The Life of Greece

  One by one these colonies took form, until Greece was no longer the narrow peninsula of Homeric days, but a strangely loose association of independent cities scattered from Africa to Thrace and from Gibraltar to the eastern end of the Black Sea. It was an epochal performance for the women of Greece; we shall not always find them so ready to have children. Through these busy centers of vitality and intelligence the Greeks spread into all of southern Europe the seeds of that subtle and precarious luxury called civilization, without which life would have no beauty, and history no meaning.

  II. THE IONIAN CYCLADES

  Sailing south from the Piraeus along the Attic coast, and bearing east around Sunium’s templed promontory, the traveler reaches the little isle of Ceos, where, if we may believe the incredible on the authority of Strabo and Plutarch, “there was once a law that appears to have commanded those who were sixty years of age to drink hemlock, in order that the food might be sufficient for the rest,” and “there was no memory of a case of adultery or seduction over a period of seven hundred years.”4

  Perhaps that is why her greatest poet exiled himself from Ceos after reaching middle age; he might have found it difficult to attain, at home, the eighty-seven years that Greek tradition gives him. All the Hellenic world knew Simonides at thirty, and when he died, in 469, he was by common consent the most brilliant writer of his time. His fame as poet and singer won him an invitation from Hipparchus, codictator of Athens, at whose court he found it possible to live in amity with another poet, Anacreon. He survived the war with Persia, and was chosen again and again to write epitaphs for memorials of the honored dead. In his old age he lived at the court of Hieron I, dictator of Syracuse; and his repute was then so high that in 475 he made peace in the field between Hieron and Theron, dictator of Acragas, as hostilities were about to begin.5 Plutarch, in his perennially pertinent essay on “Should Old Men Govern?” tells us that Simonides continued to win the prize for lyric poetry and choral song into very old age. When finally he consented to die he was buried at Acragas with the honors of a king.

  He was a personality as well as a poet, and the Greeks denounced and loved him for his vices and eccentricities. He had a passion for money, and his muse was dumb in the absence of gold. He was the first to write poetry for pay, on the ground that poets had as much right to eat as anyone else; but the practice was new to Greece, and Aristophanes echoed the resentment of the public when he said that Simonides “would go to sea on a hurdle to earn a groat.”6 He prided himself on having invented a system of mnemonics, which Cicero adopted gratefully;7 its essential principle lay in arranging the things to be remembered into some logical classification and sequence, so that each item would naturally lead to the next. He was a wit, and his sharp repartees passed like a mental currency among the cities of Greece; but in his old age he remarked that he had often repented of speaking, but never of holding his tongue.8

  We are surprised to find, in the extant fragments of a poet so widely acclaimed and so liberally rewarded, that indispersible gloom which broods over so much of Greek literature after Homer—in whose days men were too active to be pessimists, and too violent to be bored.

  Few and evil are the days of our life; but everlasting will be our sleep beneath the earth. . . . Small is the strength of man, and invincible are his errors; grief treads upon the heels of grief through his short life; and death, whom no man escapes, hangs over him at last; to this come good and bad alike. . . . Nothing human is everlasting. Well said the bard of Chios that the life of man is even as that of a green leaf; yet few who hear this bear it in mind, for hope is strong in the breast of the young. When youth is in flower, and the heart of man is light, he nurses idle thought, hoping he will never grow old or die; nor does he think of sickness in good health. Fools are they who dream thus, nor know how short are the days of our youth and our life.9

  No hope of Blessed Isles comforts Simonides, and the divinities of Olympus, like those of Christianity in some modern verse, have become instruments of poetry rather than consolations of the soul. When Hieron challenged him to define the nature and attributes of God he asked for a day’s time to prepare his answer, and the next day begged for two days more, and on each occasion doubled the period that he required for thought. When at last Hieron demanded an explanation, Simonides replied that the longer he pondered the matter the more obscure it became.10

