk, and he purchased his apparent freedom by
yielding to a sensuality far more degrading than that of women’s love. He
wished to be independent of Persia; but he was not a born soldier, and
he finally bought a pretence of autonomy by the payment of tribute to a
Persian satrap, forfeiting his manhood for the sake of peace.
The Ionians were, indeed, a strange medley of qualities, and with them
intellectual activity stood in sharp contrast with moral and physical
sloth. They were essentially a race of city dwellers; for them the
charm of the country and of nature had little attraction, and their
civilisation found its most perfect expression during the seventh and
sixth centuries in the splendid luxury of such towns as the Ionian
Miletus, in Asia Minor, and the Achæan Sybaris, in South Italy. The two
cities were closely connected by ties of trade and social intercourse,
and in both places material prosperity led quickly to moral corruption,
and voluptuousness became the rule of life. Like Buenos Ayres to-day,
Miletus and Sybaris were trading ports founded in a new country, and the
rapid growth of riches discouraged the manlier virtues. The mixture of
races was a danger, the climate favoured voluptuous pleasures, and the
bracing stimulus of war was, until too late, absent. The moral and sexual
degradation that resulted from this unbridled pursuit of pleasure found
its expression, as we have seen, in literature. The tale of Ganymede, the
episode of the tricked husband in the _Iliad_, and the catalogue of women
in Simonides, are fair samples of Ionian thought. No one of the three has
any moral value; indeed, a strict Puritan would probably refuse to let
them soil his lips; but they are at least decent enough to be written
down in a literary form, and to pass muster, if they are not too closely
examined.
There was, however, another and even less creditable class of story of
which literary historians tell us little, but which, probably, was first
invented in such towns as Miletus and Sybaris in the seventh and sixth
centuries, during the time of their greatest prosperity—the so-called
Milesian Tales. Usually circulating by word of mouth, they endured for
centuries, and occasionally make a furtive appearance in history, but
their significance in sexual morality has not always been appreciated.
In dealing with them as literature we are confronted with a threefold
difficulty: firstly, many of the most typical specimens of this style
were never written down at all; secondly, most of the stories that found
a footing in literature were blotted out by the righteous indignation of
Christian moralists; thirdly, in the case of the few that do survive, it
is neither possible nor desirable to introduce them to a modern audience.
But, though they are the least estimable part of our inheritance from
ancient literature, their influence on ancient morals was very great, and
their tendency was so definitely to ruin any reasonable conception of sex
relationships that they force themselves into notice.
Though sometimes written in prose, their natural medium was the iambic
measure, invented by Archilochus, and they were meant both for a male and
female audience. Iambus the jester, _Pierrot_, has his female counterpart
in Iambë, _Pierrette_, who appears in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, and by
her capers forces the sad goddess to smile once more. This is, perhaps,
the one justification of the tales; in their more innocent form they
were intended to purge away that feeling of melancholy of which, as the
precursor of madness, the Greeks were so much afraid, by exciting the
emotion of laughter; just as tragedy effects the same purpose by exciting
the emotions of pity and fear. But this sort of humour in Athens and
Ionia soon degenerated into coarseness, and Iambë, her name now changed
to Baubo, as we see her in the ritual statuette, a woman sitting on a
pig, played a prominent and a shameful part in the Eleusinian mysteries
of Demeter. The worship of the sorrowing mother—Mater Dolorosa—was
made the cloak for nameless obscenities, and the influence of religion
was added to that of literature to degrade men’s conception of women.
These were the sort of verses and images to which Aristotle alludes in
the Seventh Book of the _Politics_; and this is one of the reasons for
Plato’s objection to poetry; better no literature at all, he thinks, than
literature degraded to these ends.
The worst type of Milesian or Sybaritic tale was definitely meant to
stimulate the animal passions, and owed little to any qualities of humour
or imagination. The sense of artistic fitness which the Athenians always
possessed kept this kind of stories out of written literature during the
great period, and confined them to the gossip of the perfumers’ and
barbers’ shops. But as soon as the decadence began, these ‘Ionian poems,’
as Athenæus calls them, became a recognised branch of letters, and we
hear of their chief practitioners, writers of ‘facetiæ,’ the ‘Hilarodoi,’
the ‘Simodoi,’ and the ‘Lysiodoi.’
