The Life of Greece

  The Jews did what they could to allay the resentment against their amixia—their social separation—and their success. Though they clung to their religion they spoke Greek, studied and wrote about Greek literature, and translated their sacred books and their histories into Greek. To acquaint the Greeks with the Jewish religious tradition, and to enable the Jew who knew no Hebrew to read his own scriptures, a group of Alexandrian Jewish scholars began, probably under Ptolemy II, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The kings favored the undertaking in the hope that it would make the Jews of Egypt more independent of Jerusalem, and would lessen the flow of Jewish-Egyptian funds to Palestine. Legend told how Ptolemy Philadelphus, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, had invited some seventy Jewish scholars to come from Judea about 250 to translate the scriptures of their people; how the King had lodged each of them in a separate room on Pharos, and had kept them without intercommunication until each had made his own rendering of the Pentateuch; how all the seventy versions, when finished, agreed word for word, proving the divine inspiration of the text and of the translators; how the King rewarded the scholars with costly presents of gold; and how from these circumstances the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible came to be known as the hermeneia kata tous hebdomekonta—the Interpretation according to the Seventy—in Latin, Interpretatio Septuaginta (sc. Seniorum)—in a word, the “Septuagint.”*44 Whatever the process of translation, the Pentateuch seems to have appeared in Greek before the close of the third century, and the Prophetic books in the second.46 This was the Bible used by Philo and St. Paul.

  The process of Hellenization in Egypt failed as completely with the natives as with the Jews. Outside of Alexandria the Egyptians sullenly maintained their own religion, their own dress or nudity, their own immemorial ways. The Greeks thought of themselves as conquerors, not as fellow men; they did not bother to build Greek cities south of the Delta, or to learn the language of the people; and their laws did not recognize the marriage of an Egyptian with a Greek. Ptolemy I tried to unite the Greek and native faiths by identifying Serapis and Zeus; later Ptolemies encouraged the cult of themselves as gods to offer a common and convenient object of worship to their heterogeneous population; but those Egyptians who were not courting office paid little attention to these artificial cults. The Egyptian priests, shorn of their wealth and power, and dependent for their sustenance upon grants of money from the state, waited patiently for the Greek wave to recede. In the end it was not Hellenism that won in Alexandria, but mysticism; now were laid the foundations of Neo-Platonism and the medley of promissory cults that competed for the Alexandrian soul in the centuries that surrounded the birth of Christ. Osiris as Serapis became the favorite god of the later Egyptians, and of many Egyptian Greeks; Isis regained popularity as the goddess of women and motherhood. When Christianity came neither the clergy nor the people found it impossible to change Isis into Mary, and Serapis into Christ.

  IV. REVOLT

  The lesson of Ptolemaic socialism is that even a government may exploit. Under the first two Ptolemies the system worked reasonably well: great engineering enterprises were completed, agriculture was improved, marketing was brought into order, the overseers behaved with a modest measure of injustice and partiality, and though the exploitation of materials and men was thorough, its profits went in large degree to develop and adorn the country, and to finance its cultural life. Three factors ruined the experiment. The Ptolemies went to war, and spent more and more of the people’s earnings upon armies, navies, and campaigns. After Philadelphus there was a rapid deterioration in the quality of the kings; they ate and drank and mated, and allowed the administration of the system to fall into the hands of rascals who ground every possible penny out of the poor. The fact that the exploiters were foreigners was never forgotten by the Egyptians, nor by the priests who dreamed of the fleshpots of Egypt that their class had enjoyed before the Persian and Greek domination.

