in Athens. Now Athens, as all men know, was a “democracy”; that
is, the general body of the citizens (excluding the slaves and
“resident aliens”) personally made and interpreted their laws. Such
a constitution was characterized by two elements which between them
practically exhausted its meaning; namely, _autonomy_ or freedom to
govern oneself by one’s own laws, and _isonomy_ or equality of all
citizens before the law. Thus Eleutheria, defined as the Reign of
Law, may be regarded as synonymous with Democracy. “The basis of the
democratical constitution is Eleutheria,” says Aristotle. This is
common ground with all Greek writers, whether they write to praise or
to condemn. Thus Plato humorously, but not quite good-humouredly,
complains that in Athens the very horses and donkeys knocked you out of
their way, so exhilarated were they by the atmosphere of Eleutheria.
But at the worst he only means that you may have too much of a good
thing. Eleutheria translated as unlimited democracy you may object to;
Eleutheria as an ideal or a watchword never fails to win the homage of
Greek men. Very early begins that sentimental republicanism which is
the inspiration of Plutarch, and through Plutarch has had so vast an
influence on the practical affairs of mankind. It appears in the famous
drinking-catch beginning _I will bear the sword in the myrtle-branch
like Harmodios and Aristogeiton_. It appears in Herodotus. Otanes the
Persian (talking Greek political philosophy), after recounting all the
evils of a tyrant’s reign, is made to say: _But what I am about to
tell are his greatest crimes: he breaks ancestral customs, and forces
women, and puts men to death without trial. But the rule of the people
in the first place has the fairest name in the world, “isonomy,” and
in the second place it does none of those things a despot doeth._ In
his own person Herodotus writes: _It is clear not merely in one but in
every instance how excellent a thing is “equality.” When the Athenians
were under their tyrants they fought no better than their neighbours,
but after they had got rid of their masters they were easily superior.
Now this proves that when they were held down they fought without
spirit, because they were toiling for a master, but when they had been
liberated every man was stimulated to his utmost efforts in his own
behalf._ The same morning confidence in democracy shines in the reply
of the constitutional king, Theseus, to the herald in Euripides’ play
asking for the “tyrant” of Athens. _You have made a false step in the
beginning of your speech, O stranger, in seeking a tyrant here. Athens
is not ruled by one man, but is free. The people govern by turns in
yearly succession, not favouring the rich but giving him equal measure
with the poor._
The _naïveté_ of this provokes a smile, but it should provoke some
reflection too. Why does the rhetoric of liberty move us so little?
Partly, I think, because the meaning of the word has changed, and
partly because of this new “liberty” we have a super-abundance. No
longer does Liberty mean in the first place the Reign of Law, but
something like its opposite. Let us recover the Greek attitude, and
we recapture, or at least understand, the Greek emotion concerning
Eleutheria. Jason says to Medea in Euripides’ play, _Thou dwellest in
a Greek instead of a Barbarian land, and hast come to know Justice and
the use of Law without favour to the strong_. The most “romantic” hero
in Greek legend recommending the conventions!
This, however, is admirably and characteristically Greek. The typical
heroes of ancient story are alike in their championship of law and
order. I suppose the two most popular and representative were Heracles
and Theseus. Each goes up and down Greece and Barbary destroying
_hybristai_, local robber-kings, strong savages, devouring monsters,
ill customs and every manner of “lawlessness” and “injustice.” In
their place each introduces Greek manners and government, Law and
Justice. It was this which so attracted Greek sympathy to them and
so excited the Greek imagination. For the Greeks were surrounded by
dangers like those which Heracles or Theseus encountered. If they had
not to contend with supernatural hydras and triple-bodied giants and
half-human animals, they had endless pioneering work to do which made
such imaginings real enough to them; and men who had fought with the
wild Thracian tribes could vividly sympathize with Heracles in his
battle with the Thracian “king,” Diomedes, who fed his fire-breathing
horses with the flesh of strangers. Nor was this preference of the
Greeks for heroes of such a type merely instinctive; it was reasoned
and conscious. The “mission” of Heracles, for example, is largely the
theme of Euripides’ play which we usually call _Hercules Furens_. A
contemporary of Euripides, the sophist Hippias of Elis, was the author
of a too famous apologue, _The Choice of Heracles_, representing the
youthful hero making the correct choice between Laborious Virtue and
Luxurious Vice. Another Euripidean play, _The Suppliant Women_, as
we have seen, reveals Theseus in the character of a conventional,
almost painfully constitutional, sovereign talking the language of
Lord John Russell. As for us, our sympathies are ready to flow out
to the picturesque defeated monsters—the free Centaurs galloping on
Pelion—the cannibal Minotaur lurking in his Labyrinth. But then our
bridals are not liable to be disturbed by raids of wild horsemen from
the mountains, nor are our children carried off to be dealt with at the
pleasure of a foreign monarch. People who meet with such experiences
get surprisingly tired of them. There is a figure known to mythologists
as a Culture Hero. He it is who is believed to have introduced law
and order and useful arts into the rude community in which he arose.