Among the more notorious authors were Simus the Magnesian, Alexander the
Ætolian, Pyres the Milesian, and Sotades of Maronea, who gives his name
to that whole class of licentious writings which is represented in modern
times by the sotadic satire of Nicholas Chorier. Sotades, however, did
not confine himself to the comparatively safe pastime of libelling women.
He ventured to write lampoons upon Ptolemy Philadelphus and his sister
Arsinoe, was caught on the island where he had taken refuge, put into a
jar with a leaden top, and drowned.
But the most famous, or infamous, of all the class is Aristides, usually
called, but on very little evidence, ‘of Miletus,’ who lived perhaps
in the second century before Christ. Of the man and his book we have
little direct knowledge, but he was translated into Latin by Sisenna,
the companion of Sulla in his voluptuous debauchery, and copies of this
version were found by the Parthians in the tents of the Roman officers
after the battle of Carrhæ. Even the Parthians, as Plutarch tells us,
were disgusted by Aristides, and Ovid tries to use him as a shelter for
himself against the charge of immoral writing. The Roman poet who, though
a libertine, was at least free from some of the grosser vices of his age,
complains bitterly in his exile of the difference in treatment meted
out to Aristides and himself. ‘_Aristides was not banished_,’ he cries,
‘_and yet he fathered all the scandalous stories of Miletus: the authors
amongst us who now put together Sybaritic stories go unpunished_.’
Sybaritic and Milesian were the descriptive adjectives used even in
Ovid’s time for this kind of writing, and we can trace its popularity and
influence in Rome. Quotations are obviously impossible, and indeed the
_genre_ does not depend on literary grace. One author alone, Petronius,
possesses sufficient skill to make it tolerable, and the viler portions
of the ‘Satyricon’ are the most real examples of the literature that was
inspired by Miletus, and by Milesian ideas of womankind. The natural
coarseness of the Roman mind gave this sort of story a greater prominence
than the Greeks ever allowed, but it will probably be correct to trace
its first origin to the coast of Ionia in the seventh century and
especially to the metropolis of the Ionian States.
From the beginning at Miletus the relations between men and women were
notoriously bad, and, as Herodotus tells us, they had some historical
justification. ‘The first settlers at Miletus,’ he says, ‘having no
wives of their own, killed the men and seized the women of the country.’
On account of this massacre, the women established the law and imposed
upon themselves an oath, which they handed down to their daughters, to
this effect:
They should never eat at the same table with their husbands,
nor should any woman ever call her husband by his name. For
they had killed their fathers, their husbands, and their sons,
and after so doing had forced them to become their wives.
This is the first incident in the history of Miletus, an episode not
unlike the story of the Lemnian women, and it explains a great deal.
In the chief city of Ionia, enmity, not love, was the law between
husband and wife. Domestic life was poisoned, and literature caught
the infection. By action and reaction the mischief spread, and it is
impossible for us now fully to estimate its extent. But we cannot doubt
the effect that Ionian literature had in lowering men’s estimate of
women, and thereby degrading all their ideals of social life. The three
great curses of Greek civilisation—sexual perversion, infanticide, and
the harem system—all come into prominence during the sixth century, and
there is good reason to believe that it was just at this time that the
natural increase of population was checked, and the slow process of race
suicide begun. If Ionia was the cradle of Greek culture, as we know it,
from Ionia also came the germs of that moral disease which made a fatal
counterpoise to the intellectual supremacy of Greece.
In the worse type of Milesian Tale immorality takes its most revolting
form; but there was another and more pleasing form of story, also
invented in Ionia about this time, which occasionally is called by the
same title, and is best known to us in the collection of Æsop’s Fables.
Æsop himself, the lame slave who was made by tradition the fellow-servant
of the fair courtesan, Rhodopis, and so a contemporary of Sappho,
is hardly more a real person than Homer, and his name was used as a
convenient shelter for two slightly different kinds of humorous story.
There were the well-known animal fables which are common to the whole
Mediterranean and Asiatic world, and in Æsop find a Greek dress, and
beside them a sort of humorous anecdote, sometimes trivial, sometimes
coarse, but always strongly realistic.