  Out of Ceos came not only Simonides, but his nephew and lyric successor Bacchylides, and, in Alexandrian days, the great anatomist Erasistratus. We cannot say so much for Seriphos, or Andros, or Tenos, or Myconos, or Sicinos, or Ios. On Syros lived Pherecydes (ca. 550), who was reputed to have taught Pythagoras, and to have been the first philosopher to write in prose. On Delos, said Greek story, Apollo himself had been born. So sacred was the island as his sanctuary that both death and birth were forbidden within its borders; those about to give birth or to die were hurriedly conveyed from its shores; and all known graves were emptied that the island might be purified.11 There, after the repulse of the Persians, Athens and her Ionian allies would keep the treasure of the Delian Confederacy; there, every fourth year, the Ionians met in pious but convivial assemblage to celebrate the festival of the handsome god. A seventh-century hymn describes the “women with fine girdles,”12 the eager merchants busy at their booths, the crowds lining the road to watch the sacred procession; the tense ritual and solemn sacrifice in the temple; the joyous dances and choral hymns of Delian and Athenian maidens chosen for their comeliness as well as their song; the athletic and musical contests, and the plays in the theater under the open sky. Annually the Athenians sent an embassy to Delos to celebrate Apollo’s birthday; and no criminal might be executed in Athens until this embassy’s return. Hence the long interval, so fortunate for literature and philosophy, between the conviction of Socrates and his execution.

  Naxos is the largest, as Delos is almost the smallest, of the Cyclades. It was famous for its wine and its marble, and became rich enough, in the sixth century, to have its own navy and its own school of sculpture. Southeast of Naxos lies Amorgos, home of the unamiable Semonides, whose ungallant satire on women has been carefully preserved by man-written history.* To the west lies Paros, almost composed of marble; its citizens made their homes of it, and Praxiteles found there the translucent stone which he would carve and polish into the warmth and texture of human flesh. On this island, about the end of the eighth century, Archilochus was born, son of a slave woman, but one of the greatest lyric singers of Greece. A soldier’s fortune led him north to Thasos where, in a battle with the natives, he found his heels more valuable than his shield; he took to the one and abandoned the other, and lived to turn many a merry quip about his flight. Back in Paros he fell in love with Neobule, daughter of the rich Lycambes. He describes her as a modest lass with tresses falling over her shoulders, and sighs, as so many centuries have sighed, “only to touch her hand.”14 But Lycambes, admiring the poet’s verses more than his income, put an end to the affair; whereupon Archilochus aimed at him and Neobule and her sister such barbs of satiric verse that all three of them, legend assures us, hanged themselves. Archilochus turned his back sourly upon the “figs and fishes” of Paros, and became again a soldier of fortune. Finally, his heels having failed him, he was killed in battle against the Naxians.

  We learn from his poems that he was a man of rough speech to both friends and foes, with a disappointed lover’s penchant for adultery.15 We picture him as an inspired pirate, a melodious buccaneer coarse in prose and polished in verse; taking the iambic meter already popular in folk songs and fashioning it into short and stinging lines of six feet; this was the “iambic trimeter” that would become the classic medium of Greek tragedy. He experimented gaily with dactylic hexameters, trochaic tetrameters, and a dozen other meters,* and gave to Greek poetry the metrical forms that it would keep to the end. Only a few broken lines survive, and we must accept the word of the ancients that he was the most popular of all Greek poets after Homer. Horace l
oved to imitate his technical diversities; and the great Hellenistic critic, Aristophanes of Byzantium, when asked which of Archilochus’ poems he liked best, voiced in two words the feeling of Greece when he answered, “The longest.”16

  A morning’s sail west of Paros is Siphnos, famous for its mines of silver and gold. These were owned by the people through their government. The yield was so rich that the island could set up at Delphi the Siphnian Treasury with its placid caryatides, erect many another monument, and yet distribute a substantial balance among the citizens at the end of every year.17 In 524 a band of freebooters from Samos landed on the island and exacted a tribute of a hundred talents—the equivalent of $600,000 today. The rest of Greece accepted this heroic robbery with the equanimity and fortitude with which men are accustomed to bear the misfortunes of their friends.