Such heroes were specially regarded, and the reverence felt for them
measures the need of them. Thus in ancient Greece we read of Prometheus
and Palamêdes, the Finns had their Wainomoinen, the Indians of North
America their Hiawatha. Think again of historical figures like
Charlemagne and Alfred, like Solon and Numa Pompilius, even Alexander
the Great. A peculiar romance clings about their names. Why? Only
because to people fighting what must often have seemed a losing battle
against chaos and night the institution and defence of law and order
seemed the most romantic thing a man could do. And so it was.
Such a view was natural for them. Whether it shall seem natural to us
depends on the fortunes of our civilization. On that subject we may
leave the prophets to rave, and content ourselves with the observation
that there are parts of Europe to-day in which many a man must feel
himself in the position of Roland fighting the Saracens or Aëtius
against the Huns. As for ourselves, however confident we may feel, we
shall be foolish to be over-confident; for we are fighting a battle
that has no end. The Barbarian we shall have always with us, on our
frontiers or in our own breasts. There is also the danger that the
prize of victory may, like Angelica, escape the strivers’ hands.
Already perhaps the vision which inspires us is changing. I am not
concerned to attack the character of that change but to interpret the
Greek conception of civilization, merely as a contribution to the
problem. To the Greeks, then, civilization is the slow result of a
certain immemorial way of living. You cannot get it up from books,
or acquire it by imitation; you must absorb it and let it form your
spirit, you must live in it and live through it; and it will be hard
for you to do this, unless you have been born into it and received it
as a birth-right, as a mould in which you are cast as your fathers
were. “Oh, but we must be more progressive than that.” Well, we are
not; on the contrary the Greeks were very much the most progressive
people that ever existed—intellectually progressive, I mean of course;
for are we not talking about civilization?
The Greek conception, therefore, seems to work. I think it works, and
worked, because the tradition, so cherished as it is, is not regarded
as stationary. It is no more stationary to the Greeks than a tree, and
a tree whose growth they stimulated in every way. It seems a fairly
common error, into which Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton sometimes fall,
for modern champions of tradition to over-emphasize its stability.
There has always been the type of “vinous, loudly singing, unsanitary
men,” which Mr. Wells has called the ideal of these two writers; he is
the foundational type of European civilization. But it almost looks
as if Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton were entirely satisfied with him.
They want him to stay on his small holding, and eat quantities of ham
and cheese, and drink quarts of ale, and hate rich men and politicians,
and be perfectly parochial and illiterate. But Hellenism means, simply
an effort to work on this sound and solid stuff; it is not content to
leave him as he is; it strives to develope him, but to develope him
within the tradition; to transform him from an Aristophanic demesman
into an Athenian citizen. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton are Greek
in this, that they have constantly the sense of fighting an endless and
doubtful battle against strong enemies that would destroy whatever is
most necessary to the soul of civilized men. _Well I know in my heart
and soul that sacred Ilium must fall, and Priam, and the folk of Priam
with the good ashen spear ... yet before I die will I do a deed for
after ages to hear of!_
V
SOPHROSYNE
It needs imagination for the modern man to live into the atmosphere of
ancient Greece. It ought not now to be so hard for us who have seen the
lives and sanctities of free peoples crushed and stained. It should
be easier for us to reoccupy the spiritual ground of Hellas, to feel
a new thrill in her seemingly too simple formulas, a new value in her
seemingly cold ideals. It is opportune to write about her now, and
justifiable to write with a quickened hope. For all that, mental habits
are the last we lose, and the habit of regarding our civilization as
secure has had time to work itself deep into our minds. It has coloured
our outlook, directed our tastes, altered our souls.
