THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE

BY

G. LOWES DICKINSON, M. A. 

SIXTH EDITION

NEW YORK

1909

PREFACE

The following pages are intended to serve as a general introduction toGreek literature and thought, for those, primarily, who do not knowGreek. Whatever opinions may be held as to the value of translations, itseems clear that it is only by their means that the majority of modernreaders can attain to any knowledge of Greek culture; and as I believethat culture to be still, as it has been in the past, the most valuableelement of a liberal education, I have hoped that such an attempt as thepresent to give, with the help of quotations from the original authors, some general idea of the Greek view of life, will not be regarded aslabour thrown away. 

It has been essential to my purpose to avoid, as far as may be, allcontroversial matter; and if any classical scholar who may come acrossthis volume should be inclined to complain of omissions or evasions, Iwould beg him to remember the object of the book and to judge itaccording to its fitness for its own end. 

"The Greek View of Life, " no doubt, is a question-begging title, but Ibelieve it to have a quite intelligible meaning; for varied and manifoldas the phases may be that are presented by the Greek civilization, theydo nevertheless group themselves about certain main ideas, to bedistinguished with sufficient clearness from those which have dominatedother nations. It is these ideas that I have endeavoured to bring intorelief; and if I have failed, the blame, I submit, must be ascribedrather to myself than to the nature of the task I have undertaken. 

From permission to make the extracts from translations here printed mybest thanks are due to the following authors and publishers:--ProfessorButcher, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. E. D. A. Morshead, Mr. B. B. Rogers, Dr. Verrall, Mr. A. S. Way, Messrs. George Bell and Sons, the Syndics of theCambridge University Press, the Delegates of the Clarendon Press, Oxford, Messrs. Macmillan and Co. , Mr. John Murray, and Messrs. SampsonLow, Marston and Co. --I have also to thank the Master and Fellows ofBalliol College, Oxford, for permission to quote at considerable lengthfrom the late Professor Jowett's translations of Plato and Thucydides. 

Appended is a list of the translations from which I have quoted. 

LIST OF TRANSLATIONS USED

AESCHYLUS (B. C. 525--456). "The House of Atreus" (I. E. The "Agamemnon, " "Choephorae" and "Eumenides"), translated by E. D. A. MORSHEAD (Warren and Sons). The "Eumenides, " translated by DR. VERRALL (Cambridge, 1885). 

ARISTOPHANES (C. B. C. 444--380). "The Acharnians, the Knights, and the Birds, " translated by JOHN HOOKHAM FRERE (Morley's Universal Library, Routledge). [Also the "Frogs" and the "Peace" in his Collected Works, (Pickering)]. The "Clouds, " the "Lysistrata" ["Women in Revolt, "] the "Peace, " and the "Wasps, " translated by B. B. ROGERS

ARISTOTLE (B. C. 384--322). The "Ethics, " the "Politics, " and the "Rhetoric, " translated by J. E. C. WELLDON (Macmillan & Co. ). 

DEMOSTHENES (B. C. 385--322). "Orations, " translated by C. R. KENNEDY (Bell). 

EURIPIDES (B. C. 480--406). "Tragedies, " translated by A. S. WAY (Macmillan & Co. ). 

HERODOTUS (B. C. 484-- ). "The History, " translated by S. R. RAWLINSON (Murray). 

HOMER. The "Iliad, " translated by LANG, LEAF AND MYERS; the "Odyssey, " translated by BUTCHER & LANG (Macmillan). 

PINDAR (B. C. 522--442). "Odes, " translated by E. MYERS (Macmillan & Co. ). 

PLATO (B. C. 430--347). The "Dialogues, " translated by B. JOWETT (Clarendon Press). "The Republic, " translated by DAVIES AND VAUGHAN (Macmillan & Co. ). 

PLUTARCH. "Lives, " DRYDEN'S translation, edited by A. CLOUGH (Sampson Low, Marston & Co. ). 

SOPHOCLES (B. C. 496--406). Edited and Translated by DR. JEBB (Cambridge University Press). 

THUCYDIDES (B. C. 471-- ), edited and translated by B. JOWETT (Clarendon Press). 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. --THE GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION

1. Introductory

2. Greek Religion an Interpretation of Nature

3. Greek Religion an Interpretation of the Human Passions

4. Greek Religion the Foundation of Society

5. Religious Festivals

6. The Greek Conception of the Relation of Man to the Gods

7. Divination, Omens, Oracles

8. Sacrifice and Atonement

9. Guilt and Punishment

10. Mysticism

11. The Greek View of Death and a Future Life

12. Critical and Sceptical Opinion in Greece

13. Ethical Criticism

14. Transition to Monotheism

15. Metaphysical Criticism

16. Metaphysical reconstruction--Plato

17. Summary

CHAPTER II. --THE GREEK VIEW OF THE STATE

1. The Greek State a "City"

2. The Relation of the State to the Citizen

3. The Greek View of Law

4. Artisans and Slaves

5. The Greek State primarily Military, not Industrial

6. Forms of Government in the Greek State

7. Faction and Anarchy

8. Property and the Communistic Ideal

9. Sparta

10. Athens

11. Sceptical Criticism of the Basis of the State

12. Summary

CHAPTER III. --THE GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL

1. The Greek View of Manual Labour and Trade

2. Appreciation of External Goods

3. Appreciation of Physical Qualities

4. Greek Athletics

5. Greek Ethics--Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical Points of View

6. The Greek View of Pleasure

7. Illustrations. --Ischomachus; Socrates

8. The Greek View of Woman

9. Protests against the Common View of Woman

10. Friendship

11. Summary

CHAPTER IV. --THE GREEK VIEW OF ART

1. Greek Art an Expression of National Life

2. Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical points of View

3. Sculpture and Painting

4. Music and the Dance

5. Poetry

6. Tragedy

7. Comedy

8. Summary

CHAPTER V. --CONCLUSION

THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE

CHAPTER I

THE GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION

Section 1. Introductory. 

In approaching the subject of the religion of the Greeks it is necessaryto dismiss at the outset many of the associations which we are naturallyinclined to connect with that word. What we commonly have in our mindwhen we speak of religion is a definite set of doctrines, of a more orless metaphysical character, formulated in a creed and supported by anorganisation distinct from the state. And the first thing we have tolearn about the religion of the Greeks is that it included nothing ofthe kind. There was no church, there was no creed, there were noarticles; there was no doctrine even, unless we are so to call a chaosof legends orally handed down and in continual process of transformationby the poets. Priests there were, but they were merely public officials, appointed to perform certain religious rites. The distinction betweencleric and layman, as we know it, did not exist; the distinction betweenpoetry and dogma did not exist; and whatever the religion of the Greeksmay have been, one thing at any rate is clear, that it was somethingvery different from all that we are in the habit of associating with theword. 

What then was it? It is easy to reply that it was the worship of thosegods--of Zeus, Apollo, Athene, and the rest--with whose names andhistories every one is familiar. But the difficulty is to realise whatwas implied in the worship of these gods; to understand that themythology which we regard merely as a collection of fables was to theGreeks actually true; or at least that to nine Greeks out of ten itwould never occur that it might be false, might be, as we say, merestories. So that though no doubt the histories of the gods were in partthe inventions of the poets, yet the poets would conceive themselves tobe merely putting into form what they and every one believed to beessentially true. 

But such a belief implies a fundamental distinction between theconception, or rather, perhaps, the feeling of the Greeks about theworld, and our own. And it is this feeling that we want to understandwhen we ask ourselves the question, what did a belief in the gods reallymean to the ancient Greeks? To answer it fully and satisfactorily isperhaps impossible. But some attempt must be made; and it may help us inour quest if we endeavour to imagine the kind of questionings and doubtswhich the conception of the gods would set at rest. 

Section 2. Greek Religion an Interpretation of Nature. 

When we try to conceive the state of mind of primitive man the firstthing that occurs to us is the bewilderment and terror he must have feltin the presence of the powers of nature. Naked, houseless, weaponless, he is at the mercy, every hour, of this immense and incalculableSomething so alien and so hostile to himself. As fire it burns, as waterit drowns, as tempest it harries and destroys; benignant it may be attimes, in warm sunshine and calm, but the kindness is brief andtreacherous. Anyhow, whatever its mood, it has to be met and dealt with. By its help, or, if not, in the teeth of its resistance, every step inadvance must be won; every hour, every minute, it is there to bereckoned with. What is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameableThing? What is it? The question haunts the mind; it will not be putaside; and the Greek at last, like other men under similar conditions, only with a lucidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply, "it is something like myself. " Every power of nature he presumes to be aspiritual being, impersonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter, the sea as Poseidon; from generation to generation under his shapinghands, the figures multiply and define themselves; character and storycrystallise about what at first were little more than names; till atlast, from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted him in thebeginning, there emerges into the charmed light of a world of idealgrace a pantheon of fair and concrete personalities. Nature has become acompany of spirits; every cave and fountain is haunted by a nymph; inthe ocean dwell the Nereids, in the mountain the Oread, the Dryad in thewood; and everywhere, in groves and marshes, on the pastures or therocky heights, floating in the current of the streams or traversinguntrodden snows, in the day at the chase and as evening closes insolitude fingering his flute, seen and heard by shepherds, alone or withhis dancing train, is to be met the horned and goat-footed, the sunny-smiling Pan. 

Thus conceived, the world has become less terrible because morefamiliar. All that was incomprehensible, all that was obscure and dark, has now been seized and bodied forth in form, so that everywhere man isconfronted no longer with blind and unintelligible force, but withspiritual beings moved by like passions with himself. The gods, it istrue, were capricious and often hostile to his good, but at least theyhad a nature akin to his; if they were angry, they might be propitiated;if they were jealous, they might be appeased; the enmity of one might becompensated by the friendship of another; dealings with them, after all, were not so unlike dealings with men, and at the worst there was alwaysa chance for courage, patience and wit. 

Man, in short, by his religion has been made at home in the world; andthat is the first point to seize upon. To drive it home, let us take anillustration from the story of Odysseus. Odysseus, it will beremembered, after the sack of Troy, for ten years was a wanderer on theseas, by tempest, enchantment, and every kind of danger detained, as itseemed, beyond hope of return from the wife and home he had left inIthaca. The situation is forlorn enough. Yet, somehow or other, beautyin the story predominates over terror. And this, in part at least, because the powers with which Odysseus has to do, are not mere forces ofnature, blind and indifferent, but spiritual beings who take aninterest, for or against, in his fate. The whole story becomes familiar, and, if one may say so, comfortable, by the fact that it is conductedunder the control and direction of the gods. Listen, for example, to theHomeric account of the onset of a storm, and observe how it sets one atease with the elements:

"Now the lord, the shaker of the earth, on his way from the Ethiopians, espied Odysseus afar off from the mountains of the Solymi: even thencehe saw him as he sailed over the deep; and he was yet more angered inspirit, and wagging his head he communed with his own heart. 'Lo now, itmust be that the gods at the last have changed their purpose concerningOdysseus, while I was away among the Ethiopians. And now he is nigh tothe Phaeacian land, where it is so ordained that he escape the greatissues of the woe which hath come upon him. But me-thinks, that even yetI will drive him far enough in the path of suffering. '

"With that he gathered the clouds and troubled the waters of the deep, grasping his trident in his hands; and he roused all storms of allmanner of winds, and shrouded in clouds the land and sea: and down spednight from heaven. The East Wind and the South Wind clashed, and thestormy West, and the North, that is born in the bright air, rollingonward a great wave. " [Footnote: Odyss. V. 282. --Translated by Butcherand Lang. ]

The position of the hero is terrible, it is true, but not with theterror of despair; for as it is a god that wrecked him, it may also be agod that will save. If Poseidon is his enemy, Athene, he knows, is hisfriend; and all lies, after all, in the hands, or, as the Greeks said, "on the knees, " not of a blind destiny, but of beings accessible toprayer. 

Let us take another passage from Homer to illustrate the same point. Itis the place where Achilles is endeavouring to light the funeral pyre ofPatroclus, but because there is no wind the fire will not catch. What ishe to do? What _can_ he do? Nothing, say we, but wait till the windcomes. But to the Greek the winds are persons, not elements; Achilleshas only to call and to promise, and they will listen to his voice. Andso, we are told, "fleet-footed noble Achilles had a further thought:standing aside from the pyre he prayed to the two winds of North andWest, and promised them fair offerings, and pouring large libations froma golden cup besought them to come, that the corpses might blaze upspeedily in the fire, and the wood make haste to be enkindled. ThenIris, when she heard his prayer, went swiftly with the message to theWinds. They within the house of the gusty West Wind were feasting alltogether at meat, when Iris sped thither, and halted on the threshold ofstone. And when they saw her with their eyes, they sprung up and calledto her every one to sit by him. But she refused to sit, and spake herword: 'No seat for me; I must go back to the streams of Ocean, to theEthiopians' land where they sacrifice hecatombs to the immortal gods, that I too may feast at their rites. But Achilles is praying the NorthWind and the loud West to come, and promising them fair offerings, thatye may make the pyre be kindled whereon lieth Patroclos, for whom allthe Achaians are making moan. '

"She having thus said departed, and they arose with a mighty sound, rolling the clouds before them. And swiftly they came blowing over thesea, and the wave rose beneath their shrill blast; and they came todeep-soiled Troy, and fell upon the pile, and loudly roared the mightyfire. So all night drave they the flame of the pyre together, blowingshrill; and all night fleet Achilles, holding a two-handled cup, drewwine from a golden bowl, and poured it forth and drenched the earth, calling upon the spirit of hapless Patroclos. As a father waileth whenhe burneth the bones of his son, new-married, whose death is woe to hishapless parents, so wailed Achilles as he burnt the bones of hiscomrade, going heavily round the burning pile, with many moans. 

"But at the hour when the Morning Star goeth forth to herald light uponthe earth, the star that saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, andspreadeth over the salt sea, then grew the burning faint, and the flamedied down. And the Winds went back again to betake them home over theThracian main, and it roared with a violent swell. Then the son ofPeleus turned away from the burning and lay down wearied, and sweetsleep leapt on him. " [Footnote: Iliad xxiii. P. 193. --Translated byLang, Leaf and Myers. ]

The exquisite beauty of this passage, even in translation, will escapeno lover of poetry. And it is a beauty which depends on the character ofthe Greek religion; on the fact that all that is unintelligible in theworld, all that is alien to man, has been drawn, as it were, from itsdark retreat, clothed in radiant form, and presented to the mind as aglorified image of itself. Every phenomenon of nature, night and "rosy-fingered" dawn, earth and sun, winds, rivers, and seas, sleep anddeath, --all have been transformed into divine and conscious agents, tobe propitiated by prayer, interpreted by divination, and comprehended bypassions and desires identical with those which stir and controlmankind. 

Section 3. Greek Religion an Interpretation of the Human Passions. 

And as with the external world, so with the world within. The powers ofnature were not the only ones felt by man to be different from and aliento himself; there were others, equally strange, dwelling in his ownheart, which, though in a sense they were part of him, yet he felt to benot himself, which came upon him and possessed him without his choiceand against his will. With these too he felt the need to make himself athome, and these too, to satisfy his need, he shaped into creatures likehimself. To the whole range of his inner experience he gave definitionand life, presenting it to himself in a series of spiritual forms. InAphrodite, mother of Eros, he incarnated the passion of love, placing inher broidered girdle "love and desire of loving converse that steals thewits even of the wise"; in Ares he embodied the lust of war; in Athene, wisdom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs of guilt took shape inthe conception of avenging Furies; and the very prayers of theworshipper sped from him in human form, wrinkled and blear-eyed, withhalting pace, in the rear of punishment. Thus the very self of man heset outside himself; the powers, so intimate, and yet so strange, thatswayed him from within he made familiar by making them distinct;converted their shapeless terror into the beauty of visible form; and bymerely presenting them thus to himself in a guise that was immediatelyunderstood, set aside, if he could not answer, the haunting question oftheir origin and end. 

Here then is at least a partial reply to our question as to the effectof a belief in the gods on the feeling of the Greek. To repeat thephrase once more, it made him at home in the world. The mysteriouspowers that controlled him it converted into beings like himself; and sogave him heart and breathing-space, shut in, as it were, from the abyssby this shining host of fair and familiar forms, to turn to theinterests and claims of the passing hour an attention undistracted bydoubt and fear. 

Section 4. Greek Religion the Foundation of Society. 

But this relation to the world of nature is only one side of man's life;more prominent and more important, at a later stage of his development, is his relation to society; and here too in Greek civilization a greatpart was played by religion. For the Greek gods, we must remember, werenot purely spiritual powers, to be known and approached only in theheart by prayer. They were beings in human form, like, though superiorto ourselves, who passed a great part of their history on earth, intervened in the affairs of men, furthered or thwarted theirundertakings, begat among them sons and daughters, and followed, fromgeneration to generation, the fortunes of their children's children. Between them and mankind there was no impassable gulf; from Heracles theson of Zeus was descended the Dorian race; the Ionians from Ion, son ofApollo; every family, every tribe traced back its origin to a "hero", and these "heroes" were children of the gods, and deities themselves. Thus were the gods, in the most literal sense, the founders of society;from them was derived, even physically, the unit of the family and therace; and the whole social structure raised upon that natural basis wasnecessarily penetrated through and through by the spirit of religion. 

We must not therefore be misled by the fact that there was no church inthe Greek state to the idea that the state recognised no religion; onthe contrary, religion was so essential to the state, so bound up withits whole structure, in general and in detail, that the very conceptionof a separation between the powers was impossible. If there was noseparate church, in our sense of the term, as an independent organismwithin the state, it was because the state, in one of its aspects, wasitself a church, and derived its sanction, both as a whole and in itsparts, from the same gods who controlled the physical world. Not onlythe community as a whole but all its separate minor organs were underthe protection of patron deities. The family centred in the hearth, where the father, in his capacity of priest, offered sacrifice andprayer to the ancestors of the house; the various corporations intowhich families were grouped, the local divisions for the purpose oftaxation, elections, and the like, derived a spiritual unity from theworship of a common god; and finally the all-embracing totality of thestate itself was explained and justified to all its members by the cultof the special protecting deity to whom its origin and prosperouscontinuance were due. The sailor who saw, on turning the point ofSunium, the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on the Acropolis, beheld in a type the spiritual form of the state; Athene and Athens werebut two aspects of the same thing; and the statue of the goddess ofwisdom dominating the city of the arts may serve to sum up for us theideal of that marvellous corporate life where there was noecclesiastical religion only because there was no secular state. 

Regarded from this point of view, we may say that the religion of theGreeks was the spiritual side of their political life. And we must addthat in one respect their religion pointed the way to a higher politicalachievement than they were ever able to realise in fact. One fataldefect of the Greek civilisation, as is familiar to students of theirhistory, was the failure of the various independent city states tocoalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the tendency of religionwas to obviate this defect. We find, for example, that at one time oranother federations of states were formed to support in common the cultof some god; and one cult in particular there was--that of the DelphianApollo--whose influence on political no less than on religious life wasfelt as far as and even beyond the limits of the Greek race. No colonycould be founded, no war hazarded, no peace confirmed, without theadvice and approval of the god--whose cult was thus at once a religiouscentre for the whole of Greece, and a forecast of a political unity thatshould co-ordinate into a whole her chaos of conflicting states. 

The religion of the Greeks being thus, as we have seen, thepresupposition and bond of their political life, we find its sanctionextended at every point to custom and law. The persons of heralds, forexample, were held to be under divine protection; treaties betweenstates and contracts between individuals were confirmed by oath; thevengeance of the gods was invoked upon infringers of the law; nationalassemblies and military expeditions were inaugurated by public prayers;the whole of corporate life, in short, social and political, was soembraced and bathed in an idealising element of ritual that the secularand religious aspects of the state must have been as inseparable to aGreek in idea as we know them to have been in constitution. 

Section 5. Religious Festivals. 

For it was in ritual and art, not in propositions, that the Greekreligion expressed itself; and in this respect it was closer to theRoman Catholic than to the Protestant branch of the Christian faith. Theplastic genius of the race, that passion to embody ideas in form, whichwas at the root, as we saw, of their whole religious outlook, drove themto enact for their own delight, in the most beautiful and telling forms, the whole conception they had framed of the world and of themselves. Thechanges of the seasons, with the toil they exact and the gifts theybring, the powers of generation and destruction, the bounty or therigours of the earth; and on the other hand, the order and operations ofsocial phenomena, the divisions of age and sex, of function and of rankin the state--all these took shape and came, as it were, to self-consciousness in a magnificent series of publicly ordered _fetes_. So numerous were these and so diverse in their character that it wouldbe impossible, even if it were desirable in this place, to give anygeneral account of them. Our purpose will be better served by adescription of two, selected from the calendar of Athens, and typical, the one of the relations of man to nature, the other of his relation tothe state. The festivals we have chosen are those known as the"Anthesteria" [Footnote: This interpretation of the meaning of the"Anthesteria" is not accepted by modern scholars. It is not, however, for typographical reasons, convenient to remove it from the text, andthe error is of no importance for the purpose of this book. ] and the"Panathenaea. "

The Anthesteria was held at that season of the year when, as Pindarsings in an ode composed to be sung upon the occasion, "the chamber ofthe Hours is opened and the blossoms hear the voice of the fragrantspring; when violet clusters are flung on the lap of earth, and chapletsof roses braided in the hair; when the sound of the flute is heard andchoirs chanting hymns to Semele. " On the natural side the festivalrecords the coming of spring and the fermenting of last year's wine; onthe spiritual, its centre is Dionysus, who not only was the god of wine, but, according to another legend, symbolised in his fate the death ofthe year in winter and its rebirth at spring. 

The ceremonies open with a scene of abandoned jollity; servants andslaves are invited to share in the universal revel; the school holidaysbegin; and all the place is alive with the bustle and fun of a greatfair. Bargaining, peep-shows, conjuring, and the like fill up the hoursof the day; and towards evening the holiday-makers assemble garlandedand crowned in preparation for the great procession. The processiontakes place by torch-light; the statue of Dionysus leads the way, andthe revellers follow and swarm about him, in carriages or on foot, costumed as Hours or Nymphs or Bacchae in the train of the god of wine. The destination is the temple of the god and there sacrifice isperformed with the usual accompaniment of song and dance; the wholeclosing with a banquet and a drinking contest, similar to those in vogueamong the German students. Aristophanes has described the scene for us--

 "Couches, tables, Cushions and coverlets for mattresses, Dancing and singing-girls for mistresses, Plum cake and plain, comfits and caraways, Confectionery, fruits preserved and fresh, Relishes of all sorts, hot things and bitter, Savouries and sweets, broiled biscuits and what not; Flowers and perfumes, and garlands, everything. " [Footnote: Aristoph. Ach. 1090. --Frere's translation. ]

and in the midst of this the signal given by the trumpet, thesimultaneous draught of wine, and the prize adjudged to the man who isthe first to empty his cup. 

Thus ends the first phase of the festival. So far all has been mirth andrevelry; but now comes a sudden change of tone. Dionysus, god of winethough he be, has also his tragic aspect; of him too there is recorded a"descent into hell"; and to the glad celebration of the renewal of lifein spring succeeds a feast in honour of the dead. The ghosts, it issupposed, come forth to the upper air; every door-post is smeared withpitch to keep off the wandering shades; and every family sacrifices toits own departed. Nor are the arts forgotten; a musical festival isheld, and competing choirs sing and dance in honour of the god. 

Such, so far as our brief and imperfect records enable us to trace it, was the ritual of a typical Greek festival. With the many questions thatmight be raised as to its origin and development we need not concernourselves at present; what we have to note is the broad fact, characteristic of the genius of the Greeks, that they have taken thenatural emotions excited by the birth of spring, and by connecting themwith the worship of Dionysus have given them expression and form; sothat what in its origin was a mere burst of primitive animal spirits istransmuted into a complex and beautiful work of art, the secret springsand fountains of physical life flowing into the forms of a spiritualsymbol. It is this that is the real meaning of all ceremonial, and thisthat the Greeks better than any other people understood. Their religion, one may almost say, consisted in ritual; and to attempt to divide theinner from the outer would be to falsify from the beginning itsdistinctive character. 

Let us pass to our second illustration, the great city-festival ofAthens. In the Anthesteria it was a moment of nature that was seized andidealized; here, in the Panathenaea, it is the forms of social life, itsdistinctions within its embracing unity, that are set forth in theirinterdependence as functions of a spiritual life. In this great nationalfete, held every four years, all the higher activities of Athenian lifewere ideally displayed--contests of song, of lyre and of flute, foot andhorse races, wrestling, boxing, and the like, military evolutions ofinfantry and horse, pyrrhic dances symbolic of attack and defence inwar, mystic chants of women and choruses of youths--the wholeconcentring and discharging itself in that great processional act inwhich, as it were, the material forms of society became transparent, andthe Whole moved on, illumined and visibly sustained by the spiritualsoul of which it was the complete and harmonious embodiment. Of thisprocession we have still in the frieze of the Parthenon a marbletranscript. There we may see the life of ancient Athens moving in stone, from the first mounting of their horses by isolated youths, like theslow and dropping prelude of a symphony, on to the thronged andtrampling ranks of cavalry, past the antique chariots reminiscent ofHomeric war, and the marching band of flutes and zithers, by lines ofmen and maidens bearing sacrificial urns, by the garlanded sheep andoxen destined for sacrifice, to where, on turning the corner that leadsto the eastern front, we find ourselves in the presence of the Olympiangods themselves, enthroned to receive the offering of a people's life. And if to this marble representation we add the colour it lacks, thegold and silver of the vessels, the purple and saffron robes; if we setthe music playing and bid the oxen low; if we gird our living picturewith the blaze of an August noon and crown it with the Acropolis ofAthens, we may form a conception, better perhaps than could otherwise beobtained, of what religion really meant to the citizen of a state whoseactivities were thus habitually symbolised in the cult of its patrondeity. Religion to him, clearly, could hardly be a thing apart, dwellingin the internal region of the soul and leaving outside, untouched by thelight of the ideal, the whole business and complexity of the materialside of life; to him it was the vividly present and active soul of hiscorporate existence, representing in the symbolic forms of ritual theactual facts of his experience. What he re-enacted periodically, inordered ceremony, was but the drama of his daily life; so that, as wesaid before, the state in one of its aspects was a church, and everylayman from one point of view a priest. 

The question, "What did a belief in the gods really mean to the Greek"has now received at least some sort of answer. It meant, to recur to ourold phrase, that he was made at home in the world. In place of theunintelligible powers of nature, he was surrounded by a company ofbeings like himself; and these beings who controlled the physical worldwere also the creators of human society. From them were descended theHeroes who founded families and states; and under their guidance andprotection cities prospered and throve. Their histories were recountedin innumerable myths, and these again were embodied in ritual. The wholelife of man, in its relations both to nature and to society, wasconceived as derived from and dependent upon his gods; and thisdependence was expressed and brought vividly home to him in a series ofreligious festivals. Belief in the gods was not to him so much anintellectual conviction, as a spiritual atmosphere in which he moved;and to think it away would be to think away the whole structure of Greekcivilisation. 

Section 6. The Greek Conception of the Relation of Man to the Gods. 

Admitting, however, that all this is true, admitting the place ofreligion in Greek life, do we not end, after all, in a greater puzzlethan we began with? For this, it may be said, whatever it may be, is notwhat we mean by religion. This, after all, is merely a beautiful way ofexpressing facts; a translation, not an interpretation, of life. What wemean by religion is something very different to that, something whichconcerns the relation of the soul to God; the sense of sin, for example, and of repentance and grace. The religion of the Greeks, we may admit, did something for them which our religion does not do for us. It gaveintelligible and beautiful form to those phenomena of nature which wecan only describe as manifestations of energy; it expressed in a ritualof exquisite art those corporate relations which we can only enunciatein abstract terms; but did it perform what after all, it may be said, isthe true function of religion? did it touch the conscience as well asthe imagination and intellect?

To this question we may answer at once, broadly speaking, No! It was, wemight say, a distinguishing characteristic of the Greek religion that itdid not concern itself with the conscience at all; the conscience, infact, did not yet exist, to enact that drama of the soul with God whichis the main interest of the Christian, or at least of the Protestantfaith. To bring this point home to us let us open the "Pilgrim'sProgress", and present to ourselves, in its most vivid colours, theposition of the English Puritan:

"Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was(as he was wont) reading in his book, and greatly distressed in hismind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, 'What shall I do to be saved?' I looked then, and saw a man namedEvangelist coming to him, and asked, 'Wherefore dost thou cry?'

"He answered, 'Sir, I perceive by the book in my hand, that I amcondemned to die, and after that to come to judgment; and I find that Iam not willing to do the first, nor able to do the second. '

"Then said Evangelist, 'Why not willing to die, since this life isattended with so many evils?' The man answered, 'Because I fear thatthis burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, andI shall fall into Tophet. And, Sir, if I be not fit to go to prison, Iam not fit to go to judgment, and from thence to execution; and thethoughts of these things makes me cry. '

"Then said Evangelist, 'If this be thy condition, why standest thoustill?' He answered, 'Because I know not whither to go. ' Then he gavehim a parchment roll, and there was written within, 'Fly from the wrathto come. '"

The whole spirit of the passage transcribed, and of the book from whichit is quoted, is as alien as can be to the spirit of the Greeks. To thePuritan, the inward relation of the soul to God is everything; to theaverage Greek, one may say broadly, it was nothing; it would have beenat variance with his whole conception of the divine power. For the godsof Greece were beings essentially like man, superior to him not inspiritual nor even in moral attributes, but in outward gifts, such asstrength, beauty, and immortality. And as a consequence of this hisrelations to them were not inward and spiritual, but external andmechanical. In the midst of a crowd of deities, capricious andconflicting in their wills, he had to find his way as best he could. There was no knowing precisely what a god might want; there was noknowing what he might be going to do. If a man fell into trouble, nodoubt he had offended somebody, but it was not so easy to say whom orhow; if he neglected the proper observances no doubt he would bepunished, but it was not everyone who knew what the proper observanceswere. Altogether it was a difficult thing to ascertain or to move thewill of the gods, and one must help oneself as best one could. TheGreek, accordingly, helped himself by an elaborate system of sacrificeand prayer and divination, a system which had no connection with aninternal spiritual life, but the object of which was simply to discoverand if possible to affect the divine purposes. This is what we meant bysaying that the Greek view of the relation of man to the gods wasmechanical. The point will become clearer by illustration. 

Section 7. Divination, Omens, Oracles. 

Let us take first a question which much exercised the Greek mind--thedifficulty of forecasting the future. Clearly, the notion that the worldwas controlled by a crowd of capricious deities, swayed by humanpassions and desires, was incompatible with the idea of fixed law; buton the other hand it made it possible to suppose that some intimationmight be had from the gods, either directly or symbolically, of whattheir intentions and purposes really were. And on this hypothesis wefind developed quite early in Greek history, a complex art of diviningthe future by signs. The flight of birds and other phenomena of theheavens, events encountered on the road, the speech of passers-by, or, most important of all, the appearance of the entrails of the victimssacrificed were supposed to indicate the probable course of events. Andthis art, already mature in the time of the Homeric poems, we findflourishing throughout the historic age. Nothing could better indicateits prevalence and its scope than the following passage fromAristophanes, where he ridicules the readiness of his contemporaries tosee in everything an omen, or, as he puts it, punning on the Greek word, a "bird": "On us you depend, " sings his chorus of Birds, "On us you depend, and to us you repair For counsel and aid, when a marriage is made, A purchase, a bargain, a venture in trade; Unlucky or lucky, whatever has struck ye, An ox or an ass, that may happen to pass, A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet, A name or a word by chance overheard, You deem it an omen, and call it a Bird. " [Footnote: Aristoph. "Birds" 717. --Frere's translation. ]

Aristophanes, of course, is jesting; but how serious and important thisart of divination must have appeared even to the most cultivatedAthenians may be gathered from a passage of the tragedian Aeschylus, where he mentions it as one of the benefits conferred by Prometheus onmankind, and puts it on a level with the arts of building, metal-making, sailing, and the like, and the sciences of arithmetic and astronomy. 

And if anyone were dissatisfied with this method of interpretation bysigns, he had a directer means of approaching the gods. He could visitone of the oracles and consult the deity at first hand about his mosttrivial and personal family affairs. Some of the questions put to theoracle at Dodona have been preserved to us, [Footnote: See PercyGardner, "New Chapters in Greek History. "] and very curious they are. "Who stole my cushions and pillow?" asks one bereaved householder. Another wants to know whether it will pay him to buy a certain house andfarm; another whether sheep-farming is a good investment. Clearly, thegod was not above being consulted on the meanest affairs; and his easyaccessibility must have been some compensation for his probable caprice. 