  III. THE DORIAN OVERFLOW

  The Dorians, too, colonized the Cyclades, and tamed their warlike spirits to terrace the mountain slopes patiently, that the parsimonious rain might be held and coaxed to nourish their crops and vines. In Melos they took over from their Bronze Age predecessors the quarrying of obsidian, and made the island so prosperous that the Athenians, as we shall see, spared no pains to Melos to win its support in the struggle with Sparta. Here, in 1820, was found that Aphrodite of Melos* which is now the most famous statue in the Western world.

  Moving east and then south, the Dorians conquered Thera and Crete, and from Thera sent a further colony to Cyrene. A few of them settled in Cyprus, where, from the eleventh century, a small colony of Arcadian Greeks had struggled for mastery against the old Phoenician dynasties. It was one of these Phoenician kinglets, Pygmalion, of whom legend told how he so admired an ivory Aphrodite carved by his hands that he fell in love with it, begged the goddess to give it life, and married his creation when the goddess complied.18 The coming of iron probably lessened the demand for Cyprian copper, and left the island off the main line of Greek economic advance. The cutting of the timber by the natives to burn the copper ore, by the Phoenicians for ships and by the Greeks for agricultural clearings, slowly transformed Cyprus into the hot and half-barren derelict that it is today. The art of the island, like its population, was in the Greek period a medley of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Hellenic influences, and never attained a homogeneous character of its own.†

  The Dorians were but a minority of the Greek population in Cyprus; but in Rhodes and the southern Sporades and on the adjoining mainland they became the ruling class. Rhodes prospered in the centuries between Homer and Marathon, though its zenith would not come till the Hellenistic age. On a promontory jutting out from Asia, Dorian settlers developed the city of Cnidus, well situated to be a port of the coastal trade. Here the astronomer Eudoxus would be born, and the historian (or fabulist) Ctesias, and that Sostratus who was to build the Pharos at Alexandria. Here, among the ruins of ancient temples, would be found the sad and matronly Demeter of the British Museum.

  Opposite Cnidus lay the island of Cos, home of Hippocrates and rival of Cnidus as a center of Greek medical science. Apelles the painter would be born here, and Theocritus the poet. A little to the north, on the coast, was Halicarnassus, birthplace of Herodotus and royal seat, in Hellenistic days, of the Carian King Mausolus and his fond Artemisia. This city, with Cos and Cnidus and the chief towns of Rhodes (Lindus, Camirus, and Ialysus) formed the Dorian Hexapolis, or Six Cities, of Asia Minor—weak rivals, for a time, of the Twelve Cities of Ionia.

  IV. THE IONIAN DODECAPOLIS

  1. Miletus and the Birth of Greek Philosophy

  Running northwest of Caria for some ninety miles was the strip of mountainous coastland, twenty to thirty miles wide, anciently known as Ionia. Here, said Herodotus, “the air and climate are the most beautiful in the whole world.”19 Its cities lay for the most part at the mouths of rivers, or at the ends of roads, that carried the goods of the hinterland down to the Mediterranean for shipment everywhere.