  The Ptolemaic conception of socialism was essentially one of intensified production rather than of wide distribution. The fellah received enough of his product to keep him alive, but not enough to encourage him in his work or in the business of rearing a family. Generation after generation the government’s exactions grew. The system of detailed national control became intolerable, like the relentlessly watchful eye of a despotic parent. The state lent seed-corn to the peasant to plant his crop, and then bound him to the farm until the harvest was in. No peasant might use any of his own product until all his debts had been paid to the state. The fellah was patient, but even he began to grumble. By the second century a substantial part of the soil had been abandoned for lack of peasants to work it; the cleruchs or lessees of royal land could get no tenants to till it for them; they tried to do it themselves, but were not up to the task; gradually the desert crept back upon civilization. In the gold mines of Nubia the slaves worked naked in dark and narrow galleries, in cramping positions, loaded with chains, and encouraged by the whip of the overseer; their food was poor, not even enough to keep them alive; thousands of them succumbed from malnutrition and fatigue; and the only welcome event in their lives was death47 The common laborer in the factories received one obol (nine cents) a day, the skilled worker two or three. Every tenth day was a day of rest.

  Complaints multiplied, and strikes grew more frequent: strikes among the miners, the quarrymen, the boatmen, the peasants, the artisans, the tradesmen, even the overseers and the police; strikes seldom for better pay, since the toilers had ceased to hope for this, but of simple exhaustion and despair. “We are worn out,” says a papyrus record of one strike; “we will run away”—i.e., seek sanctuary in a temple.48 Nearly all the exploiters were Greeks, nearly all the exploited were Egyptians or Jews. The priests clandestinely appealed to the religious feelings of the natives, while the Greeks resented any concession made to Jews or Egyptians by the government. In the capital the populace was bribed by state bounties and spectacles, but it was excluded from the royal quarter, was watched by a large military force, and was allowed no voice in national affairs; in the end it became an irresponsible and violent mob.49 In 216 the Egyptians revolted, but were put down; in 189 they revolted again, and the mutiny continued for five years. The Ptolemies won for a time by the force of their army, and by raising their contributions to the priests; but the situation had become impossible. The country had been milked to depletion, and even the exploiters felt that nothing remained.

  Disintegration set in on every side. The Ptolemies passed from natural to unnatural vice, from intelligence to stupidity; they married with a freedom and haste that forfeited the esteem of their people; luxury unfitted them for war or government, at last even for thought. Lawlessness and dishonesty, incompetence and hopelessness, the absence of competition and of the stimulus that comes from ownership, lowered year by year the productivity of the land. Literature waned, creative art died; after the third century Alexandria added little to either. The Egyptians lost respect for the Greeks; the Greeks, if such a thing can be believed, lost respect for themselves. Year by year they forgot their own language, and spoke a corrupt mixture of Greek and Egyptian; more and more of them married their sisters, after native custom, or married into Egyptian families and were absorbed; thousands of them worshiped Egyptian gods. By the second century the Greeks had ceased to be the dominant race even politically; the Ptolemies, to preserve their authority, had adopted the Egyptian faith and ritual, and had increased the power of the priests. As the kings sank into epicurean ease the clergy reasserted its leadership, and won back year by year the lands and privileges which the earlier Ptolemies had taken away.50 The Rosetta Stone, dated 196 B.C., describes the coronation ceremonies of Ptolemy V as following almost completely the Egyptian forms. Under Ptolemy V (203-181) and Ptolemy VI (181-145) dynastic feuds absorbed the energies of the royal house, while Egyptian agriculture and industry decayed. Order and peace were not restored until Caesar, as a mere incident in his career, took Egypt with hardly a blow, and Augustus made it a p
rovince of Rome (30 B.C.).

  V. SUNSET IN SICILY

  The Hellenistic age faced east and south, and almost ignored the west. Cyrene prospered as usual, having learned that it is better to trade than to war; out of it, in this period, came Callimachus the poet, Eratosthenes the philosopher, and Carneades the philosopher. Greek Italy was worried and weakened by the double challenge of multiplying natives and rising Rome, while Sicily lived in daily fear of the Carthaginian power. Twenty-three years after the coming of Timoleon a rich man’s revolution suppressed the Syracusan democracy, and put the government into the hands of six hundred oligarchic families (320). These divided into factions, and were in turn overthrown by a radical revolution in which four thousand persons were killed and six thousand of the well to do were sent into banishment. Agathocles won dictatorship by promising a cancellation of debts and a redistribution of the land.51 So, periodically, the concentration of wealth becomes extreme, and gets righted by taxation or by revolution.