Nor must it be supposed that this phase of the Greek religion was asuperstition confined to individuals; on the contrary, it was fullyrecognised by the state. No important public act could be undertakenwithout a previous consultation of omens. More than once, in theclearest and most brilliant period of the Greek civilisation, we hear ofmilitary expeditions being abandoned because the sacrifices wereunfavourable; and at the time of the Persian invasion, at the mostcritical moment of the history of Greece, the Lacedaemonians, we aretold, came too late to be present at the battle of Marathon, becausethey thought it unlucky to start until the moon was full. 

In all this we have a suggestion of the sort of relation in which theGreek conceived himself to stand to the gods. It is a relation, as wesaid, external and mechanical. The gods were superior beings who knew, it might be presumed, what was going to happen; man didn't know, butperhaps he could find out. How could he find out? that was the problem;and it was answered in the way we have seen. There was no question, clearly, of a spiritual relation; all is external; and a similarexternality pervades, on the whole, the Greek view of sacrifice and ofsin. Let us turn now to consider this point. 

Section 8. Sacrifice and Atonement. 

In Homer, we find that sacrifice is frankly conceived as a sort ofpresent to the gods, for which they were in fairness bound to anequivalent return; and the nature of the bargain is fully recognised bythe gods themselves. 

"Hector, " says Zeus to Hera, "was dearest to the gods of all mortalsthat are in Ilios. So was he to me at least, for nowise failed he in thegifts I loved. Never did my altar lack seemly feast, drink-offering andthe steam of sacrifice, even the honour that falleth to our due. "[Footnote: Iliad xxiv. 66. --Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. ] And heconcludes that he must intervene to secure the restoration of the bodyof Hector to his father. 

The performance of sacrifice, then, ensures favour; and on the otherhand its neglect entails punishment. When Apollo sends a plague upon theGreek fleet the most natural hypothesis to account for his conduct isthat he has been stinted of his due meed of offerings; "perhaps, " saysAgamemnon, "the savour of lambs and unblemished goats may appease him. "Or again, when the Greeks omit to sacrifice before building the wallaround their fleet, they are punished by the capture of their positionby the Trojans. The whole relation between man and the gods is of thenature of a contract. "If you do your part, I'll do mine; if not, not!"that is the tone of the language on either side. The conception islegal, not moral nor spiritual; it has nothing to do with what we callsin and conscience. 

At a later period, it is true, we find a point of view prevailing whichappears at first sight to come closer to that of the Christian. Certainacts we find, such as murder, for example, were supposed to infect aswith a stain not only the original offender but his descendants fromgeneration to generation. Yet even so, the stain, it appears, wasconceived to be rather physical than moral, analogous to disease both inits character and in the methods of its cure. Aeschylus tells us of theearth breeding monsters as a result of the corruption infused by theshedding of blood; and similarly a purely physical infection tainted theman or the race that had been guilty of crime. And as was the evil, sowas the remedy. External acts and observations might cleanse and purgeaway what was regarded as an external affection of the soul; and we knowthat in historic times there was a class of men, comparable to themediaeval "pardoners", whose profession it was to effect such cures. Plato has described them for us in striking terms. "Mendicant prophets, "he says, "go to rich men's doors and persuade them that they have apower committed to them of making an atonement for their sins or thoseof their fathers by sacrifices or charms with rejoicings and games; andthey promise to harm an enemy whether just or unjust, at a small charge;with magic arts and incantations binding the will of heaven, as theysay, to do their work.... And they produce a host of books written byMusaeus and Orpheus, who were children of the Moon and the Muses--thatis what they say--according to which they perform their ritual, andpersuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations andatonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill avacant hour. " [Footnote: Plato's Republic, II. 364b. --Jowett'stranslation. ]

How far is all this from the Puritan view of sin! How far from theChristian of the "Pilgrim's Progress" with the burden on his back! Tomeasure the distance we have only to attend, with this passage in ourmind, a meeting, say, of the "Salvation Army". We shall then perhapsunderstand better the distinction between the popular religion of theGreeks and our own; between the conception of sin as a physicalcontagion to be cured by external rites, and the conception of it as anaffection of the conscience which only "grace" can expel. In the onecase the fact that a man was under the taint of crime would be borne inupon him by actual misfortune from without--by sickness, or failure inbusiness, or some other of the troubles of life; and he would ease hismind and recover the spring of hope by performing certain ceremonies andrites. In the other case, his trouble is all inward; he feels that he isguilty in the sight of God, and the only thing that can relieve him isthe certainty that he has been forgiven, assured him somehow or otherfrom within. The difference is fundamental, and important to bear inmind, if we would form a clear conception of the Greek view of life. 

Section 9. Guilt and Punishment. 

It must not be supposed, however, that the popular superstitiondescribed by Plato, however characteristic it may be of the point ofview of the Greeks, represents the highest reach of their thought on thesubject of guilt. No profounder utterances are to be found on this themethan those of the great poets and thinkers of Greece, who, withoutrejecting the common beliefs of their time, transformed them by theinsight of their genius into a new and deeper significance. Speciallystriking in this connection is the poetry of the tragedian Aeschylus;and it will be well worth our while to pause for a moment and endeavourto realise his position. 

Guilt and its punishment is the constant theme of the dramas ofAeschylus; and he has exhausted the resources of his genius in theattempt to depict the horror of the avenging powers, who under the nameof the Erinyes, or Furies, persecute and torment the criminal. Theirbreath is foul with the blood on which they feed; from their rheumy eyesa horrible humour drops; daughters of night and clad in black they flywithout wings; god and man and the very beasts shun them; their place iswith punishment and torture, mutilation, stoning and breaking of necks. And into their mouth the poet has put words which seem to breathe thevery spirit of the Jewish scriptures. 

"Come now let us preach to the sons of men; yea, let us tell them of ourvengeance; yea, let us all make mention of justice. 

"Whoso showeth hands that are undefiled, lo, he shall suffer nought ofus for ever, but shall go unharmed to his ending. 

"But if he hath sinned, like unto this man, and covereth hands that areblood-stained: then is our witness true to the slain man. 

"And we sue for the blood, sue and pursue for it, so that at the last there is payment. 

 Even so 'tis written: (Oh sentence sure!) "Upon all that wild in wickedness dip hand In the blood of their birth, in the fount of their flowing: So shall he pine until the grave receive him--to find no grace even in the grave! Sing then the spell, Sisters of hell; Chant him the charm Mighty to harm, Binding the blood, Madding the mood; Such the music that we make: Quail, ye sons of man, and quake, Bow the heart, and bend, and break!

 This is our ministry marked for us from the beginning; This is our gift, and our portion apart, and our godhead, Ours, ours only for ever, Darkness, robes of darkness, a robe of terror for ever! Ruin is ours, ruin and wreck; When to the home Murder hath come, Making to cease Innocent peace; Then at his beck Follow we in, Follow the sin; And ah! we hold to the end when we begin!" [Footnote: Aeschyl. Eum. 297. --Translated by Dr. Verrall (Cambridge, 1885). ]

There is no poetry more sublime than this; none more penetrated with thesense of moral law. But still it is wholly Greek in character. The themeis not really the conscience of the sinner but the objective consequenceof his crime. "Blood calls for blood, " is the poet's text; a man, hesays, must pay for what he does. The tragedy is the punishment of theguilty, not his inward sense of sin. Orestes, in fact, who is thesubject of the drama with which we are concerned, in a sense was not asinner at all. He had killed his mother, it is true, but only to avengehis father whom she had murdered, and at the express bidding of Apollo. So far is he from feeling the pangs of conscience that he constantlyjustifies his act. He suffers, not because he has sinned but because heis involved in the curse of his race. For generations back the house ofAtreus had been tainted with blood; murder had called for murder toavenge it; and Orestes, the last descendant, caught in the net of guilt, found that his only possibility of right action lay in a crime. He wasbound to avenge his father, the god Apollo had enjoined it; and theavenging of his father meant the murder of his mother. What he commits, then, is a crime, but not a sin; and so it is regarded by the poet. Thetragedy, as we have said, centres round an external objective law--"blood calls for blood. " But that is all. Of the internal drama of thesoul with God, the division of the man against himself, the remorse, therepentance, the new birth, the giving or withholding of grace--of allthis, the essential content of Christian Protestantism, not a trace inthe clear and concrete vision of the Greek. The profoundest of the poetsof Hellas, dealing with the darkest problem of guilt, is true to theplastic genius of his race. The spirit throws outside itself the law ofits own being; by objective external evidence it learns that doinginvolves suffering; and its moral conviction comes to it only whenforced upon it from without by a direct experience of physical evil. OfAeschylus, the most Hebraic of the Hellenes, it is as true as of theaverage Greek, that in the Puritan meaning of the phrase he had no senseof sin. And even in treating of him, we must still repeat what we saidat the beginning, that the Greek conception of the relation of man tothe gods is external and mechanical, not inward and spiritual. 

Section 10. Mysticism. 

But there is nothing so misleading as generalisation, specially on thesubject of the Greeks. Again and again when we think we have laid holdof their characteristic view we are confronted with some new aspect oftheir life which we cannot fit into harmony with our scheme. There is noformula which will sum up that versatile and many-sided people. And so, in the case before us, we have no sooner made what appears to be thesafe and comprehensive statement that the Greeks conceived the relationof man to the gods mechanically, than we are reminded of quite anotherphase of their religion, different from and even antithetic to that withwhich we have hitherto been concerned. Nothing, we might be inclined tosay on the basis of what we have at present ascertained, nothing couldbe more opposed to the clear anthropomorphic vision of the Greek, thanthat conception of a mystic exaltation, so constantly occurring in thehistory of religion, whose aim is to transcend the limits of humanpersonality and pass into direct communion with the divine life. Yet ofsome such conception, and of the ritual devised under its influence, wehave undoubted though fragmentary indications in the civilization of theGreeks. It is mainly in connection with the two gods Apollo and Dionysusthat the phenomena in question occur; gods whose cult was introducedcomparatively late into Greece and who brought with them from the northsomething of its formless but pregnant mystery; as though at a point thechain of guardian deities was broken, and the terror and forces of theabyss pressed in upon the charmed circle of Hellas. For Apollo, who inone of his aspects is a figure so typically Hellenic, the ever-young andbeautiful god of music and the arts, was also the Power of propheticinspiration, of ecstasy or passing out of oneself. The priestess whodelivered his oracle at Delphi was possessed and mastered by the god. Maddened by mephitic vapours streaming from a cleft in the rock, convulsed in every feature and every limb, she delivered in semi-articulate cries the burden of the divine message. Her own personality, for the time being, was annihilated; the wall that parts man from godwas swept away; and the Divine rushed in upon the human vessel itshattered as it filled. This conception of inspiration as a higher formof madness, possessed of a truer insight than that of sanity, was fullyrecognised among the Greeks. "There is a madness, " as Plato puts it, "which is the special gift of heaven, and the source of the chiefestblessings among men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess atDelphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses haveconferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, butwhen in their senses few or none.... And in proportion as prophecy ishigher and more perfect than divination both in name and reality, in thesame proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sanemind, for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin. "[Footnote: Plato, Phaedrus, 244. --Jowett's translation. ]

Here then, in the oracle at Delphi, the centre of the religious lifeof the Greeks, we have an explicit affirmation of that element ofmysticism which we might have supposed to be the most alien to theirgenius; and the same element re-appears, in a cruder and more barbaricform, in connection with the cult of Dionysus. He, the god of wine, was also the god of inspiration; and the ritual with which he wasworshipped was a kind of apotheosis of intoxication. To suppress for atime the ordinary work-a-day consciousness, with its tedium, itschecks, its balancing of pros and cons, to escape into the directnessand simplicity of mere animal life, and yet to feel in this nodegradation but rather a submission to the divine power, an actualidentification with the deity-such, it would seem, was the intentionof those extraordinary revels of which we have in the "Bacchae" ofEuripides so vivid a description. And to this end no stimulus wasomitted to excite and inspire the imagination and the sense. Theinfluence of night and torches in solitary woods, intoxicating drinks, the din of flutes and cymbals on a bass of thunderous drums, dancesconvulsing every limb and dazzling eyes and brain, the harking-back, as it were, to the sympathies and forms of animal life in the dress offawnskin, the horns, the snakes twined about the arm, and theimpersonation of those strange half-human creatures who were supposedto attend upon the god, the satyrs, nymphs, and fauns who formed histrain--all this points to an attempt to escape from the bounds ofordinary consciousness and pass into some condition conceived, howeverconfusedly, as one of union with the divine power. And though thebasis, clearly enough, is physical and even bestial, yet the wholeritual does undoubtedly express, and that with a plastic grace andbeauty that redeems its frank sensuality, that passion to transcendthe limitations of human existence which is at the bottom of themystic element in all religions. 

But this orgy of the senses was not the only form which the worship ofDionysus took in Greece. In connection with one of his legends, the mythof Dionysus Zagreus, we find traces of an esoteric doctrine, taught bywhat were known as the orphic sects, very curiously opposed, one wouldhave said, to the general trend of Greek conceptions. According to thestory, Zagreus was the son of Zeus and Persephone. Hera, in herjealousy, sent the Titans to destroy him; after a struggle, they managedto kill him, cut him up and devoured all but the heart, which was savedby Athene and carried to Zeus. Zeus swallowed it, and produced therefroma second Dionysus. The Titans he destroyed by lightning, and from theirashes created Man. Man is thus composed of two elements, one bad, theTitanic, the other good, the Dionysiac; the latter being derived fromthe body of Dionysus, which the Titans had devoured. This fundamentaldualism, according to the doctrine founded on the myth, is the perpetualtragedy of man's existence; and his perpetual struggle is to purifyhimself of the Titanic element. The process extends over manyincarnations, but an ultimate deliverance is promised by the aid of theredeemer Dionysus Lysius. 

The belief thus briefly described was not part of the popular religionof the Greeks, but it was a normal growth of their consciousness, and itis mentioned here as a further indication that even in what we call theclassical age there were not wanting traces of the more mystic andspiritual side of religion. Here, in the tenets of these orphic sects, we have the doctrine of "original sin, " the conception of life as astruggle between two opposing principles, and the promise of an ultimateredemption by the help of the divine power. And if this be taken inconnection with the universal and popular belief in inspiration aspossession by the god, we shall see that our original statement that therelation of man to the gods was mechanical and external in the Greekconception, must at least be so far modified that it must be taken onlyas an expression of the central or dominant point of view, not asexcluding other and even contradictory standpoints. 

Still, broadly speaking and admitting the limitations, the statement maystand. If the Greek popular religion be compared with that of theChristian world, the great distinction certainly emerges, that in theone the relation of God to man is conceived as mechanical and external, in the other as inward and spiritual. The point has been sufficientlyillustrated, and we may turn to another division of our subject. 

Section 11. The Greek View of Death and a Future Life. 

Of all the problems on which we expect light to be thrown by religionnone, to us, is more pressing than that of death. A fundamental, and asmany believe, the most essential part of Christianity, is its doctrineof reward and punishment in the world beyond; and a religion which hadnothing at all to say about this great enigma we should hardly feel tobe a religion at all. And certainly on this head the Greeks, more thanany people that ever lived, must have required a consolation and a hope. Just in proportion as their life was fuller and richer than that whichhas been lived by any other race, just in proportion as their capacityfor enjoyment, in body and soul, was keener, as their senses were finer, their intellect broader, their passions more intense, must they havefelt, with peculiar emphasis, the horror of decay and death. And such, in fact, is the characteristic note of their utterances on this theme. "Rather, " says the ghost of Achilles to Odysseus in the world of shades, "rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with alandless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all thedead that are no more. " [Footnote: Od. Xi 489. --Translated by Butcherand Lang. ] Better, as Shakespeare has it, "The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature, "

better that, on earth at least and in the sun, than the phantom kingdomsof the dead. The fear of age and death is the shadow of the love oflife; and on no people has it fallen with more horror than on theGreeks. The tenderest of their songs of love close with a sob; and it isan autumn wind that rustles in their bowers of spring. Here, forexample, is a poem by Mimnermus characteristic of this mood of theGreeks:

 "O golden Love, what life, what joy but thine? Come death, when thou art gone, and make an end! When gifts and tokens are no longer mine, Nor the sweet intimacies of a friend. These are the flowers of youth. But painful age The bane of beauty, following swiftly on, Wearies the heart of man with sad presage And takes away his pleasure in the sun. Hateful is he to maiden and to boy And fashioned by the gods for our annoy. " [Footnote: Mimnermus, El. I. ]

Such being the general view of the Greeks on the subject of death, whathas their religion to say by way of consolation? It taught, to beginwith, that the spirit does survive after death. But this survival, as itis described in the Homeric poems, is merely that of a phantom and ashade, a bloodless and colourless duplicate of the man as he lived onearth. Listen to the account Odysseus gives of his meeting with hismother's ghost. 

"So spake she, and I mused in my heart and would fain have embraced thespirit of my mother dead. Thrice I sprang towards her, and was minded toembrace her; thrice she flitted from my hands as a shadow or even as adream, and sharper ever waxed the grief within me. And uttering my voiceI spake to her winged words:

"'Mother mine, wherefore dost thou not tarry for me who am eager toseize thee, that even in Hades we twain may cast our arms each about theother, and satisfy us with chill lament? Is it but a phantom that thehigh goddess Persephone hath sent me, to the end that I may groan formore exceeding sorrow?'

"So spake I, and my lady mother answered me anon:

"'Ah me, my child, luckless above all men, nought doth Persephone, thedaughter of Zeus, deceive thee, but even in this wise it is with mortalswhen they die. For the sinews no more bind together the flesh and thebones, but the force of burning fire abolishes them, so soon as the lifehath left the white bones, and the spirit like a dream flies forth andhovers near. '"

From such a conception of the life after death little comfort could bedrawn; nor does it appear that any was sought. So far as we can tracethe habitual attitude of the Greek he seems to have occupied himselflittle with speculation, either for good or evil, as to what might awaithim on the other side of the tomb. He was told indeed in his legends ofa happy place for the souls of heroes, and of torments reserved forgreat criminals; but these ideas do not seem to have haunted hisimagination. He was never obsessed by that close and imminent vision ofheaven and hell which overshadowed and dwarfed, for the mediaeval mind, the brief space of pilgrimage on earth. Rather he turned, by preference, from the thought of death back to life, and in the memory of honourabledeeds in the past and the hope of fame for the future sought hiscompensation for the loss of youth and love. In the great funeral speechupon those who have fallen in war which Thucydides puts into the mouthof Pericles we have, we must suppose, a reflection, more accurate thanis to be found elsewhere, of the position naturally adopted by theaverage Greek. And how simple are the topics, how broad and human, howrigorously confined to the limits of experience! There is no suggestionanywhere of a personal existence continued after death; the dead liveonly in their deeds; and only by memory are the survivors to beconsoled. 

"I do not now commiserate the parents of the dead who stand here; Iwould rather comfort them. You know that your life has been passed amidmanifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who havegained most honour, whether an honourable death like theirs, or anhonourable sorrow like yours, and whose days have been so ordered thatthe term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life... Someof you are at an age at which they may hope to have other children, andthey ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children whomay hereafter be born make them forget their now lost ones, but the citywill be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will besafer. For a man's counsels cannot be of equal weight or worth, when healone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you whohave passed their prime, I say: 'Congratulate yourselves that you havebeen happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your lifeof sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those whoare gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, assome say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old anduseless. '" [Footnote: Thuc. II. 44. --Jowett's translation. ]

The passage perhaps represents what we may call the typical attitude ofthe Greek. To seek consolation for death, if anywhere, then in life, andin life not as it might be imagined beyond the grave, but as it had beenand would be lived on earth, appears to be consonant with all that weknow of the clear and objective temper of the race. It is the spiritwhich was noted long ago by Goethe as inspiring the sepulchral monumentsof Athens. 

"The wind, " he says, "which blows from the tombs of the ancients comeswith gentle breath as over a mound of roses. The reliefs are touchingand pathetic, and always represent life. There stand father and mother, their son between them, gazing at one another with unspeakable truth tonature. Here a pair clasp hands. Here a father seems to rest on hiscouch and wait to be entertained by his family. To me the presence ofthese scenes was very touching. Their art is of a late period, yet arethey simple, natural, and of universal interest. Here there is no knightin harness on his knees awaiting a joyful resurrection. The artist haswith more or less skill presented to us only the persons themselves, andso made their existence lasting and perpetual. They fold not theirhands, gaze not into heaven; they are on earth, what they were and whatthey are. They stand side by side, take interest in one another; andthat is what is in the stone, even though somewhat unskilfully, yet mostpleasingly depicted. " [Footnote: From Goethe's "Italienische Reise. " Itake this translation (by permission) from Percy Gardner's "New Chaptersin Greek History", p. 319. ]

As a further illustration of the same point an epitaph may be quotedequally striking for its simple human feeling and for its absence of anysuggestion of a continuance of the life of the dead. "Farewell" is thefirst and last word; no hint of a "joyful resurrection. "

"Farewell, tomb of Melite; the best of women lies here, who loved herloving husband, Onesimus; thou wert most excellent, wherefore he longsfor thee after thy death, for thou wert the best of wives. --Farewell, thou too, dearest husband, only love my children. "

But however characteristic this attitude of the Greeks may appear to be, especially by contrast with the Christian view, it would be a mistake tosuppose that it was the only one with which they were acquainted, orthat they had put aside altogether, as indifferent or insoluble, thewhole problem of a future world. As we have seen, they did believe inthe survival of the spirit, and in a world of shades ruled by Pluto andPersephone. They had legends of a place of bliss for the good and aplace of torment for the wicked; and if this conception did not haunttheir mind, as it haunted that of the mediaeval Christian, yet at timesit was certainly present to them, with terror or with hope. That theGreek was not unacquainted with the fear of hell we know from thepassage of Plato, part of which we have already quoted, where inspeaking of the mendicant prophets who professed to make atonement forsin he says that their ministrations "are equally at the service of theliving and the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and theyredeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knowswhat awaits us. " And on the other hand we hear, as early as the date ofthe Odyssey, of the Elysian fields reserved for the souls of thefavourites of the gods. 

The Greeks, then, were not without hope and fear concerning the world tocome, however little these feelings may have coloured their daily life;and there was one phase of their religion, which appears to have beenspecially occupied with this theme. In almost every Greek city we hearof "mysteries", the most celebrated being, of course, those of Eleusisin Attica. What exactly these "mysteries" were we are very imperfectlyinformed; but so much, at least, is clear that by means of a scenicsymbolism, representing the myth of Demeter and Kore or of DionysusZagreus, hopes were held out to the initiated not only of a happy lifeon earth, but of a happy immortality beyond. "Blessed, " says Pindar, "blessed is he who has seen these things before he goes under the hollowearth. He knows the end of life, and he knows its god-given origin. " Andit is presumably to the initiated that the same poet promises the joysof his thoroughly Greek heaven. "For them, " he says, "shineth below thestrength of the sun while in our world it is night, and the space ofcrimson-flowered meadows before their city is full of the shade offrankincense trees, and of fruits of gold. And some in horses, and inbodily feats, and some in dice, and some in harp-playing have delight;and among them thriveth all fair-flowering bliss; and fragrancestreameth ever through the lovely land, as they mingle incense of everykind upon the altars of the gods. " [Footnote: Pindar, Thren. I. --Translation by E. Myers. ]

The Greeks, then, were not unfamiliar with the conception of heaven andhell: only, and that is the point to which we must return and on whichwe must insist, the conception did not dominate and obsess their mind. They may have had their spasms of terror, but these they could easilyrelieve by the performance of some atoning ceremony; they may have hadtheir thrills of hope, but these they would only indulge at the crisisof some imposing ritual. 

The general tenor of their life does not seem to have been affected byspeculations about the world beyond. Of age indeed and of death they hada horror proportional to their acute and sensitive enjoyment of life;but their natural impulse was to turn for consolation to the interestsand achievements of the world they knew, and to endeavour to soothe, bymemories and hopes of deeds future and past, the inevitable pains offailure and decay. 

Section 12. Critical and Sceptical Opinion in Greece. 

And now let us turn to a point for which perhaps some readers have longbeen waiting, and with which they may have expected us to begin ratherthan to end. So far, in considering the part played by religion in GreekLife, we have assumed the position of orthodoxy. We have endeavoured toplace ourselves at the standpoint of the man who did not criticise orreflect, but accepted simply, as a matter of course, the traditionhanded down to him by his fathers. Only so, if at all, was it possiblefor us to detach ourselves from our habitual preconceptions, and toregard the pagan mythology not as a graceful invention of the poets, butas a serious and, at the time, a natural and inevitable way of lookingat the world. Now, however, it is time to turn to the other side, and toconsider the Greek religion as it appeared to contemporary critics. Forcritics there were, and sceptics, or rather, to put it more exactly, there was a critical age succeeding an age of faith. As we trace, however imperfectly, the development of the Greek mind, we can observetheir intellect and their moral sense expanding beyond the limits oftheir creed. Either as sympathetic, though candid, friends, or as avowedenemies, they bring to light its contradictions and defects; and as aresult of the process one of two things happens. Either the ancientconception of the gods is transformed in the direction of monotheism, orit is altogether swept away, and a new system of the world built up, onthe basis of natural science or of philosophy. These tendencies ofthought we must now endeavour to trace; for we should have formed but animperfect idea of the scope of the religious consciousness of the Greeksif we confined ourselves to what we may call their orthodox faith. It isin their most critical thinkers, in Euripides and Plato, that thereligious sense is most fully and keenly developed; and it is in thephilosophy that supervened upon the popular creed, rather than in thepopular creed itself, that we shall find the highest and most spiritualreaches of their thought. 

Let us endeavour, then, in the first place to realise to ourselves howthe Greek religion must have appeared to one who approached it not fromthe side of unthinking acquiescence, but with the idea of discoveringfor himself how far it really met the needs and claims of the intellectand the moral sense. Let us imagine him turning to his Homer, to thosepoems which were the Bible of the Greek, his ultimate appeal both inreligion and in ethics; which were taught in the schools, quoted in thelaw-courts, recited in the streets; and from which the teacher drew hismoral instances, the rhetorician his allusions, the artist his models, every man his conception of the gods. Let us imagine some candid andingenuous youth, turning to his Homer and repeating, say, the followingpassage of the Iliad:--

"Among the other gods fell grievous bitter strife, and their hearts werecarried diverse in their breasts. And they clashed together with a greatnoise, and the wide earth groaned, and the clarion of great Heaven rangaround. Zeus heard as he sate upon Olympus, and his heart within himlaughed pleasantly when he beheld that strife of the gods. " [Footnote:Iliad xxi. 385. --Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. ]

At this point, let us suppose, the reader pauses to reflect; and isstruck, for the first time, with a shock of surprise by the fact thatthe gods should be not only many but opposed; and opposed on what issue?a purely human one! a war between Greeks and Trojans for the possessionof a beautiful woman! Into such a contest the immortal gods descend, fight with human weapons, and dispute in human terms! Where is thesingle purpose that should mark the divine will? where the repose of thewisdom that foreordained and knows the end? Not, it is clear, in thismotley array of capricious and passionate wills! Then, perhaps, in Zeus, Zeus, who is lord of all? He, at least, will impose upon this mob ofrecalcitrant deities the harmony which the pious soul demands. He, whoserod shakes the sky, will arise and assert the law. He, in his majesty, will speak the words--alas! what words! Let us take them straight fromthe lips of the King of gods and men:--

"Hearken to me, all gods and all ye goddesses, that I may tell you thatmy heart within my breast commandeth me. One thing let none essay, be itgoddess or be it god, to wit, to thwart my saying; approve ye it alltogether, that with all speed I may accomplish these things. WhomsoeverI shall perceive minded to go, apart from the gods, to succour Trojansor Danaans, chastened in no seemly wise shall he return to Olympus, or Iwill take and cast him into misty Tartaros, right far away, where is thedeepest gulf beneath the earth; there are the gate of iron and thresholdof bronze, as far beneath Hades as heaven is high above the earth: thenshall ye know how far I am mightiest of all gods. Go to now, ye gods, make trial that ye all may know. Fasten ye a rope of gold from heaven, and all ye gods lay hold thereof and all goddesses; yet could ye notdrag from heaven to earth Zeus, counsellor supreme, not though ye toiledsore. But once I likewise were minded to draw with all my heart, thenshould I draw ye up with very earth and sea withal. Thereafter would Ibind the rope about a pinnacle of Olympus, and so should all thosethings be hung in air. By so much am I beyond gods and beyond men. "[Footnote: Iliad viii. 5. --Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. ]

And is that all? In the divine tug of war Zeus is more than a match forall the other gods together! Is it on this that the lordship of heavenand earth depends? This that we are to worship as highest, we of thebrain and heart and soul? And even so, even admitting the ground ofsupremacy, with what providence or consistency of purpose is itexercised? Why, Zeus himself is as capricious as the rest! BecauseThetis comes whining to him about an insult put upon Achilles, heinterferes to change the whole course of the war, and that too by meansof a lying dream! Even his own direct decrees he can hardly be inducedto observe. His son Sarpedon, for example, who is "fated, " as he sayshimself, to die, he is yet at the last moment in half a mind to savealive! How is such division possible in the will of the supreme god? Oris the "fate" of which he speaks something outside himself? But if so, then above him! and if above him, what is he? Not, after all, thehighest, not the supreme at all! What then _are_ we to worship?What _is_ this higher "fate?"

Such would be the kind of questions that would vex our candid youth whenhe approached his Homer from the side of theology. Nor would he fare anybetter if he took the ethical point of view. The gods, he would find, who should surely at least attain to the human standard, not only arecapable of every phase of passion, anger, fear, jealousy and, above all, love, but indulge them all with a verve and an abandonment that mightmake the boldest libertine pause. Zeus himself, for example, expendsupon the mere catalogue of his amours a good twelve lines of hexameterverse. No wonder that Hera is jealous, and that her lord is driven toput her down in terms better suited to the lips of mortal husbands:

"Lady, ever art thou imagining, nor can I escape thee; yet shalt thou inno wise have power to fulfil, but wilt be the further from my heart;that shall be even the worse for thee. Hide thou in silence and hearkento my bidding, lest all the gods that are in Olympus keep not off fromthee my visitation, when I put forth my hands unapproachable againstthee. " [Footnote: Iliad i. 560. --Translated by Leaf, Lang and Myers. ]

Section 13. Ethical Criticism. 

The incongruity of all this with any adequate conception of deity ispatent, if once the critical attitude be adopted; and it was adopted bysome of the clearest and most religious minds of Greece. Nay, evenorthodoxy itself did not refrain from a genial and sympatheticcriticism. Aristophanes, for example, who, if there had been anestablished church, would certainly have been described as one of itsmain pillars, does not scruple to represent his Birds as issuing--

 "A warning and notices, formally given, To Jove, and all others residing in heaven, Forbidding them ever to venture again To trespass on our atmospheric domain, With scandalous journeys, to visit a list Of Alcmenas and Semeles; if they persist, We warn them that means will be taken moreover To stop their gallanting and acting the lover, " [Footnote: Aristophanes, "Birds" 556. --Translation by Frere. ]

and Heracles the glutton, and Dionysus, the dandy and the coward, arefamiliar figures of his comic stage. The attitude of Aristophanes, it istrue, is not really critical, but sympathetic; it was no more hisintention to injure the popular creed by his fun than it is theintention of the cartoons of Punch to undermine the reputation of ourleading statesmen. On the contrary, nothing popularises like genialridicule; and of this Aristophanes was well aware. But the samecharacteristics of the god which suggested the friendly burlesque of thecomedian were also those which provoked the indignation and the disgustof more serious minds. The poet Pindar, for example, after referring tothe story of a battle, in which it was said gods had fought againstgods, breaks out into protest against a legend so little creditable tothe divine nature:--" O my mouth, fling this tale from thee, for tospeak evil of gods is a hateful wisdom, and loud and unmeasured wordsstrike a note that trembleth upon madness. Of such things talk thou not;leave war and all strife of immortals aside. " [Footnote: Pind. Ol. IX54. --Translation by E. Myers. ] And the same note is taken up withemphasis, and reiterated in every quality of tone, by such writers asEuripides and Plato. 

The attitude of Euripides towards the popular religion is so clearly andfrankly critical that a recent writer has even gone so far as tomaintain that his main object in the construction of his dramas was todiscredit the myths he selected for his theme. However that may havebeen, it is beyond controversy true that the deep religious sense ofthis most modern of the Greeks was puzzled and repelled by the tales hewas bound by tradition to dramatize; and that he put into the mouth ofhis characters reflexions upon the conduct of the gods which if they maynot be taken as his own deliberate opinions, are at least expressions ofone aspect of his thought. It was, in fact, impossible to reconcile witha profound and philosophic view of the divine nature the intrigues andamours, partialities, antipathies, actions and counter-actions of theseanthropomorphic deities. Consider, for example, the most famous of allthe myths, that of Orestes, to which we have already referred. Orestes, it will be remembered, was the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Agamemnon, on his return from Troy, was murdered by Clytemnestra. Orestes escapes; but returns later, at the instigation of Apollo, andkills his mother to avenge his father. Thereupon, in punishment for hiscrime, he is persecuted by the Furies. Now the point which Euripidesseizes here is the conduct of Apollo. Either it was right for Orestes tokill his mother, or it was wrong. If wrong, why did Apollo command it?If right, why was Orestes punished? Or are there, as Aeschylus wouldhave it, two "rights", one of Apollo, the other of the Furies? If so, what becomes of that unity of the divine law after which every religiousnature seeks? "Phoebus, " cries the Orestes of Euripides, "prophet thoughhe be, deceived me. I gave him my all, I killed my mother in obedienceto his command; and in return I am undone myself. " [Footnote: Euripides, Iph. Taur. 711] The dilemma is patent; and Euripides makes no seriousattempt to meet it. 