They were especially popular at Athens. ‘Tell them a funny tale of
Æsop, or of Sybaris,’ says the old gentleman in Aristophanes’ ‘Wasps,’
‘something you heard at the club’; and later on in the play, when
Bdelycleon is intoxicated, we get two specimens of the style. Like our
Limericks, they are in verse, with a catch refrain: ‘_A woman at Sybaris
once_,’ and ‘_Æsop one day_,’ and although they are not particularly
humorous, it must be remembered that they are the witticisms of a drunken
man. The first runs thus:
Æsop one night was going back from dinner, when a bitch began
to bark at him, a bold, drunken creature. Thereupon said he:
‘Dear, dear! my good bitch, if you were to sell that foul
tongue of yours and buy some flour, you would be more sensible.’
The other is this:
A woman of Sybaris once broke a jug. The jug got a friend to
act as witness, and laid a claim for damages. Thereupon the
lady said: ‘By the virgin, if you would but let the lawyers
alone and buy some sticking-plaster you would show more wisdom.’
The fables of Æsop are now a nursery classic, for, like the _Arabian
Nights_ and _Gulliver’s Travels_, they have been turned by the kindly
irony of time to a use which their authors hardly contemplated. But in
their Milesian shape there was always an underlying vein of satire, even
in the animal stories. The male animals, the eagle and the lion, are
brave and generous; the females, the fox and the weasel, are cunning and
treacherous.
Moreover, as we see in the Greek version of Babrius and the Latin
of Phædrus, separated though they be from the original by a gap of
centuries, there was a great deal of matter in the Æsopian stories which
was plainly misogynistic.
As examples, we may take from Babrius, Fable 10:
A man fell in love with an ugly, dirty slave-girl, his own
property, and readily gave her all she asked. She had her fill
of gold: fine purple robes trailing at her ankles, and soon
she began to rival the mistress of the house. ‘The goddess of
love,’ thought she, ‘is the cause of all this’ and she honoured
her with votive tapers, going every day to sacrifice and prayer
with supplications and requests. But at last the goddess
came in a dream while they were asleep, and appearing to the
slave-girl, she said, ‘Do not thank me, or suppose that I have
made you beautiful: I am angry with that fellow there, and so
he thinks you fair.’
Belief in women’s beauty, we see, is mere infatuation, and so is belief
in their truth, as No. 16 shows:
A country nurse once threatened a whining child: ‘Stop, or I
will throw you to the wolf.’ The wolf heard the words, and
supposing that the old dame was speaking the truth, waited
patiently for the meal which he thought would soon be ready.
It was not till evening that the child fell asleep, and the
wolf, who had been waiting on slow hope, went off home very
hungry, his mouth really agape. ‘How is it you have come home
empty-handed?’ said his wife, who had been keeping house. ‘It’s
very unusual.’ But the wolf replied: ‘What would you have? I
have trusted a woman.’
No. 32 is a curious reminiscence of Simonides:
Once upon a time a cat fell in love with a comely man, and
glorious Cypris, the mother of Desire, allowed her to change
her shape and take a woman’s body, one so fair that all men
desired her. The young man saw her, fell captive in his turn
and arranged to wed. The marriage feast was just prepared when
a mouse ran by, and the bride, jumping down from the high
couch, rushed after it. So the banquet came to an end, and
Love, who had had a merry jest, departed too—for even he could
not fight against nature.
No. 22 is more outspoken:
Once upon a time a middle-aged man—not young, but not yet old,
his hair a mixture of black and white—feeling that he still had
leisure for love and merriment, took two mistresses, one young,
one old. Now the young woman wanted to see in her lover a young
man, the old dame desired some one as old as herself. So,
every time, the girl plucked out any hairs that she could find
turning white, while the old lady did the same to the black
hairs, until young and old together at last pulled out all the
hair he had and left him bald. _Moral_: Pitiable is the man who
falls into the hands of women: they bite and bite until they
strip him to the bone.
So in the fable of the lion who falls in love with a maiden, the noble
animal strips himself of claws and teeth, and everything that makes him
formidable, to please the girl, and for his reward is beaten to death.