  After forty-seven years of chaos, during which the Carthaginians repeatedly invaded the island, and Pyrrhus came, won, lost, and went, Syracuse by unmerited good fortune fell into the power of Hieron II, the most beneficent of the many dictators thrown up by the passions and turbulence of the Sicilian Greeks. Hieron ruled for fifty-four years, says the astonished Polybius, “without killing, exiling, or injuring a single citizen, which indeed is the most remarkable of all things.”52 Surrounded by all the means of luxury, he led a modest and temperate life, and lived to the age of ninety. On several occasions he wished to resign his authority, but the people begged him to retain it.53 He had the good judgment to make an alliance with Rome, and thereby kept the Carthaginians at bay for half a century. He gave the city order and peace, and considerable freedom; he executed great public works, and without oppressive taxation left a full treasury at his death. Under his protection or patronage Archimedes brought ancient science to its culmination, and Theocritus sang, in the last perfect Greek, the loveliness of Sicily and the expected bounty of its king. Syracuse became now the most populous and prosperous city in Hellas.54

  Hieron amused his leisure by watching his artisans, under the supervision of Archimedes, construct for him a pleasure boat that embodied all the shipbuilding art and science of antiquity. It was half a stadium (407 feet) in length; it had a sport deck with a gymnasium and a large marble bath, and a shaded garden deck with a great variety of plants; it was manned by six hundred seamen in twenty groups of oars, and could carry in addition three hundred passengers or marines; it had sixty cabins, some with mosaic floors, and doors of ivory and precious woods; it was elegantly furnished in every part, and was adorned with paintings and statuary. It was protected against attack by armor and turrets; from each of the eight turrets great beams extended, with a hole at the end through which large stones could be dropped upon enemy vessels; throughout its length Archimedes constructed a great catapult capable of hurling stones of three talents’ weight (174 pounds), or arrows twelve cubits (eighteen feet) long. It could carry 3900 tons of cargo, and itself weighed a thousand tons. Hieron had hoped to use it in regular service between Syracuse and Alexandria; but finding it too large for his own docks, and extravagantly expensive to maintain, he filled it with corn and fish from Sicily’s abounding fields and seas, and sent it, vessels and contents, as a gift to Egypt, which was suffering an unusual dearth of corn.55

  Hieron died in 216. He had wished to establish a democratic constitution before his death, but his daughters prevailed upon his dotage to bequeath his power to his grandson.56 Hieronymus turned out to be a weakling and a scoundrel; he abandoned the Roman alliance, received envoys from Carthage, and permitted them to become in effect the rulers of Syracuse. Rome, not abounding in corn, prepared to fight Carthage for the wealth of an island that had never learned to govern itself. All the Mediterranean world, like a decaying fruit, prepared to fall into the hands of a greater and more ruthless conqueror than Greek history had ever known.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Books

  I. LIBRARIES AND SCHOLARS

  IN every field of Hellenistic life except the drama we find the same phenomenon—Greek civilization not destroyed but dispersed. Athens was dying, and the Greek settlements of the west, barring Syracuse, were in decay; but the Greek cities of Egypt and the East were at their material and cultural zenith. Polybius, a man of wide experience, historical knowledge, and careful judgment, spoke, about 148 B.C., of “the present day, when the progress of the arts and sciences has been so rapid”;1 the words have a familiar ring. Through the dissemination of Greek as a common tongue a cultural unity was now established which would last in the eastern Mediterranean for nearly a thousand years. All men of education in the new empires learned Greek as the medium of diplomacy, literature, and science; a book written in Greek could be understood by almost any educated non-Greek in Egypt or the Near East. Men spoke of the oikoumene, or inhabited world, as one civilization, and developed a cosmopolitan outlook less stimulating but perhaps more sensible than the proud and narrow nationalism of the city-state.