Or again, to take another example, less familiar, but even more to thepoint--the tale of Ion and Creusa. Creusa has been seduced by Apollo andhas borne him a child, the Ion of the story. This child she exposes, andit is conveyed by Hermes to Delphi, where at last it is found, andrecognised by the mother, and a conventionally happy ending is patchedup. But the point on which the poet has insisted throughout is, oncemore, the conduct of Apollo. What is to be made of a god who seduces anddeserts a mortal woman; who suffers her to expose her child, and leavesher in ignorance of its fate? Does he not deserve the reproaches heapedupon him by his victim?--

 "Child of Latona, I cry to the sun--I will publish thy shame! Thou with thy tresses a-shimmer with gold, through the flowers as I came Plucking the crocuses, heaping my veil with their gold- litten flame, Cam'st on me, caughtest the poor pallid wrists of mine hands, and didst hale Unto thy couch in the cave. 'Mother! mother!' I shrieked out my wail-- Wroughtest the pleasure of Kypris; no shame made the god-lover quail. Wretched I bare thee a child, and I cast him with shuddering throe Forth on thy couch where thou forcedst thy victim, a bride-bed of woe. Lost--my poor baby and thine! for the eagles devoured him: and lo! Victory-songs to thy lyre dost thou chant!--Ho, I call to thee, son Born to Latona, Dispenser of boding, on gold-gleaming throne Midmost of earth who art sitting:--thine ears shall be pierced with my moan! Thy Delos doth hate thee, thy bay-boughs abhor thee, By the palm-tree of feathery frondage that rose Where in sacred travail Latona bore thee In Zeus's garden close. " [Footnote: Euripid. Ion, 885. --Translated by A. S. Way. ]

This is a typical example of the kind of criticism which Euripidesconveys through the lips of his characters on the stage. And the pointswhich he can only dramatically suggest, Plato expounds directly in hisown person. The quarrel of the philosopher with the myths is not thatthey are not true, but that they are not edifying. They represent theson in rebellion against the father--Zeus against Kronos, Kronos againstUranos; they describe the gods as intriguing and fighting one againstthe other; they depict them as changing their form divine into thesemblance of mortal men; lastly--culmination of horror!--they representthem as laughing, positively laughing!--Or again, to turn to a moremetaphysical point, if God be good, it is argued by Plato, he cannot bethe author of evil. What then, are we to make of the passage in Homerwhere he says, "two urns stand upon the floor of Zeus filled with hisevil gifts, and one with blessings. To whomsoever Zeus whose joy is inthe lightning dealeth a mingled lot, that man chanceth now upon ill andnow again on good, but to whom he giveth but of the bad kind, him hebringeth to scorn, and evil famine chaseth him over the goodly earth, and he is a wanderer honoured of neither gods nor men. " [Footnote: Il. Xxiv. 527--Translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. ]

And again, if God be true, he cannot be the author of lies. How thencould he have sent, as we are told he did, lying dreams to men?--Clearly, concludes the philosopher, our current legends need revision;in the interest of religion itself we must destroy the myths of thepopular creed. 

Section 14. Transition to Monotheism. 

The myths, but not religion! The criticism certainly of Plato andprobably of Euripides was prompted by the desire not to discreditaltogether the belief in the gods, but to bring it into harmony with therequirements of a more fully developed consciousness. The philosopherand the poet came not to destroy, but to fulfil; not to annihilate butto transform the popular theology. Such an intention, strange as it mayappear to us with our rigid creeds, we shall see to be natural enough tothe Greek mind, when we remember that the material of their religion wasnot a set of propositions, but a more or less indeterminate body oftraditions capable of being presented in the most various forms as thegenius and taste of individual poets might direct. And we find, in fact, that the most religious poets of Greece, those even who were mostinnocent of any intention to innovate on popular beliefs, didnevertheless unconsciously tend to transform, in accordance with theirown conceptions, the whole structure of the Homeric theology. Takingover the legends of gods and heroes, as narrated in poetry andtradition, the earlier tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, as theyshaped and reshaped their material for the stage, were evolving forthemselves, not in opposition to but as it were on the top of thepolytheistic view, the idea of a single supreme and righteous God. TheZeus of Homer, whose superiority, as we saw, was based on physicalforce, grows, under the hands of Aeschylus, into something akin to theJewish Jehovah. The inner experience of the poet drives him inevitablyto this transformation. Born into the great age of Greece, coming tomaturity at the crisis of her fate, he had witnessed with his own eyes, and assisted with his own hands the defeat of the Persian host atMarathon. The event struck home to him like a judgment from heaven. TheNemesis that attends upon human pride, the vengeance that follows crime, henceforth were the thoughts that haunted and possessed his brain; andunder their influence he evolved for himself out of the popular idea ofZeus the conception of a God of justice who marks and avenges crime. Read for example the following passage from the "Agamemnon" and contrastit with the lines of Homer quoted on page 42. Nothing could illustratemore strikingly the transformation that could be effected, under theconditions of the Greek religion, in the whole conception of the divinepower by one whose conscious intention, nevertheless, was not toinnovate but to conserve. 

 "Zeus the high God! Whate'er be dim in doubt, This can our thought track out-- The blow that fells the sinner is of God, And as he wills, the rod Of vengeance smiteth sore. One said of old 'The Gods list not to hold A reckoning with him whose feet oppress The grace of holiness'-- An impious word! for whensoe'er the sire Breathed forth rebellious fire-- What time his household overflows the measure Of bliss and health and treasure-- His children's children read the reckoning plain, At last, in tears and pain. * * * * * Who spurns the shrine of Right, nor wealth nor power Shall be to him a tower, To guard him from the gulf: there lies his lot, Where all things are forgot. Lust drives him on--lust, desperate and wild Fate's sin-contriving child-- And cure is none; beyond concealment clear Kindles sin's baleful glare. As an ill coin beneath the wearing touch Betrays by stain and smutch Its metal false--such is the sinful wight. Before, on pinions light, Fair pleasure flits, and lures him childlike on, While home and kin make moan Beneath the grinding burden of his crime; Till, in the end of time, Cast down of heaven, he pours forth fruitless prayer To powers that will not hear. " [Footnote: Aesch. Agamem. 367. --Translated by E. D. A. Morshead ("The House of Atreus"). ]

And Sophocles follows in the same path. For him too Zeus is no longerthe god of physical strength; he is the creator and sustainer of themoral law--of "those laws of range sublime, called into life throughoutthe high clear heaven, whose father is Olympus alone; their parent wasno race of mortal men, no, nor shall oblivion ever lay them to sleep; amighty god is in them, and he grows not old. " [Footnote: Soph. O. T. 865. --Translated by Dr. Jebb. ] Such words imply a completetransformation of the Homeric conception of Divinity; a transformationmade indeed in the interests of religion, but involving nevertheless, and contrary, no doubt, to the intention of its authors, a completesubversion of the popular creed. Once grant the idea of God as aneternal and moral Power and the whole fabric of polytheism falls away. The religion of the Greeks, as interpreted by their best minds, annihilates itself. Zeus indeed is saved, but only at the cost of allOlympus. 

Section 15. Metaphysical Criticism. 

While thus, on the one hand, the Greek religion by its inner evolution, was tending to destroy itself, on the other hand it was threatened fromwithout by the attack of what we should call the "scientific spirit. " Asystem so frankly anthropomorphic was bound to be weak on thespeculative side. Its appeal, as we have seen, was rather to theimagination than to the intellect, by the presentation of a series ofbeautiful images, whose contemplation might offer to the mind if notsatisfaction, at least acquiescence and repose. A Greek who was not tooinquisitive was thus enabled to move through the calendar of splendidfestivals and fasts, charmed by the beauty of the ritual, inspired bythe chorus and the dance, and drawing from the familiar legends themoral and aesthetic significance with which he had been accustomed fromhis boyhood to connect them, but without ever raising the question, Isall this true? Does it really account for the existence and nature ofthe world? Once, however, the spell was broken, once the intellect wasaroused, the inadequacy of the popular faith, on the speculative side, became apparent; and the mind turned aside altogether from religion towork out its problems on its own lines. We find accordingly, from earlytimes, physical philosophers in Greece free from all theologicalpreconceptions, raising from the very beginning the question of theorigin of the world, and offering solutions, various indeed but allalike in this, that they frankly accept a materialistic basis. Onederives all things from water, another from air, another from fire; oneinsists upon unity, another on a plurality of elements; but all alikereject the supernatural, and proceed on the lines of physical causation. 

The opposition, to use the modern phrase, between science and religion, was thus developed early in ancient Greece; and by the fifth century itis clear that it had become acute. The philosopher Anaxagoras was drivenfrom Athens as an atheist; the same charge, absurdly enough, was one ofthe counts in the indictment of Socrates; and the physical speculationsof the time are a favourite butt of that champion of orthodoxy, Aristophanes. To follow up these speculations in detail would be towander too far from our present purpose; but it may be worth while toquote a passage from the great comedian, to illustrate not indeed thevalue of the theories ridiculed, but their generally materialisticcharacter, and their antagonism to the popular faith. The passageselected is part of a dialogue between Socrates and Strepsiades, one ofhis pupils; and it is introduced by an address from the chorus of"Clouds", the new divinities of the physicist:

CHORUS OF CLOUDS. 

 Our welcome to thee, old man, who would see the marvels that science can show: And thou, the high-priest of this subtlety feast, say what would you have us bestow? Since there is not a sage for whom we'd engage our wonders more freely to do, Except, it may be, for Prodicus: he for his knowledge may claim them, but you, Because as you go, you glance to and fro, and in dignified arrogance float; And think shoes a disgrace, and put on a grave face, your acquaintance with us to denote. 

 STREPSIADES. Oh earth! what a sound, how august and profound! It fills me with wonder and awe. 

 SOCRATES. These, these then alone, for true Deities own, the rest are all God-ships of straw. 

 STREPS. Let Zeus be left out: He's a God beyond doubt; come, that you can scarcely deny. 

 SOCR. Zeus indeed! there's no Zeus: don't you be so obtuse. 

 STREPS. No Zeus up above in the sky? Then you first must explain, who it is sends the rain; or I really must think you are wrong. 

 SOCR. Well then, be it known, these send it alone: I can prove it by argument strong. Was there ever a shower seen to fall in an hour when the sky was all cloudless and blue? Yet on a fine day, when the clouds are away, he might send one, according to you. 

 STREPS. Well, it must be confessed, that chimes in with the rest: your words I am forced to believe. 

 Yet before I had dreamed that the rain-water streamed from Zeus and his chamber-pot sieve. But whence then, my friend, does the thunder descend? that does make us quake with affright!

 SOCR. Why, 'tis they, I declare, as they roll through the air. 

 STREPS. What the clouds? did I hear you aright?

 SOCR. Ay: for when to the brim filled with water they swim, by Necessity carried along, They are hung up on high in the vault of the sky, and so by Necessity strong In the midst of their course, they clash with great force, and thunder away without end. 

 STREPS. But is it not He who compels this to be? does not Zeus this Necessity send?

 SOCR. No Zeus have we there, but a vortex of air. 

 STREPS. What! Vortex? that's something I own. I knew not before, that Zeus was no more, but Vortex was placed on his throne! But I have not yet heard to what cause you referred the thunder's majestical roar. 

 SOCR. Yes, 'tis they, when on high full of water they fly, and then, as I told you before, By compression impelled, as they clash, are compelled a terrible clatter to make. 

 STREPS. Come, how can that be? I really don't see. 

 SOCR. Yourself as my proof I will take. Have you never then ate the broth puddings you get when the Panathenaea come round, And felt with what might your bowels all night in turbulent tumult resound

 STREPS. By Apollo, 'tis true, there's a mighty to do, and my belly keeps rumbling about; And the puddings begin to clatter within and to kick up a wonderful rout: Quite gently at first, papapax, papapax, but soon papappappax away, Till at last, I'll be bound, I can thunder as loud papapappappappappax as they. 

 SOCR. Shalt thou then a sound so loud and profound from thy belly diminutive send, And shall not the high and the infinite sky go thundering on without end? For both, you will find, on an impulse of wind and similar causes depend. 

 STREPS. Well, but tell me from whom comes the bolt through the gloom, with its awful and terrible flashes; And wherever it turns, some it singes and burns, and some it reduces to ashes: For this 'tis quite plain, let who will send the rain, that Zeus against perjurers dashes

 SOCR. And how, you old fool, of a dark-ages school, and an antidiluvian wit, If the perjured they strike, and not all men alike, have they never Cleonymus hit? Then of Simon again, and Theorus explain: known perjurers, yet they escape. But he smites his own shrine with these arrows divine, and "Sunium, Attica's cape, " And the ancient gnarled oaks: now what prompted those strokes? They never forswore I should say. 

 STREPS. Can't say that they do: your words appear true. Whence comes then the thunderbolt, pray?

 SOCR. When a wind that is dry, being lifted on high, is suddenly pent into these, It swells up their skin, like a bladder, within, by Necessity's changeless decrees: Till compressed very tight, it bursts them outright, and away with an impulse so strong, That at last by the force and the swing of the course, it takes fire as it whizzes along. 

 STREPS. That's exactly the thing, that I suffered one spring, at the great feast of Zeus, I admit: I'd a paunch in the pot, but I wholly forgot about making the safety-valve slit. So it spluttered and swelled, while the saucepan I held, till at last with a vengeance it flew: Took me quite by surprise, dung-bespattered my eyes, and scalded my face black and blue! [Footnote: Aristoph. "Clouds" 358. --Translation by B. B. Rogers. ]

Nothing could be more amusing than this passage as a burlesque of thephysical theories of the time; and nothing could better illustrate thequarrel between science and religion, as it presents itself on thesurface to the plain man. But there is more in the quarrel than appearsat first sight. The real sting of the comedy from which we have quotedlies in the assumption, adopted throughout the play, that the atheist isalso necessarily anti-social and immoral. The physicist, in the personof Socrates, is identified with the sophist; on the one hand he isrepresented as teaching the theory of material causation, on the otherthe art of lying and deceit. The object of Strepsiades in attending theschool is to learn how not to pay his debts; the achievement of his sonis to learn how to dishonour his father. The cult of reason isidentified by the poet with the cult of self-interest; the man who doesnot believe in the gods cannot, he implies, believe in the family or thestate. 

Section 16. Metaphysical Reconstruction--Plato. 

The argument is an old one into whose merits this is not the place toenter. But one thing is certain, that the sceptical spirit which wasinvading religion, was invading also politics and ethics; and thattowards the close of the fifth century before Christ, Greece and inparticular Athens was overrun by philosophers, who not only did notscruple to question the foundations of social and moral obligation, butin some cases explicitly taught that there were no foundations at all;that all law was a convention based on no objective truth; and that theonly valid right was the natural right of the strong to rule. It wasinto this chaos of sceptical opinion that Plato was born; and it was thedesire to meet and subdue it that was the motive of his philosophy. LikeAristophanes, he traced the root of the evil to the decay of religiousbelief; and though no one, as we have seen, was more trenchant than hein his criticism of the popular faith, no one, on the other hand, wasmore convinced of the necessity of some form of religion as a basis forany stable polity. The doctrine of the physicists, he asserts, that theworld is the result of "nature and chance" has immediate and disastrouseffects on the whole structure of social beliefs. The conclusioninevitably follows that human laws and institutions, like everythingelse, are accidental products; that they have no objective validity, nobinding force on the will; and that the only right that has anyintelligible meaning is the right which is identical with might. [Footnote: See e. G. Plato's "Laws". X. 887. ] Against these conclusionsthe whole soul of Plato rose in revolt. To reconstruct religion, he wasdriven back upon metaphysics; and elaborated at last the system whichfrom his day to our own has not ceased to perplex and fascinate theworld, and whose rare and radiant combination of gifts, speculative, artistic, and religious, marks the highest reach of the genius of theGreeks, and perhaps of mankind. To attempt an analysis of that systemwould lead us far from our present task. All that concerns us here, isits religious significance; and of that, all we can note is that Plato, the deepest thinker of the Greeks, was also among the farthest removedfrom the popular faith. The principle from which he derives the World isthe absolute Good, or God, of whose ideas the phenomena of sense areimperfect copies. To the divine intelligence man by virtue of his reasonis akin. But the reason in him has fallen into bondage of the flesh; andit is the task of his life on earth, or rather of a series of lives (forPlato believed in successive re-incarnations), to deliver this divinerelement of his soul, and set it free to re-unite with God. 

To the description of the divine life thus prepared for the soul, fromwhich she fell but to which she may return, Plato has devoted some ofhis finest passages; and if we are to indicate, as we are bound to do, the highest point to which the religious consciousness of the Greeksattained, we must not be deterred, by dread of the obscurity necessarilyattaching to an extract, from a citation from the most impassioned ofhis dialogues. Speaking of that "divine madness, " to which we havealready had occasion to refer, he says that this is the madness which"is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transportedwith the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to fly away, buthe cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and carelessof the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad. And I haveshown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest and theoff-spring of the highest to him who has or shares in it, and that hewho loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it. Forevery soul of man has in the way of nature beheld true being; this wasthe condition of her passing into the form of man. But all souls do noteasily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them fora short time only, or they may have been unfortunate in their earthlylot, and having had their hearts turned to unrighteousness through somecorrupting influence, they may have lost the memory of the holy thingswhich once they saw. Few only retain an adequate remembrance of them;and they, when they behold here any image of that other world, are raptin amazement; but they are ignorant of what that rapture means, becausethey do not clearly perceive. For there is no clear light of justice ortemperance, or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls, inthe earthly copies of them: they are seen through a glass dimly; andthere are few who, going to the images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty. There was a time when, with the rest ofthe happy band, they saw beauty shining in brightness--we philosophersfollowing in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; andthen we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mysterywhich may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state ofinnocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we wereadmitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm andhappy, which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yetenshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we areimprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger overthe memory of scenes which have passed away. " [Footnote: Plato, Phaedrus. 249d. --Jowett's translation. ]

Section 17. Summary. 

At this point, where religion passes into philosophy, the discussionwhich has occupied the present chapter must close. So far it wasnecessary to proceed, in order to show how wide was the range of thereligious consciousness of the Greeks, and through how many points ofview it passed in the course of its evolution. But its development wasaway from the Greek and towards the Christian; and it will therefore bedesirable, in conclusion, to fix once more in our minds that central andprimary phase of the Greek religion under the influence of which theircivilisation was formed into a character definite and distinct in thehistory of the world. This phase will be the one which underlay and wasreflected in the actual cult and institutions of Greece and musttherefore be regarded not as a product of critical and self-consciousthought, but as an imaginative way of conceiving the world stamped as itwere passively on the mind by the whole course of concrete experience. Of its character we have attempted to give some kind of account in theearlier part of this chapter, and we have now only to summarise what wasthere said. 

The Greek religion, then, as we saw, in this its characteristic phase, involved a belief in a number of deities who on the one hand werepersonifications of the powers of nature and of the human soul, on theother the founders and sustainers of civil society. To the operations ofthese beings the whole of experience was referred, and that, not merelyin an abstract and unintelligible way, as when we say that the world wascreated by God, but in a quite precise and definite sense, the action ofthe gods being conceived to be the same in kind as that of man, proceeding from similar motives, directed to similar ends, andaccomplished very largely by similar, though much superior means. Byvirtue of this uncritical and unreflective mode of apprehension theGreeks, we said, were made at home in the world. Their religion suffusedand transformed the facts both of nature and of society, interpretingwhat would otherwise have been unintelligible by the idea of an activitywhich they could understand because it was one which they wereconstantly exercising themselves. Being thus supplied with a generalexplanation of the world, they could put aside the question of itsorigin and end, and devote themselves freely and fully to the art ofliving, unhampered by scruples and doubts as to the nature of life. Consciousness similar to their own was the ultimate fact; and there wasnothing therefore with which they might not form intelligible andharmonious relations. 

And as on the side of metaphysics they were delivered from theperplexities of speculation, so on the side of ethics they wereundisturbed by the perplexities of conscience. Their religion, it istrue, had a bearing on their conduct, but a bearing, as we saw, externaland mechanical. If they sinned they might be punished directly byphysical evil; and from this evil religion might redeem them by theappropriate ceremonies of purgation. But on the other hand they were notconscious of a spiritual relation to God, of sin as an alienation fromthe divine power and repentance as the means of restoration to grace. The pangs of conscience, the fears and hopes, the triumph and despair ofthe soul which were the preoccupations of the Puritan, were phenomenaunknown to the ancient Greek. He lived and acted undisturbed byscrupulous introspection; and the function of his religion was rather toquiet the conscience by ritual than to excite it by admonition andreproof. 

From both these points of view, the metaphysical and the ethical, theGreeks were brought by their religion into harmony with the world. Neither the perplexities of the intellect nor the scruples of theconscience intervened to hamper their free activity. Their life wassimple, straightforward and clear; and their consciousness directedoutwards upon the world, not perplexedly absorbed in the contemplationof itself. 

On the other hand, this harmony which was the essence of the Greekcivilisation, was a temporary compromise, not a final solution. Itdepended on presumptions of the imagination, not on convictions of theintellect; and as we have seen, it destroyed itself by the process ofits own development. The beauty, the singleness, and the freedom whichattracts us in the consciousness of the Greek was the result of apoetical view of the world, which did but anticipate in imagination anideal that was not realised in fact or in thought. It depended on theassumption of anthropomorphic gods, an assumption which could not standbefore the criticism of reason, and either broke down into scepticism, or was developed into the conception of a single supreme and spiritualpower. 

And even apart from this internal evolution, from this subversion of itsideal basis, the harmony established by the Greek religion was at thebest but partial and incomplete. It was a harmony for life, but not fordeath. The more completely the Greek felt himself to be at home in theworld, the more happily and freely he abandoned himself to the exerciseof his powers, the more intensely and vividly he lived in action and inpassion, the more alien, bitter, and incomprehensible did he find thephenomena of age and death. On this problem, so far as we can judge, hereceived from his religion but little light, and still less consolation. The music of his brief life closed with a discord unresolved; and evenbefore reason had brought her criticism to bear upon his creed, itsdeficiency was forced upon him by his feeling. 

Thus the harmony which we have indicated as the characteristic result ofthe Greek religion contained none of the conditions of completeness orfinality. For on the one hand there were elements which it was neverable to include; and on the other, its hold even over those which itembraced was temporary and precarious. The eating of the tree ofknowledge drove the Greeks from their paradise; but the vision of thatEden continues to haunt the mind of man, not in vain, if it prophesiesin a type the end to which his history moves. 

CHAPTER II

THE GREEK VIEW OF THE STATE

Section 1. The Greek State a "City. "

The present kingdom of Greece is among the smallest of European states;but to the Greeks it would have appeared too large to be a state at all. Within that little peninsular whose whole population and wealth are soinsignificant according to modern ideas, were comprised in classicaltimes not one but many flourishing polities. And the conception of anamalgamation of these under a single government was so foreign to theGreek idea, that even to Aristotle, the clearest and most comprehensivethinker of his age, it did not present itself even as a dream. To him, as to every ancient Greek, the state meant the City--meant, that is tosay, an area about the size of an English county, with a population, perhaps, of some hundred thousand, self-governing and independent of anylarger political whole. 

If we can imagine the various County Councils of England emancipatedfrom the control of Parliament and set free to make their own laws, manage their own finance and justice, raise troops and form with oneanother alliances, offensive and defensive, we may form thus somegeneral idea of the political institutions of the Greeks and somemeasure of their difference from our own. 

Nor must it be supposed that the size of the Greek state was a mereaccident in its constitution, that it might have been indefinitelyenlarged and yet regained its essential character. On the contrary, thelimitation of size belonged to its very notion. The greatest state, saysAristotle, is not the one whose population is most numerous; on thecontrary, after a certain limit of increase has been passed, the stateceases to be a state at all. "Ten men are too few for a city; a hundredthousand are too many. " Not only London, it seems, but every one of ourlarger towns, would have been too big for the Greek idea of a state; andas for the British empire, the very conception of it would have beenimpossible to the Greeks. 

Clearly, their view on this point is fundamentally different from ourown. Their civilisation was one of "city-states", not of kingdoms andempires; and their whole political outlook was necessarily determined bythis condition. Generalising from their own experience, they had formedfor themselves a conception of the state not the less interesting to usthat it is unfamiliar; and this conception it will be the business ofthe present chapter to illustrate and explain. 

Section 2. The Relation of the State to the Citizen. 

First, let us consider the relation of the state to the citizens--thatis to say, to that portion of the community, usually a minority, whichwas possessed of full political rights. It is here that we have the keyto that limitation of size which we have seen to be essential to theidea of the city-state. For, in the Greek view, to be a citizen of astate did not merely imply the payment of taxes, and the possession of avote; it implied a direct and active co-operation in all the functionsof civil and military life. A citizen was normally a soldier, a judge, and a member of the governing assembly; and all his public duties heperformed not by deputy, but in person. He must be able frequently toattend the centre of government; hence the limitation of territory. Hemust be able to speak and vote in person in the assembly; hence thelimitation of numbers. The idea of representative government neveroccurred to the Greeks; but if it had occurred to them, and if they hadadopted it, it would have involved a revolution in their wholeconception of the citizen. Of that conception, direct personal servicewas the cardinal point--service in the field as well as in the council;and to substitute for personal service the mere right to a vote wouldhave been to destroy the form of the Greek state. Such being the ideathe Greeks had formed, based on their own experience, of the relation ofthe citizen to the state, it follows that to them a society so complexas our own would hardly have answered to the definition of a state atall. Rather they would have regarded it as a mere congeries ofunsatisfactory human beings, held together, partly by political, partlyby economic compulsion, but lacking that conscious identity of interestwith the community to which they belong which alone constitutes thecitizen. A man whose main pre-occupation should be with his trade or hisprofession, and who should only become aware of his corporate relationswhen called upon for his rates and taxes--a man, that is to say, in theposition of an ordinary Englishman--would not have seemed to the Greeksto be a full and proper member of a state. For the state, to them, wasmore than a machinery, it was a spiritual bond; and "public life", as wecall it, was not a thing to be taken up and laid aside at pleasure, buta necessary and essential phase of the existence of a complete man. 

This relation of the citizen to the state, as it was conceived by theGreeks, is sometimes described as though it involved the sacrifice ofthe individual to the whole. And in a certain sense, perhaps, this istrue. Aristotle, for instance, declares that no one must suppose hebelongs to himself, but rather that all alike belong to the state; andPlato, in the construction of his ideal republic, is thinking much lessof the happiness of the individual citizens, than of the symmetry andbeauty of the whole as it might appear to a disinterested observer fromwithout. Certainly it would have been tedious and irksome to any but hisown ideal philosopher to live under the rule of that perfect polity. Individual enterprise, bent, and choice is rigorously excluded. Nothingescapes the net of legislation, from the production of children to thefashion of houses, clothes, and food. It is absurd, says the ruthlesslogic of this mathematician among the poets, for one who would regulatepublic life to leave private relations uncontrolled; if there is to beorder at all, it must extend through and through; no moment, no detailmust be withdrawn from the grasp of law. And though in this, Plato, nodoubt, goes far beyond the common sense of the Greeks, yet he is notbuilding altogether in the air. The republic which he desiderates wasrealised, as we shall see, partially at least, in Sparta. So that hisinsistence on the all-pervading domination of the state, exaggeratedthough it be, is exaggerated on the actual lines of Greek practice, andmay be taken as indicative of a real distinction and even antithesisbetween their point of view and that which prevails at present in mostmodern states. 

But on the other hand such a phrase as the "sacrifice of the individualto the whole", to this extent at least is misleading, that itpresupposes an opposition between the end of the individual and that ofthe State, such as was entirely foreign to the Greek conception. Thebest individual, in their view, was also the best citizen; the twoideals not only were not incompatible, they were almostindistinguishable. When Aristotle defines a state as "an association ofsimilar persons for the attainment of the best life possible", heimplies not only that society is the means whereby the individualattains his ideal, but also that that ideal includes the functions ofpublic life. The state in his view is not merely the convenientmachinery that raises a man above his animal wants and sets him free tofollow his own devices; it is itself his end, or at least a part of it. And from this it follows that the regulations of the state were notregarded by the Greeks--as they are apt to be by modern men--as so manyvexatious, if necessary, restraints on individual liberty; but rather asthe expression of the best and highest nature of the citizen, as theformula of the conduct which the good man would naturally prescribe tohimself. So that, to get a clear conception of what was at least theGreek ideal, however imperfectly it may have been attained in practice, we ought to regard the individual not as sacrificed to, but rather asrealising himself in the whole. We shall thus come nearer to what seemsto have been the point of view not only of Aristotle and of Plato, butalso of the average Greek man. 

Section 3. The Greek View of Law. 

For nothing is more remarkable in the political theory of the Greeksthan the respect they habitually express for law. Early legislators werebelieved to have been specially inspired by the divine power--Lycurgus, for instance, by Apollo, and Minos by Zeus; and Plato regards it as afundamental condition of the well-being of any state that this viewshould prevail among its citizens. Nor was this conception of the divineorigin of law confined to legend and to philosophy; we find it expressedin the following passage of Demosthenes, addressed to a jury of averageAthenians, and representing at any rate the conventional and orthodox, if not the critical view of the Greek public:

"The whole life of men, O Athenians, whether they inhabit a great cityor a small one, is governed by nature and by laws. Of these, nature is athing irregular, unequal, and peculiar to the individual possessor; lawsare regular, common, and the same for all. Nature, if it be depraved, has often vicious desires; therefore you will find people of that sortfalling into error. Laws desire what is just and honourable and useful;they seek for this, and, when it is found, it is set forth as a generalordinance, the same and alike for all; and that is law, which all menought to obey for many reasons, and especially because every law is aninvention and gift of the Gods, a resolution of wise men, a correctiveof errors intentional and unintentional, a compact of the whole state, according to which all who belong to the state ought to live. "[Footnote: Demosth. In Aristogeit. Section 17. --Translation by C. R. Kennedy. ]

In this opposition of Law, as the universal principle, to Nature, asindividual caprice, is implied a tacit identification of Law andJustice. The identification, of course, is never complete in any state, and frequently enough is not even approximate. No people were moreconscious of this than the Greeks, none, as we shall see later, pushedit more vigorously home. But still, the positive conception which lay atthe root of their society was that which finds expression in the passagewe have quoted, and which is stated still more explicitly in the"Memorabilia" of Xenophon, where that admirable example of the good andefficient citizen represents his hero Socrates as maintaining, withouthesitation or reserve, that "that which is in accordance with law isjust. " The implication, of course, is not that laws cannot be improved, that they do at any point adequately correspond to justice; but thatjustice has an objective and binding validity, and that Law is a seriousand on the whole a successful attempt to embody it in practice. This wasthe conviction predominant in the best period of Greece; the convictionunder which her institutions were formed and flourished, and whoseoverthrow by the philosophy of a critical age was coincident with, if itwas not the cause of, her decline. 

Section 4. Artisans and Slaves. 

