is a creation of this period. The Greeks had
[Illustration: PLATE LXXVII. COINS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY B.C.
1. RHODES. 2. ATHENS. 3. PANTICAPÆUM. 4. TENEDOS. 5. SICILIAN
DECADRACHM.]
always been a rhetorical people. We have noted how, even in Homer,
persuasion by the power of speech was a god-given attribute of kings and
elders. The Greeks, and the Romans too, went into battle under the
influence of oratory as our Highlanders are aroused to martial frenzy by
the eloquence of the pibroch. No one doubts that all the speeches in
Thucydides’ history are of his own invention, but if they bear any
resemblance to the real thing we must believe that the Greek soldier was
encouraged, in the fifth century, to fight by a very sober and logical
style of speech, including a categorical estimate of the chances in his
favour. The modern reader is frequently lulled to sleep by the words of
Brasidas or Nikias encouraging his men to battle. Thucydides had, it
seems, learnt his peculiarly artificial style of rhetoric from Antiphon,
who was the first professional rhetorician to engage in politics. But
even Antiphon was content to direct operations through his pupils. In
the fourth century the trained professional orator comes forward on the
Pnyx as a public statesman, is elected general, and gives orders to the
professional soldiers who now command armies and fleets. The profession
of the pleader had grown inevitably out of the legal system in vogue at
Athens. Where suits were decided by juries numbering hundreds, a rather
violent style of pleading had naturally arisen. Although it was
necessary by law for the litigants to conduct their own case, it became
customary for them to apply to speech-writers like Lysias, Isæus, and
Demosthenes for a speech to be learnt and recited as dramatically as
possible. We should expect such performances to be highly emotional and
to consist largely of oratorical claptrap. That, on the contrary, they
are for the most part severely logical, that purple passages are
carefully eschewed and references to national feeling kept within limits
is the clearest possible proof of the high intellectual standard of the
average Athenian citizen who sat upon the jury. It is true that
defendants did dress in mourning and produce wives and families in rags
and tears to move the sympathies of their judges, but their arguments
must be sensible and must include copious reference to the letter of
the law. From the so-called “Private Orations” of Demosthenes we obtain
rare glimpses of social life at Athens in the fourth century, the banker
Phormio who rises to affluence from slavery, who is liberated and
marries his master’s daughter, the elegant hooliganism of rich young men
who quarrel in camp and assault one another in the Athenian
market-place, the extraordinary luxury of Meidias, who rode on a
silver-plated saddle, or the quarrels of neighbours in the country about
watercourses and rights of way. In a later chapter we shall have to
consider the public orations of Demosthenes as the opponent of the
Macedonian conquerors. He is unquestionably for European literature the
father of oratory. Cicero learnt his art from Demosthenes, and Burke
from Cicero. Cleverness is the distinguishing mark of Demosthenes; his
style is restrained and logical. I do not think he was morally great, or
even more than tolerably honest, but he was so subtle a pleader that I
for one always have an instinctive desire to take the other side.
Isocrates, “the old man eloquent,” who died about 338 B.C., is an
interesting figure, very typical of his day. He became a professor of
rhetoric, and kept a school in which he had a hundred pupils, each of
whom paid him 1000 drachmæ for the course. He received as much as thirty
talents for writing a single speech. But he was a pure theorist; he
scarcely ever delivered his orations, which were written for private
reading, and carefully polished for that purpose. Some modern historians
discern in him a statesman of wide and lofty views. It is true that he
advocated peace, retrenchment, and reform for Athens. It is true also
that he spoke in his great Panegyric Oration, a work which had taken him
ten years to write, in favour of concerted action by Hellas against the
Persians. But I fear that Isocrates as a Panhellenist is a fraud.
