The Life of Greece

  Slightly north of where Naples stands today adventurers from Chalcis, Eretria, Euboean Cyme, and Graia founded, about 750, the great port of Cumae, oldest of Greek towns in the West. Taking the products of eastern Greece and selling them in central Italy, Cumae rapidly acquired wealth, colonized and controlled Rhegium, obtained command of the Straits of Messina, and excluded from them, or subjected to heavy tolls, the vessels of cities not leagued with it in trade.56 Spreading southward, the Cumaeans founded Dicaearchia—which became the Roman port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli)—and Neapolis, or New City, our Naples. From these colonies Greek ideas as well as goods passed into the crude young city of Rome, and northward into Etruria. At Cumae the Romans picked up several Greek gods—Apollo and Heracles especially—and bought for more than they were worth the scrolls in which the Cumaean Sibyl—the aged priestess of Apollo—had foretold the future of Rome.

  Near the beginning of the sixth century the Phocaeans of Ionia landed on the southern shore of France, founded Massalia (Marseilles), and carried Greek products up the Rhone and its branches as far as Aries and Nîmes. They made friends and wives of the natives, introduced the olive and the vine as gifts to France, and so familiarized southern Gaul with Greek civilization that Rome found it easy to spread its kindred culture there in Caesar’s time. Ranging along the coast to the east, the Phocaeans established Antipolis (Antibes), Nicaea (Nice), and Monoecus (Monaco). Westward they ventured into Spain and built the towns of Rhodae (Rosas), Emporium (Ampurias), Hemeroscopium, and Maenaca (near Malaga). The Greeks in Spain flourished for a while by exploiting the silver mines of Tartessus; but in 535 the Carthaginians and Etruscans combined their forces to destroy the Phocaean fleet, and from that time Greek power in the western Mediterranean waned.

  V. SICILY

  We have left not quite to the last the richest of all the regions colonized by the Greeks. To Sicily nature had given what she had withheld from continental Greece—an apparently inexhaustible soil fertilized by rain and lava, and producing so much wheat and corn that Sicily was thought to be if not the birthplace at least a favorite haunt of Demeter herself. Here were orchards, vineyards, olive groves, heavy with fruit; honey as succulent as Hymettus’, and flowers blooming in their turn from the beginning to the end of the year. Grassy plains pastured sheep and cattle, endless timber grew in the hills, and the fish in the surrounding waters reproduced faster than Sicily could eat them.

  A neolithic culture had flourished here in the third millennium before Christ, a bronze culture in the second; even in Minoan days trade had bound the island with Crete and Greece.57 Towards the end of the second millennium three waves of immigration broke upon Sicilian shores: the Sicans came from Spain, the Elymi from Asia Minor, the Sicels from Italy.58 About 800 the Phoenicians established themselves at Motya and Panormus (Palermo) in the west. From 735 on* the Greeks poured in, and in quick succession founded Naxos, Syracuse, Leontini, Messana (Messina), Catana, Gela, Himera, Selinus, and Acragas. In all these cases the natives were driven from the coast by force of arms. Most of them retired to till the mountainous interior, some became slaves to the invaders, so many others intermarried with the conquerors that Greek blood, character, and morals in Sicily took on a perceptible native tint of passion and sensuality.59 The Hellenes never quite conquered the island; the Phoenicians and Carthaginians remained predominant on the west coast, and for five hundred years periodic war marked the struggle of Greek and Semite, Europe and Africa, for the possession of Sicily. After thirteen centuries of domination by Rome that contest would be resumed, in the Middle Ages, between Norman and Saracen.

  Catana was distinguished for its laws, the Lipari Islands for their communism, Himera for its poet, Segesta, Selinus, and Acragas for their temples, Syracuse for its power and wealth. The laws that Charondas gave to Catana, a full generation before Solon, became a model for many cities in Sicily and Italy, and served to create public order and sexual morality in communities unprotected by ancient mores and sacred precedents. A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.60 Charondas, according to a typically Greek tale, forbade the citizens to enter the assembly while armed. One day, however, he himself came to the public meeting forgetfully wearing his sword. When a voter reproached him for breaking his own law he answered, “I will rather confirm it,” and slew himself.61

  If we wish to visualize the difficulties of life in colonies carved out by violent conquest we need only contemplate the curious communism of the Lipari—Le., the Glorious—Islands, which lie to the north of eastern Sicily. Here, about 580, some adventurers from Cnidus organized a pirate’s paradise. Preying upon the commerce about the Straits, they brought the booty to their island lairs and shared it with exemplary equality. The land was owned by the community, a part of the population was assigned to till it, and the products were distributed in like shares to all the citizens. In time, however, individualism reasserted itself: the land was divided into plots individually owned, and life resumed the uneven tenor of its competitive way.