We have now arrived at a general idea of the nature of the Greek state, and of its relations to the individual citizen. But there were alsomembers of the state who were not citizens at all; there was the classof labourers and traders, who, in some states at least, had no politicalrights; and the class of slaves who had nowhere any rights at all. Forin the Greek conception the citizen was an aristocrat. His excellencewas thought to consist in public activity; and to the performance ofpublic duties he ought therefore to be able to devote the greater partof his time and energy. But the existence of such a privileged classinvolved the existence of a class of producers to support them; and theproducers, by the nature of their calling, be they slave or free, wereexcluded from the life of the perfect citizen. They had not thenecessary leisure to devote to public business; neither had they theopportunity to acquire the mental and physical qualities which wouldenable them to transact it worthily. They were therefore regarded by theGreeks as an inferior class; in some states, in Sparta, for example, andin Thebes, they were excluded from political rights; and even in Athens, the most democratic of all the Greek communities, though they wereadmitted to the citizenship and enjoyed considerable politicalinfluence, they never appear to have lost the stigma of socialinferiority. And the distinction which was thus more or less definitelydrawn in practice between the citizens proper and the productive class, was even more emphatically affirmed in theory. Aristotle, the mostbalanced of all the Greek thinkers and the best exponent of the normaltrend of their ideas, excludes the class of artisans from thecitizenship of his ideal state on the ground that they are debarred bytheir occupation from the characteristic excellence of man. And Plato, though here as elsewhere he pushes the normal view to excess, yet, inhis insistence on the gulf that separates the citizen from the mechanicand the trader, is in sympathy with the general current of Greek ideas. His ideal state is one which depends mainly on agriculture; in whichcommerce and exchange are reduced to the smallest possible dimensions;in which every citizen is a landowner, forbidden to engage in trade; andin which the productive class is excluded from all political rights. Theobverse then, of the Greek citizen, who realised in the state hishighest life, was an inferior class of producers who realised only themeans of subsistence. But within this class again was a distinction yetmore fundamental--the distinction between free men and slaves. In themajority of the Greek states the slaves were the greater part of thepopulation; in Athens, to take an extreme case, at the close of thefourth century, they are estimated at 400, 000, to 100, 000 citizens. Theywere employed not only in domestic service, but on the fields, infactories and in mines, and performed, in short, a considerable part ofthe productive labour in the state. A whole large section, then, of theproducers in ancient Greece had no social or political rights at all. They existed simply to maintain the aristocracy of citizens, for whomand in whom the state had its being. Nor was this state of things in theleast repugnant to the average Greek mind. Nothing is more curious tothe modern man than the temper in which Aristotle approaches this theme. Without surprise or indignation, but in the tone of an impartial, scientific inquirer, he asks himself the question whether slavery isnatural, and answers it in the affirmative. For, he argues, though inany particular case, owing to the uncertain chances of fortune and war, the wrong person may happen to be enslaved, yet, broadly speaking, thegeneral truth remains, that there are some men so inferior to othersthat they ought to be despotically governed, by the same right and forthe same good end that the body ought to be governed by the soul. Suchmen, he maintains, are slaves by nature; and it is as much to theirinterest to be ruled as it is to their masters' interest to rule them. To this class belong, for example, all who are naturally incapable ofany but physical activity. These should be regarded as detachable limbs, so to speak, of the man who owns them, instruments of his will, likehands and feet; or, to use Aristotle's own phrase, "the slave is a toolwith life in it, and the tool a lifeless slave. "

The relation between master and slave thus frankly conceived by theGreeks, did not necessarily imply, though it was quite compatible with, brutality of treatment. The slave might be badly treated, no doubt, andvery frequently was, for his master had almost absolute control overhim, life and limb; but, as we should expect, it was clearly recognisedby the best Greeks that the treatment should be genial and humane. "There is a certain mutual profit and kindness, " says Aristotle, "between master and slave, in all cases where the relation is natural, not merely imposed from without by convention or force. " [Footnote:Arist. Pol. I. 7. 1255 b 12] And Plato insists on the duty of neitherinsulting nor outraging a slave, but treating him rather with evengreater fairness than if he were in a position of equality. 

Still, there can be no doubt that the Greek conception of slavery is oneof the points in which their view of life runs most counter to our own. Centuries of Christianity have engendered in us the conviction, orrather, the instinct, that men are equal at least to this extent, thatno one has a right explicitly to make of another a mere passiveinstrument of his will--that every man, in short, must be regarded as anend in himself. Yet even here the divergence between the Greek and themodern view is less extreme than it appears at first sight. For themodern man, in spite of his perfectly genuine belief in equality (in thesense in which we have just defined the word), does nevertheless, whenhe is confronted with racial differences, recognise degrees ofinferiority so extreme, that he is practically driven into theAristotelian position that some men are naturally slaves. The American, for example, will hardly deny that such is his attitude towards thenegro. The negro, in theory, is the equal, politically and socially, ofthe white man; in practice, he is excluded from the vote, from theprofessions, from the amenities of social intercourse, and even, as wehave recently learnt, from the most elementary forms of justice. Thegeneral and a priori doctrine of equality is shattering itself againstthe actual facts; and the old Greek conception, "the slave by nature", may be detected behind the mask of the Christian ideal. And while thus, even in spite of itself, the modern view is approximating to that of theGreeks, on the other hand the Greek view by its own evolution wasalready beginning to anticipate our own. Even Aristotle, in formulatinghis own conception of slavery, finds it necessary to observe that thoughit be true that some men are naturally slaves, yet in practice, underconditions which give the victory to force, it may happen that the"natural" slave becomes the master, and the "natural" master is degradedto a slave. This is already a serious modification of his doctrine. Andother writers, pushing the contention further, deny altogether thetheory of natural slavery. "No man, " says the poet Philemon, "was everborn a slave by nature. Fortune only has put men in that position. " AndEuripides, the most modern of the Greeks, writes in the same strain:"One thing only disgraces a slave, and that is the name. In all otherrespects a slave, if he be good, is no worse than a freeman. " [Footnote:Euripides, Ion. 854]

It seems then that the distinction between the Greek and the modernpoint of view is not so profound or so final as it appears at firstsight. Still, the distinction, broadly speaking, is there. The Greeks, on the whole, were quite content to sacrifice the majority to theminority. Their position, as we said at the outset, was fundamentallyaristocratic; they exaggerated rather than minimised the distinctionsbetween men--between the Greek and the barbarian, the freeman and theslave, the gentleman and the artisan--regarding them as natural andfundamental, not as the casual product of circumstances. The "equality"which they sought in a well-ordered state was proportional notarithmetical--the attribution to each of his peculiar right, not ofequal rights to all. Some were born to rule, others to serve; some to beends, others to be means; and the problem to be solved was not how toobliterate these varieties of tone, but how to compose them into anordered harmony. 

In a modern state, on the other hand, though class distinctions areclearly enough marked, yet the point of view from which they areregarded is fundamentally different. They are attributed rather toaccidents of fortune than to varieties of nature. The artisan, forexample, ranks no doubt lower than the professional man; but no onemaintains that he is a different kind of being, incapable by nature, asAristotle asserts, of the characteristic excellence of man. Thedistinction admitted is rather one of wealth than of natural calling, and may be obliterated by ability and good luck. Neither in theory norin practice does the modern state recognise any such gulf as that which, in ancient Greece, separated the freeman from the slave, or the citizenfrom the non-citizen. 

Section 5. The Greek State Primarily Military, not Industrial. 

The source of this divergence of view must be sought in the wholecircumstances and character of the Greek states. Founded in thebeginning by conquest, many of them still retained, in their internalstructure, the marks of their violent origin. The citizens, for example, of Sparta and of Crete, were practically military garrisons, settled inthe midst of a hostile population. These were extreme cases; andelsewhere, no doubt, the distinction between the conquerors and theconquered had disappeared. Still, it had sufficed to mould theconception and ideal of the citizen as a member of a privileged andsuperior class, whose whole energies were devoted to maintaining, bycouncil and war, not only the prosperity, but the very existence of thestate. The original citizen, moreover, would be an owner of land, whichwould be tilled for him by a subject class. Productive labour would bestamped, from the outset, with the stigma of inferiority; commerce wouldgrow up, if at all, outside the limits of the landed aristocracy, andwould have a struggle to win for itself any degree of social andpolitical recognition. Such were the conditions that produced the Greekconception of the citizen. In some states, such as Sparta, theycontinued practically unchanged throughout the best period of Greekhistory; in others, such as Athens, they were modified by the growth ofa commercial population, and where that was the case the conception ofthe citizen was modified too, and the whole polity assumed a democraticcharacter. Yet never, as we have seen, even in the most democraticstates, was the modern conception of equality admitted. For, in thefirst place, the institution of slavery persisted, to stamp the mass ofproducers as an inferior caste; and in the second place, trade, even inthe states where it was most developed, hardly attained a preponderatinginfluence. The ancient state was and remained primarily military. Thegreat industrial questions which agitate modern states either did notexist at all in Greece, or assumed so simple a form that they did notrise to the surface of political life. [Footnote: There was, of course, the general opposition between rich and poor (see below). But not thoseinfinitely complex relations which are the problems of modernstatesmanship. ] How curious it is, for example, from the modern point ofview, to find Plato, a citizen of the most important trading centre ofGreece, dismissing in the following brief sentence the whole commerciallegislation of his ideal state:

"As to those common business transactions between private individuals inthe market, including, if you please, the contracts of artisans, libels, assaults, law-proceedings, and the impanelling of juries, or againquestions relating to tariffs, and the collection of such customs as maybe necessary in the market or in the harbours, and generally allregulations of the market, the police, the custom-house, and the like;shall we condescend to legislate at all on such matters?

"No, it is not worth while to give directions on these points to goodand cultivated men: for in most cases they will have little difficultyin discovering all the legislation required. " [Footnote: Plato, Rep. IV. 425. --Translated by Davies and Vaughan. ]

In fact, throughout his treatise it is the non-commercial or militaryclass with which Plato is almost exclusively concerned; and in takingthat line he is so far at least in touch with reality that that classwas the one which did in fact predominate in the Greek state; and thateven where, as in Athens, the productive class became an importantfactor in political life, it was never able altogether to overthrow thearistocratic conception of the citizen. 

And with that conception, we must add, was bound up the whole Greek viewof individual excellence. The inferiority of the artisan and the trader, historically established in the manner we have indicated, was furtheremphasised by the fact that they were excluded by their calling from thecultivation of the higher personal qualities--from the training of thebody by gymnastics and of the mind by philosophy; from habitualconversance with public affairs; from that perfect balance, in a word, of the physical, intellectual, and moral powers, which was only to beattained by a process of self-culture, incompatible with the pursuanceof a trade for bread. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of the Greeks. We shall have occasion to return to it later. Meantime, let us sum upthe course of our investigation up to the present point. 

We have seen that the state, in the Greek view, must be so limited, bothin territory and population, that all its citizens might be able toparticipate in person in its government and defence; that it was basedon fundamental class distinctions separating sharply the citizen fromthe non-citizen, and the slave from the free; that its end and purposewas that all-absorbing corporate activity in which the citizen found thehighest expression of himself; and that to that end the inferior classeswere regarded as mere means--a point of view which finds its completestexpression in the institution of slavery. 

Section 6. Forms of Government in the Greek State. 

While, however, this was the general idea of the Greek state, it wouldbe a mistake to suppose that it was everywhere embodied in a singlepermanent form of polity. On the contrary, the majority of the states inGreece were in a constant state of flux; revolution succeeded revolutionwith startling rapidity; and in place of a single fixed type what wereally get is a constant transition from one variety to another. Thegeneral account we have given ought therefore to be regarded only as akind of limiting formula, embracing within its range a number ofpolities distinct and even opposed in character. Of these politiesAristotle, whose work is based on an examination of all the existingstates of Greece, recognises three main varieties: government by theone, government by the few, and government by the many; and each ofthese is subdivided into two forms, one good, where the government hasregard to the well-being of the whole, the other bad, where it hasregard only to the well-being of those who govern. The result is sixforms, of which three are good, monarchy, aristocracy, and what he callsa "polity" par excellence; three bad, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Of all these forms we have examples in Greek history, and indeed canroughly trace a tendency of the state to evolve through the series ofthem. But by far the most important, in the historical period, are thetwo forms known as Oligarchy and Democracy; and the reason of theirimportance is that they corresponded roughly to government by the richand government by the poor. "Rich and poor, " says Aristotle, "are thereally antagonistic members of a state. The result is that the characterof all existing polities is determined by the predominance of one orother of these classes, and it is the common opinion that there are twopolities and two only, viz. , Democracy and Oligarchy. " [Footnote: Arist. Pol. VI. (IV) 1291 b8. --Translation by Welldon. ] In other words, thesocial distinction between rich and poor was exaggerated in Greece intopolitical antagonism. In every state there was an oligarchic and ademocratic faction; and so fierce was the opposition between them, thatwe may almost say that every Greek city was in a chronic state of civilwar, having become, as Plato puts it, not one city but two, "onecomprising the rich and the other the poor, who reside together on thesame ground, and are always plotting against one another. " [Footnote:Plat. Rep. Viii. 551--Translation by Davies and Vaughan]

Section 7. Faction and Anarchy. 

This internal schism which ran through almost every state, came to ahead in the great Peloponnesian war which divided Greece at the close ofthe fifth century, and in which Athens and Sparta, the two chiefcombatants, represented respectively the democratic and the oligarchicprinciples. Each appealed to the kindred faction in the states that wereopposed to them; and every city was divided against itself, the partythat was "out" for the moment plotting with the foreign foe to overthrowthe party that was "in. " Thus the general Greek conception of theordered state was so far from being realised in practice that probablyat no time in the history of the civilised world has anarchy morecomplete and cynical prevailed. 

To appreciate the gulf that existed between the ideal and the fact, wehave only to contrast such a scheme as that set forth in the "Republic"of Plato with the following description by Thucydides of the state ofGreece during the Peloponnesian war:

"Not long afterwards the whole Hellenic world was in commotion; in everycity the chiefs of the democracy and of the oligarchy were struggling, the one to bring in the Athenians, the other the Lacedaemonians. Now intime of peace, men would have had no excuse for introducing either, andno desire to do so; but when they were at war and both sides couldeasily obtain allies to the hurt of their enemies and the advantage ofthemselves, the dissatisfied party were only too ready to invoke foreignaid. And revolution brought upon the cities of Hellas many terriblecalamities, such as have been and always will be while human natureremains the same, but which are more or less aggravated and differ incharacter with every new combination of circumstances. In peace andprosperity both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious necessities;but war which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life is ahard master, and tends to assimilate men's characters to theirconditions. 

"When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carriedthe revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdothe report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of theirenterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words hadno longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as theythought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudentdelay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanlyweakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was thetrue quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was arecreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted, and hisopponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but astill greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the otherhand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots wasa breaker-up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In aword, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, andso was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The tie ofparty was stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was moreready to dare without asking why (for party associations are not basedupon any established law, nor do they seek the public good; they areformed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest). The seal of goodfaith was not divine law, but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when hewas in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party receivedthem, not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchfulness of hisactions. Revenge was dearer than self-preservation. Any agreements swornto by either party, when they could do nothing else, were binding aslong as both were powerless. But he who on a favourable opportunityfirst took courage and struck at his enemy when he saw him off hisguard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious than he would have had in anopen act of revenge; he congratulated himself that he had taken thesafer course, and also that he had overreached his enemy and gained theprize of superior ability. In general the dishonest more easily gaincredit for cleverness than the simple for goodness; men take a pride inthe one, but are ashamed of the other. 

"The cause of all these evils was the love of power originating inavarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by themwhen men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on eitherside used specious names, the one party professing to uphold theconstitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of anaristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name theywere devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcomeeach other, they committed the most monstrous crimes; yet even thesewere surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges which they pursued tothe very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either ofjustice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of themoment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, orgrasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate theimpatience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for religion; but anyfair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose wasgreatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a preyto both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men werejealous of their surviving. 

"Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas. Thesimplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed toscorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhereprevailed; for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terribleenough to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the convictionthat nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety, and could notafford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. For aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacities of theiropponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whosesubtle wits were likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, theystruck boldly and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in theirarrogance that they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act whenthey could think, were taken off their guard and easily destroyed. "[Footnote: Thuc. Iii. 82. --Translated by Jowett. ]

The general indictment thus drawn up by Thucydides is amply illustratedby the events of war which he describes. On one occasion, for example, the Athenians were blockading Mitylene; the government, an oligarchy, was driven to arm the people for the defence; the people, havingobtained arms, immediately demanded political rights, under threat ofsurrendering the city to the foreign foe; and the government, ratherthan concede their claims, surrendered it themselves. Again, Megara, welearn, was twice betrayed, once by the democrats to the Athenians, andagain by the oligarchs to the Lacedaemonians. At Leontini the Syracusanswere called in to drive out the popular party. And at Corcyra thepeople, having got the better of their aristocratic opponents, proceededto a general massacre which extended over seven days, with every varietyof moral and physical atrocity. 

Such is the view of the political condition of Greece given to us by acontemporary observer towards the close of the fifth century, and it isa curious comment on the Greek idea of the state. That idea, as we saw, was an ordered inequality, political as well as social; and in certainstates, and notably in Sparta, it was successfully embodied in a stableform. But in the majority of the Greek states it never attained to morethan a fluctuating and temporary realisation. The inherent contradictionwas too extreme for the attempted reconciliation; the inequalitiesrefused to blend in a harmony of divergent tones but asserted themselvesin the dissonance of civil war. 

Section 8. Property and the Communistic Ideal. 

And, as we have seen, this internal schism of the Greek state was asmuch social as political. The "many" and the "few" were identifiedrespectively with the poor and the rich; and the struggle was thus atbottom as much economic as political. Government by an oligarchy wasunderstood to mean the exploitation of the masses by the classes. "Anoligarchy, " says a democrat, as reported by Thucydides, "while givingthe people the full share of danger, not merely takes too much of thegood things, but absolutely monopolises them. " [Footnote: Thuc. Vi. 39. --Translated by Jowett. ] And, similarly, the advent of democracy was heldto imply the spoliation of the classes in the interest of the masses, either by excessive taxation, by an abuse of the judicial power to fine, or by any other of the semi-legal devices of oppression which themajority in power have always at their command. This substantialidentity of rich and poor, respectively, with oligarch and democrat maybe further illustrated by the following passage from Aristotle:

"In consequence of the political disturbances and contentions betweenthe commons on the one hand and the rich on the other, whichever partyhappens to get the better of its opponents, instead of establishing apolity of a broad and equal kind, assumes political supremacy as a prizeof the victory, and sets up either a Democracy or an Oligarchy. "[Footnote: Arist. Pol. VI. (IV) 1296 a 27. --Translation by Welldon. ]

We see then that it was the underlying question of property that infusedso strong a rancour into the party struggles of Greece. From the veryearliest period, in fact, we find it to have been the case thatpolitical revolution was prompted by economic causes. Debt was the mainfactor of the crisis which led to the legislation of Solon; and a re-division of the land was one of the measures attributed to Lycurgus. [Footnote: I have not thought it necessary for my purpose, here orelsewhere, to discuss the authenticity of the statements made by Greekauthors about Lycurgus. ] As population increased, and, in the maritimestates, commerce and trade developed, the problem of poverty becameincreasingly acute; and though it was partially met by the emigration ofthe surplus population to colonies, yet in the fifth and fourthcenturies we find it prominent and pressing both in practical politicsand in speculation. Nothing can illustrate better how familiar the topicwas, and to what free theorising it had led, than the passages in whichit is treated in the comedies of Aristophanes. Here for example, is anextract from the "Ecclesiazusae" which it may be worth while to insertas a contribution to an argument that belongs to every age. 

PRAXAGORA. I tell you that we are all to share alike and have everythingin common, instead of one being rich and another poor, and one havinghundreds of acres and another not enough to make him a grave, and one ahouseful of servants and another not even a paltry foot-boy. I am goingto introduce communism and universal equality. 

BLEPSYRUS. How communism?

PRAX. That's just what I was going to tell you. First of all, everybody's money and land and anything else he may possess will be madecommon property. Then we shall maintain you all out of the common stock, with due regard to economy and thrift. 

BLEPS. But how about those who have no land, but only money that theycan hide?

PRAX. It will all go to the public purse. To keep anything back will beperjury. 

BLEPS. Perjury! Well, if you come to that, it was by perjury it was allacquired. 

PRAX. And then, money won't be the least use to any one. 

BLEPS. Why not?

PRAX. Because nobody will be poor. Everybody will have everything hewants, bread, salt-fish, barley-cake, clothes, wine, garlands, chickpeas. So what will be the good of keeping anything back? Answerthat if you can!

BLEPS. Isn't it just the people who have all these things that are thegreatest thieves?

PRAX. No doubt, under the old laws. But now, when everything will be incommon what will be the good of keeping anything back?

BLEPS. Who will do the field work?

PRAX. The slaves; all you will have to do is to dress and go out todinner in the evening. 

BLEPS. But what about the clothes? How are they to be provided?

PRAX. What you have now will do to begin with, and afterwards we shallmake them for you ourselves. 

BLEPS. Just one thing more! Supposing a man were to lose his suit in thecourts, where are the damages to come from? It would not be fair to takethe public funds. 

PRAX. But there won't be any lawsuits at all!

BLEPS. That will mean ruin to a good many people!

BYSTANDER. Just my idea!

PRAX. Why should there be any?

BLEPS. Why! for reasons enough, heaven knows! For instance, a man mightrepudiate his debts. 

PRAX. In that case, where did the man who lent the money get it from?Clearly, since everything is in common, he must have stolen it!

BLEPS. So he must! An excellent idea! But now tell me this. When fellowscome to blows over their cups, where are the damages to come from?

PRAX. From the rations! A man won't be in such a hurry to make a rowwhen his belly has to pay for it. 

BLEPS. One thing more! Will there be no more thieves?

PRAX. Why should any one steal what is his own?

BLEPS. And won't one be robbed of one's cloak at night?

PRAX. Not if you sleep at home!

BLEPS. Nor yet, if one sleeps out, as one used to do?

PRAX. No, for there will be enough and to spare for all. And even if athief does try to strip a man, he will give up his cloak of his ownaccord. What would be the good of fighting? He has only to go and getanother, and a better, from the public stores. 

BLEPS. And will there be no more gambling?

PRAX. What will there be to play for?

BLEPS. And how about house accommodation?

PRAX. That will be the same for all. I tell you I am going to turn thewhole city into one huge house, and break down all the partitions, sothat every one may have free access to every one else. [Footnote:Aristoph. Eccles. 590. ]

The "social problem, " then, had clearly arisen in ancient Greece, thoughno doubt in an infinitely simpler form than that in which it ispresented to ourselves; and it might perhaps have been expected that theGreeks, with their notion of the supremacy of the state, would haveadopted some drastic public measure to meet it. And, in fact, in theearlier period of their history, as has been indicated above, we do findsweeping revolutions effected in the distribution of property. InAthens, Solon abolished debt, either in whole or part, by reducing therate of interest and depreciating the currency; and in Sparta Lycurgusis said to have resumed the whole of the land for the state, andredivided it equally among the citizens. We have also traces of lawsexisting in other states to regulate in the interests of equality thepossession and transfer of land. But it does not appear that any attemptwas made in any state permanently to control by public authority theproduction and distribution of wealth. Meantime, however, the problem ofsocial inequality was exercising the minds of political theorists; andwe have notice of various schemes for an ideal polity framed uponcommunistic principles. Of these the most important, and the only onepreserved to us, is the celebrated "Republic" of Plato; and never, itmay be safely asserted, was a plan of society framed so consistent, harmonious and beautiful in itself, or so indifferent to the actualcapacities of mankind. Following out what we have already indicated asthe natural drift of Greek ideas, the philosopher separates off on theone hand the productive class, who are to have no political rights; andon the other the class of soldiers and governors. It is the latter alonewith whom he seriously concerns himself; and the scheme he draws up forthem is uncompromisingly communistic. After being purged, by anelaborate education, of all the egoistic passions, they are to livetogether, having all things in common, devoted heart and soul to thepublic good, and guiltless even of a desire for any private possessionor advantage of their own. "In the first place, no one, " says Plato, "should possess any private property, if it can possibly be avoided;secondly, no one should have a dwelling or store house into which allwho please may not enter; whatever necessaries are required by temperateand courageous men, who are trained to war, they should receive byregular appointment from their fellow-citizens, as wages for theirservices, and the amount should be such as to leave neither a surplus onthe year's consumption nor a deficit; and they should attend commonmesses and live together as men do in a camp: as for gold and silver, wemust tell them that they are in perpetual possession of a divine speciesof the precious metals placed in their souls by the gods themselves, andtherefore have no need of the earthly one; that in fact it would beprofanation to pollute their spiritual riches by mixing them with thepossession of mortal gold, because the world's coinage has been thecause of countless impieties, whereas theirs is undefiled: therefore tothem, as distinguished from the rest of the people, it is forbidden tohandle or touch gold and silver, or enter under the same roof with them, or to wear them in their dresses, or to drink out of the preciousmetals. If they follow these rules, they will be safe themselves and thesaviours of the city: but whenever they come to possess lands, andhouses, and money of their own, they will be householders andcultivators instead of guardians, and will become hostile masters oftheir fellow-citizens rather than their allies; and so they will spendtheir whole lives, hating and hated, plotting and plotted against, standing in more frequent and intense alarm of their enemies at homethan of their enemies abroad; by which time they and the rest of thecity will be running on the very brink of ruin. " [Footnote: Plato, Rep. III. 416. --Translation by Davies and Vaughan. ]

The passage is interesting, if only as an illustration of the way inwhich Plato had been impressed by the evil results of the institution ofprivate property. But as a contribution to political theory it was opento severe attack from the representatives of experience and commonsense. Of these, the chief was Aristotle, whose criticism has beenpreserved to us, and who, while admitting that Plato's scheme has aplausible appearance of philanthropy, maintains that it is inapplicableto the facts of human nature. To this conclusion, indeed, even Platohimself was driven in the end; for in his later work, the "Laws, "although he still asserts that community of goods would be the idealinstitution, he reluctantly abandons it as a basis for a possible state. On the other hand, he endeavours by the most stringent regulations, toprevent the growth of inequalities of wealth. He distributes the land inequal lots among his citizens, prohibiting either purchase or sub-division; limits the possession of money to the amount required fordaily exchange; and forbids lending on interest. The object of alegislator, he declares, is to make not a great but a happy city. Butonly the good are happy, and goodness and wealth are incompatible. Thelegislator, therefore, will not allow his citizens to be wealthy, anymore than he will allow them to be poor. He will seek to establish bylaw the happy mean; and to this end, if he despair of the possibility ofa thorough-going communism, will legislate at least as indicated above. The uncompromising idealism of Plato's scheme, with its assumption ofthe indefinite plasticity of human nature, is of course peculiar tohimself, not typical of Greek ideas. But it is noticeable thatAristotle, who is a far better representative of the average Greek mind, exhibits the same mistrust of the accumulation of private property. Inthe beginning of his "Politics" he distinguishes two kinds of money-making, one natural, that which is pursued for the sake of a livelihood, the other unnatural, that which is pursued for the sake of accumulation. "The motive of this latter, " he says, "is a desire for life instead offor good life"; and its most hateful method is that of usury, theunnatural breeding of money out of money. And though he rejects asimpracticable the compulsory communism of Plato's "Republic", yet heurges as the ideal solution that property, while owned by individuals, should be held as in trust for the common good; and puts before thelegislator the problem: "so to dispose the higher natures that they areunwilling, and the lower that they are unable to aggrandise themselves. "[Footnote: Aristotle, Pol. Ii. 7. 1267 b 6. --Translation by Welldon. ]

Such views as these, it may be noted, interesting though they be, asillustrating how keenly the thinkers of ancient Greece had realised thedrawbacks of private property, have but the slightest bearing on theconditions of our own time. The complexity and extent of modern industryhave given rise to quite new problems, and quite new schemes for theirsolution; and especially have forced into prominence the point of viewof the producers themselves. To Greek thinkers it was natural toapproach the question of property from the side of the governing classor of the state as a whole. The communism of Plato, for example, appliedonly to the "guardians" and soldiers, and not to the productive class onwhom they depended; and so completely was he pre-occupied with theformer to the exclusion of the latter, that he dismisses in a singlesentence, as unworthy the legislator's detailed attention, the wholeapparatus of labour and exchange. To regard the "working-class" as themost important section of the community, to substitute for the moral orpolitical the economic standpoint, and to conceive society merely as amachine for the production and distribution of wealth, would have beenimpossible to an ancient Greek. Partly by the simplicity of the economicside of the society with which he was acquainted, partly by the habit ofregarding the labouring class as a mere means to the maintenance of therest, he was led, even when he had to deal with the problem of povertyand wealth, to regard it rather from the point of view of the stabilityand efficiency of the state, than from that of the welfare of theproducers themselves. The modern attitude is radically different; arevolution has been effected both in the conditions of industry and inthe way in which they are regarded; and the practice and the speculationof the Greek city-states have for us an interest which, great as it is, is philosophic rather than practical. 

Section 9. Sparta. 

The preceding attempt at a general sketch of the nature of the Greekstate is inevitably loose and misleading to this extent, that itendeavours to comprehend in a single view polities of the most variedand discrepant character. To remedy, so far as may be, this defect, togive an impression, more definite and more complete, of the variety andscope of the political experience of the Greeks, let us examine a littlemore in detail the character of the two states which were at once themost prominent and the most opposed in their achievement and their aim--the state of Sparta on the one hand, and that of Athens on the other. Itwas these two cities that divided the hegemony of Greece; they representthe extremes of the two forms--oligarchy and democracy--under which, aswe saw, the Greek polities fall; and from a sufficient acquaintance withthem we may gather a fairly complete idea of the whole range of Greekpolitical life. 

In Sparta we see one extreme of the political development of Greece, andthe one which approaches nearest, perhaps, to the characteristic Greektype. Of that type, it is true, it was an exaggeration, and wasrecognised as such by the best thinkers of Greece; but just for thatreason it is the more interesting and instructive as an exhibition of adistinctive aspect of Greek civilisation. 

The Spartan state was composed of a small body of citizens--theSpartiatae or Spartans proper-encamped in the midst of a hostilepopulation to whom they allowed no political rights and by whose labourthey were supplied with the necessaries of life. The distinction betweenthe citizen class on the one hand and the productive class on the otherwas thus as clearly and sharply drawn as possible. It was evenexaggerated; for the citizens were a band of conquerors, the productiveclass a subject race, perpetually on the verge of insurrection and onlykept in restraint by such measures as secret assassination. The resultwas to draw together the small band of Spartiatae into a discipline sorigorous and close that under it everything was sacrificed to thenecessity of self-preservation; and the bare maintenance of the statebecame the end for which every individual was born, and lived, and died. This discipline, according to tradition, had been devised by a singlelegislator, Lycurgus, and it was maintained intact for severalcenturies. Its main features may be summarised as follows. 

The production and rearing of children, to begin at the beginning, instead of being left to the caprice of individuals, was controlled andregulated by the state. The women, in the first place, were trained byphysical exercise for the healthy performance of the duties ofmotherhood; they were taught to run and wrestle naked, like the youths, to dance and sing in public, and to associate freely with men. Marriagewas permitted only in the prime of life; and a free intercourse, outsideits limits, between healthy men and women, was encouraged and approvedby public opinion. Men who did not marry were subject to social andcivic disabilities. The children, as soon as they were born, weresubmitted to the inspection of the elders of their tribe; if strong andwell-formed, they were reared; if not, they were allowed to die. 

A healthy stock having been thus provided as a basis, every attentionwas devoted to its appropriate training. The infants were encouragedfrom the beginning in the free use of their limbs, unhampered byswaddling-clothes, and were accustomed to endure without fear darknessand solitude, and to cure themselves of peevishness and crying. At theage of seven the boys were taken away from the charge of their parents, and put under the superintendence of a public official. Their education, on the intellectual side, was slight enough, comprising only suchrudiments as reading and writing; but on the moral side it was stringentand severe. Gathered into groups under the direction of elder youths--"monitors" we might call them--they were trained to a discipline of ironendurance. One garment served them for the whole year; they went withoutshoes, and slept on beds of rushes plucked with their own hands. Theirfood was simple, and often enough they had to go without it. Everymoment of the day they were under inspection and supervision, for it wasthe privilege and the duty of every citizen to admonish and punish notonly his own but other people's children. At supper they waited at tableon their elders, answered their questions and endured their jests. Inthe streets they were taught to walk in silence, their hands folded intheir cloaks, their eyes cast down, their heads never turning to rightor left. Their gymnastic and military training was incessant; whereverthey met, we are told, they began to box; under the condition, however, that they were bound to separate at the command of any bystander. Toaccustom them early to the hardships of a campaign, they were taught tosteal their food from the mess-tables of their elders; if they weredetected they were beaten for their clumsiness, and went without theirdinner. Nothing was omitted, on the moral or physical side, to make themefficient members of a military state. Nor was the discipline relaxedwhen they reached years of maturity. For, in fact, the whole city was acamp. Family life was obliterated by public activity. The men dinedtogether in messes, rich and poor alike, sharing the same coarse andsimple food. Servants, dogs, and horses, were regarded as commonproperty. Luxury was strictly forbidden. The only currency incirculation was of iron, so cumbrous that it was impossible toaccumulate or conceal it. The houses were as simple as possible, theroofs shaped only with the axe, and the doors with the saw; thefurniture and fittings corresponded, plain but perfectly made. Thenature of the currency practically prohibited commerce, and no citizenwas allowed to be engaged in any mechanical trade. Agriculture was themain industry, and every Spartan had, or was supposed to have, a landedestate, cultivated by serfs who paid him a yearly rent. In completeaccordance with the Greek ideal, it was a society of soldier-citizens, supported by an inferior productive class. In illustration of this pointthe following curious anecdote may be quoted from Plutarch. During oneof the wars in which Sparta and her allies were engaged, the alliescomplained that they, who were the majority of the army, had been forcedinto a quarrel which concerned nobody but the Spartans. WhereuponAgesilaus, the Spartan king, "devised this expedient to show the allieswere not the greater number. He gave orders that all the allies, ofwhatever country, should sit down promiscuously on one side, and all theLacedaemonians on the other: which being done, he commanded a herald toproclaim, that all the potters of both divisions should stand out; thenall the blacksmiths; then all the masons; next the carpenters; and so hewent through all the handicrafts. By this time almost all the allieswere risen, but of the Lacedaemonians not a man, they being by lawforbidden to learn any mechanical business; and now Agesilaus laughedand said, "You see, my friends, how many more soldiers we send out thanyou do. " [Footnote: Plut. Agesilaus. --Translation by Clough. ]

And certainly, so far as its immediate ends were concerned, this societyof soldier-citizens was singularly successful. The courage andefficiency of Spartan troops were notorious, and were maintained indeednot only by the training we have described, but by social penaltiesattached to cowardice. A man who had disgraced himself in battle was apariah in his native land. No one would eat with him, no one wouldwrestle with him; in the dance he must take the lowest place; he mustgive the wall at meetings in the street, and resign his seat even toyounger men; he must dress and bear himself humbly, under penalty ofblows, and suffer the reproaches of women and of boys. Death plainlywould be preferable to such a life; and we are not surprised to hearthat the discipline and valour of Spartan troops was celebrated far andwide. Here is a description of them, given by one of themselves to thePersian king when he was projecting the invasion of Greece:

"Brave are all the Greeks who dwell in any Dorian land; but what I amabout to say does not concern all, but only the Lacedaemonians. First, then, come what may, they will never accept thy terms, which wouldreduce Greece to slavery; and further, they are sure to join battle withthee, though all the rest of Greece should submit to thy will. As fortheir numbers, do not ask how many they are, that their resistanceshould be a possible thing; for if a thousand of them should take thefield, they will meet thee in battle, and so will any number, be it lessthan this, or be it more. 