Panhellenic orations on the text of the Persian wars were a standing
dish at the Olympic festival. Gorgias of Leontini, among others, had
delivered a similar oration in
[Illustration: PLATE LXXVIII. GREEK GEMS
_Mansell & Co._]
past years. It is surely a proof of the deadness of Panhellenic feeling
in Greece that the assembled States could periodically applaud such
orations and then go home and sign the peace which the Great King had
sent down from Susa. Moreover, the Panegyric itself is written in a very
curious tone for a genuine internationalist. He begins very happily:
“Athens and Sparta united, shoulder to shoulder, as they stood at
Platæa, Athens and Sparta ... yes, but in that order, mind you....
Athens must come first.... Sparta is, and always has been, a bully and a
sneak ... don’t you remember ...?” That is the spirit of the Panegyric.
Nor is the style really comparable to that of Demosthenes. Carefully
constructed as it is, it smells of the lamp; there is a wearisome
mellifluousness in its cadences, and a horrid odour of
self-consciousness and self-righteousness in its tone.
Turning now to philosophy, we are confronted at once with the problem of
Socrates and his real personality.[106] The sage himself wrote nothing,
but he has been written of by two immediate disciples, Xenophon and
Plato. Between the two we must form our idea of the man. It is likely
that Xenophon missed a great deal of the inner meaning of his master’s
teaching, but it is certain that Plato used Socrates as a peg for his
own ideas with a freedom which could only be tolerated in a country
where portraiture was seldom as yet practised as an art. Socrates may be
shortly described as a man who went about asking “Why?” It is a habit
that we are too apt to repress in children: the Athenians put Socrates
to death for it. Remember that it was the age when sophistry--that is,
formal profession of superior wisdom--was beginning to be rife, when
professors of this, that, and the other were abroad in the streets of
Athens. You may reduce any professor to tears by asking him “Why?” with
sufficient persistence, especially if you are followed by a train of
admiring young men of good family. Socrates was very pertinacious and
absolutely fearless. So a jury of Athenian citizens condemned him to
drink hemlock on the charge of corrupting the youth with atheistical
doctrines. He was certainly not an atheist. He was deeply religious in
the highest sense. He objected, or at least Plato did, to the theology
of Homer as undignified, in that it exhibited gods laughing and weeping.
But he used constantly to speak of “the God,” “the divine principle,”
and even of a “Daimonion,” or divine spirit in his own breast. Moreover,
Apollo, speaking by the mouth of the Delphic oracle, had declared him to
be the wisest of mankind.
In the main, there is no doubt but that the condemnation of Socrates
was, like that of Christ, a political move. Both Critias and Theramenes,
the foremost leaders of the oligarchic revolution, were among the
disciples of Socrates. Both Anytus and Melitus, his accusers, belonged
to the democratic reactionaries who had overthrown them. If we may judge
by Plato and Xenophon, Socrates was unquestionably a keen critic of the
innumerable sophistries upon which democracy was built. With all that,
Socrates was a good citizen and patriot. He had fought in many Athenian
battles, the soldiers marvelled at his contempt for cold and danger, he
had done his best to prevent the unjust sentence upon the generals of
Arginusæ, he had incurred the hostility of the Thirty Tyrants.
The trial and death of Socrates present a scene which for pathos and
nobility stands, with one other, alone in history. At the first trial he
was condemned only by a majority of six. Athenian law permitted him
under such circumstances to propose an alternative penalty. He proposed,
accordingly, that he should be entertained for the rest of his life at
public expense, along with the officers and benefactors of the State, in
the Presidential Hall. This Socratic irony was treated by the judges as
contumacy, and at the second hearing he was condemned to death by a
large plurality of votes. Plato has written of his end in three great
dialogues--“The Apology,” “The Phædo,” and “The Crito.” In “The Apology”
Socrates concludes his address to the jury with these words: “This only
I ask of you. When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if they seem to
[Illustration: PLATE LXXIX. CORINTHIAN CAPITAL
_Mansell & Co._]
you to be concerned about wealth or anything rather than virtue, punish
them, I pray you, with the same affliction as that with which I have
afflicted you, and if they pretend to be something when they are
nothing, make it a reproach to them, as I have made it to you. If you
will do that, we shall have received justice at your hands, I and my
sons. Ah, I see it is now time for us all to go hence, me to my death,
you to your life. But which of us is going on a better errand--that none
can say, but only God alone.”