That last expression may appear overstrained. Yet reflect if it really
be so. These many ages we have felt so safe. If fear came on us, it
was not fear for the fabric itself of civilization. We grew delicately
weary of our inevitably clasping and penetrating culture. We called
it our “old” civilization, with some implication of senility; and we
were restive under its restraints and conventions. We were affected
in different ways, but we were all affected, we were all tired of
our security. To escape it some of us fled to the open road and a
picturesque gipsyism, some hunted big game in Africa. One or two of us
actually did these things, a greater number did them in imagination,
reading about them in books. Others, not caring to fatigue their
bodies, or too fastidious or sincere or morbid to find relief in
personal or vicarious adventures—for this reason or that—pursued
“spiritual adventures” or flamed out into rebellion against what they
felt insulted their souls. It seems clear enough that our bohemianism
of the city and the field is not two things but one, and I am not put
from this opinion by the consciousness of temperamental gulfs between
typical moderns such as (not to come too near ourselves) Whitman and
Poe in America. The symptoms are different, but the malady is the same.
I am not concerned to defend the word “malady,” if it be thought
objectionable. It may be a quite excellent and healthy reaction we
have been experiencing. But a reaction means a disturbance of poise,
leaving us to some extent, as we say, unbalanced. It may have been so
in an opposite sense with the Greeks. I may not deny (for I am not
sure about it) that they went to the other extreme. It is possible and
even likely. But if they were rather mad about the virtues of sanity,
and rather excessive in their passion for moderation, this intensity
can only be medicinal to us, who need the tonic badly. It may help
us to reach that just equilibrium in which the soul is not asleep,
but, in fact, most thrillingly sensitive. Being what it is, the human
soul seems bound to oscillate for ever about its equipoise. It will
always have its actions and reactions. Our violent reaction against
the sense of an absolute security is entirely natural because of that
strange passion, commingled of longing and fear, that draws us to the
heart of loneliness and night. But it has exactly reversed our point of
view. We have wished for the presence of conditions which the Greeks,
having them, wished away. We have wished the forest to grow closer to
our doors. We have admired explorers and pioneers. We have admired
them because we are different. Well, the Greeks were explorers and
pioneers—and not merely in things of the spirit—and they wished the
forest away. Naturally, you see; just as naturally as we long for it to
be there.
There is a line in Juvenal which means that when the gods intend to
destroy a man they grant him his desire. If we suddenly found ourselves
in the heart of savagery, most of us would wish to retract our prayers.
Robinson Crusoe tired of his delightful island. Men who live on the
verge of civilization are apt to cherish ideals which create strong
shudders in the modern artistic soul. On the African or Canadian
frontiers, or cruising in the south seas, a man may dream of a future
“home” of the kind which has moved so many of our writers to laughter
or pity. Whatever our own aspiration might be under the burden of
similar circumstances, we should at least experience a far profounder
sense of the value of those very civilities and conventions, of which
we had professed our weariness. To uphold the flag of the human spirit
against the forces that would crush and humiliate it—that would seem
the heroic, the romantic thing. Exactly that was the mission of Greece,
as she knew well, feeling all the glory and labour of it. And so far
as to fight bravely for a fair ideal with the material odds against you
is romantic, in that degree Greece was romantic. Her victory (of which
we reap the fruits) has wrought her this injury, that her ideal has
lost the attraction that clings to beautiful threatened things. It has
become the “classical” ideal, consecrated and—for most of us—dead.
But it is not dead, and it will never perish, for it is the watchword
of a conflict that may die down but cannot expire; the conflict between
the Hellene and the Barbarian, the disciplined and the undisciplined
temper, the constructive and the destructive soul. Let that conflict
become desperate once more, and we shall understand. But a little
exercise of imagination would let us understand now. As it is, we
hardly do. We note with chilled amazement the passionate emphasis with
which the Greeks repeat over and over to themselves their _Nothing too
much!_ as if it were charged with all wisdom and human comfort. We
understand what the words say; we do not understand what they mean.