"When they fight singly, they are as good men as any in the world, andwhen they fight in a body, they are the bravest of all. For though theybe freemen, they are not in all respects free; Law is the master whomthey own; and this master they fear more than thy subjects fear thee. Whatever he commands they do; and his commandment is always the same: itforbids them to flee in battle, whatever the number of their foes, andrequires them to stand firm, and either to conquer or die. " [Footnote:Herodotus vii. 102, 4. --Translation by Rawlinson. ]

The practical illustration of this speech is the battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans kept at bay the whole Persian host, till they werebetrayed from the rear and killed fighting to a man. 

The Spartan state, then, justified itself according to its own ideal;but how limited that ideal was will be clear from our sketch. Theindividual, if it cannot be said that he was sacrificed to the state--for he recognised the life of the state as his own--was at any ratestarved upon one side of his nature as much as he was hypertrophied uponthe other. Courage, obedience, and endurance were developed in excess;but the free play of passion and thought, the graces and arts of life, all that springs from the spontaneity of nature, were crushed out ofexistence under this stern and rigid rule. "None of them, " saysPlutarch, an enthusiastic admirer of the Spartan polity "none of themwas left alone to live as he chose; but passing their time in the cityas though it were a camp, their manner of life and their avocationsordered with a view to the public good, they regarded themselves asbelonging, not to themselves, but to their country. " [Footnote: Plut. Lycurgus, ch. 24. ] And Plato, whose ideal republic was based so largelyupon the Spartan model, has marked nevertheless as the essential defectof their polity its insistence on military virtue to the exclusion ofeverything else, and its excessive accentuation of the corporate aspectof life. "Your military way of life, " he says, "is modelled after thecamp, and is not like that of dwellers in cities; and you have youryoung men herding and feeding together like young colts. No one takeshis own individual colt and drags him away from his fellows against hiswill, raging and foaming, and gives him a groom for him alone, andtrains and rubs him down privately, and gives him the qualities ineducation which will make him not only a good soldier, but also agovernor of a state and of cities. Such a one would be a greater warriorthan he of whom Tyrtaeus sings; and he would honour courage everywhere, but always as the fourth, and not as the first part of virtue, either inindividuals or states. " [Footnote: Plato Laws, II. 666 e. --Translationby Jowett]. 

The Spartan state, in fact, by virtue of that excellence which was alsoits defect--the specialising of the individual on the side of disciplineand rule--carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. Thetendencies which Lycurgus had endeavoured to repress by externalregulation reasserted themselves in his despite. He had intended oncefor all both to limit and to equalise private property; but already asearly as the fifth century Spartans had accumulated gold which theydeposited in temples in foreign states; the land fell, by inheritanceand gift, into the hands of a small minority; the number of the citizenswas reduced, not only by war, but by the disfranchisement attendinginability to contribute to the common mess-tables; till at last we findno more than 700 Spartan families, and of these no more than 100possessing estates in land. 

And this decline from within was hastened by external events. Theconstitution devised for a small state encamped amidst a hostilepopulation, broke down under the weight of imperial power. The conquestof Athens by Sparta was the signal of her own collapse. The power andwealth she had won at a stroke alienated her sons from her discipline. Generals and statesmen who had governed like kings the wealthy cities ofthe east were unable to adapt themselves again to the stern and narrowrules of Lycurgus. They rushed into freedom and enjoyment, into theunfettered use of their powers, with an energy proportional to theprevious restraint. The features of the human face broke through thefair but lifeless mask of ancient law; and the Spartan, ceasing to be aSpartan, both rose and fell to the level of a man. 

Section 10. Athens. 

In the institutions of Sparta we see, carried to its furthest point, oneside of the complex Greek nature--their capacity for discipline and law. Athens, the home of a different stock, gives us the other extreme--theircapacity for rich and spontaneous individual development. To pass fromSparta to Athens, is to pass from a barracks to a playing-field. All thebeauty, all the grace, all the joy of Greece; all that chains the desireof mankind, with a yearning that is never stilled, to that one goldenmoment in the past, whose fair and balanced interplay of perfect fleshand soul no later gains of thought can compensate, centres about thatbright and stately city of romance, the home of Pericles and all thearts, whence from generation to generation has streamed upon ages lessillustrious an influence at once the sanest and the most inspired of allthat have shaped the secular history of the world. Girt by mountain andsea, by haunted fountain and sacred grove, shaped and adorned by themaster hands of Pheidias and Polygnotus and filled with the breath ofpassion and song by Euripides and Plato, Athens, famed alike for thelegended deeds of heroes and gods and for the feats of her human sons incouncil, art, and war, is a name, to those who have felt her spell, morefamiliar and more dear than any of the few that mark with gold thesombre scroll of history. And still across the years we feel the throbof the glorious verse that broke in praise of his native land from thelips of Euripides:

 "Happy of yore were the children of race divine Happy the sons of old Erechtheus' line Who in their holy state With hands inviolate Gather the flower of wisdom far-renowned, Lightly lifting their feet in the lucid air Where the sacred nine, the Pierid Muses, bare Harmonia golden-crowned. 

 There in the wave from fair Kephisus flowing Kupris sweetens the winds and sets them blowing Over the delicate land; And ever with joyous hand Braiding her fragrant hair with the blossom of roses, She sendeth the Love that dwelleth in Wisdom's place That every virtue may quicken and every grace In the hearts where she reposes. " [Footnote: Eurip. Medea, 825. ]

And this, the Athens of poetry and art, is but another aspect of theAthens of political history. The same individuality, the same free andpassionate energy that worked in the hearts of her sculptors and herpoets, moulded also and inspired her city life. In contradistinction tothe stern and rigid discipline of Sparta, the Athenian citizen displayedthe resource, the versatility and the zeal that only freedom and self-reliance can teach. The contrast is patent at every stage of the historyof the two states, and has been acutely set forth by Thucydides in thespeech which he puts into the mouths of the Corinthian allies of Sparta:

"You have never considered, " they say to the Lacedaemonians, "whatmanner of men are these Athenians with whom you will have to fight, andhow utterly unlike yourselves. They are revolutionary, equally quick inthe conception and in the execution of every new plan; while you areconservative--careful only to keep what you have, originating nothing, and not acting even when action is most necessary. They are bold beyondtheir strength; they run risks which prudence would condemn; and in themidst of misfortunes they are full of hope. Whereas it is your nature, though strong, to act feebly; when your plans are most prudent, todistrust them; and when calamities come upon you, to think that you willnever be delivered from them. They are impetuous, and you are dilatory;they are always abroad, and you are always at home. For they hope togain something by leaving their homes; but you are afraid that any newenterprise may imperil what you have already. When conquerors, theypursue their victory to the utmost; when defeated, they fall back theleast. Their bodies they devote to their country as though they belongedto other men; their true self is their mind, which is most truly theirown when employed in her service. When they do not carry out anintention which they have formed, they seem to have sustained a personalbereavement; when an enterprise succeeds, they have gained a mereinstalment of what is to come; but if they fail, they at once conceivenew hopes and so fill up the void. 

"With them alone to hope is to have, for they lose not a moment in theexecution of an idea. This is the lifelong task, full of danger andtoil, which they are always imposing upon themselves. None enjoy theirgood things less, because they are always seeking for more. To do theirduty is their only holiday, and they deem the quiet of inaction to be asdisagreeable as the most tiresome business. If a man should say of them, in a word, that they were born neither to have peace themselves nor toallow peace to other men, he would simply speak the truth. " [Footnote:Thuc. I. 70. --Translated by Jowett. ]

The qualities here set forth by Thucydides as characteristic of theAthenians, were partly the cause and partly the effect of theirpolitical constitution. The history of Athens, indeed, is the veryantithesis to that of Sparta. In place of a type fixed at a stroke andenduring for centuries, she presents a series of transitions through thewhole range of polities, to end at last in a democracy so extreme thatit refuses to be included within the limits of the general formula ofthe Greek state. 

Seldom, indeed, has "equality" been pushed to so extreme a point as itwas, politically at least, in ancient Athens. The class of slaves, it istrue, existed there as in every other state; but among the freecitizens, who included persons of every rank, no political distinctionat all was drawn. All of them, from the lowest to the highest, had theright to speak and vote in the great assembly of the people which wasthe ultimate authority; all were eligible to every administrative post;all sat in turn as jurors in the law-courts. The disabilities of povertywere minimised by payment for attendance in the assembly and the courts. And, what is more extraordinary, even distinctions of ability werelevelled by the practice of filling all offices, except the highest, bylot. 

Had the citizens been a class apart, as was the case in Sparta, had theybeen subjected from the cradle to a similar discipline and training, forbidden to engage in any trade or business, and consecrated to theservice of the state, there would have been nothing surprising in thisuncompromising assertion of equality. But in Athens the citizenship wasextended to every rank and calling; the poor man jostled the rich, theshopman the aristocrat, in the Assembly; cobblers, carpenters, smiths, farmers, merchants, and retail traders met together with the ancientlanded gentry, to debate and conclude on national affairs; and it wasfrom such varied elements as these that the lot impartially chose theofficials of the law, the revenue, the police, the highways, themarkets, and the ports, as well as the jurors at whose mercy stoodreputation, fortune, and life. The consequence was that in Athens, atleast in the later period of her history, the middle and lower classestended to monopolise political power. Of the popular leaders, Cleon, themost notorious, was a tanner; another was a baker, another a cattle-dealer. Influence belonged to those who had the gift of leading themass; and in that competition the man of tongue, of energy, and ofresource, was more than a match for the aristocrat of birth andintellect. 

The constitution of Athens, then, was one of political equality imposedupon social inequality. To illustrate the point we may quote a passagefrom Aristophanes which shows at once the influence exercised by thetrading class and the disgust with which that influence was regarded bythe aristocracy whom the poet represents. The passage is taken from the"Knights, " a comedy written to discredit Cleon, and turning upon theexpulsion of the notorious tanner from the good graces of Demos, by thesuperior impudence and address of a sausage-seller. Demosthenes, ageneral of the aristocratic party, is communicating to the latter thedestiny that awaits him. 

 DEMOSTHENES (_to the_ SAUSAGE-SELLER _gravely_). Set these poor wares aside; and now--bow down To the ground; and adore the powers of earth and heaven. 

 S. -S. Heigh-day! Why, what do you mean?

 DEM. O happy man! Unconscious of your glorious destiny, Now mean and unregarded; but to-morrow, The mightiest of the mighty, Lord of Athens. 

 S. -S. Come, master, what's the use of making game? Why can't ye let me wash my guts and tripe, And sell my sausages in peace and quiet?

 DEM. O simple mortal, cast those thoughts aside! Bid guts and tripe farewell! Look here! Behold! (_pointing to the audience_) The mighty assembled multitude before ye!

 S. -S. (_with a grumble of indifference_). I see 'em. 

 DEM. You shall be their lord and master, The sovereign and the ruler of them all, Of the assemblies and tribunals, fleets and armies; You shall trample down the Senate under foot, Confound and crush the generals and commanders, Arrest, imprison, and confine in irons, And feast and fornicate in the Council House. 

 S. -S. Are there any means of making a great man Of a sausage-selling fellow such as I?

 DEM. The very means you have, must make ye so, Low breeding, vulgar birth, and impudence, These, these must make ye, what you're meant to be. 

 S. -S. I can't imagine that I'm good for much. 

 DEM. Alas! But why do ye say so? What's the meaning Of these misgivings? I discern within ye A promise and an inward consciousness Of greatness. Tell me truly: are ye allied To the families of gentry?

 S. -S. Naugh, not I; I'm come from a common ordinary kindred, Of the lower order. 

 DEM. What a happiness! What a footing will it give ye! What a groundwork For confidence and favour at your outset!

 S. -S. But bless ye! only consider my education! I can but barely read.... In a kind of way. 

 DEM. That makes against ye!--the only thing against ye-- The being able to read, in any way: For now no lead nor influence is allowed To liberal arts or learned education, But to the brutal, base, and underbred. Embrace then and hold fast the promises Which the oracles of the gods announce to you. [Footnote: Aristoph. Knights. 155. --Translation by Frere. ]

We have here an illustration, one among many that might be given, of thepolitical equality that prevailed in Athens. It shows us how completelythat distinction between the military or governing, and the productiveclass, which belonged to the normal Greek conception of the state, hadbeen broken down, on the side at least of privilege and right, thoughnot on that of social estimation, in this most democratic of the ancientstates. Politically, the Athenian trader and the Athenian artisan wasthe equal of the aristocrat of purest blood; and so far the governmentof Athens was a genuine democracy. 

But so far only. For in Athens, as in every Greek state, the greaterpart of the population was unfree; and the government which was ademocracy from the point of view of the freeman, was an oligarchy fromthe point of view of the slave. For the slaves, by the nature of theirposition, had no political rights; and they were more than half of thepopulation. It is noticeable, however, that the freedom andindividuality which was characteristic of the Athenian citizen, appearsto have reacted favourably on the position of the slaves. Not only hadthey, to a certain extent, the protection of the law against the worstexcesses of their masters, but they were allowed a license of bearingand costume which would not have been tolerated in any other state. Acontemporary writer notes that in dress and general appearance Athenianslaves were not to be distinguished from citizens; that they werepermitted perfect freedom of speech; and that it was open to them toacquire a fortune and to live in ease and luxury. In Sparta, he says, the slave stands in fear of the freeman, but in Athens this is not thecase; and certainly the bearing of the slaves introduced into theAthenian comedy does not indicate any undue subservience. Slavery at thebest is an undemocratic institution; but in Athens it appears to havebeen made as democratic as its nature would admit. 

We find then, in the Athenian state, the conception of equality pushedto the farthest extreme at all compatible with Greek ideas; pushed, wemay fairly say, at last to an undue excess; for the great days of Athenswere those when she was still under the influence of her aristocracy, and when the popular zeal evoked by her free institutions was directedby members of the leisured and cultivated class. The most glorious ageof Athenian history closes with the death of Pericles; and Pericles wasa man of noble family, freely chosen, year after year, by virtue of hispersonal qualities, to exercise over this democratic nation adictatorship of character and brain. It is into his mouth thatThucydides has put that great panegyric of Athens, which sets forth toall time the type of an ideal state and the record of what was at leastpartially achieved in the greatest of the Greek cities:

"Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with theinstitutions of others. We do not copy our neighbours, but are anexample to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for theadministration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But whilethe law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognised; and when a citizen is in anyway distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as amatter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty abar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of hiscondition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in ourprivate intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry withour neighbour if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks athim, which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thusunconstrained in our private intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervadesour public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect forauthority and for the laws, having an especial regard for those whichare ordained for the protection of the injured, as well as for thoseunwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobationof the general sentiment. 

"And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits manyrelaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughoutthe year; at home the style of our life is refined; and the delightwhich we daily feel in all these things helps to banish melancholy. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flowin upon us, so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely asof our own. 

"Then again, our military training is in many respects superior to thatof our adversaries. Our city is thrown open to the world, and we neverexpel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything ofwhich the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely notupon management and trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands. And inthe matter of education, whereas they from early youth are alwaysundergoing laborious exercises which are to make them brave, we live atease, and yet are ready to face the perils which they face. 

"If then we prefer to meet danger with a light heart but withoutlaborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and notenforced by law, are we not greatly the gainers? Since we do notanticipate the pain, although when the hour comes, we can be as brave asthose who never allow themselves to rest; and thus too our city isequally admirable in peace and in war. For we are lovers of thebeautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind withoutloss of manliness. 

"Wealth we employ, not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a realuse for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace isin doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect thestate because he takes care of his own household; and even those of uswho are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We aloneregard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are allsound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in ouropinion, not discussion but the want of that knowledge which is gainedby discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power ofthinking before we act, and of acting too, whereas other men arecourageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection. And they aresurely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who have the clearest senseboth of the pains and pleasures of life, but do not on that accountshrink from danger. 

"To sum up, I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that theindividual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power ofadapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmostversatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth andfact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which thesequalities have raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens aloneamong her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. No enemy whocomes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at thehands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthyof him. And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there aremighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this andof succeeding ages: we shall not need the praises of Homer or of anyother panegyrist, whose poetry may please for the moment, although hisrepresentation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we havecompelled every land, every sea, to open a path for our valour, and haveeverywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of ourenmity. " [Footnote: Thuc. Ii. 37. --Translated by Jowett. ]

An impression so superb as this it is almost a pity to mar with theinevitable complement of disaster and decay. But our account of theAthenian polity would be misleading and incomplete if we did notindicate how the idea of equality, on which it turned, defeated itself, as did, in Sparta, the complementary idea of order, by the excesses ofits own development. Already before the close of the fifth century, andwith reiterated emphasis in the earlier decades of the fourth, we hearfrom poets and orators praise of a glorious past that is dead, anddenunciations of a decadent present. The ancient training in gymnastics, we are told, the ancient and generous culture of mind and soul, isneglected and despised by a generation of traders; reverence for age andauthority, even for law, has disappeared; and in the train of these havegone the virtues they engendered and nurtured. Cowardice has succeededto courage, disorder to discipline; the place of the statesman isusurped by the demagogue; and instead of a nation of heroes, marshalledunder the supremacy of the wise and good, modern Athens presents to viewa disordered and competitive mob, bent only on turning each to his ownpersonal advantage the now corrupt machinery of administration and law. 

And however much exaggeration there may be in these denunciations andregrets, we know enough of the interior working of the institutions ofAthens to see that she had to pay in licence and in fraud the bitterprice of equality and freedom. That to the influence of disinterestedstatesmen succeeded, as the democracy accentuated itself, the tyranny ofunscrupulous demagogues, is evidenced by the testimony, not only of theenemies of popular government, but by that of a democrat so convinced asDemosthenes. "Since these orators have appeared, " he says, "who ask, What is your pleasure? what shall I move? how can I oblige you? thepublic welfare is complimented away for a moment's popularity, and theseare the results; the orators thrive, you are disgraced.... Anciently thepeople, having the courage to be soldiers, controlled the statesmen, anddisposed of all emoluments; any of the rest were happy to receive fromthe people his share of honour, office, or advantage. Now, contrariwise, the statesmen dispose of emoluments; through them everything is done;you, the people, enervated, stripped of treasure and allies, are becomeas underlings and hangers-on, happy if these persons dole you out show-money or send you paltry beeves; and, the unmanliest part of all, youare grateful for receiving your own. " [Footnote: Dem. 01. Iii. --Translation by Kennedy. ]

And this indictment is amply confirmed from other sources. We know thatthe populace was demoralised by payments from the public purse; that thefee for attendance in the Assembly attracted thither, as readyinstruments in the hands of ambitious men, the poorest and most degradedof the citizens; that the fees of jurors were the chief means ofsubsistence for an indigent class, who had thus a direct interest in themultiplication of suits; and that the city was infested by a race of"sycophants", whose profession was to manufacture frivolous andvexatious indictments. Of one of these men Demosthenes speaks asfollows:

"He cannot show any respectable or honest employment in which his lifeis engaged. His mind is not occupied in promoting any political good; heattends not to any trade, or husbandry, or other business; he isconnected with no one by ties of humanity or social union: but he walksthrough the market-place like a viper or a scorpion, with his sting up-lifted, hastening here and there, and looking out for someone whom hemay bring into a scrape, or fasten some calumny or mischief upon, andput in alarm in order to extort money. " [Footnote: Demosth. InAristogeit. A. 62. --Translated by C. R. Kennedy. ]

From all this we may gather an idea of the way in which the Atheniandemocracy by its own development destroyed itself. Beginning, on itsfirst emergence from an earlier aristocratic phase, with an energy thatinspired without shattering the forms of discipline and law, itdissolved by degrees this coherent whole into an anarchy of individualwills, drawn deeper and deeper, in pursuit of mean and egoistic ends, into political fraud and commercial chicanery, till the tradition of thegentleman and the soldier was choked by the dust of adventurers andswindlers, and the people, whose fathers had fought and prevailed atMarathon and Salamis, fell as they deserved, by treachery from within asmuch as by force from without, into the grasp of the Macedonianconqueror. 

Section 11. Sceptical Criticism of the Basis of the State. 

Having thus supplemented our general account of the Greek conception ofthe state by a description of their two most prominent polities, itremains for us in conclusion briefly to trace the negative criticismunder whose attack that conception threatened to dissolve. 

We have quoted, in an earlier part of this chapter, a striking passagefrom Demosthenes, embodying that view of the objective validity of lawunder which alone political institutions can be secure. "That is law, "said the orator, "which all men ought to obey for many reasons, andespecially because every law is an invention and gift of the gods, aresolution of wise men, a correction of errors intentional andunintentional, a compact of the whole state, according to which all whobelong to the state ought to live. " That is the conception of law whichthe citizens of any stable state must be prepared substantially toaccept, for it is the condition of that fundamental belief inestablished institutions which alone can make it worth while to adaptand to improve them. It was, accordingly, the conception tacitly, atleast, accepted in Greece, during the period of her constructive vigour. But it is a conception constantly open to attack. For law, at any givenmoment, even under the most favourable conditions, cannot do more thanapproximate to its own ideal. It is, at best, but a rough attempt atthat reconciliation of conflicting interests towards which the reason ofmankind is always seeking; and even in well-ordered states there mustalways be individuals and classes who resent, and rightly resent it, asunjust. But the Greek states, as we have seen, were not well-ordered; onthe contrary, they were always on the verge, or in the act, of civilwar; and the conception of law, as "a compact of the whole state, according to which all who belong to the state ought to live, " must havebeen, at the least, severely tried, in cities permanently divided intotwo factions, each intent not merely on defeating the other, but onexcluding it altogether from political rights. Such conditions, in fact, must have irresistibly suggested the criticism, which always dogs theidea of the state, and against which its only defence is in a perpetualperfection of itself--the criticism that law, after all, is only therule of the strong, and justice the name under which they gloze theirusurpation. That is a point of view which, even apart from theirpolitical dissensions, would hardly have escaped the subtle intellect ofthe Greeks; and in fact, from the close of the fifth century onwards, wefind it constantly canvassed and discussed. 

The mind of Plato, in particular, was exercised by this contention; andit was, one may say, a main object of his teaching to rescue the idea ofjustice from identification with the special interest of the strong, andre-affirm it as the general interest of all. For this end, he takesoccasion to state, with the utmost frankness and lucidity, the viewwhich it is his intention to refute; and consequently it is in his worksthat we find the fullest exposition of the destructive argument he seeksto answer. 

Briefly, that argument runs as follows:--It is the law of nature thatthe strong shall rule; a law which every one recognises in fact, thoughevery one repudiates it in theory. Government therefore simply means therule of the strong, and exists, no matter what its form, whethertyranny, oligarchy, or democracy, in the interests not of its subjectsbut of itself. "Justice" and "Law" are the specious names it employs tocloak its own arbitrary will; they have no objective validity, noreference to the well-being of all; and it is only the weak and thefoolish on whom they impose. Strong and original natures sweep away thistangle of words, assert themselves in defiance of false shame, and claimthe right divine that is theirs by nature, to rule at their will byvirtue of their strength. "Each government, " says Thrasymachus in theRepublic, "has its laws framed to suit its own interests; a democracymaking democratic laws; an autocrat despotic laws, and so on. Now bythis procedure these governments have pronounced that what is for theinterest of themselves is just for their subjects; and whoever deviatesfrom this, is chastised by them as guilty of illegality and injustice. Therefore, my good sir, my meaning is, that in all cities the samething, namely, the interest of the established government is just. Andsuperior strength, I presume, is to be found on the side of government. So that the conclusion of right reasoning is, that the same thing, namely, the interest of the stronger, is everywhere just. " [Footnote:Plato, Rep. 338. --Translated by Davies and Vaughan. ]

Here is an argument which strikes at the root of all subordination tothe state, setting the subject against the ruler, the minority againstthe majority, with an emphasis of opposition that admits of noconceivable reconciliation. And, as we have noticed, it was an argumentto which the actual political conditions of Greece gave a strong show ofplausibility. 

How then did the constructive thinkers of Greece attempt to meet it?

The procedure adopted by Plato is curiously opposed to that which mightseem natural to a modern thinker on politics. The scepticism which wasto be met, having sprung from the extremity of class-antagonism, itmight be supposed that the cure would be sought in some sort of systemof equality. Plato's idea is precisely the contrary. The distinctionbetween classes he exaggerates to its highest point; only he would haveit depend on degrees, not of wealth, but of excellence. In the idealrepublic which he constructs as a type of a state where justice shouldreally rule, he sets an impassable gulf between the governing class andthe governed; each is specially trained and specially bred for itsappropriate function; and the harmony between them is ensured by therecognition, on either part, that each is in occupation of the place forwhich it is naturally fitted in that whole to which both alike aresubordinate. Such a state, no doubt, if ever it had been realised inpractice, would have been a complete reply to the sceptical argument;for it would have established a "justice" which was the expression notof the caprice of the governing class, but of the objective will of thewhole community. But in practice such a state was not realised inGreece; and the experience of the Greek world does not lead us tosuppose that it was capable of realisation. The system of stereotypingclasses--in a word, of caste--which has played so great a part in thehistory of the world, does no doubt embody a great truth, that ofnatural inequality; and this truth, as we saw, was at the bottom of thatGreek conception of the state, of which the "Republic" of Plato is anidealising caricature. But the problem is to make the inequality ofnature really correspond to the inequality imposed by institutions. Thisproblem Plato hoped to solve by a strict public control of the marriagerelation, so that none should be born into any class who were notnaturally fitted to be members of it; but as a matter of fact thedifficulty has never been met; and the system of caste remains open tothe reproach that its "justice" is conventional and arbitrary, not theexpression of the objective nature and will of all classes and membersof the community. 

The attempt of Aristotle to construct a state that should be theembodiment of justice is similar to Plato's so far as the relation ofclasses is concerned. He, too, postulates a governing class of soldiersand councillors, and a subject class of productive labourers. When, however, he turns from the ideal to practical politics, and considersmerely how to avoid the worst extremes of party antagonism, his solutionis the simple and familiar one of the preponderance of the middle class. The same view was dominant both in French and English politics from theyear 1830 onwards, and is only now being thrust aside by the democraticideal. In Greece it was never realised except as a passing phase in theperpetual flux of polities. And in fine it may be said that the problemof establishing a state which should be a concrete refutation of thesceptical criticism that "justice" is merely another name for force, wasone that was never solved in ancient Greece. The dissolution of the ideaof the state was more a symptom than a cause of its failure in practiceto harmonise its warring elements. And Greece, divided into conflictingpolities, each of which again was divided within itself, passed on toMacedon and thence to Rome that task of reconciling the individual andthe class with the whole, about which the political history of the worldturns. 

Section 12. Summary. 

We have now given some account of the general character of the Greekstate, the ideas that underlay it, and the criticism of those ideassuggested by the course of history and formulated by speculativethought. It remains to offer certain reflections on the politicalachievement of the Greeks, and its relation to our own ideas. 

The fruitful and positive aspect of the Greek state, that which fastensupon it the eyes of later generations as upon a model, if not to becopied, as least to be praised and admired, is that identification ofthe individual citizen with the corporate life, which delivered him fromthe narrow circle of personal interests into a sphere of wider views andhigher aims. The Greek citizen, as we have seen, in the best days of thebest states, in Athens for example in the age of Pericles, was at once asoldier and a politician; body and mind alike were at his country'sservice; and his whole ideal of conduct was inextricably bound up withhis intimate and personal participation in public affairs. If now withthis ideal we contrast the life of an average citizen in a modern state, the absorption in private business and family concerns, the "greasydomesticity" (to use a phrase of Byron's), that limits and clouds hisvision of the world, we may well feel that the Greeks had achievedsomething which we have lost, and may even desire to return, so far aswe may, upon our steps, and to re-establish that interpenetration ofprivate and public life by which the individual citizen was at oncedepressed and glorified. 

It may be doubted, however, whether such a procedure would be in any waypossible or desirable. For in the first place, the existence of theGreek citizen depended upon that of an inferior class who were regardednot as ends in themselves, but as means to his perfection. And that isan arrangement which runs directly counter to the modern ideal. Allmodern societies aim, to this extent at least, at equality, that theirtendency, so far as it is conscious and avowed, is not to separate off aprivileged class of citizens, set free by the labour of others to livethe perfect life, but rather to distribute impartially to all theburdens and advantages of the state, so that every one shall be at oncea labourer for himself and a citizen of the state. But this ideal isclearly incompatible with the Greek conception of the citizen. Itimplies that the greater portion of every man's life must be devoted tosome kind of mechanical labour, whose immediate connection with thepublic good, though certain, is remote and obscure; and that inconsequence a deliberate and unceasing preoccupation with the end of thestate becomes as a general rule impossible. 

And, in the second place, the mere complexity and size of a modern stateis against the identification of the man with the citizen. For, on theone hand, public issues are so large and so involved that it is only afew who can hope to have any adequate comprehension of them; and on theother, the subdivision of functions is so minute that even when a man isdirectly employed in the service of the state his activity is confinedto some highly specialised department. He must choose, for example, whether he will be a clerk in the treasury or a soldier; but he cannotcertainly be both. In the Greek state any citizen could undertake, simultaneously or in succession, and with complete comprehension andmastery, every one of the comparatively few and simple public offices;in a modern state such an arrangement has become impossible. The meremechanical and physical conditions of our life preclude the ideal of theancient citizen. 

But, it may be said, the activity of the citizen of a modern stateshould be and increasingly will be concerned not with the whole but withthe part. By the development of local institutions he will come, moreand more, to identify himself with the public life of his district andhis town; and will bear to that much the same relation as was borne bythe ancient Greek to his city state. Certainly so far as the limitationof area, and the simplicity and intelligibility of issues is concerned, such an analogy might be fairly pressed; and it is probably inconnection with such local areas that the average citizen does andincreasingly will become aware of his corporate relations. But, on theother hand, it can hardly be maintained that public business in thisrestricted sense either could or should play the part in the life of themodern man that it played in that of the ancient Greek. For localbusiness after all is a matter of sewers and parks; and however greatthe importance of such matters may be, and however great their claimupon the attention of competent men, yet the kind of interest theyawaken and the kind of faculties they employ can hardly be such as tolead to the identification of the individual ideal with that of publicactivity. The life of the Greek citizen involved an exercise, the finestand most complete, of all his powers of body, soul, and mind; the samecan hardly be said of the life of a county councillor, even of the bestand most conscientious of them. And the conclusion appears to be, thatthat fusion of public and private life which was involved in the idealof the Greek citizen, was a passing phase in the history of the world;that the state can never occupy again the place in relation to theindividual which it held in the cities of the ancient world; and that anattempt to identify in a modern state the ideal of the man with that ofthe citizen, would be an historical anachronism. 