  Miletus, southernmost of the Ionian Twelve, was in the sixth century the richest city of the Greek world. The site had been inhabited by Carians from Minoan days; and when, about 1000 B.C., the Ionians came there from Attica, they found the old Aegean culture, though in a decadent form, waiting to serve as the advanced starting point of their civilization. They brought no women with them to Miletus, but merely killed the native males and married the widows;20 the fusion of cultures began with a fusion of blood. Like most of the Ionian cities, Miletus submitted at first to kings who led them in war, then to aristocrats who owned the land, then to “tyrants” representing the middle class. Under the dictator Thrasybulus, at the beginning of the sixth century, industry and trade reached their peak, and the growing-wealth of Miletus flowered forth in literature, philosophy, and art. Wool was brought down from the rich pasture lands of the interior, and turned into clothing in the textile mills of the city. Taking a lesson from the Phoenicians and gradually bettering their instruction, Ionian merchants established colonies as trading posts in Egypt, Italy, the Propontis, and the Euxine. Miletus alone had eighty such colonies, sixty of them in the north. From Abydos, Cyzicus, Sinope, Olbia, Trapezus, and Dioscurias, Miletus drew flax, timber, fruit, and metals, and paid for these with the products of her handicrafts. The wealth and luxury of the city became a proverb and a scandal throughout Greece. Milesian merchants, overflowing with profits, lent money to enterprises far and wide, and to the municipality itself. They were the Medici of the Ionian Renaissance.

  It was in this stimulating environment that Greece first developed two of its most characteristic gifts to the world—science and philosophy. The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins. Here in Miletus, as later in Athens, were men from a hundred scattered states; mentally active through competitive commerce, and freed from the bondage of tradition by long absences from their native altars and homes. Milesians themselves traveled to distant cities, and had their eyes opened by the civilizations of Lydia, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Egypt; in this way, among others, Egyptian geometry and Babylonian astronomy entered the Greek mind. Trade and mathematics, foreign commerce and geography, navigation and astronomy, developed hand in hand. Meanwhile wealth had created leisure; an aristocracy of culture was growing up in which freedom of thought was tolerated because only a small minority could read. No powerful priesthood, no ancient and inspired text limited men’s thinking; even the Homeric poems, which were to become in some sense the Bible of the Greeks, had hardly taken yet a definite form; and in that final form their mythology was to bear the imprint of Ionian skepticism and scandalous merriment. Here for the first time thought became secular, and sought rational and consistent answers to the problems of the world and man.*

  Nevertheless the new plant, mutation though it was, had its roots and ancestry. The hoary wisdom of Egyptian priests and Persian Magi, perhaps even of Hindu seers, the sacerdotal science of the Chaldeans, the poetically personified cosmogony of Hesiod, were mingled with the natural realism of Phoenician and Greek merchants to produce Ionian philosophy. Greek religion itself had paved the way by talking of Moira, or Fate, as ruler of both gods and men: here was that idea of law, as superior to incalculable personal decree, which would mark the essential difference between science and mythology, as well as between despotism and democracy. Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law. That the Greeks, so far as our knowledge goes, were the first to achieve this recognition and this freedom in both philosophy and government is the secret of their accomplishment, and of their importance in history.

  Since life proceeds by heredity as well as by variation, by stabilizing custom as well as by experimental innovation, it was to be expected that the religious roots of philosophy would form as well as feed it, and there should remain in it, to the very end, a vigorous element of theology. Two currents run side by side in the history of Greek philosophy: one naturalist
ic, the other mystical. The latter stemmed from Pythagoras, and ran through Parmenides, Heracleitus, Plato, and Cleanthes to Plotinus and St. Paul; the other had its first world figure in Thales, and passed down through Anaximander, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Hippocrates, and Democritus to Epicurus and Lucretius. Now and then some great spirit—Socrates, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius—merged the two currents in an attempt to do justice to the unformulable complexity of life. But even in these men the dominant strain, characteristic of Greek thought, was the love and pursuit of reason.

  Thales was born about 640, probably at Miletus, reputedly of Phoenician parentage,21 and derived much of his education from Egypt and the Near East; here, as if personified, we see the transit of culture from East to West. He appears to have engaged in business only so far as to provide himself with the ordinary goods of life; everyone knows the story of his successful speculation in oil presses.* For the rest he gave himself to study, with the absorbed devotion suggested by the tale of his falling into a ditch while watching the stars. Despite his solitude, he interested himself in the affairs of his city, knew the dictator Thrasybulus intimately, and advocated the federation of the Ionian states for united defense against Lydia and Persia.22