The explanation is certain. The Greek watchword is uninspiring to
us, because we do not need it. We are not afraid of stimulus and
excitement, because we have our passions better under control, because
we have more thoroughly subdued the Barbarian within us, than the
Greeks. It is at least more agreeable to our feelings to put it that
way than to speak of “this ghastly thin-faced time of ours.” The
Greeks, on the other hand, were wildly afraid of temptation, not much
for puritanic reasons, although for something finer than prudential
ones. It may seem a little banal to repeat it, but— they had the
artistic temperament. They had the exceptional impressionability, and
they felt the very practical necessity (at least as important for the
artist as the puritan) of a serenity at the core of the storm. _The
wind that fills my sails, propels; but I am helmsman_ is the image
in Meredith. I once collected a quantity of material for a study of
the Greek temperament. I have been looking over it again, and I find
illustration after illustration of an impressionability rivalling
that of the most extreme Romantics. It is difficult to appraise this
evidence. Quite clearly it is full of exaggeration and prejudice.
If you were to believe the orators about one another, and about
contemporary politicians, you would think that fourth-century Athens
was run exclusively by criminal lunatics. Nor are the historians
writing in that age much better, infected as they are by the very evil
example of the rhetoricians. But the cumulative effect is overwhelming,
and is produced as much, if not more, by little half-conscious
indications, mere gestures and casual phrases, as by the records of
hysterical emotionality and scarlet sins. Don’t you remember how people
in Homer when they meet usually burst into tears and, if something
did not happen, might (the poet says) go on weeping till sunset? It
is not so often for grief they weep—unless for that remembered sorrow
which is a kind of joy—as for delight in the renewal of friendship, or
merely to relieve their feelings. The phrase used by Homer to describe
the end of such lamentations is one he also applies to people who have
just thoroughly enjoyed a meal. There is a sensuous element in it. Of
course, one murmurs “the southern” or “the Latin temperament”; but if
we understood the Latin temperament better, we should be able to read
more meaning into that warning _Nothing too much!_
A friend said to Sophocles, “_How do you feel about love, Sophocles?
Are you still fit for an amorous encounter?_” “_Don’t mention it, man;
I have just given it the slip—and very glad too—feeling as if I had
escaped from bondage to a ferocious madman._” To be sure Sophocles
was a poet and had the poetical temperament, and it would argue a
strange ignorance of human nature to make any inferences concerning his
character from the Olympian serenity of his art. But listen to this
anecdote about an ordinary young man. _Leontios the son of Aglaion
was coming up from the Piraeus in the shadow of the North Wall, on
the outside, when he caught sight of some corpses lying at the feet
of the public executioner. He wanted to get a look at them, but at
the same time he was disgusted with himself and tried to put himself
off the thing. For a time he fought it out and veiled his eyes. His
desire, however, getting the mastery of him, he literally pulled apart
his eyelids and, running up to the dead bodies, said, “There you are,
confound you; glut yourselves on the lovely sight!”_
Both anecdotes are in Plato, and may serve as a warning when we are
tempted to think him too hard on the emotional elements of the soul. He
knew the danger, because he felt it himself, because he understood the
Greek temperament—better, for instance, than Aristotle did. Undoubtedly
there is an ascetic strain in Plato, as there is in every moralist who
has done the world any good. But Greek asceticism is an attuning of the
instrument, not a mortification of the flesh. It is just the training
or discipline that is as necessary for eminence in art or in athletics
as for eminence in virtue. The Greek words—askêsis, aretê—level these
distinctions.
This high tension is the natural reaction of a spirit, finely and
richly endowed as the Greek was, to the pressure of strong alien
forces. If the tension relaxed or broke, the result was what you might
expect; there was a rocket-like flash to an extreme. Others as well as
I may have wondered at the sort of language we find in Greek writers
concerning “tyrants.” The horror expressed is not merely conventional
or naïve as in a child’s history book, it is real and deeply felt.