Nor is this a conclusion which need be regretted. For as the sphere ofthe state shrinks, it is possible that that of the individual may beenlarged. The public side of human life, it may be supposed, will becomemore and more mechanical, as our understanding and control of socialforces grow. But every reduction to habit and rule of what were oncespiritual functions, implies the liberation of the higher powers for apossible activity in other regions. And if advantage were taken of thisopportunity, the inestimable compensation for the contraction to routineof the life of the citizen would be the expansion into new spheres ofspeculation and passion of the freer and more individual life of theman. 

CHAPTER III

THE GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Section 1. The Greek View of Manual Labour and Trade. 

In our discussion of the Greek view of the State we noticed the tendencyboth of the theory and the practice of the Greeks to separate thecitizens proper from the rest of the community as a distinct andaristocratic class. And this tendency, we had occasion to observe, waspartly to be attributed to the high conception which the Greeks hadformed of the proper excellence of man, an excellence which it was thefunction of the citizen to realise in his own person, at the cost, ifneed be, of the other members of the State. This Greek conception of theproper excellence of man it is now our purpose to examine more closely. The chief point that strikes us about the Greek ideal is itscomprehensiveness. Our own word "virtue" is applied only to moralqualities; but the Greek word which we so translate should properly berendered "excellence, " and includes a reference to the body as well asto the soul. A beautiful soul, housed in a beautiful body, and suppliedwith all the external advantages necessary to produce and perpetuatesuch a combination--that is the Greek conception of well-being; and itis because labour with the hands or at the desk distorts or impairs thebody, and the petty cares of a calling pursued for bread pervert thesoul, that so strong a contempt was felt by the Greeks for manual labourand trade. "The arts that are called mechanical, " says Xenophon, "arealso, and naturally enough, held in bad repute in our cities. For theyspoil the bodies of workers and superintendents alike, compelling themto live sedentary indoor lives, and in some cases even to pass theirdays by the fire. And as their bodies become effeminate, so do theirsouls also grow less robust. Besides this, in such trades one has noleisure to devote to the care of one's friends or of one's city. So thatthose who engage in them are thought to be bad backers of their friendsand bad defenders of their country. " [Footnote: Xen. Oec. Iv. 3. ]

In a similar spirit Plato asserts that a life of drudgery disfigures thebody and mars and enervates the soul; [Footnote: Plato, Rep. 495. ] whileAristotle defines a mechanical trade as one which "renders the body andsoul or intellect of free persons unfit for the exercise and practice ofvirtue;" [Footnote: Arist. Pol. V. 1337 b 8. --Translated by Welldon. ]and denies to the artisan not merely the proper excellence of man, butany excellence of any kind, on the plea that his occupation and statusis unnatural, and that he misses even that reflex of human virtue whicha slave derives from his intimate connection with his master. [Footnote:Ibid. I. 1260 a 34. ]

If then the artisan was excluded from the citizenship in some of theGreek states, and even in the most democratic of them never altogetherthrew off the stigma of inferiority attaching to his trade, the reasonwas that the life he was compelled to lead was incompatible with theGreek conception of excellence. That conception we will now proceed toexamine a little more in detail. 

Section 2. Appreciation of External Goods. 

In the first place, the Greek ideal required for its realisation a solidbasis of external Goods. It recognised frankly the dependence of manupon the world of sense, and the contribution to his happiness ofelements over which he had at best but a partial control. Not that itplaced his Good outside himself, in riches, power, and other suchappendages; but that it postulated certain gifts of fortune as necessarymeans to his self-development. Of these the chief were, a competence, tosecure him against sordid cares, health, to ensure his physicalexcellence, and children, to support and protect him in old age. Aristotle's definition of the happy man is "one whose activity accordswith perfect virtue and who is adequately furnished with external goods, not for a casual period of time but for a complete or perfect life-time;" [Footnote: Arist. Ethics. I. Ii. 1101 a 14. --Translated byWelldon. ] and he remarks, somewhat caustically, that those who say thata man on the rack would be happy if only he were good, intentionally orunintentionally are talking nonsense. That here, as elsewhere, Aristotlerepresents the common Greek view we have abundant testimony from othersources. Even Plato, in whom there runs so clear a vein of asceticism, follows the popular judgment in reckoning high among goods, first, health, then beauty, then skill and strength in physical exercises, andlastly wealth, if it be not blind but illumined by the eye of reason. Tothese Goods must be added, to complete the scale, success andreputation, topics which are the constant theme of the poets' eulogy. "Two things alone there are, " says Pindar, "that cherish life's bloom toits utmost sweetness amidst the fair flowers of wealth--to have goodsuccess and to win therefore fair fame;" [Footnote: Pind. Isth. Iv. 14. --Translated by E. Myers. ] and the passage represents his habitualattitude. That the gifts of fortune, both personal and external, are anessential condition of excellence, is an axiom of the point of view ofthe Greeks. But on the other hand we never find them misled into theconception that such gifts are an end in themselves, apart from thepersonal qualities they are meant to support or adorn. The orientalideal of unlimited wealth and power, enjoyed merely for its own sake, never appealed to their fine and lucid judgment. Nothing could betterillustrate this point than the anecdote related by Herodotus of theinterview between Solon and Croesus, King of Lydia. Croesus, proud ofhis boundless wealth, asks the Greek stranger who is the happiest man onearth? expecting to hear in reply his own name. Solon, however, answerswith the name of Tellus, the Athenian, giving his reasons in thefollowing speech:

"First, because his country was flourishing in his days, and he himselfhad sons both beautiful and good, and he lived to see children born toeach of them, and these children all grew up; and further because, aftera life spent in what our people look upon as comfort, his end wassurpassingly glorious. In a battle between the Athenians and theirneighbours near Eleusis, he came to the assistance of his countrymen, routed the foe, and died upon the field most gallantly. The Atheniansgave him a public funeral on the spot where he fell, and paid him thehighest honours. "

Later on in the discussion Solon defines the happy man as he who "Iswhole of limb, a stranger to disease, free from misfortune, happy in hischildren, and comely to look upon, " and who also ends his life well. [Footnote: Herodotus, i. 30. 32. --Translated by Rawlinson]

Section 3. Appreciation of Physical Qualities. 

While, however, the gifts of a happy fortune are an essential conditionof the Greek ideal, they are not to be mistaken for the ideal itself. "Abeautiful soul in a beautiful body, " to recur to our former phrase, isthe real end and aim of their endeavour. "Beautiful and good" is theirhabitual way of describing what we should call a gentleman; and noexpression could better represent what they admired. With ourselves, inspite of our addiction to athletics, the body takes a secondary place;after a certain age, at least, there are few men who make its systematiccultivation an important factor of their life; and in our estimate ofmerit physical qualities are accorded either none or the very smallestweight. It was otherwise with the Greeks; to them a good body was thenecessary correlative of a good soul. Balance was what they aimed at, balance and harmony; and they could scarcely believe in the beauty ofthe spirit, unless it were reflected in the beauty of the flesh. Thepoint is well put by Plato, the most spiritually minded of the Greeks, and the least apt to underprize the qualities of the soul. 

"Surely then, " he says, "to him who has an eye to see, there can be nofairer spectacle than that of a man who combines the possession of moralbeauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding andharmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters intoboth. 

"There can be none so fair. 

"And you will grant that what is fairest is loveliest?

"Undoubtedly it is. 

"Then the truly musical person will love those who combine mostperfectly moral and physical beauty, but will not love any one in whomthere is dissonance. 

"No, not if there be any defect in the soul, but if it is only a bodilyblemish, he may so bear with it as to be willing to regard it withcomplacency. 

"I understand that you have now, or have had, a favourite of this kind;so I give way. " [Footnote: Plato, Rep. 402. --Translated by Davies andVaughan. ]

The reluctance of the admission that a physical defect may possibly beoverlooked is as significant as the rest of the passage. Body and soul, it is clear, are regarded as aspects of a single whole, so that ablemish in the one indicates and involves a blemish in the other. Thetraining of the body is thus, in a sense, the training of the soul, andgymnastic and music, as Plato puts it, serve the same end, theproduction of a harmonious temperament. 

Section 4. Greek Athletics. 

It is this conception which gives, or appears at least in the retrospectto give, a character so gracious and fine to Greek athletics. In fact, if we look more closely into the character of the public games in Greecewe see that they were so surrounded and transfused by an atmosphere ofimagination that their appeal must have been as much to the aesthetic asto the physical sense. For in the first place those great gymnasticcontests in which all Hellas took part, and which gave the tone to theirwhole athletic life, were primarily religious festivals. The Olympic andNemean Games were held in honour of Zeus, the Pythian, of Apollo, theIsthmean, of Poseidon. In the enclosures in which they took place stoodtemples of the gods; and sacrifice, prayer, and choral hymn were theback-ground against which they were set. And since in Greece religionimplied art, in the wake of the athlete followed the sculptor and thepoet. The colossal Zeus of Pheidias, the wonder of the ancient world, flashed from the precincts of Olympia its glory of ivory and gold;temples and statues broke the brilliant light into colour and form; andunder that vibrating heaven of beauty, the loveliest nature crowned withthe finest art, shifted and shone what was in itself a perfect type ofboth, the grace of harmonious motion in naked youths and men. For inGreek athletics, by virtue of the practice of contending nude, thecontest itself became a work of art; and not only did sculptors drawfrom it an inspiration such as has been felt by no later age, but to thecombatants themselves, and the spectators, the plastic beauty of thehuman form grew to be more than its prowess or its strength, andgymnastic became a training in aesthetics as much as, or more than, inphysical excellence. 

And as with the contest, so with the reward, everything was designed toappeal to the sensuous imagination. The prize formally adjudged wassymbolical only, a crown of olive; but the real triumph of the victorwas the ode in which his praise was sung, the procession of happycomrades, and the evening festival, when, as Pindar has it, "the lovelyshining of the fair-faced moon beamed forth, and all the precinctsounded with songs of festal glee, " [Footnote: Pindar, Ol. Xi. 90. --Translated by Myers] or "beside Kastaly in the evening his name burntbright, when the glad sounds of the Graces rose. " [Footnote: Pindar, Nem. 6. 65. ]

Of the Graces! for these were the powers who presided over the world ofGreek athletics. Here, for example, is the opening of one of Pindar'sodes, typical of the spirit in which he at least conceived the functionsof the chronicler of sport:

"O ye who haunt the land of goodly steeds that drinketh of Kephisos'waters, lusty Orchomenos' Queens renowned in song, O Graces, guardiansof the Minyai's ancient race, hearken, for unto you I pray. For by yourgift come unto men all pleasant things and sweet, and the wisdom of aman and his beauty, and the splendour of his fame. Yea, even godswithout the Graces' aid rule never at feast or dance; but these havecharge of all things done in heaven, and beside Pythian Apollo of thegolden bow they have set their thrones, and worship the eternal majestyof the Olympian Father. O lady Aglaia, and thou Euphrosyne, lover ofsong, children of the mightiest of the gods, listen and hear, and thouThalia delighting in sweet sounds, and look down upon this triumphalcompany, moving with light step under happy fate. In Lydian mood ofmelody concerning Asopichos am I come hither to sing, for that throughthee, Aglaia, in the Olympic games the Minyai's home is winner. "[Footnote: Pindar, Ol. Xiv. --Translated by Myers. ]

This is but a single passage among many that might be quoted toillustrate the point we are endeavouring to bring into relief--theconscious predominance in the Greek games of that element of poetry andart which is either not present at all in modern sport or at best is ahappy accessory of chance. The modern man, and especially theEnglishman, addicts himself to athletics, as to other avocations, with acertain stolidity of gaze on the immediate end which tends to confinehim to the purely physical view of his pursuit. The Greek, an artist bynature, lifted his not less strenuous sports into an air of finersentiment, touched them with the poetry of legend and the grace of artand song, and even to his most brutal contests--for brutal some of themwere--imparted so rich an atmosphere of beauty, that they could beadmitted as fit themes for dedication to the Graces by the choice andspiritual genius of Pindar. 

Section 5. Greek Ethics--Identification of the Aesthetic and EthicalPoints of View. 

And as with the excellence of the body, so with that of the soul, theconception that dominated the mind of the Greeks was primarilyaesthetic. In speaking of their religion we have already remarked thatthey had no sense of sin; and we may now add that they had no sense ofduty. Moral virtue they conceived not as obedience to an external law, asacrifice of the natural man to a power that in a sense is alien tohimself, but rather as the tempering into due proportion of the elementsof which human nature is composed. The good man was the man who wasbeautiful--beautiful in soul. "Virtue, " says Plato, "will be a kind ofhealth and beauty and good habit of the soul; and vice will be a diseaseand deformity and sickness of it. " [Footnote: Plato, Rep. 444, --Translated by Davies and Vaughan. ] It follows that it is as natural toseek virtue and to avoid vice as to seek health and to avoid disease. There is no question of a struggle between opposite principles; thedistinction of good and evil is one of order or confusion, amongelements which in themselves are neither good nor bad. 

This conception of virtue we find expressed in many forms, but alwayswith the same underlying idea. A favourite watch-word with the Greeks isthe "middle" or "mean", the exact point of rightness between twoextremes. "Nothing in excess, " was a motto inscribed over the temple ofDelphi; and none could be more characteristic of the ideal of theselovers of proportion. Aristotle, indeed, has made it the basis of hiswhole theory of ethics. In his conception, virtue is the mean, vice theexcess lying on either side--courage, for example, the mean betweenfoolhardiness and cowardice, temperance, between incontinence andinsensibility, generosity, between extravagance and meanness. Thevarious phases of feeling and the various kinds of action he analysesminutely on this principle, understanding always by "the mean" thatwhich adapts itself in the due proportion to the circumstances andrequirements of every case. 

The interest of this view for us lies in its assumption that it is notpassions or desires in themselves that must be regarded as bad, but onlytheir disproportional or misdirected indulgence. Let us take, forexample, the case of the pleasures of sense. The puritan's rule is toabjure them altogether; to him they are absolutely wrong in themselves, apart from all considerations of time and place. Aristotle, on thecontrary, enjoins not renunciation but temperance; and defines thetemperate man as one who "holds a mean position in respect of pleasures. He takes no pleasure in the things in which the licentious man takesmost pleasure; he rather dislikes them; nor does he take pleasure at allin wrong things, nor an excessive pleasure in anything that is pleasant, nor is he pained at the absence of such things, nor does he desire them, except perhaps in moderation, nor does he desire them more than isright, or at the wrong time, and so on. But he will be eager in amoderate and right spirit for all such things as are pleasant and at thesame time conducive to health or to a sound bodily condition, and forall other pleasures, so long as they are not prejudicial to these orinconsistent with noble conduct or extravagant beyond his means. Forunless a person limits himself in this way, he affects such pleasuresmore than is right, whereas the temperate man follows the guidance ofright reason. " [Footnote: Arist. Ethics. III. 14. --1119 a 11. --Translatedby Welldon. ]

As another illustration of this point of view, we may take the case ofanger. The Christian rule is never to resent an injury, but rather, inthe New Testament phrase, to "turn the other cheek. " Aristotle, whileblaming the man who is unduly passionate, blames equally the man who isinsensitive; the thing to aim at is to be angry "on the proper occasionsand with the proper people in the proper manner and for the properlength of time. " And in this and all other cases the definition of whatis proper must be left to the determination of "the sensible man. "

Thus, in place of a series of hard and fast rules, a rigid anduncompromising distinction of acts and affections into good and bad, theformer to be absolutely chosen and the latter absolutely eschewed, Aristotle presents us with the general type of a subtle and shiftingproblem, the solution of which must be worked out afresh by eachindividual in each particular case. Conduct to him is a free and livingcreature, and not a machine controlled by fixed laws. Every life is awork of art shaped by the man who lives it; according to the faculty ofthe artist will be the quality of his work, and no general rules cansupply the place of his own direct perception at every turn. The Good isthe right proportion, the right manner and occasion; the Bad is all thatvaries from this "right. " But the elements of human nature in themselvesare neither good nor bad; they are merely the raw material out of whichthe one or the other may be shaped. 

The idea thus formulated by Aristotle is typically Greek. In anotherform it is the basis of the ethical philosophy of Plato, who habituallyregards virtue as a kind of "order. " "The virtue of each thing, " hesays, "whether body or soul, instrument or creature, when given to themin the best way comes to them not by chance but as the result of theorder and truth and art which are imparted to them. " [Footnote: Plato, Gorgias, 506 d. --Translated by Jowett] And the conception hereindicated, is worked out in detail in his Republic. There, afterdistinguishing in the soul three principles or powers, reason, passion, and desire, he defines justice as the maintenance among them of theirproper mutual relation, each moving in its own place and doing itsappropriate work as is, or should be, the case with the differentclasses in a state. 

"The just man will not permit the several principles within him to doany work but their own, nor allow the distinct classes in his soul tointerfere with each other, but will really set his house in order; andhaving gained the mastery over himself, will so regulate his owncharacter as to be on good terms with himself, and to set those threeprinciples in tune together, as if they were verily three chords of aharmony, a higher and a lower and a middle, and whatever may lie betweenthese; and after he has bound all these together, and reduced the manyelements of his nature to a real unity, as a temperate and dulyharmonized man, he will then at length proceed to do whatever he mayhave to do. " [Footnote: Plato, Rep. IV. 443. --Translation by Davies andVaughan. ]

Plato, it is true, in other parts of his work, approaches more closelyto the dualistic conception of an absolute opposition between good andbad principles in man. Yet even so, he never altogether abandons thataesthetic point of view which looks to the establishment of order amongthe conflicting principles rather than to the annihilation of one by theother in an internecine conflict. The point may be illustrated by thefollowing passage, where the two horses represent respectively theelements of fleshly desire and spiritual passion, while the charioteerstands for the controlling reason; and where, it will be noticed, theultimate harmony is achieved, not by the complete eradication of desire, but by its due subordination to the higher principle. Even Plato, themost ascetic of the Greeks, is a Greek first and an ascetic afterwards. 

"Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme oflarge and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in afigure, and let the figure be composite--a pair of winged horses and acharioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods areall of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races aremixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them isnoble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed;and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble tohim.... The right hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a loftyneck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he isa lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of trueglory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word andadmonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put togetheranyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a darkcolour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolenceand pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Nowwhen the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soulwarmed through sense, and is full of, the prickings and ticklings ofdesire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government ofshame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless ofthe blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner oftrouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approachthe beloved and to remember the joys of love. They at first indignantlyoppose him and will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful deeds;but at last, when he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree todo as he bids them. And now they are at the spot and behold the flashingbeauty of the beloved; which when the charioteer sees, his memory iscarried to the true beauty whom he beholds in company with Modesty likean image placed upon a holy pedestal He sees her, but he is afraid andfalls backwards in adoration, and by his fall is compelled to pull backthe reins with such violence as to bring both the steeds on theirhaunches, the one willing and unresisting, the unruly one veryunwilling; and when they have gone back a little, the one is overcomewith shame and wonder, and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration; theother, when the pain is over which the bridle and the fall had givenhim, having with difficulty taken breath, is full of wrath andreproaches, which he heaps upon the charioteer and his fellow-steed, forwant of courage and manhood, declaring that they have been false totheir agreement and guilty of desertion. Again they refuse, and again heurges them on, and will scarce yield to their prayer that he would waituntil another time. When the appointed hour comes, they make as if theyhad forgotten, and he reminds them, fighting and neighing and draggingthem on, until at length he on the same thoughts intent, forces them todraw near again. And when they are near he stoops his head and puts uphis tail, and takes the bit in his teeth and pulls shamelessly. Then thecharioteer is worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at thebarrier, and with a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of theteeth of the wild steed and covers his abusive jaws and tongue withblood, and forces his legs and haunches to the ground and punishes himsorely. 

"And when this has happened several times and the villain has ceasedfrom his wanton way, he is tamed and humbled and follows the will of thecharioteer, and when he sees the beautiful one he is ready to die offear. And from that time forward the soul of the lover follows thebeloved in modesty and holy fear. " [Footnote: Plato, Phaedrus. 246. --Translated by Jowett. ]

Even from this passage, in spite of its dualistic hypothesis, but farmore clearly from the whole tenor of his work, we may perceive thatPlato's description of virtue as an "order" of the soul is prompted bythe same conception, characteristically Greek, as Aristotle's account ofvirtue as a "mean. " The view, as we said at the beginning, is properlyaesthetic rather than moral. It regards life less as a battle betweentwo contending principles, in which victory means the annihilation ofthe one, the altogether bad, by the other, the altogether good, than asthe maintenance of a balance between elements neutral in themselves butcapable, according as their relations are rightly ordered or thereverse, of producing either that harmony which is called virtue, orthat discord which is called vice. 

Such being the conception of virtue characteristic of the Greeks, itfollows that the motive to pursue it can hardly have presented itself tothem in the form of what we call the "sense of duty. " For dutyemphasises self-repression. Against the desires of man it sets a law ofprohibition, a law which is not conceived as that of his own completenature, asserting against a partial or disproportioned development thebalance and totality of the ideal, but rather as a rule imposed fromwithout by a power distinct from himself, for the mortification, not theperfecting, of his natural impulses and aims. Duty emphasises self-repression; the Greek view emphasised self-development. That "health andbeauty and good habit of the soul, " which is Plato's ideal, is as muchits own recommendation tion to the natural man as is the health andbeauty of the body. Vice, on this view, is condemned because it is afrustration of nature, virtue praised because it is her fulfilment; andthe motive throughout is simply that passion to realise oneself which iscommonly acknowledged as sufficient in the case of physical development, and which appeared sufficient to the Greeks in the case of thedevelopment of the soul. 

Section 6. The Greek View of Pleasure. 

From all this it follows clearly enough that the Greek ideal was farremoved from asceticism; but it might perhaps be supposed, on the otherhand, that it came dangerously near to license. Nothing, however, couldbe further from the case. That there were libertines among the Greeks, as everywhere else, goes without saying; but the conception that theGreek rule of life was to follow impulse and abandon restraint is afigment of would-be "Hellenists" of our own time. The word which bestsums up the ideal of the Greeks is "temperance"; "the mean, " "order, ""harmony, " as we saw, are its characteristic expressions; and the self-realisation to which they aspired was not an anarchy of passion, but anordered evolution of the natural faculties under the strict control of abalanced mind. The point may be illustrated by a reference to thetreatment of pleasure in the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle. 

The practice of the libertine is to identify pleasure and good in such amanner that he pursues at any moment any pleasure that presents itself, eschewing comparison and reflection, with all that might tend to checkthat continuous flow of vivid and fresh sensations which he postulatesas the end of life. The ideal of the Greeks, on the contrary, asinterpreted by their two greatest thinkers, while on the one hand it isso far opposed to asceticism that it requires pleasure as an essentialcomplement of Good, on the other, is so far from identifying the two, that it recognises an ordered scale of pleasures, and while rejectingaltogether those at the lower end, admits the rest, not as in themselvesconstituting the Good, but rather as harmless additions or at most asnecessary accompaniments of its operation. Plato, in the Republic, distinguishes between the necessary and unnecessary pleasures, definingthe former as those derived from the gratification of appetites "whichwe cannot get rid of and whose satisfaction does us good"--such, forexample, as the appetite for wholesome food; and the latter as thosewhich belong to appetites "which we can put away from us by earlytraining; and the presence of which, besides, never does us any good, and in some cases does positive harm, "--such, for example, as theappetite for delicate and luxurious dishes. [Footnote: Plato, Rep. VIII. 558. --Translated by Davies and Vaughan. ] The former he would admit, thelatter he excludes from his ideal of happiness. And though in a laterdialogue, the Philebus, he goes further than this, and would excludefrom the perfect life all pleasures except those which he describes as"pure, " that is those which attend upon the contemplation of form andcolour and sound, or which accompany intellectual activity; yet here, nodoubt, he is passing beyond the sphere of the practicable ideal, and hisdistinct personal bias towards asceticism must be discounted if we areto take him as representative of the Greek view. His general contention, however, that pleasures must be ranked as higher and as lower, and thatat the best they are not to be identified with the Good, is fullyaccepted by so typical a Greek as Aristotle. Aristotle, however, iscareful not to condemn any pleasure that is not definitely harmful. Even"unnecessary" pleasures, he admits, may be desirable in themselves; eventhe deliberate creation of desire with a view to the enjoyment ofsatisfying it may be admissible if it is not injurious. Still, there arekinds of pleasures which ought not to be pursued, and occasions andmethods of seeking it which are improper and perverse. Therefore theReason must be always at hand to check and to control; and the ultimatetest of true worth in pleasure, as in everything else, is the trainedjudgment of the good and sensible man. 

Section 7. Illustrations--Ischomachus; Socrates. 

Such, then, was the character of the Greek conception of excellence. Theaccount we have given may seem somewhat abstract and ideal; but it givesthe general formula of the life which every cultivated Greek would atany rate have wished to live. And in confirmation of this point we mayadduce the testimony of Xenophon, who has left us a description, evidently drawn from life, of what he conceives to be the perfect typeof a "gentleman. "

The interest of the account lies in the fact, that Xenophon himself wasclearly an "average" Greek, one, that is to say, of good natural parts, of perfectly normal faculties and tastes, undisturbed by any originalityof character or mind, and representing therefore, as we may fairlyassert, the ordinary views and aims of an upright and competent man ofthe world. His description of the "gentleman, " therefore, may be takenas a representative account of the recognised ideal of all that class ofAthenian citizens. And this is how the gentleman in question, Ischomachus, describes his course of life. 

"In the first place, " he says, "I worship the gods. Next, I endeavour tothe best of my ability, assisted by prayer, to get health and strengthof body, reputation in the city, good will among my friends, honourablesecurity in battle and an honourable increase of fortune. "

At this point Socrates, who is supposed to be the interlocutor, interrupts. "Do you really covet wealth, " he asks, "with all the troubleit involves?" "Certainly I do, " is the reply, "for it enables me tohonour the gods magnificently, to help my friends if they are in want, and to contribute to the resources of my country. "

Here definitely and precisely expressed is the ideal of the Atheniangentleman--the beautiful body housing the beautiful soul, the externalaids of fortune, friends, and the like, and the realisation of theindividual self in public activity. Upon it follows an account of theway in which Ischomachus was accustomed to pass his days. He risesearly, he tells us, to catch his friends before they go out, or walks tothe city to transact his necessary business. If he is not called intotown, he pays a visit to his farm, walking for the sake of exercise andsending on his horse. On his arrival he gives directions about thesowing, ploughing, or whatever it may be, and then mounting his horsepractices his military exercises. Finally he returns home on foot, running part of the way, takes his bath, and sits down to a moderatemidday meal. 

This combination of physical exercise, military training and business, arouses the enthusiasm of Socrates. "How right you are!" he cries, "andthe consequence is that you are as healthy and strong as we see you, andone of the best riders and the wealthiest men in the country!"

This little prosaic account of the daily life of an Athenian gentlemanis completely in harmony with all we have said about the character ofthe Greek ideal; but it comprehends only a part, and that the leastspiritual, of that rich and many-sided excellence. It may be as well, therefore, to append by way of complement the description of anotherpersonality, exceptional indeed even among the Greeks, yet one whichonly Greece could have produced--the personality of Socrates. No morestriking figure is presented to us in history, none has been morevividly portrayed, and none, in spite of the originality of mind whichprovoked the hostility of the crowd, is more thoroughly Hellenic inevery aspect, physical, intellectual, and moral. 

That Socrates was ugly in countenance was a defect which a Greek couldnot fail to note, and his snub nose and big belly are matters offrequent and jocose allusion. But apart from these defects his physique, it appears, was exceptionally good; he was sedulous in his attendance atthe gymnasia, and was noted for his powers of endurance and his courageand skill in war. Plato records it of him that in a hard winter oncampaign, when the common soldiers were muffling themselves insheepskins and felt against the cold, he alone went about in hisordinary cloak, and barefoot over the ice and snow; and he furtherdescribes his bearing in a retreat from a lost battle, how "there youmight see him, just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalking like apelican and rolling his eyes, calmly contemplating enemies as well asfriends, and making very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance, that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stoutresistance. " [Footnote: Plato, Symp. 221 b. --Translated by Jowett. ]

To this efficiency of body corresponded, in accordance with the Greekideal, a perfect balance and harmony of soul. Plato, in a fine figure, compares him to the wooden statues of Silenus, which concealed behind agrotesque exterior beautiful golden images of the gods. Of these divineforms none was fairer in Socrates than that typical Greek virtue, temperance. Without a touch of asceticism, he knew how to be contentedwith a little. His diet he measured strictly with a view to health. Naturally abstemious, he could drink, when he chose, more than anotherman; but no one had ever seen him drunk. His affections were strong anddeep, but never led him away to seek his own gratification at the costof those he loved. Without cutting himself off from any of the pleasuresof life, a social man and a frequent guest at feasts, he preservedwithout an effort the supremacy of character and mind over the flesh heneither starved nor pampered. Here is a description by Plato of hisbearing at the close of an all-night carouse, which may stand as aconcrete illustration not only of the character of Socrates, but of themeaning of "temperance" as it was understood by the Greeks:

"Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away--hehimself fell asleep, and as the nights were long took a good rest: hewas awakened towards day-break by a crowing of cocks, and when he awokethe others were either asleep, or had gone away; there remained awakeonly Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of alarge goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing tothem. Aristodemus did not hear the beginning of the discourse, and hewas only half awake, but the chief thing which he remembered wasSocrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius ofcomedy was the same as that of tragedy, and that the true artist intragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they assented, beingdrowsy, and not quite following the argument. And first of allAristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, when he had laid them to sleep, rose to depart:Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took abath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest athis own house. " [Footnote: Plato, Symposion, 223. --Translated byJowett. ]

With this quality of temperance was combined in Socrates a rare measureof independence and moral courage. He was never an active politician;but as every Athenian citizen was called, at some time or another, topublic office, he found himself, on a critical occasion, responsible forputting a certain proposition to the vote in the Assembly. It was amoment of intense excitement. A great victory had just been won; but thegenerals who had achieved the success had neglected to recover thecorpses of the dead or to save the ship-wrecked. It was proposed to takea vote of life or death on all the generals collectively. Socrates, asit happened, was one of the committee whose duty it was to put thequestion to the Assembly. But the proposition was in itself illegal, andSocrates with some other members of the committee, refused to submit itto the vote. Every kind of pressure was brought to bear upon therecalcitrant officers; orators threatened, friends besought, the mobclamoured and denounced. Finally all but Socrates gave way. He alone, anold man, in office for the first time, had the courage to obey hisconscience and the law in face of an angry populace crying for blood. 

And as he could stand against a mob, so he could stand against a despot. At the time when Athens was ruled by the thirty tyrants he was ordered, with four others, to arrest a man whom the authorities wished to put outof the way. The man was guilty of no crime, and Socrates refused. "Iwent quietly home, " he says, "and no doubt I should have been put todeath for it, if the government had not shortly after come to an end. "

These, however, were exceptional episodes in the career of a man who wasnever a prominent politician. The main interest of Socrates wasintellectual and moral; an interest, however, rather practical thanspeculative. For though he was charged in his indictment with preachingatheism, he appears in fact to have concerned himself little or nothingwith either theological or physical inquiries. He was careful in hisobservance of all prescribed religious rites, and probably accepted thegods as powers of the natural world and authors of human institutionsand laws. His originality lay not in any purely speculative views, butin the pertinacious curiosity, practical in its origin and aim, withwhich he attacked and sifted the ethical conceptions of his time: "Whatis justice?" "What is piety?" "What is temperance?"--these were thekinds of questions he never tired of raising, pointing outcontradictions and inconsistencies in current ideas, and awakeningdoubts which if negative in form were positive and fruitful in effect. 

His method in pursuing these inquiries was that of cross-examination. Inthe streets, in the market, in the gymnasia, at meetings grave and gay, in season or out of season, he raised his points of definition. The citywas in a ferment around him. Young men and boys followed and hung on hislips wherever he went. By the charm of his personality, his graciouscourtesy and wit, and the large and generous atmosphere of a sympathyalways at hand to temper to particular persons the rigours of ageneralising logic, he drew to himself, with a fascination not more ofthe intellect than of the heart, all that was best and brightest in theyouth of Athens. His relation to his young disciples was that of a loverand a friend; and the stimulus given by his dialectics to their keen andeager minds was supplemented and reinforced by the appeal to theiradmiration and love of his sweet and virile personality. 