The dialogue of “Phædo” is perhaps the sublimest thing in literature. It
purports to be the last discourse of Socrates to the friends who have
come to share his last moments. He preaches the immortality of the soul,
the unimportance of death, nay, the urgent necessity of that release
from the hampering and deluding trammels of the body, if a philosopher
is to see things as they are and enjoy the knowledge of reality. He puts
it as a “myth,” using the current Greek mythology of Styx and Hades and
Tartarus to enforce his doctrine of Hell, Paradise, and Purgatory. His
friend Crito asks for instructions as to his burial.
“‘Bury me any way you like,’ answered Socrates, ‘if you get hold of
me and I don’t escape you.’ He looked at us with a quiet smile and
proceeded: ‘No, sirs, I can’t convince Crito that I am this
Socrates who is now conversing with you. He thinks I am that one
whom he will presently see dead, and he asks, if you please, how he
is to bury me. I have been making a long speech to prove that when
I have drunk the poison I shall not be with you any more, but shall
have gone away to enjoy whatever blessings await the departed; only
I am afraid it is all lost upon Crito, with all my consolations for
myself and you. So you must be my sureties with Crito in a pledge
just contrary to that which he gave to my judges. He went bail that
I would remain here. You must go bail that I shall certainly not
remain, but abscond and vanish. Then Crito will be less afflicted,
and when he sees my body being burnt or buried he won’t grieve for
me as if something unpleasant was happening to me, and he won’t say
at the funeral that it is Socrates he is laying out or burying.’”
Then the story of his painful and courageous death is told in language
of extraordinary simplicity and dignified restraint. “Such, Echecrates,
was the last end of our companion, as we should say, the best, the
wisest, and the justest man of all we had ever known.”
Socrates had done much towards giving Greek philosophy its new trend.
The earlier philosophers had been chiefly concerned with the physical
universe, trying to discover its origin, and thereby its “principle”;
this had been apt to degenerate into that paltry inquisitiveness about
mere phenomena which many people are still apt to dignify with the name
of “natural science.” Socrates sought not so much the origin as the end
of things; he made philosophy concern herself with the nature of
reality, and incidentally with ethics and conduct.
The development of ideal philosophy may probably be ascribed, in the
main, to Plato rather than Socrates. Perhaps the general English reader
will find the simplest exposition of the Platonic theory of Ideas in
Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Put very briefly, it
is that the material world apprehended by the human senses is only a
copy or pale reflection of the realities “laid up in heaven.” The soul
comes into this world
“Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness.”
We recognise the forms of things by their likeness to the patterns
apprehended by the soul elsewhere. Thus, as Plato says in the “Meno,”
all learning is a process of recollection. The words of St. Paul to the
Corinthians are almost a verbal echo of this teaching of Socrates: “For
now we see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face: now I know in
part; but then shall I know even as I am known.”
The doctrines of Plato about Love have been strangely perverted in the
popular mind by a singular freak of language in the use of the word
“platonic.” They are expounded in two very different dialogues, the
almost boisterous “Symposium,”
[Illustration: PLATE LXXX. FIVE TANAGRA STATUETTES
_Mansell & Co._]
where Socrates and his friends agree to diversify the drinking with a
series of discourses on Love, and that most exquisite composition called
the “Phædrus,” in which Socrates and his friend converse on the same
topic as they lie in the shade of a spreading plane-tree upon the grassy
banks of the Ilissus.
The human soul, coming from eternity into life, has not forgotten
altogether “the sea of beauty” of which it had once enjoyed the vision.
All beautiful things remind us of it, and (once more to quote
Wordsworth):
“Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.”