In all these stories there is a note of satirical depreciation, but the
best example of the cynical humour which inspires the whole class is
to be found in the tale of the Ephesian Widow. Phædrus gives a brief
version; in Petronius the story is put into the mouth of the satyr-poet
Eumolpus, and in a condensed form it will perhaps bear quotation.
‘There was once a matron of Ephesus so notoriously virtuous that all
the women of the neighbouring towns used to come and gaze upon her as
at a wonderful spectacle.’ So it begins, and the first sentence, which
might come from Voltaire’s _Candide_, gives the spirit in which it is
written. The lady’s husband died, and not satisfied with the ordinary
signs of grief, the bereaved wife insisted on following the corpse to
the underground chamber where it was laid. There the lady ‘with singular
and exemplary constancy,’ remained with it for five days, deaf to the
entreaties of relatives and magistrates, refusing all food, and attended
only by one servant-girl whose business it was to share her mistress’
grief and renew the taper which alone lit up the sepulchral chamber.
‘The whole country was full of the story,’ so the tale runs, ‘and men of
every class agreed that this was a real and brilliant example of virtue
and affection in a woman—_the only one they had ever known_.’
In the meantime, however, some robbers had been crucified near the place,
and a soldier on guard over the crosses noticed the light of the taper
gleaming in the darkness. Yielding to the weakness of human nature,
he made his way down to the vault, and was surprised to find a pretty
woman, where he had expected to see a ghost. But he soon realised the
situation—that the lady could not get over the loss of her man—and so
he brought his traps down to the cellar and began to address some words
of comfort to her. ‘Do not persist in useless grief,’ said he, ‘do not
rend your breast with unavailing sobs; all of us will come to this; we
all have but one final resting-place.’ His attempt at consolation—which,
though well-meant, is certainly somewhat commonplace—only irritated the
lady, and he turned his attention to the servant (for in this sort of
stories there is always a soubrette) and induced her to partake of his
rations.
The girl was then able to persuade her mistress to follow her example,
and soon all three were eating and drinking together.
‘You know,’ so says Eumolpus, ‘the result of a good meal: the soldier was
soon as successful in overcoming the matron’s resolute virtue as he had
been in overcoming her resolute desire for death.’
The doors of the vault were closed, so that it might appear that the good
lady had breathed her last over her husband’s body; the soldier brought
down all sorts of comestibles, and two or three days and nights were
spent in dalliance.
Meanwhile the crucified robbers were quite forgotten, and on the third
morning the soldier found that one of the crosses was empty, for the body
had been removed for burial by the relatives in the night. He explained
his plight to the lady, and announced his intention of committing
suicide, the proper penalty, as he said, for his neglect of duty.
But the matron was as compassionate as she was virtuous, and ‘Heaven
forfend!’ she cried. ‘I cannot bear to see two such dear men both depart
from life. I would rather pay over the dead than lose the living.’ So she
told the soldier to take the husband’s body out of its receptacle and fix
it on the vacant cross. ‘The soldier gladly followed the clever lady’s
ingenious idea, and the next day people were wondering how it was that a
dead man had found his way to the cross.’
The Ephesian Widow represents the Milesian Tales at their best; at their
worst they are only to be read by those who can touch pitch and not be
defiled. In themselves they are beneath contempt, but they have a very
considerable importance in the history of the world, and especially
in the history of the relations of the sexes. The perverse ideas that
underlie them were transplanted from Ionia to Athens, and, recommended by
the literary genius of Athenian writers, they have had an influence on
later thought which the Ionian pornographers would never have secured.
V.—ATHENS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY
We have traced the main tendencies of Ionian thought, and have seen
how the degradation of women involved a corresponding degradation of
literature. Its very offensiveness protects a great deal of Ionian work
from notice, but it has been necessary to quote some of the less noisome
specimens, for it must be remembered that this immorality of literature
was both the cause and the result of the low opinion in which women were
held. The motives which inspired the whole school of writers were utterly
contemptible, the means they employed were not much better; but they were
successful in their purpose. When Athens took over the leadership of
Greece, she took over from Ionia the idea of women as inferior creatures,
and during all the great period of Athenian history women were a subject
class. It became no longer necessary to slander them; they were simply
neglected.