Only in Ancient Athens, perhaps, could such a character and suchconditions have met. The sociable out-door city life; the meeting placesin the open air, and especially the gymnasia, frequented by young andold not more for exercise of the body than for recreation of the mind;the nimble and versatile Athenian wits trained to preternaturalacuteness by the debates of the law courts and the Assembly; all thiswas exactly the environment fitted to develop and sustain a genius atonce so subtle and so humane as that of Socrates. It is the concretepresentation of this city-life that lends so peculiar a charm to thedialogues of Plato. The spirit of metaphysics puts on the human form;and Dialectic walks the streets and contends in the palaestra. It wouldbe impossible to convey by citation the cumulative effect of thisconstant reference in Plato to a human background; but a single excerptmay perhaps help us to realise the conditions under which Socrates livedand worked. Here, then, is a description of the scene in one of thosegymnasia in which he was wont to hold his conversations:

"Upon entering we found that the boys had just been sacrificing; andthis part of the festival was nearly at an end. They were all in whitearray, and games at dice were going on among them. Most of them were inthe outer court amusing themselves; but some were in a corner of theApodyterium playing at odd and even with a number of dice, which theytook out of little wicker baskets. There was also a circle of lookers-on, one of whom was Lysis. He was standing among the other boys andyouths, having a crown upon his head, like a fair vision, and not lessworthy of praise for his goodness than for his beauty. We left them, andwent over to the opposite side of the room, where, finding a quietplace, we sat down; and then we began to talk. This attracted Lysis, whowas constantly turning round to look at us--he was evidently wanting tocome to us. For a time he hesitated and had not the courage to comealone; but first of all, his friend Menexenus came in out of the courtin the interval of his play, and when he saw Ctesippus and myself, cameand sat by us; and then Lysis, seeing him, followed, and sat down withhim, and the other boys joined. 

"I turned to Menexenus, and said: 'Son of Demophon, which of you twoyouths is the elder?'

"'That is a matter of dispute between us, ' he said. 

"'And which is the nobler? Is that a matter of dispute too?'

"'Yes, certainly. '

"'And another disputed point is, which is the fairer?'

"The two boys laughed. 

"'I shall not ask which is the richer, ' I said; 'for you two arefriends, are you not?'

"'Certainly, ' they replied. 

"'And friends have all things in common, so that one of you can be noricher than the other, if you say truly that you are friends. '

"They assented. I was about to ask which was the greater of the two, andwhich was the wiser of the two; but at this moment Menexenus was calledaway by some one who came and said that the gymnastic-master wanted him. I supposed that he had to offer sacrifice. So he went away and I askedLysis some more questions. " [Footnote: Plato, Lysis 206 e. --Translatedby Jowett]

Such were the scenes in which Socrates passed his life. Of his influenceit is hardly necessary here to speak at length. In the well-knownmetaphor put into his mouth by Plato, he was the "gad-fly" of theAthenian people. To prick intellectual lethargy, to force people tothink, and especially to think about the conceptions with which theysupposed themselves to be most familiar, those which guided theirconduct in private and public affairs--justice expediency, honesty, andthe like--such was the constant object of his life. That he should havemade enemies, that he should have been misunderstood, that he shouldhave been accused of undermining the foundations of morality andreligion, is natural and intelligible enough; and it was on thesegrounds that he was condemned to death. His conduct at his trial was ofa piece with the rest of his life. The customary arts of the pleader, the appeal to the sympathies of the public, the introduction into courtof weeping wife and children, he rejected as unworthy of himself and ofhis cause. His defence was a simple exposition of the character and theaims of his life; so far from being a criminal he asserted that he was abenefactor of the Athenian people; and having, after his condemnation, to suggest the sentence he thought appropriate, he proposed that heshould be supported at the public expense as one who had deserved wellof his country. After his sentence to death, having to wait thirty daysfor its execution, he showed no change from his customary cheerfulness, passing his time in conversation with his friends. So far fromregretting his fate he rather congratulated himself that he would escapethe decadence that attends upon old age; and he had, if we may trustPlato, a fair and confident assurance that a happy life awaited himbeyond. He died, according to the merciful law of Athens, by drinkinghemlock; "the wisest and justest and best, " in Plato's judgment, "of allthe men that I have ever known. "

We have dwelt thus long on the personality of Socrates, familiar thoughit be, not only on account of its intrinsic interest, but also becauseit is peculiarly Hellenic. That sunny and frank intelligence, bathed, asit were, in the open air, a gracious blossom springing from the root ofphysical health, that unique and perfect balance of body and soul, passion and intellect, represent, against the brilliant setting ofAthenian life, the highest achievement of the civilisation of Greece. The figure of Socrates, no doubt, has been idealised by Plato, but it isnone the less significant of the trend of Hellenic life. No other peoplecould have conceived such an ideal; no other could have gone so fartowards its realisation. 

Section 8. The Greek View of Woman. 

In the preceding account we have attempted to give some conception ofthe Greek ideal for the individual man. It is now time to remindourselves that that ideal was only supposed to be proper to a smallclass--the class of soldier-citizens. Artisans and slaves, as we haveseen, had no participation in it; neither, and that is our next point, had women. 

Nothing more profoundly distinguishes the Hellenic from the modern viewof life than the estimate in which women were held by the Greeks. Theiropinion on this point was partly the cause and partly the effect of thatpreponderance of the idea of the State on which we have already dwelt, and from which it followed naturally enough that marriage should beregarded primarily as a means of producing healthy and efficientcitizens. This view is best illustrated by the institutions of such aState as Sparta, where, as we saw, the woman was specially trained formaternity, and connections outside the marriage tie were sanctioned bycustom and opinion, if they were such as were likely to lead to healthyoffspring. Further it may be noted that in almost every State theexposure of deformed or sickly infants was encouraged by law, the childbeing thus regarded, from the beginning, as a member of the State, rather than as a member of the family. 

The same view is reflected in the speculations of politicalphilosophers. Plato, indeed, in his Republic, goes so far as toeliminate the family relation altogether. Not only is the wholeconnection between men and women to be regulated by the State, inrespect both of the persons and of the limit of age within which theymay associate, but the children as soon as they are born are to becarried off to a common nursery, there to be reared together, undistinguished by the mothers, who will suckle indifferently any infantthat might happen to be assigned to them for the purpose. Here, as inother instances, Plato goes far beyond the limits set by the currentsentiment of the Greeks, and in his later work is reluctantlyconstrained to abandon his scheme of community of wives and children. Yet even there he makes it compulsory on every man to marry between theages of thirty and thirty-five, under penalty of fine and civildisabilities. Plato, no doubt, as we have said, exaggerates the opinionsof his time; but the view, which he pushes to its extreme, of thesubordination of the family to the State, was one, as we have alreadypointed out, which did predominate in Greece. It reappears in a sobererform in the treatise of Aristotle. He too would regulate by law both theage at which marriages should take place and the number of children thatshould be produced, and would have all deformed infants exposed. Andhere, no doubt, he is speaking in conformity if not with the practice, at least with the feeling of Greece. The modern conception that themarriage relation is a matter of private concern, and that anyindividual has a right to wed whom and when he will, and to producechildren at his own discretion, regardless of all considerations ofhealth and decency, was one altogether alien to the Greeks. In theory atleast, and to some extent in practice (as for example in the case ofSparta), they recognised that the production of children was a businessof supreme import to the State, and that it was right and proper that itshould be regulated by law with a view to the advantage of the wholecommunity. 

 * * * * *

And if now we turn from considering the family in its relation to theState to regard it in its relation to the individual, we are struck oncemore by a divergence from the modern point of view, or rather from theview which is supposed to prevail, particularly by writers of fiction, at any rate in modern English life. In ancient Greece, so far as ourknowledge goes, there was little or no romance connected with themarriage tie. Marriage was a means of producing legitimate children;that is how it is defined by Demosthenes; and we have no evidence thatit was ever regarded as anything more. In Athens we know that marriageswere commonly arranged by the father, much as they are in modern France, on grounds of age, property, connection and the like, and without anyregard for the inclination of the parties concerned. And an interestingpassage in Xenophon indicates a point of view quite consonant with thisaccepted practice. God, he says, ordained the institution of marriage;but on what grounds? Not in the least for the sake of the personalrelation that might be established between the husband and wife, but forends quite external and indifferent to any affection that might existbetween them. First, for the perpetuation of the human race; secondly, to raise up protectors for the father in his old age; thirdly, to securean appropriate division of labour, the man performing the outdoor work, the woman guarding and superintending at home, and each thus fulfillingduly the function for which they were designed by nature. This eminentlyprosaic way of conceiving the marriage relation, is also, it would seem, eminently Greek; and it leads us to consider more particularly theopinion prevalent in Greece of the nature and duty of woman in general. 

Here the first point to be noticed is the wide difference of the viewrepresented in the Homeric poems from that which meets us in thehistoric period. Readers of the Iliad and the Odyssey will find depictedthere, amid all the barbarity of an age of rapine and war, relationsbetween men and women so tender, faithful and beautiful, that they mayalmost stand as universal types of the ultimate human ideal. Such forexample is the relation between Odysseus and Penelope, the wife waitingyear by year for the husband whose fate is unknown, wooed in vain bysuitors who waste her substance and wear her life, nightly "watering herbed with her tears" for twenty weary years, till at last the wandererreturns, and "at once her knees were loosened and her heart meltedwithin her... And she fell a weeping and ran straight towards him, andcast her hands about his neck, and kissed his head;" for "even as thesight of the land is welcome to mariners, so welcome to her was thesight of her lord, and her white arms would never quite leave hold ofhis neck. " [Footnote: Odyss. Xxiii. 205, 231. --Translated by Butcher andLang. ]

Such, again, is the relation between Hector and Andromache as describedin the well-known scene of the Iliad, where the wife comes out with herbabe to take leave of the husband on his way to battle. "It were betterfor me, " she cries, "to go down to the grave if I lose thee; for neverwill any comfort be mine, when once thou, even thou, hast met thy fate, but only sorrow..... Thou art to me father and lady mother, yea, andbrother, even as thou art my goodly husband. Come now, have pity andabide here upon the tower, lest thou make thy child an orphan and thywife a widow. " Hector answers with the plea of honour. He cannot drawback, but he foresees defeat; and in his anticipation of the futurenothing is so bitter as the fate he fears for his wife. "Yet doth theconquest of the Trojans hereafter not so much trouble me, neitherHekabe's own, neither King Priam's, neither my brethren's, the many andbrave that shall fall in the dust before their foemen, as doth thineanguish in the day when some mail-clad Achaian shall lead thee weepingand rob thee of the light of freedom.... But me in death may the heaped-up earth be covering, ere I hear thy crying and thy carrying intocaptivity. " [Footnote: Iliad vi. 450. --Translated by Lang, Leaf andMyers. ]

But most striking of all the portraits of women to be found in Homer, and most typical of a frank and healthy relation between the sexes, isthe account of Nausicaa given in the Odyssey. Ulysses, shipwrecked andnaked, battered and covered with brine, surprises Nausicaa and hermaidens as they are playing at ball on the shore. The attendants runaway, but Nausicaa remains to hear what the stranger has to say. He asksher for shelter and clothing; and she grants the request with anexquisite courtesy and a freedom from all embarrassment which becomesonly the more marked and the more delightful when, as she sees himemerge from the bath, clothed and beautiful, she cannot restrain theexclamation "would that such a one might be called my husband, dwellinghere, and that it might please him here to abide. " [Footnote: Od. Vi. 244. --Translated by Butcher and Lang. ] About the whole scene there is afreshness and a fragrance as of early morning, and a tone so natural, free and frank, that in the face of this rustic idyl the later centuriessicken and faint, like candle-light in the splendour of the dawn. 

If we had only Homer to give us our ideas of the Greeks, we mightconclude, from such passages as these, that they had a conception ofwoman and of her relation to man, finer and nobler, in some respects, than that of modern times. But in fact the Homeric poems represent acivilisation which had passed away before the opening of the period withwhich at present we are chiefly concerned. And in the interval, forreasons which we need not here attempt to state, a change had takenplace in the whole way of regarding the female sex. So far, at any rate, as our authorities enable us to judge, woman, in the historic age, wasconceived to be so inferior to man that he recognised in her no otherend than to minister to his pleasure or to become the mother of hischildren. Romance and the higher companionship of intellect and spiritdo not appear (with certain notable exceptions) to have been commonlysought or found in this relation. 

Woman, in fact, was regarded as a means, not as an end; and was treatedin a manner consonant with this view. Of this estimate manyillustrations might be adduced from the writers of the fifth and fourthcenturies. Plato, for example, classes together "children, women, andservants, " [Footnote: Plato, Republic 431 c. ] and states generally thatthere is no branch of human industry in which the female sex is notinferior to the male. [Footnote: Ibid. 455 c. ] Similarly, Aristotleinsists again and again on the natural inferiority of woman, andillustrates it by such quaint observations as the following: "a manwould be considered a coward who was only as brave as a brave woman, anda woman as a chatterbox who was only as modest as a good man. "[Footnote: Arist. Pol. III. 1277 b 21. --Translated by Welldon. ] But themost striking example, perhaps, because the most unconscious, of thishabitual way of regarding women is to be found in the funeral orationput by Thucydides into the mouth of Pericles, where the speaker, aftersuggesting what consolation he can to the fathers of the slain, turns tothe women with the brief but significant exhortation: "If I am to speakof womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let mesum them up in one short admonition: To a woman not to show moreweakness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to betalked about for good or for evil among men. " [Footnote: Thucydides ii. 45. --Translated by Jowett. ]

The sentiments of the poets are less admissible as evidence. But some ofthem are so extreme that they may be adduced as a further indication ofa point of view whose prevalence alone could render them evendramatically plausible. Such for example is the remark which Euripidesputs into the mouth of his Medea--"women are impotent for good, butclever contrivers of all evil" [Footnote: Euripides, Medea. 406. ]; orthat of one of the characters of Menander, "a woman is necessarily anevil, and he is a lucky man who catches her in the mildest form. " Whilethe general Greek view of the dependence of woman on man is wellexpressed in the words of Aethra, in the "Suppliants" of Euripides--"itis proper for women who are wise to let men act for them in everything. "[Footnote: Euripides, Hik. 40. ]

In accordance with this conception of the inferiority of the female sex, and partly as a cause, partly as an effect of it, we find that theposition of the wife in ancient Greece was simply that of the domesticdrudge. To stay at home and mind the house was her recognised ideal. "Afree woman should be bounded by the street door, " says one of thecharacters in Menander; and another writer discriminates as follows thefunctions of the two sexes:--"War, politics, and public speaking are thesphere of man; that of woman is to keep house, to stay at home and toreceive and tend her husband. " We are not surprised, therefore, to findthat the symbol of woman is the tortoise; and in the following burlesquepassage from Aristophanes we shall recognise, in spite of the touch ofcaricature, the genuine features of the Greek wife. Praxagora isrecounting the merits and services of women:

"They dip their wool in hot water according to the ancient plan, all ofthem without exception, and never make the slightest innovation. Theysit and cook, as of old. They carry upon their heads, as of old. Theyconduct the Themophoriae, as of old. They wear out their husbands, as ofold. They buy sweets, as of old. They take their wine neat, as of old. "[Footnote: Aristophanes, Eccles. 215. ]

And that this was also the kind of ideal approved by their lords andmasters, and that any attempt to pass beyond it was resented, isamusingly illustrated in the following extract from the same poet, whereLysistrata explains the growing indignation of the women at the badconduct of affairs by the men, and the way in which their attempts tointerfere were resented. The comments of the "magistrate" typify, ofcourse, the man's point of view. 

 "Think of our old moderation and gentleness, think how we bore with your pranks, and were still, All through the days of your former prognacity, all through the war that is over and spent: Not that (be sure) we approved of your policy; never our griefs you allowed us to vent. Well we perceived your mistakes and mismanagement. Often at home on our housekeeping cares, Often we heard of some foolish proposal you made for conducting the public affairs. Then would we question you mildly and pleasantly, inwardly grieving, but outwardly gay; 'Husband, how goes it abroad?' we would ask of him; 'what have ye done in Assembly to-day?' 'What would ye write on the side of the Treaty-stone?' Husband says angrily, 'What's that to you? You hold your tongue!' And I held it accordingly. 

 STRATYLLIS. 

 That is a thing which I never would do!

 MAGISTRATE. 

 Ma'am, if you hadn't you'd soon have repented it. 

 LYSISTRATA. 

 Therefore I held it, and spake not a word. Soon of another tremendous absurdity, wilder and worse than the former we heard. 'Husband, ' I say, with a tender solicitude, 'Why have you passed such a foolish decree?' Viciously, moodily, glaring askance at me, 'Stick to your spinning, my mistress, ' says he, 'Else you will speedily find it the worse for you! war is the care and the business of men!'

 MAGISTRATE. 

 Zeus! 'twas a worthy reply, and an excellent!

 LYSISTRATA. 

 What! you unfortunate, shall we not then, Then, when we see you perplexed and incompetent, shall we not tender advice to the state!" [Footnote: Aristoph. Lysistrata. 507. --Translated by B. B. Rogers. ]

The conception thus indicated in burlesque of the proper place of womanis expressed more seriously, from the point of view of the average manin the "Oeconomicus" of Xenophon. Ischomachus, the hero of that work, with whom we have already made acquaintance, gives an account of his ownwife, and of the way in which he had trained her. When he married her, he explains, she was not yet fifteen, and had been brought up with theutmost care "that she might see, hear, and ask as little as possible. "Her accomplishments were weaving and a sufficient acquaintance with allthat concerns the stomach; and her attitude towards her husband sheexpressed in the single phrase: "Everything rests with you; my duty, mymother said, is simply to be modest. " Ischomachus proceeds to explain toher the place he expects her to fill; she is to suckle his children, tocook, and to superintend the house; and for this purpose God has givenher special gifts, different from but not necessarily inferior to thoseof man. Husband and wife naturally supply one another's deficiencies;and if the wife perform her function worthily she may even make herselfthe ruling partner, and be sure that as she grows older she will be heldnot less but more in honour, as the guardian of her children and thestewardess of her husband's goods. --In Xenophon's view, in fact, theinferiority of the woman almost disappears; and the sentimentapproximates closely to that of Tennyson--

 "either sex alone Is half itself, and in true marriage lies Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils Defect in each. "

Such a conception, however, of the "complementary" relation of woman toman, does not exclude a conviction of her essential inferiority. Andthis conviction, it can hardly be disputed, was a cardinal point in theGreek view of life. 

Section 9. Protests against the Common View of Woman. 

Nevertheless, there are not wanting indications, both in theory andpractice, of a protest against it. In Sparta as we have already noticed, girls, instead of being confined to the house, were brought up in theopen air among the boys, trained in gymnastics and accustomed to run andwrestle naked. And Plato, modelling his view upon this experience, makesno distinction of the sexes in his ideal republic. Women, he admits, aregenerally inferior to men, but they have similar, if lower, capacitiesand powers. There is no occupation or art for which they may not befitted by nature and education; and he would therefore have them taketheir share in government and war, as well as in the various mechanicaltrades. " None of the occupations, " he says, "which comprehend theordering of a state, belong to woman as woman, nor yet to man as man;but natural gifts are to be found here and there, in both sexes alike;and, so far as her nature is concerned, the woman is admissible to allpursuits as well as the man; though in all of them the woman is weakerthan the man. " [Footnote: Plato, Rep, 455 d. --Translated by Davies andVaughan. ]

In adopting this attitude Plato stands alone not only among Greeks, butone might almost say, among mankind, till we come to the latest views ofthe nineteenth century. But there is another Greek, the poet Euripides, who, without advancing any theory about the proper position of women, yet displays so intimate an understanding of their difficulties, and sowarm and close a sympathy with their griefs, that some of his utterancesmay stand to all time as documents of the dumb and age-long protest ofthe weaker against the stronger sex. In illustration we may cite thefollowing lines from the "Medea, " applicable, _mutatis mutandis_, to how many generations of suffering wives?

"Of all things that have life and sense we women are most wretched. Forwe are compelled to buy with gold a husband who is also--worst of all!--the master of our person. And on his character, good or bad, our wholefate depends. For divorce is regarded as a disgrace to a woman and shecannot repudiate her husband. Then coming as she does into the midst ofmanners and customs strange to her, she would need the gift ofdivination--unless she has been taught at home--to know how best totreat her bed-fellow. And if we manage so well that our husband remainsfaithful to us, and does not break away, we may think ourselvesfortunate; if not, there is nothing for it but death. A man when he isvexed at home can go out and find relief among his friends oracquaintances; but we women have none to look to but him. They tell uswe live a sheltered life at home while they go to the wars; but that isnonsense. For I would rather go into battle thrice than bear a childonce. " [Footnote: Euripides, Med. 230. ]

Hitherto we have been speaking mainly of the position of the wife inGreece. It is necessary now to say a few words about that class of womenwho were called in the Greek tongue Hetaerae; and who are by somesupposed to have represented, intellectually at least, a higher level ofculture than the other members of their sex. In exceptional cases, this, no doubt, was the fact. Aspasia, for example, the mistress of Pericles, was famous for her powers of mind. According to Plato she was anaccomplished rhetorician, and the real composer of the celebratedfuneral oration of Pericles; and Plutarch asserts that she was courtedand admired by the statesmen and philosophers of Greece. But Aspasiacannot be taken as a type of the Hetaerae of Greece. That these women, by the variety and freedom of their life, may and must have acquiredcertain qualities of character and mind that could hardly be developedin the seclusion of the Greek home, may readily be admitted; we know, for example, that they cultivated music and the power of conversation;and were welcome guests at supper-parties. But we have no evidence thatthe relations which they formed rested as a rule on any but the simplestphysical basis. The real distinction, under this head, between the Greekpoint of view and our own, appears to lie rather in the frankness withwhich this whole class of relations was recognised by the Greeks. Therewere temples in honour of Aphrodite Pandemos, the goddess of illicitlove, and festivals celebrated in her honour; statues were erected offamous courtesans, of Phryne for example, at Delphi, between two kings;and philosophers and statesmen lived with their mistresses openly, without any loss of public reputation. Every man, said the oratorDemosthenes, requires besides his wife at least two mistresses; and thisstatement, made as a matter of course in open court, is perhaps the mostcurious illustration we possess of the distinction between the Greekcivilisation and our own, as regards not the fact itself but the lightin which it was viewed. 

Section 10. Friendship. 

From what has been said about the Greek view of women, it mightnaturally have been supposed that there can have been little place intheir life for all that we designate under the term "romance. " Personalaffection, as we have seen, was not the basis of married life; andrelations with Hetaerae appear to have been, in this respect, no fineror higher than similar relations in our own times. Nevertheless, itwould be a mistake to conclude, from these conditions, that the elementof romance was absent from Greek life. The fact is simply that with themit took a different form, that of passionate friendship between men. Such friendships, of course, occur in all nations and at all times, butamong the Greeks they were, we might say, an institution. Their idealwas the development and education of the younger by the older man, andin this view they were recognised and approved by custom and law as animportant factor in the state. In Sparta, for example, it was the rulethat every boy had attached to him some elder youth by whom he wasconstantly attended, admonished, and trained, and who shared in publicestimation the praise and blame of his acts; so that it is even reportedthat on one occasion a Spartan boy having cried out in a fight, not hehimself but his friend was fined for the lapse of self-control. Thecustom of Sparta existed also in Crete. But the most remarkable instanceof the deliberate dedication of this passion to political and militaryends is that of the celebrated "Theban band, " a troop consistingexclusively of pairs of lovers, who marched and fought in battle side byside, and by their presence and example inspired one another to acourage so constant and high that "it is stated that they were neverbeaten till the battle at Chaeronea: and when Philip, after the fight, took a view of the slain, and came to the place where the three hundredthat fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, andunderstanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears, and said, "Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or sufferedanything that was base. " [Footnote: Plutarch, Pelopidas. Ch. 18. --Ed. ByClough. ]

Greek legend and history, in fact, resounds with the praises of friends. Achilles and Patroclus, Pylades and Orestes, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Solon and Peisistratus, Socrates and Alcibiades, Epaminondas andPelopidas, --these are names that recall at once all that is highest inthe achievement and all that is most romantic in the passion of Greece. For it was the prerogative of this form of love, in its finermanifestations, that it passed beyond persons to objective ends, linkingemotion to action in a life of common danger and toil. Not only, norprimarily, the physical sense was touched, but mainly and in chief theimagination and intellect. The affection of Achilles for Patroclus is asintense as that of a lover for his mistress, but it has in addition abody and depth such as only years of common labour could impart. "Achilles wept, remembering his dear comrade, nor did sleep thatconquereth all take hold of him, but he kept turning himself to thisside and to that, yearning for Patroclus' manhood and excellent valour, and all the toils he achieved with him and the woes he bare, cleavingthe battles of men and the grievous waves. As he thought thereon he shedbig tears, now lying on his side, now on his back, now on his face; andthen anon he would arise upon his feet and roam wildly beside the beachof the salt sea. " [Footnote: Iliad XXIV. 3. --Translated by Lang, Leafand Myers. ] That is the ideal spirit of Greek comradeship--eachsupporting the other in his best efforts and aims, mind assisting mindand hand hand, and the end of the love residing not in an easysatisfaction of itself but in the development and perfecting of thesouls in which it dwelt. 

Of such a love we have a record in the elegies of Theognis, in which thepoet has embodied, for the benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripeexperience of an eventful life. The poems for the most part are didacticin character, consciously and deliberately aimed at the instruction andguidance of the man to whom they are addressed; but every now and againthe passion breaks through which informs and inspires this virileintercourse, and in such a passage as the following gives us the key tothis and to all the finer friendships of the Greeks:--

 "Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly Over the boundless ocean and the earth; Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie, The comrade of their banquet and their mirth. Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound Upon the silver flute's melodious breath; And when thou goest darkling underground Down to the lamentable house of death, Oh yet not then from honour shalt thou cease But wander, an imperishable name, Kurnus, about the seas and shores of Greece, Crossing from isle to isle the barren main. Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride Sped by the Muses of the violet crown, And men to come, while earth and sun abide, Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown. Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return Thou givest me the scorn with which I burn. " [Footnote: Theognis 237. ]

It was his insistence on friendship as an incentive to a noble life thatwas the secret of the power of Socrates. Listen, for example, to theaccount which Plutarch gives of his influence upon the young Alcibiades:

"Alcibiades, listening now to language entirely free from every thoughtof unmanly fondness and silly displays of affection, finding himselfwith one who sought to lay open to him the deficiencies of his mind, andrepress his vain and foolish arrogance, 'Dropped like the craven cock his conquered wing. '

He esteemed these endeavours of Socrates as most truly a means which thegods made use of for the care and preservation of youth, and began tothink meanly of himself, and to admire him; to be pleased with hiskindness, and to stand in awe of his virtue; and, unawares to himself, there became formed in his mind that reflex image and reciprocation oflove, or Anteros, that Plato talks of..... Though Socrates had many andpowerful rivals, yet the natural good qualities of Alcibiades gave hisaffection the mastery. His words overcame him so much, as to draw tearsfrom his eyes, and to disturb his very soul. Yet sometimes he wouldabandon himself to flatterers, when they proposed to him varieties ofpleasure, and would desert Socrates; who then would pursue him, as if hehad been a fugitive slave. He despised every one else, and had noreverence or awe for any but him. " [Footnote: Plut. Alc. Ch. 4. --Ed. ByClough. ] The relation thus established may be further illustrated by thefollowing graceful little anecdote. Socrates and Alcibiades were fellow-soldiers at Potidaea and shared the same tent. In a stiff engagementboth behaved with gallantry. At last Alcibiades fell wounded, andSocrates, standing over him, defended and finally saved him. For this hemight fairly have claimed the customary prize of valour; but he insistedon resigning it to his friend, as an incentive to his "ambition fornoble deeds. "

Another illustration of the power of this passion to evoke and stimulatecourage is given in the story of Cleomachus, narrated by Plutarch. In abattle between the Chalcidians and the Eretrians, the cavalry of theformer being hard pressed, Cleomachus was called upon to make adiversion. He turned to his friend and asked him if he intended to be aspectator of the struggle; the youth replied in the affirmative, andembracing his friend, with his own hands buckled on his helmet;whereupon Cleomachus charged with impetuosity, routed the foe and diedgloriously fighting. And thenceforth, says Plutarch, the Chalcidians, who had previously mistrusted such friendships, cultivated and honouredthem more than any other people. 

So much indeed were the Greeks impressed with the manliness of thispassion, with its power to prompt to high thought and heroic action, that some of the best of them set the love of man for man far above thatof man for woman. The one, they maintained, was primarily of the spirit, the other primarily of the flesh; the one bent upon shaping to the typeof all manly excellence both the body and the soul of the beloved, theother upon a passing pleasure of the senses. And they noted that amongthe barbarians, who were subject to tyrants, this passion wasdiscouraged, along with gymnastics and philosophy, because it was feltby their masters that it would be fatal to their power; so essentiallywas it the prerogative of freedom, so incompatible with the nature andthe status of a slave. 

It is in the works of Plato that this view is most completely andexquisitely set forth. To him, love is the beginning of all wisdom; andamong all the forms of love, that one in chief, which is conceived byone man for another, of which the main operation and end is in thespirit, and which leads on and out from the passion for a particularbody and soul to an enthusiasm for that highest beauty, wisdom, andexcellence, of which the most perfect mortal forms are but a faint andinadequate reflection. Such a love is the initiation into the higherlife, the spring at once of virtue, of philosophy, and of religion. Always operative in practice in Greek life it was not invented butinterpreted by Plato. The philosopher merely gave an ideal expression towhat was stirring in the heart of every generous youth; and the passagewhich we have selected for quotation may be taken as representative notonly of the personality of Plato, but of the higher aspect of acharacteristic phase of Greek civilisation. 

"And now, taking my leave of you, I will rehearse a tale of love which Iheard from Diotima of Mantineia, a woman wise in this and in many otherkinds of knowledge. She was my instructress in the art of love, and Ishall repeat to you what she said to me: 'On the birthday of Aphroditethere was a feast of the gods, at which the god Poros or Plenty, who isthe son of Metis or Discretion, was one of the guests. When the feastwas over, Penia or Poverty, as the manner is on such occasions, cameabout the doors to beg. Now Plenty, who was the worse for nectar (therewas no wine in those days), went into the garden of Zeus and fell into aheavy sleep; and Poverty considering her own straitened circumstances, plotted to have a child by him, and accordingly she lay down at his sideand conceived Love, who partly because he is naturally a lover of thebeautiful, and because Aphrodite is herself beautiful, and also becausehe was born on her birthday, is her follower and attendant. And as hisparentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is alwayspoor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and heis rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on thebare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in the streets, or atthe doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is alwaysin distress. Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he isalways plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen inthe pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neithermortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he isin plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of hisfather's nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowingout, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he isin a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The truth of the matter isthis: No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, neither do theignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that hewho is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: hehas no desire for that of which he feels no want. ' 'But who then, Diotima, ' I said, 'are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither thewise nor the foolish?' 'A child may answer that question, ' she replied;'they are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; andtherefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being alover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And ofthis too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, andhis mother poor and foolish. Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature ofthe spirit Love. '

"I said: 'O thou stranger woman, thou sayest well; but, assuming Love tobe such as you say, what is the use of him to man?'

"'That, Socrates, ' she replied, 'I will attempt to unfold: of his natureand birth I have already spoken; and you acknowledge that Love is of thebeautiful. But some one will say: Of the beautiful in what, Socrates andDiotima? or rather let me put the question more clearly, and ask: When aman loves the beautiful, what does he desire?'

"I answered her, 'That the beautiful may be his. '

"'Still, ' she said, 'the answer suggests a further question: What isgiven by the possession of beauty?'

"'To what you have asked, ' I said, 'I have no answer ready. '

"'Then, ' she said, 'let me put the word "good" in the place of"beautiful, " and repeat the question once more: If he who loves, lovesthe good, what is it then that he loves?'

"'The possession of the good, ' I said. 

"'And what does he gain who possesses the good?'

"'Happiness, ' I replied; 'there is less difficulty in answering thatquestion. '

"'Yes, ' she said, 'the happy are made happy by the acquisition of goodthings. Nor is there any need to ask why a man desires happiness; theanswer is already final. '

"'You are right, ' I said. 

"'And is this wish and this desire common to all? and do all men alwaysdesire their own good, or only some men?--what say you?'

"'All men, ' I replied; 'the desire is common to all. '

"'Then, ' she said, 'the simple truth is that men love the good. '

"'Yes, ' I said. 

"'To which must be added that they love the possession of the good?'

"'That must be added too. '

"'Then love, ' she said, may be described generally as the love of theeverlasting possession of the good?'

"'That is most true. '

"'Then if this be the nature of love, can you tell me further, ' shesaid, 'what is the manner of the pursuit? what are they doing who showall this eagerness and heat which is called love? and what is the objectwhich they have in view? Answer me. '

"'Nay, Diotima, ' I replied, 'if I had known, I should not have wonderedat your wisdom, neither should I have come to learn from you about thisvery matter. '

"'Well, ' she said, 'I will teach you:--The object which they have inview is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul. '

"'I do not understand you, ' I said; 'the oracle requires anexplanation. '

"'I will make my meaning clearer, ' she replied. 'I mean to say, that allmen are bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their souls. Thereis a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreation--procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and thisprocreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing: forconception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortalcreature, and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed isalways inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides atbirth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power ispropitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: atthe sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains fromconception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conceptionarrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter andecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alleviation of the pain oftravail. For love, Socrates, is not as you imagine, the love of thebeautiful only. '

"'What then?'