  On the northern coast of Sicily lay Himera, destined to be the Plataea of the West. There Stesichorus, “Maker of Choruses,” at a time when the Greeks were tiring of epics, recast into the form of choral lyrics the legends of the race, and gave even to Helen and Achilles the passing novelty of “modern dress.” As if to bridge the gap between the dying epic and the future novel, Stesichorus composed love stories in verse; in one of these a pure and timid lass dies of unrequited love, in the style of Provençal madrigals or Victorian fiction. At the same time he opened a pathway for Theocritus by writing a pastoral poem on the death of the shepherd Daphnis, whose love for Chloe was to be the main business of the Greek novel in the Roman age. Stesichorus had his own romance, and with no less a lady than Helen herself. Having lost his sight, he attributed this calamity to his having handed down the tale of Helen’s infidelity; to atone to her (for she was now a goddess) he composed a “palinode,” or second song, assuring the world that Helen had been kidnaped by force, had never yielded to Paris, had never gone to Troy, but had waited intact in Egypt until Menelaus came to rescue her. In his old age the poet warned Himera against giving dictatorial power to Phalaris of Acragas.* Being unheeded, he moved to Catana, where his monumental tomb was one of the sights of Roman Sicily.

  West of Himera lay Segesta, of which nothing remains but a peristyle of unfinished Doric columns weirdly rising amid surrounding weeds. To find Sicilian architecture at its best we must cross the island southward to the once great cities of Selinus and Acragas. During its tragic tenure of life from its establishment in 651 to its destruction by Carthaginians in 409, Selinus raised to the silent gods seven Doric temples, immense in size but of imperfect workmanship, covered with painted plaster and decorated with crude reliefs. The demon of earthquake destroyed these temples at a date unknown, and little survives of them but broken columns and capitals sprawling on the ground.

  Acragas, the Roman Agrigentum, was in the sixth century the largest and richest city in Sicily. We picture it rising from its busy wharves through a noisy market place to the homes on the slope of the hill, and the stately acropolis whose shrines almost lifted their worshipers to the sky. Here, as in most of the Greek colonies, the landowning aristocracy yielded power to a dictatorship representing chiefly the middle class. In 570 Phalaris seized the government, and secured immortality by roasting his enemies in a brazen bull; he was particularly pleased by a contrivance that made the agonized cries of his victims sound through a mechanism of pipes like the bellowing of the animal.62 Nevertheless it was to him and a later dictator, Theron, that the city owed the political order and stability that permitted its economic development. The merchants of Acragas, like those of Selinus, Crotona, and Sybaris, became the American millionaires of their time, upon whom the lesser plutocrats of older Greece looked with secret envy and compensatory scorn; the new world, said the old, was interested in size and show, but ha
d no taste or artistry. The temple of Zeus at Acragas unquestionably sought size, for Polybius describes it as “second to none in Greece in dimensions and design”;63 we cannot directly judge its beauty, for wars and earthquakes destroyed it. A generation later, in the age of Pericles, Acragas raised more modest structures. One of them, the temple of Concord, survives almost completely, and of the temple of Hera there remains an impressive colonnade; enough in either case to show that Greek taste was not confined to Athens, and that even the commercial west had learned that “size is not development.”—In Acragas the great Empedocles would be born; and perhaps it was there, and not in Etna’s crater, that he would die.

  Syracuse began as it is today—a village huddled on the promontory of Ortygia. As far back as the eighth century Corinth had sent colonists, armed with righteousness and superior weapons, to seize the little peninsula, which was then perhaps an island. They built or widened the connection with the mainland of Sicily, and drove most of the Sicels into the interior. They multiplied with all the rapidity of a vigorous people on a resource-full soil; in time their city became the largest in Greece, with a circumference of fourteen miles and a population of half a million souls. An aristocracy of landholders was overthrown about 495 by a revolt of the unfranchised plebs in alliance with the enslaved Sicels. The new democracy, if we may believe Aristotle,64 proved incapable of establishing an orderly society, and in 485 Gelon of Gela, by a program of enlightened treachery, set up a dictatorship. Like many of his kind he was as able as he was unscrupulous. Scorning all moral codes and political restraints, he transformed Ortygia into an impregnable fortress for his government, conquered Naxos, Leontini, and Messana, and taxed all eastern Sicily to make Syracuse the most beautiful of Greek capitals. “In this way,” says Herodotus, sadly, “Gelon became a great king.”*65

  He redeemed himself, and became the idolized Napoleon of Sicily when, as Xerxes’ fleet moved upon Athens, the Carthaginians sent an armada only less numerous than the Persian to wrest the island paradise from the Greeks. The fate of Sicily was joined with that of Greece when in the same monthtradition said on the same day—Gelon faced Hamilcar at Himera, and Themistocles confronted Xerxes at Salamis.

  VI. THE GREEKS IN AFRICA

  The Carthaginians had reason to be disturbed, for even on the north coast of Africa the Greeks had established cities and were capturing trade. As early as 630 the Dorians of Thera had sent a numerous colony to Cyrene, midway between Carthage and Egypt. There, on the desert’s edge, they found good soil, with rain so abundant that the natives spoke of the site as the place where there was a hole in the sky. The Greeks used part of the land for pasturage, and exported wool and hides; they grew from the silphium plant a spice that all Greece was eager to buy; they sold Greek products to Africa, and developed their own handicrafts to such a point that Cyrenaic vases ranked among the best. The city used its wealth intelligently, and adorned itself with great gardens, temples, statuary, and gymnasiums. Here the first famous epicurean philosopher, Aristippus, was born, and here, after much wandering, he returned to found the Cyrenaic School.