  For this enlarged audience thousands of writers wrote hundreds of thousands of books. We know the names of eleven hundred Hellenistic authors; the unknown are an incalculable multitude. A cursive script had developed to facilitate writing; indeed, as early as the fourth century B.C. we hear of systems of shorthand whereby “certain vowels and consonants can be expressed by strokes placed in various positions.”2 Books were written on Egyptian papyrus until Ptolemy VI, hoping to check the growth of the library at Pergamum, forbade the export of the material from Egypt. Eumenes II countered by encouraging the mass production of the treated skins of sheep and calves, which had long been used for writing purposes in the East; and soon “parchment,” from the city and the name of Pergamum, rivaled paper as a vehicle of communication and literature.

  Books having grown to such numbers, libraries became a necessity. These had existed before as the luxury of Egyptian or Mesopotamian potentates; but apparently Aristotle’s library was the first extensive private collection. We may conjecture its size and worth from the fact that he paid $18,000 for that part of it which he bought from Plato’s successor Speusippus. Aristotle bequeathed his books to Theophrastus, who bequeathed them (287) to Neleus, who took them to Scepsis in Asia Minor, where they were buried, says tradition, to escape the literary cupidity of the Pergamene kings. After almost a century of this damaging interment the volumes were sold about 100 B.C. to Apellicon of Teos, an Athenian philosopher. Apellicon found that many passages had been eaten away by the damp; he made new copies, filling in the gaps as intelligently as he could;3 this may explain why Aristotle is not the most fascinating philosopher in history. When Sylla captured Athens (86) he appropriated Apellicon’s library and transported it to Rome. There the Rhodian scholar Andronicus reordered and published the texts of Aristotle’s works4—an event almost as stimulating in the history of Roman thought as the rediscovery of Aristotle was to prove in the awakening of medieval philosophy.

  The adventures of this collection suggest the debt that literature owes to the Ptolemies for establishing and maintaining, as part of the Museum, the famous Alexandrian Library. Ptolemy I began it, Ptolemy II completed it, and added a smaller library in the suburban sanctuary of Serapis. By the end of Philadelphus’ reign the number of rolls had reached 532,000—making probably 100,000 books in our sense of this word.5 For a time the enlargement of this collection rivaled the strategy of power in the affections of the Egyptian kings. Ptolemy III ordered that every book brought to Alexandria should be deposited with the Library; that copies should be made, the owner to receive the copy, the Library to retain the original. The same autocrat asked Athens to lend him the manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and deposited $90,000 as security for their return; he kept the originals, sent back copies, and told the Athenians to keep his money as a forfeit.6 The ambition to possess old books became so widespread that men arose who specialized in dyeing a
nd spoiling new manuscripts to sell them as antiquities to collectors of first editions.7

  The Library soon eclipsed the rest of the Museum in importance and interest. The office of librarian was one of the highest in the king’s gift, and included the obligation of tutoring the crown prince. The names of these librarians have been preserved, with variations, in different manuscripts; the latest list8 gives, as the first six, Zenodotus of Ephesus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Apollonius of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace; their diversity of origin suggests again the unity of Hellenistic culture. Quite as important as these was the poet and scholar Callimachus, who classified the collection in. a catalogue running to one hundred and twenty rolls. We picture a corps of copyists, presumably slaves, making duplicates of precious originals, and a hive of scholars separating the materials into groups. Some of these men wrote histories of various departments of literature or science, others edited definitive editions of the masterpieces, others composed commentaries on these texts for the enlightenment of laity and posterity. Aristophanes of Byzantium effected a literary revolution by separating the clauses and sentences of the ancient writings with capitals and marks of punctuation; and it was he who invented the accents that so disturb us in reading Greek. Zenodotus began, Aristophanes advanced, Aristarchus completed, the recension of the Iliad and the Odyssey, establishing the present text, and illuminating its obscurities in learned scholia. By the end of the third century the Museum, the Library, and their scholars had made Alexandria, in everything but philosophy, the intellectual capital of the Greek world.