The danger of tyranny was of course very actual in most of the Greek
states, even in Athens. But it is not so much the danger of suffering
as of exercising a tyranny that is in the minds of the best Greek
writers. The tyrant is a damned soul. Waiting for him in the dark are
“certain fiery-looking” devils and the Erinyes, Avengers of Blood. The
tyrant is the completion and final embodiment of human depravity....
Well, perhaps he is. But we should never think of giving the tyrant
so very special a pre-eminence over every other type of criminal. Yet
the Greek feeling seems quite natural when we reflect that the very
definition of a tyrant is one that is placed above the law, and is
therefore under no external obligation to self-restraint, lacking which
the average Greek very rapidly and flamboyantly went to the devil.
There was, for example, Alexander prince of Pherae, whom Shakespeare
read about in his Plutarch. Alexander had a habit of burying people
alive, or wrapping them in the skins of bears or boars; he used to hunt
them with dogs. He consecrated the spear with which he had murdered his
uncle, crowning it with garlands and offering sacrifices to it under
the name of Tychon, an obscene god. This same Alexander was present
once at a performance of Euripides’ _Trojan Women_, and was so overcome
by his feelings that he hurried from the theatre, leaving a message for
the leading actor, which explained that he did not disapprove of the
acting, but was ashamed to let people see him, who had never shown the
least pity for his victims, crying over Hecuba and Andromache. _What’s
Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?_
One might perhaps say of Alexander what Ruskin (speaking, as he
assures us, after due deliberation) says of Adam Smith, that he was
“in an entirely damned state of soul.” It would be easy to multiply
examples like that of this Pheraean, but it would be still easier to
disgust the reader with them. I will take, then, a milder case (more
instructive in its way than much pathology) which has for us this
twofold value, that it is full of human and pathetic interest, and at
the same time reflects, all the more if there are legendary elements in
it, the popular imagination of the tyrant’s mood. It is the tragedy of
Periandros, lord of Corinth. Hear Sosikles the Corinthian in Herodotus.
_When Kypselos had reigned thirty years and ended his life happily, he
was succeeded by his son, Periandros. Now Periandros was milder than
his father at first, but afterwards by means of messengers he joined
himself to Thrasyboulos the tyrant of Miletus, and became yet more
bloody by far than Kypselos. For he sent a herald to Thrasyboulos and
inquired how he might most safely put affairs in order and best govern
Corinth. Thrasyboulos brought the messenger of Periandros forth from
the city, and entering into a field of corn he went through the corn,
putting one question after another to the herald on the matter of
his coming from Corinth. And ever as he spied an ear that overtopped
the rest, he would strike it off, and so marring it cast it down,
until in this way he destroyed the fairest and tallest portion of the
crop. And having traversed the field he sends away the herald without
giving him a word of counsel. When the herald returned to Corinth,
Periandros wished to learn the counsel. But the other said that
Thrasyboulos had answered nothing, and that he marvelled at him, what
manner of man he had sent him to, one beside himself and a destroyer
of his own possessions; relating what he saw done by Thrasyboulos. But
Periandros, understanding the action and perceiving that Thrasyboulos
advised him to slay the most eminent of the citizens, then showed every
manner of villainy towards the Corinthians. Whatever Kypselos had
left unaccomplished by his slaughterings and banishments, Periandros
fulfilled. And in one day he stripped naked all the women of Corinth
for his wife Melissa’s sake. For when he had sent messengers to the
river Acheron in Thesprotia, to the Oracle of the Dead there, to
inquire concerning a treasure deposited by a stranger, the ghost of
Melissa appeared and said that she would not signify nor declare in
what place the treasure was laid; for she was cold and naked, since she
had no profit of the garments that had been buried with her, for that
they had not been burned; and for proof that her words were true she
had a secret message for his ear.... When these things were reported to
Periandros (for the secret forced him to believe, since he had had to
do with Melissa when she was dead) immediately after he caused it to be
proclaimed that all the wives of the Corinthians should come forth to
the temple of Hera. And when they came, wearing their richest garments
as for a holy feast, he set his bodyguard in their way, and stripped
them all, bond and free alike, and gathering all into a trench he
burned the pile with prayer to Melissa. And when he had done this, and
had sent to her the second time, the ghost of Melissa told him where
she had deposited the stranger’s treasure._