Thus all men possess a natural yearning for beauty, however much their
glimpses of it may have been darkened and distorted by their earthly
experiences, and in their beloved they are seeing the reflection of the
reality of beauty. The procreant impulse is part of man’s yearning for
immortality; it is out of goodness and beauty that the immortal is to be
begotten.
With Plato’s political views as expressed especially in the “Republic”
we shall be able to deal more fully in the next chapter, when we come to
consider the political theories which arose out of the conditions of the
city-state. It is clear that in the hands of men like Socrates and Plato
philosophy was usurping the place which according to our notions
religion ought to occupy in the minds of men. Greek religion, or at
least the official Olympian worship as defined by Homer, Hesiod, and the
Tragic Poets, had never attained much influence over the morality of its
worshippers. But now philosophy was definitely claiming to teach virtue.
Not only sophists like Protagoras and Hippias, but even philosophers
like Socrates and Plato, claimed to put right conduct on a basis of
reason, and therefore of education. Hence followed the deplorable
consequence that virtue was to be for the rich and well-born. Philosophy
was snobbish from the start; it finished by excluding all but the
select few from any chance of salvation, and, if it had had its way,
would have excluded them from any political rights whatever. Socrates
seldom discriminates between wise and learned, nor between wise and
good. The strength of Greek philosophy is in its earnest opposition to
materialism, its proper scorn of base, trivial, and temporary pursuits.
But therewith it felt and inculcated a contempt of honest labour, and
thereby it drifted farther and farther apart from practical life. For
that, of course, the institution of slavery is largely responsible.
[Illustration: PLATE LXXXI. BUST OF “SOCRATES”
_Mansell & Co._]
VI
THE MACEDONIAN WORLD
εἴπερ ἴσην ῥώμην γνώμῃ, Δημόσθενες, εἶχες
οὔποτ’ ἂν Ἑλλήνων ἦρξεν Ἄρης Μακεδών.
PLUTARCH.
ALEXANDER AND HIS WORK
The fate of that old god Cronos, supplanted by his own children whom he
had tried in vain to devour, is more or less the common lot of all
parents of vigorous offspring. The Athenians had a nocturnal festival in
which young men ran in relays, each member of the team handing his torch
to another, and, as Æschylus says in a fine metaphor, “the first is the
victor, even though he be last in the running.” So at this point of our
history we begin to be aware of new forces arising in the Greek world,
new powers on the fringe of the Hellenic circle now stepping into the
light and taking their places in the torch-race of civilisation. Such
were Rhodes, the new commercial republic, Caria under Mausolus, Thessaly
under Jason, Cyprus under Evagoras, Pergamum under Attalus, the two
Leagues, Ætolian and Achæan, and above all Macedon under Philip and
Alexander. The stream of culture and intelligence that emanated from
Athens and the other ancient cities was now pulsing in the finger-tips
of Greece. Many of these new powers are more than half barbarian. They
are either monarchies or confederations. What generally happens is that
leaders arise who are themselves sufficiently endowed with civilised
intelligence to utilise the latent force in a race of untamed and
uncivilised warriors. In the military sense the case is that the old
powers had grown into the habit of replacing their citizen militias by
paid professional soldiers, and their citizens accordingly had grown
slack and unwarlike. Rulers like Philip of Macedon were able to raise
much larger native levies and to drill them into the professional
tactics of the day. Economically it was wealth that told. The old cities
were, partly, no doubt through their own lack of foresight, in a state
of financial exhaustion, while Philip, by his control of the gold-mines,
Attalus and Evagoras by their private wealth, and the Phocians by their
sacrilegious seizure of the treasures of Delphi, were still able to
bring large forces into the field. The old powers were thus left behind
in the race through the force of circumstances beyond their control. In
fact, the day of the city-state seemed for a time to be drawing to a
close, and larger units, either kingdoms or confederacies, to be taking
its place according to their natural superiority.
Modern historians, therefore, suckled on Bismarckism and devoted to
physical force, turn aside from the old cities and pronounce them
hopelessly degenerate. This is a proposition that deserves examination.