  Within Egypt itself, normally hostile to any foreign settlement, the Greeks gained a foothold, at last an empire. About 650 the Milesians opened a “factory,” or trading post, at Naucratis on the Canopic branch of the Nile. Pharaoh Psamtik I tolerated them because they made good mercenaries, while their commerce provided rich prey for his collectors of customs revenues.67 Ahmose II gave them a large measure of self-government. Naucratis became almost an industrial city, with manufactures of pottery, terra cotta, and faience; still more it became an emporium of trade, bringing in Greek oil and wine, and sending out Egyptian wheat, linen, and wool, African ivory, frankincense, and gold. Gradually, amid these exchanges, Egyptian lore and techniques in religion, architecture, sculpture, and science flowed into Greece, while in return Greek words and ways entered Egypt, and paved the way for Greek domination in the Alexandrian age.

  If in imagination we take a merchant vessel from Naucratis to Athens, our tour of the Greek world will be complete. It was necessary that we should make this long circuit in order that we might see and feel the extent and variety of Hellenic civilization. Aristotle described the constitutional history of 158 Greek city-states, but there were a thousand more. Each contributed in commerce, industry, and thought to what we mean by Greece. In the colonies, rather than on the mainland, were born Greek poetry and prose, mathematics and metaphysics, oratory and history. Without them, and the thousand absorbing tentacles which they stretched out into the old world, Greek civilization, the most precious product in history, might never have been. Through them the cultures of Egypt and the Orient passed into Greece, and Greek culture spread slowly into Asia, Africa, and Europe.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Gods of Greece

  I. THE SOURCES OF POLYTHEISM

  WHEN we look for unifying elements in the civilization of these scattered cities we find essentially five: a common language, with local dialects; a common intellectual life, in which only major figures in literature, philosophy, and science are known far beyond their political frontiers; a common passion for athletics, finding outlet in municipal and interstate games; a love of beauty locally expressed in forms of art common to all the Greek communities; and a partly common religious ritual and belief.

  Religion divided the cities as much as it united them. Under the polite and general worship of the remote Olympians lay the intenser cults of local deities and powers who served no vassalage to Zeus. Tribal and political separatism nourished polytheism, and made monotheism impossible. In the early days every family had its own god; to him the divine fire burned unextinguished at the hearth, and to him offerings of food and wine were made before every meal. This holy communion, or sharing of food with the god, was the basic and primary act of religion in the home. Birth, marriage, and death were sanctified into sacraments by ancient ritual before the sacred fire; and in this way religion suffused a mystic poetry and a stabilizing solemnity over the elemental events of human life. In like manner the gene, the phratry, the tribe, and the city had each its special god. Athens worshiped Athena, Eleusis Demeter, Samos Hera, Ephesus Artemis, Poseidonia Poseidon. The center and summit of the city was the shrine of the city god; participation in the worship of the god was the sign, the privilege, and the requisite of citizenship. When the city marched out to war it carried the form and emblem of its god in the forefront of the troops, and no important step was taken without consulting him through divination. In return he fought for the city, and sometimes seemed to appear at the head or above the spears of the soldiers; victory was the conquest not only of a city by a city but of a god by a god. The city, like the family or the tribe, kept always burning, at a public altar in the prytaneum or town hall, a sacred fire symbolizing the mystically potent and persistent life of the city’s founders and heroes; and periodically the citizens partook of a common meal before this fire. Just as in the family the father was also the priest, so in the Greek city the chief magistrate or archon was the high priest of the state religion, and all his powers and actions were sanctified by the god. By this conscription of the supernatural, man was tamed from a hunter into a citizen.

  Liberated by local independence, the religious imagination of Greece produced a luxuriant mythology and a populous pantheon. Every object or force of earth or sky, every blessing and every terror, every qualityeven the vices—of mankind was personified as a deity, usually in human form; no other religion has ever been so anthropomorphic as the Greek. Every craft, profession, and art had its divinity, or, as we should say, its patron saint; and in addition there were demons, harpies, furies, fairies, gorgons, sirens, nymphs, almost as numerous as the mortals of the earth. The old question—is religion created by priests?—is here settled; it is incredible that any conspiracy of primitive theologians should have begotten such a plethora of gods. It must have been a boon to have so many deities, so many fascinating legends, sacred shrines, and solemn or joyous f
estivals. Polytheism is as natural as polygamy, and survives as long, suiting well all the contradictory currents of the world. Even today, in Mediterranean Christianity, it is not God who is worshiped, so much as the saints; it is polytheism that sheds over the simple life the inspiring poetry of consolatory myth, and gives to the humble soul the aid and comfort that it would not venture to expect from a Supreme Being unapproachably awful and remote.