In some respects it is false. If it be the mark of historical decadence
that the motive power of a race is in some mysterious way paralysed so
that invention ceases and no more new forms or experiments are made in
culture or politics, then we may assert with some confidence that Greece
was not yet even in the third century in such a condition. We shall see
something of her new inventions in literature, philosophy, and art in
this chapter. In politics the federal systems of Western Greece were
distinctly novel and promising. Even in warfare she fought bravely
enough at Chæroneia, as she did much later against the invading Gauls.
Even Athens, when her dark hour came and she had to submit to garrisons
and alien governors, never acquiesced, but rose again and again in
rebellion against them. Sparta for a short time in the third century
performed the most difficult of all political feats, namely, a
reformation and regeneration of herself from within. At Sellasia under
Cleomenes III. in 222 B.C. the few Spartans who remained fought against
tremendous odds with all their ancient sublime devotion, and died to a
man as their ancestors had done under Leonidas. So true is it that moral
and spiritual qualities in a people do not come to the sudden end that
often befalls a state when it depends for its greatness on material
prosperity or physical force.
But the most serious symptom of later Greece was a real racial decline,
for which history has no remedy and no mercy, a decline of population.
The Spartiate race of Lacedæmon, for example, became almost extinct.
There were no more than 1500 of them at the date of the battle of
Leuctra, and after that we hear of expeditions containing no more that
thirty genuine Spartiates. In a less degree it was the same all over old
Greece, and whether it was due to malarial fever or to economic
distress, it made the political decline of these states inevitable.
Now it is necessary to go back a little into the earlier part of the
fourth century to glance at the rise of Macedon and its conquerors. At
the opening of the century Macedon was still almost uncivilised; it was
ruled by a monarchy surrounded with an aristocracy of knights very much
after the Homeric model. At that time its kings had begun to acquire
enough education to mingle a little in Greek politics, and Archelaus in
particular had the good taste to invite Euripides and Agathon to his
court. Philip II. obtained the throne by suppressing his young ward, the
rightful king. At that time Macedon was overrun by wilder barbarians
from the west, and it was long before Philip could make head against
them. He did so at last by the organising genius which he displayed in
remodelling his army, the astute statesmanship with which he made and
broke treaties, and still more by the wealth he secured and the use he
made of it in bribing his enemies. Philip was, in short, the organiser
who occasionally precedes the conqueror and grows the laurels for his
successor to wear. Expansion to the west would be difficult and
unprofitable. To the east lay the important cities of the Chalcidian
peninsulas, the gold-mines of Mount Pangæus, protected by the city of
Amphipolis, the rather decrepit kingdom of Thrace, and then the way was
clear to the Black Sea and to Asia. Now this was the chosen field of
commercial enterprise for Athens and her reviving fleets. A conflict was
therefore inevitable.
The statesman who led the anti-Macedonian party at Athens was the orator
Demosthenes. His brilliant series of Philippics and Olynthiac Orations
are full of denunciations of the crafty monarch, full of trumpet-calls
to the ancient valour of Athens which sometimes ring rather hollow to
modern ears. Demosthenes was not exceptionally honest, but there is no
warrant for suspecting the purity of his patriotism. He himself set the
example of bearing a shield personally in the ranks, and he must have
been conscious throughout his public career that he was in danger of
assassination or of execution if the enemy triumphed. The wisdom of his
opposition to Philip has also been questioned. Events were to prove that
these Macedonian kings were not barbarians; on the contrary, their
warmest aspiration was to be counted as Greeks, and they had, as they
frequently testified, a great love of Greek culture and a deep
veneration for Athens as the home of it. This the future was to prove;
the present only showed a foreign monarch devouring piecemeal the
markets of Athens in the north. Perhaps Demosthenes ought to have
realised that Macedon was too strong for Athens, but no one could
seriously expect old Greece to succumb to this upstart without a
struggle. For one thing, Macedon had not and never acquired a really
strong fleet. But her army was certainly irresistible.