"'The love of generation and of birth in beauty. '

"'Yes, ' I said. 

"'Yes indeed, ' she replied. 

"'But why of generation?'

"'Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity andimmortality, ' she replied; 'and if, as has been already admitted, loveis of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarilydesire immortality together with good: wherefore love is ofimmortality. '

"I was astonished at her words and said: 'Is this really true, O thouwise Diotima?'

"And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: 'Ofthat, Socrates, you may be assured;--think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless youconsider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run fortheir children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, andeven to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall beeternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order to preservethe kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory oftheir virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay, 'she said, 'I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the betterthey are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortalvirtue; for they desire the immortal. 

"'Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to womenand beget children--this is the character of their love; theiroffspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and give them theblessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. But soulswhich are pregnant--for there certainly are men who are more creative intheir souls than in their bodies--conceive that which is proper for thesoul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions? wisdom andvirtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who aredeserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort ofwisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states andfamilies, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who inyouth has the seed of these implanted in him and is himself inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He wandersabout, seeking beauty that he may beget offspring--for in deformity hewill beget nothing--and naturally embraces the beautiful rather than thedeformed body; above all when he finds a fair and noble and well-nurtured soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such a one heis full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a goodman; and he tries to educate him; and at the touch of the beautifulwhich is ever present to his memory, even when absent, he brings forththat which he had conceived long before, and in company with him tendsthat which he brings forth; and they are married by a far nearer tie andhave a closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for thechildren who are their common offspring are fairer and more immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would notrather have their children than ordinary ones? Who would not emulatethem in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preservedtheir memory and given them everlasting glory? Or who would not havesuch children as Lycurgus left behind him to be the saviours not only ofLacedaemon, but of Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who isthe revered father of Athenian laws; and many others there are in manyother places, both among Hellenes and barbarians, who have given to theworld many noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of everykind; and many temples have been raised in their honour for the sake ofchildren such as theirs; which were never raised in honour of any one, for the sake of his mortal children. 

"'These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown ofthese, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they willlead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do myutmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who wouldproceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautifulforms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love onesuch form only--out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon hewill of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to thebeauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognise that the beauty in every formis one and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate hisviolent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms. In the next stage hewill consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than theoutward form. So that, if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bringto the birth thoughts which may improve the young, until he is compelledto contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and tounderstand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and thatpersonal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will goon to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like aservant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards andcontemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noblethoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that store hegrows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of asingle science which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I willproceed; please to give me your very best attention:

"'He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who haslearned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comestoward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (andthis, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a naturewhich in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, orwaxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul inanother, or at one time or in one relation or in one place fair, atanother time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fairto some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or anyother part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for example, in an animal, or inheaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and withoutincrease, or any change, is imparted to the evergrowing and perishingbeauties of all other things. He who, from these ascending under theinfluence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far fromthe end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to thethings of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwardsfor the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and fromone going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair formsto fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until fromfair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at lastknows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates, ' said thestranger of Mantineia, 'is that life above all others which man shouldlive, in the contemplation of beauty absolute: a beauty which if youonce beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, andgarments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you;and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only andconversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible, --youonly want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyesto see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear andunalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all thecolours and vanities of human life--thither looking, and holdingconverse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in thatcommunion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will beenabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he hashold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth andnourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, ifmortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?'

"Such, Phaedrus--and I speak not only to you, but to all of you--werethe words of Diotima; and I am persuaded of their truth. And beingpersuaded of them, I try to persuade others, that in the attainment ofthis end human nature will not easily find a helper better than Love. And therefore, also, I say that every man ought to honour him as Imyself honour him, and walk in his ways, and exhort others to do thesame, and praise the power and spirit of Love according to the measureof my ability now and ever. " [Footnote: Plato, Symp. 201. --Translated byJowett. ]

I have thought it worth while to quote this passage, in spite of itslength, partly for the sake of its own intrinsic beauty, partly becauseno account of the Greek view of life could be complete which did notinsist upon the prominence in their civilisation of the passion offriendship, and its capacity of being turned to the noblest uses. Thatthere was another side to the matter goes without saying. This passion, like any other, has its depths, as well as its heights; and the ideal offriendship conceived by Plato was as remote, perhaps, from theexperience of the average man, as Dante's presentation of the lovebetween man and woman. Still, the fact remains that it was friendship ofthis kind that supplied to the Greek that element of romance which playsso large a part in modern life; and it is to this, and not to therelations between men and women, that we must look for the highestreaches of their emotional experience. 

Section 11. Summary. 

If now we turn back to take a general view of the points that have beentreated in the present chapter, we shall notice, in the first place, that the ideal of the Greeks was the direct and natural outcome of theconditions of their life. It was not something beyond and above theexperience of the class to which it applied, but rather, was the formulaof that experience itself: in philosophical phrase, it was immanent nottranscendent. Because there really was a class of soldier-citizens freefrom the necessity of mechanical toil, possessed of competence andleisure, and devoting these advantages willingly to the service of theState, therefore their ideal of conduct took the form we have described. It was the ideal of a privileged class, and postulated for itsrealisation, not only a strenuous endeavour on the part of theindividual, but also certain adventitious gifts of fortune, such ashealth, wealth, and family connections. These were conditions thatactually obtained among members of the class concerned; so that theideal in question was not a mere abstract "ought", but an expression ofwhat, approximately at least, was realised in fact. 

But this, which was the strength of the ideal of the Greeks, was alsoits limitation. Their ethical system rested not only on universal factsof human nature, but also on a particular and transitory socialarrangement. When therefore the city State, with its sharp antithesis ofclasses, began to decline, the ideal of the soldier-citizen declinedalso. The conditions of its realisation no longer existed, and ethicalconceptions passed into a new phase. In the first place the ideal ofconduct was extended so as to apply to man as man, instead of to aparticular class in a particular form of State; and in the second place, as a corollary of this, those external goods of fortune which were theprivilege of the few, could no longer be assumed as conditions of anideal which was supposed to apply to all. Consequently the new ideal wasconceived as wholly internal. To be virtuous was to act under thecontrol of the universal reason which was supposed to dwell in man asman; and such action was independent of all the gifts of chance. It wasas open to a slave as to a freeman, to an artisan as to a soldier or astatesman. The changes and chances of this mortal life were indifferentto the virtuous man; on the rack as on the throne he was lord of himselfand free. 

This conception of the Stoics broke down the limitation of the Greekideal by extending the possibility of virtue to all mankind. But at thesame time it destroyed its sanity and balance. For it was preciselybecause of its limitation that the ideal of the Greeks was, approximately at least, an account of what was, and not merely of whatought to be. A man possessed of wealth and friends, of leisure, health, and culture, really could and did achieve the end at which he wasaiming; but the conception of one who without any such advantages, onthe contrary with positive disadvantages, poor, sickly, and a slaveperhaps, or even in prison or on the rack, should nevertheless retainunimpaired the dignity of manhood and the freedom of his own soul--, such a conception if it is not chimerical, is at any rate so remote fromcommon experience, that it is not capable of serving as a reallypractical ideal for ordinary life. But an ideal so remote that itsrealisation is despaired of, is as good as none. And the conception ofthe Stoics, if it was more comprehensive than that of Aristotle, wasalso less practical and real. 

By virtue, nevertheless, of this comprehensiveness, the Stoic ideal ismore akin to modern tendencies than that of the soldier-citizen in thecity-state. To provide for the excellence of a privileged class at theexpense of the rest of the community is becoming to us increasinglyimpossible in fact and intolerable in idea. But while admitting this, wecannot but note that the Greeks, at whatever cost, did actually achievea development of the individual more high and more complete than hasbeen even approached by any other age. Whether it will ever be possible, under totally different conditions, to realise once more that balance ofbody and soul, that sanity of ethical intuition, that frank recognitionof the whole range of our complex human nature with a view to itsharmonious organisation under the control of a lucid reason--whether itwill ever be possible again to realise this ideal, and that not only inthe members of a privileged class, but in the whole body of the State, is a question too problematical to be raised with advantage in thisplace. But it is impossible not to perceive that with the decline of theGreek city-state something passed from the world which it can nevercease to regret, and the recovery of which, if it might be, in some moreperfect form, must be the goal of its highest practical endeavours. Immense, no doubt, is the significance of the centuries that haveintervened, but it is a significance of preparation; and when we lookbeyond the means to the wished-for end, limiting our conceptions to theactual possibilities of life on earth, it is among the Greeks that weseek the record of the highest achievement of the past, and the hope ofthe highest possibilities of the future. 

CHAPTER IV

THE GREEK VIEW OF ART

Section 1. Greek Art an Expression of National Life. 

In approaching the subject of the Art of the Greeks we come to what, more plausibly than any other, may be regarded as the central point oftheir scheme of life. We have already noticed, in dealing with othertopics, how constantly the aesthetic point of view emerges andpredominates in matters with which, in the modern way of looking atthings, it appears to have no direct and natural connection. We saw, forexample, how inseparable in their religion was the element of ritual andceremony from that of idea; how in their ethical conceptions the primarynotion was that of beauty; how they aimed throughout at a perfectbalance of body and soul, and more generally, in every department, at anexpression of the inner by the outer so complete and perfect that theconception of a separation of the two became almost as impossible totheir thought as it would have been unpleasing and discordant to theirfeeling. Now such a point of view is, in fact, that of art; andphilosophers of history have been amply justified in characterising thewhole Greek epoch as pre-eminently that of Beauty. 

But if this be a true way of regarding the matter, we should expect tofind that art and beauty had, for the Greeks, a very wide and complexsignificance. There is a view of art, and it is one that appears to beprevalent in our own time, which sets it altogether outside the generaltrend of national life and ideas; which asserts that it has noconnection with ethics, religion, politics, or any of the generalconceptions which regulate action and thought; that its end is initself, and is simply beauty; and that in beauty there is no distinctionof high or low, no preference of one kind above another. Art thusconceived is, in the first place, purely subjective in character; theartist alone is the standard, and any phase or mood of his, howeverexceptional, personal and transitory, is competent to produce a work ofart as satisfying and as great as one whose inspiration was drawn from anation's life, reflecting its highest moments, and its most universalaspirations and ideals; so that, for example, a butterfly drawn by Mr. Whistler would rank as high, say, as the Parthenon. And in the secondplace, in this view of art, the subject is a matter of absoluteindifference. The standards of ordinary life, ethical or other, do notapply; there is no better or worse, but only a more or less beautiful;and the representation of a music-hall stage or a public house bar maybe as great and perfect a work of art as the Venus of Milo or theMadonna of Raphael. 

This theory, which arises naturally and perhaps inevitably in an agewhere national life has degenerated into materialism and squalor, andthe artist feels himself a stranger in a world of Philistines, we neednot here pause to examine and criticise. It has been mentioned merely toillustrate by contrast the Greek view, which was diametrically opposedto this, and valued art in proportion as it represented in perfect formthe highest and most comprehensive aspects of the national ideal. 

To say this, is not, of course, to say that the Greek conception of artwas didactic; for the word didactic, when applied to art, has usuallythe implication that the excellence of the moral is the only point to beconsidered, and that if that is good the work itself must be good. Thisidea does indeed occur in Greek thought--we find it, for example, paradoxically enough, in so great an artist as Plato--but if it had beenthe one which really determined their production, there would have beenno occasion to write this chapter, for there would have been no Greekart to write about. The truer account of the impulse that urged them tocreate is that given also by Plato in an earlier and more impassionedwork, in which he describes it as a "madness of those who are possessedby the Muses; which enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and thereinspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with theseadorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction ofposterity. But he who having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by thehelp of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man isnowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. " [Footnote:Plato, Phaedrus, 245a. --Translated by Jowett. ]

The presupposition, in fact, of all that can be said about the Greekview of art, is that primarily and to begin with they were, by nature, artists. Judged simply by the aesthetic standard, without anyconsideration of subject matter at all, or any reference tointellectual or ethical ideals, they created works of art more purelybeautiful than those of any other age or people. Their mere householdcrockery, their common pots and pans, are cast in shapes so exquisitelygraceful, and painted in designs so admirably drawn and composed, thatany one of them has a higher artistic value than the whole contents ofthe Royal Academy; and the little clay figures they used as we do chinaornaments put to shame the most ambitious efforts of modern sculpture. Who, for example, would not rather look at a Tanagra statuette than atthe equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington?

The Greeks, in fact, quite apart from any theories they may have held, were artists through and through; and that is a fact we must carry withus through the whole of our discussion. 

Section 2. Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical Points of View. 

But on the other hand, it seems to be clear from all that we can learn, that their habitual way of regarding works of art was not to judge themsimply and exclusively by their aesthetic value. On the contrary, incriticising two works otherwise equally beautiful, they would give ahigher place to the one or the other for its ethical or quasi-ethicalqualities. This indeed is what we should expect from the comprehensivesense which, as we have seen, attached in their tongue to the word whichwe render "beautiful. " The aesthetic and ethical spheres, in fact, werenever sharply distinguished by the Greeks; and it follows that as, onthe one hand, their conception of the good was identified with that ofthe beautiful, so, on the other hand, their conception of the beautifulwas identified with that of the good. Thus the most beautiful work ofart, in the Greek sense of the term, was that which made the finest andmost harmonious appeal not only to the physical but to the moral sense, and while communicating the highest and most perfect pleasure to the eyeor the ear, had also the power to touch and inform the soul with thegrace which was her moral excellence. Of this really characteristicGreek conception, this fusion, so instinctive as to be almostunconscious, of the aesthetic and ethical points of view, no betterillustration could be given than the following passage from the Republicof Plato, where the philosopher is describing the effect of beautifulworks of art, and especially of music, on the moral and intellectualcharacter of his imaginary citizens:

"'We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moraldeformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed uponmany a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until theysilently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul. Letour artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature ofthe beautiful and graceful: then will our youth dwell in a land ofhealth, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything;and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye andear, like a healthgiving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly drawthe soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beautyof reason. '

"'There can be no nobler training than that, ' he replied. 

"'And therefore, ' I said, "'Glaucon, musical training is a more potentinstrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their wayinto the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educatedgraceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because hewho has received this true education of the inner being will mostshrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a truetaste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul thegood, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reasonwhy: and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend withwhom his education has made him long familiar. "[Footnote: Plato, Republic III. 401. --Translated by Jowett. ]

This fusion of the ideas of the beautiful and the good is the centralpoint in the Greek Theory of Art; and it enables us to understand how itwas that they conceived art to be educational. Its end, in their view, was not only pleasure, though pleasure was essential to it; but also, and just as much, edification. Plato, indeed, here again exaggeratingthe current view, puts the edification above the pleasure. He criticisesHomer as he might criticise a moral philosopher, pointing out theinadequacy, from an ethical point of view, of his conception of heavenand of the gods, and dismissing as injurious and of bad example toyouthful citizens the whole tissue of passionate human feeling, theirrepressible outbursts of anger and grief and fear, by virtue of whichalone the Iliad and the Odyssey are immortal poems instead of ethicaltracts. And finally, with a half reluctant assent to the course of hisown argument, he excludes the poets altogether from his ideal republic, on the ground that they encourage their hearers in that indulgence ofemotion which it is the object of every virtuous man to repress. Theconclusion of Plato, by his own admission, was half paradoxical, and itcertainly never recommended itself to such a nation of artists as theGreeks. But it illustrates, nevertheless, the general bent of theirviews of art, that tendency to the identification of the beautiful andthe good, which, while it was never pushed so far as to choke art withdidactics--for Plato himself, even against his own will, is a poet--yetserved to create a standard of taste which was ethical as much asaesthetic, and made the judgment of beauty also a judgment of moralworth. 

Quite in accordance with this view we find that the central aim of allGreek art is the representation of human character and human ideals. Theinterpretation of "nature" for its own sake (in the narrower sense inwhich "nature" is opposed to man) is a modern and romantic developmentthat would have been unintelligible to a Greek. Not that the Greeks werewithout a sense of what we call the beauties of nature, but that theytreat them habitually, not as the centre of interest, but as thebackground to human activity. The most beautiful descriptions of natureto be found in Greek poetry occur, incidentally only, in the choral odesintroduced into their dramas; and among all their pictures of which wehave any record there is not one that answers to the description of alandscape; the subject is always mythological or historical, and therepresentation of nature merely a setting for the main theme. And on theother hand, the art for which the Greeks are most famous, and in whichthey have admittedly excelled all other peoples, is that art ofsculpture whose special function it is not only to represent but toidealise the human form, and which is peculiarly adapted to embody forthe sense not only physical but ethical types. And, more remarkablestill, as we shall have occasion to observe later, the very art whichmodern men regard as the most devoid of all intellectual content, themost incommensurable with any standard except that of pure beauty--Irefer of course to the art of music--was invested by the Greeks with adefinite moral content and worked into their general theory of art as adirect interpretation of human life. The excellence of man, in short, directly or indirectly, was the point about which Greek art turned; thatexcellence was at once aesthetic and ethical; and the representation ofwhat was beautiful involved also the representation of what was good. This point we will now proceed to illustrate more in detail inconnection with the various special branches of art. 

Section 3. Sculpture and Painting. 

Let us take, first, the plastic arts, sculpture and painting; and tobring into clear relief the Greek point of view let us contrast with itthat of the modern "impressionist. " To the impressionist a picture issimply an arrangement of colour and line; the subject represented isnothing, the treatment everything. It would be better, on the whole, noteven to know what objects are depicted; and, to judge the picture by acomparison with the objects, or to consider what is the worth of theobjects in themselves, or what we might think of them if we came acrossthem in the connections of ordinary life, is simply to misconceive thewhole meaning of a picture. For the artist and for the man whounderstands art, all scales and standards disappear except that of thepurely aesthetic beauty which consists in harmony of line and tone; themost perfect human form has no more value than a splash of mud; orrather both mud and human form disappear as irrelevant, and all that isleft for judgment is the arrangement of colour and form originallysuggested by those accidental and indifferent phenomena. 

In the Greek view, on the other hand, though we certainly cannot saythat the subject was everything and the treatment nothing (for thatwould be merely the annihilation of art) yet we may assert that, grantedthe treatment, granted that the work was beautiful (the first andindispensable requirement) its worth was determined by the character ofthe subject. Sculpture and painting, in fact, to the Greeks, were notmerely a medium of aesthetic pleasure; they were ways of expressing andinterpreting national life. As such they were subordinated to religion. The primary end of sculpture was to make statues of the gods and heroes;the primary end of painting was to represent mythological scenes; and ineither case the purely aesthetic pleasure was also a means to areligious experience. 

Let us take, for example, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the most famousof the works of Pheidias. This colossal figure of ivory and gold wasdoubtless, according to all the testimony we possess, from a merelyaesthetic point of view, among the most consummate creations of humangenius. But what was the main aim of the artist who made it? what themain effect on the spectator? The artist had designed and the spectatorseemed to behold a concrete image of that Homeric Zeus who was thecentre of his religious consciousness--the Zeus who "nodded his darkbrow, and the ambrosial locks waved from the King's immortal head, andhe made great Olympus quake. " [Footnote: Iliad i. 528. --Translated byLang, Leaf and Myers. ] "Those who approach the temple, " says Lucian, "donot conceive that they see ivory from the Indies or gold from the minesof Thrace; no, but the very son of Kronos and Rhea, transported byPheidias to earth and set to watch over the lonely plain of Pisa. " "Hewas, " says Dion Chrysostom, "the type of that unattained ideal, Hellascome to unity with herself; in expression at once mild and awful, asbefits the giver of life and all good gifts, the common father, saviourand guardian of men; dignified as a king, tender as a father, awful asgiver of laws, kind as protector of suppliants and friends, simple andgreat as giver of increase and wealth; revealing, in a word, in form andcountenance, the whole array of gifts and qualities proper to hissupreme divinity. "

The description is characteristic of the whole aim of Greek sculpture, --the representation not only of beauty, but of character, not only ofcharacter but of character idealised. The statues of the various godsderive their distinguishing individuality not merely from theirassociation with conventional symbols, but from a concrete reproduction, in features, expression, drapery, pose, of the ethical and intellectualqualities for which they stand. An Apollo differs in type from a Zeus, an Athene from a Demeter; and in every case the artist works from anintellectual conception, bent not simply on a graceful harmony of lines, but on the representation of a character at once definite and ideal. 

Primarily, then, Greek sculpture was an expression of the nationalreligion; and therefore, also, of the national life. For, as we saw, thecult of the gods was the centre, not only of the religious but of thepolitical consciousness of Greece; and an art which was born andflourished in the temple and the sacred grove, naturally became theexponent of the ideal aspect of the state. It was thus, for example, that the Parthenon at Athens was at once the centre of the worship ofAthene, and a symbol of the corporate life over which she presided; thestatue of the goddess having as its appropriate complement the friezeover which the spirit of the city moved in stone. And thus, too, thestatues of the victors at the Olympian games were dedicated in thesacred precinct, as a memorial of what was not only an athletic meeting, but also at once a centre of Hellenic unity and the most consummateexpression of that aspect of their culture which contributed at least asmuch to their aesthetic as to their physical perfection. 

Sculpture, in fact, throughout, was subordinated to religion, andthrough religion to national life; and it was from this that it derivedits ideal and intellectual character. And, so far as our authoritiesenable us to judge, the same is true of painting. The great pictures ofwhich we have descriptions were painted to adorn temples and publicbuildings, and represented either mythological or national themes. Such, for example, was the great work of Polygnotus at Delphi, in which wasdepicted on the one hand the sack of Troy, on the other the descent ofOdysseus into Hades; and such his representation of the battle ofMarathon, in the painted porch that led to the Acropolis of Athens. Andeven the vase paintings of which we have innumerable examples, and whichare mere decorations of common domestic utensils, have often enough somestory of gods and heroes for their theme, whereby over and above theirpurely aesthetic value they made their appeal to the general religiousconsciousness of Greece. Painting, like sculpture, had its end, in asense, outside itself; and from this very fact derived its peculiardignity, simplicity, and power. 

From this account of the plastic art of the Greeks it follows as asimple corollary, that their aim was not merely to reproduce but totranscend nature. For their subject was gods and heroes, and heroes andgods were superior to men. Of this idealising tendency we have insculpture evidence enough in the many examples which have been preservedto us; and with regard to painting there is curious literary testimonyto the same effect. Aristotle, for example, remarks that "even if it isimpossible that men should be such as Zeuxis painted them, yet it isbetter that he should paint them so; for the example ought to excel thatfor which it is an example. " [Footnote: Artist, Poet, xxv. --1461. 6. 12. ]

And in an imaginary conversation recorded between Socrates andParrhasius the artist admits without any hesitation that more pleasureis to be derived from pictures of men who are morally good than fromthose of men who are morally bad. In the Greek view, in fact, as we saw, physical and moral excellence went together, and it was excellence theysought to depict in their art; not merely aesthetic beauty, though thatwas a necessary presupposition, but on the top of that, ideal types ofcharacter representative of their conception of the hero and the god. Art, in a word, was subordinate to the ethical ideal; or rather theethical and aesthetic ideals were not yet dissociated; and the greatestartists the world has ever known worked deliberately under the directionand inspiration of the ideas that controlled and determined the life oftheir time. 

Section 4. Music and the Dance. 

Turning now from the plastic arts to that other group which the Greeksclassed together under the name of "Music"--namely music, in thenarrower sense, dancing and poetry--we find still more clearlyemphasised and more elaborately worked out the subordination ofaesthetic to ethical and religious ends. "Music, " in fact, as they usedthe term, was the centre of Greek education, and its moral characterthus became a matter of primary importance. By it were formed, it wassupposed, the mind and temper of the citizens, and so the wholeconstitution of the state. "The introduction of a new kind of music, "says Plato, "must be shunned as imperilling the whole state; sincestyles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most importantpolitical institutions. " "The new style, " he goes on, "gradually gaininga lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs; and fromthese it issues in greater force, and makes its way into mutualcompacts: and from compacts it goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturningeverything, both in public and in private. " [Footnote: Plato, Rep. IV. 4240. --Translated by Davies and Vaughan. ] And as in his Republic he haddefined the character of the poetry that should be admitted into hisideal state, so in the "Laws" he specially defines the character of themelodies and dances, regarding them as the most important factor indetermining and preserving the manners and institutions of the citizens. 

Nothing, at first sight, to a modern mind, could, be stranger than thispoint of view. That poetry has a bearing on conduct we can indeedunderstand, though we do not make poetry the centre of our system ofeducation; but that moral effects should be attributed to music and todancing and that these should be regarded as of such importance as toinfluence profoundly the whole constitution of a state, will appear tothe majority of modern men an unintelligible paradox. 

Yet no opinion of the Greeks is more profoundly characteristic than thisof their whole way of regarding life, and none would better repay acareful study. That moral character should be attributed to theinfluence of music is only one and perhaps the most strikingillustration of that general identification by the Greeks of the ethicaland the aesthetic standards on which we have so frequently had occasionto insist. Virtue, in their conception, was not a hard conformity to alaw felt as alien to the natural character; it was the free expressionof a beautiful and harmonious soul. And this very metaphor "harmonious, "which they so constantly employ, involves the idea of a close connectionbetween music and morals. Character, in the Greek view, is a certainproportion of the various elements of the soul, and the right characteris the right proportion. But the relation in which these elements standto one another could be directly affected, it was found, by means ofmusic; not only could the different emotions be excited or assuaged invarious degrees, but the whole relation of the emotional to the rationalelement could be regulated and controlled by the appropriate melody andmeasure. That this connection between music and morals really does existis recognised, in a rough and general way, by most people who have anymusical sense. There are rhythms and tunes, for example, that are feltto be vulgar and base, and others that are felt to be ennobling; somemusic, Wagner's, for instance, is frequently called immoral; Gounod isdescribed as enervating, Beethoven as bracing, and the like; and howeverabsurd such comments may often appear to be in detail, underlying themis the undoubtedly well-grounded sense that various kinds of music havevarious ethical qualities. But it is just this side of music, which hasbeen neglected in modern times, that was the one on which the Greekslaid most stress. Infinitely inferior to the moderns in the mechanicalresources of the art, they had made, it appears, a far finer and closeranalysis of its relation to emotional states; with the result that evenin music, which we describe as the purest of the arts, congratulatingourselves on its absolute dissociation from all definite intellectualconceptions, --even here the standard of the Greeks was as much ethicalas aesthetic, and the style of music was distinguished and its valueappraised, not only by the pleasure to be derived from it, but also bythe effect it tended to produce on character. 

Of this position we have a clear and definite statement in Aristotle. Virtue, he says, consists in loving and hating in the proper way, andimplies, therefore, a delight in the proper emotions; but emotions ofany kind are produced by melody and rhythm; therefore by music a manbecomes accustomed to feeling the right emotions. Music has thus thepower to form character; and the various kinds of music, based on thevarious modes, may be distinguished by their effects on character--one, for example, working in the direction of melancholy, another ofeffeminacy; one encouraging abandonment, another self-control, anotherenthusiasm, and so on through the series. It follows that music may bejudged not merely by the pleasure it gives, but by the character of itsmoral influence; pleasure, indeed, is essential or there would be noart; but the different kinds of pleasure given by different kinds ofmusic are to be distinguished not merely by quantity, but by quality. One will produce a right pleasure of which the good man will approve, and which will have a good effect on character; another will be inexactly the opposite case. Or, as Plato puts it, "the excellence ofmusic is to be measured by pleasure. But the pleasure must not be thatof chance persons; the fairest music is that which delights the best andbest-educated, and especially that which delights the one man who ispre-eminent in virtue and education. " [Footnote: Plato Laws. II. 6586. --Translated by Jowett. ]

We see then that even pure music, to the Greeks, had a distinct anddefinite ethical bearing. But this ethical influence was furtheremphasised by the fact that it was not their custom to enjoy their musicpure. What they called "music, " as has been already pointed out, was anintimate union of melody, verse and dance, so that the particularemotional meaning of the rhythm and tune employed was brought out intoperfect lucidity by the accompanying words and gestures. Thus we find, for example, that Plato characterises a tendency in his own time to theseparation of melody and verse as a sign of a want of true artistictaste; for, he says, it is very hard, in the absence of words, todistinguish the exact character of the mood which the rhythm and tune issupposed to represent. In this connection it may be interesting to referto the use of the "_leit-motiv_" in modern music. Here too aparticular idea, if not a particular set of words, is associated with aparticular musical phrase; the intention of the practice being clearlythe same as that which is indicated in the passage just quoted, namelyto add precision and definiteness to the vague emotional content of puremusic. 

And this determining effect of words was further enhanced, in the musicof the Greeks, by the additional accompaniment of the dance. Theemotional character conveyed to the mind by the words and to the ear bythe tune, was further explained to the eye by gesture, pose, and beat offoot; the combination of the three modes of expression forming thus inthe Greek sense a single "imitative" art. The dance as well as themelody came thus to have a definite ethical significance; "itimitates, " says Aristotle, "character, emotion, and action. " And Platoin his ideal republic would regulate by law the dances no less than themelodies to be employed, distinguishing them too as morally good ormorally bad, and encouraging the one while he forbids the other. 

The general Greek view of music which has thus been briefly expounded, the union of melody and rhythm with poetry and the dance in view of adefinite and consciously intended ethical character, may be illustratedby the following passage of Plutarch, in which he describes the music invogue at Sparta. The whole system, it will be observed, is designed witha view to that military courage which was the virtue most prized in theSpartan state, and the one about which all their institutions centred. Music at Sparta actually was, what Plato would have had it in his idealrepublic, a public and state-regulated function; and even that vigorousrace which of all the Greeks came nearest to being Philistines ofvirtue, thought fit to lay a foundation purely aesthetic for theirsevere and soldierly ideal. 

"Their instruction in music and verse, " says Plutarch, "was not lesscarefully attended to than their habits of grace and good-breeding inconversation. And their very songs had a life and spirit in them thatinflamed and possessed men's minds with an enthusiasm and ardour foraction; the style of them was plain and without affectation; the subjectalways serious and moral; most usually, it was in praise of such men ashad died in defence of their country, or in derision of those that hadbeen cowards; the former they declared happy and glorified; the life ofthe latter they described as most miserable and abject. There were alsovaunts of what they would do and boasts of what they had done, varyingwith the various ages; as, for example, they had three choirs in theirsolemn festivals, the first of the old men, the second of the young men, and the last of the children; the old men began thus:

 We once were young and brave and strong;

The young men answered them, singing;

 And we're so now, come on and try:

The children came last and said:

 But we'll be strongest by and bye. 

Indeed if we will take the pains to consider their compositions, and theairs on the flute to which they marched when going to battle, we shallfind that Terpander and Pindar had reason to say that music and valourwere allied. " [Footnote: Plutarch, Lycurgus, ch. 21. --Clough's ed. ]

The way of regarding music which is illustrated in this passage, and inall that is said on the subject by Greek writers, is so typical of thewhole point of view of the Greeks, that we may be pardoned for insistingonce again on the attitude of mind which it implies. Music, as we saw, had an ethical value to the Greeks; but that is not to say that they putthe ethics first, and the music second, using the one as a mere tool ofthe other. Rather an ethical state of mind was also, in their view, amusical one. In a sense something more than metaphorical, virtue was aharmony of the soul. The musical end was thus identical with the ethicalone. The most beautiful music was also the morally best, and _viceversa_; virtue was not prior to beauty, nor beauty to virtue; theywere two aspects of the same reality, two ways of regarding a singlefact; and if aesthetic effects were supposed to be amenable to ethicaljudgment, it was only because ethical judgments at bottom wereaesthetic. The "good" and the "beautiful" were one and the same thing;that is the first and last word of the Greek ideal. 

And while thus, on the one hand, virtue was invested with thespontaneity and delight of art, on the other, art derived from itsassociation with ethics emotional precision. In modern times the end ofmusic is commonly conceived to be simply and without more ado theexcitement of feeling. Its value is measured by the intensity ratherthan the quality of the emotion which it is capable of arousing; and theauditor abandons himself to a casual succession of highly wrought moodsas bewildering in the actual experience as it is exhausting in theafter-effects. In Greek music, on the other hand, if we may trust ouraccounts, while the intensity of the feeling excited must have been farless than that which it is in the power of modern instrumentation toevoke, its character was perfectly simple and definite. Melody, rhythm, gesture and words, were all consciously adapted to the production of asingle precisely conceived emotional effect; the listener was in aposition clearly to understand and appraise the value of the moodexcited in him; instead of being exhausted and confused by a chaos ofvague and conflicting emotion he had the sense of relief whichaccompanies the deliverance of a definite passion, and returned to hisordinary business "purged", as they said, and tranquillised, by aprocess which he understood, directed to an end of which he approved. 

Section 5. Poetry. 

If now, as we have seen, in the plastic arts, and in an art whichappears to us so pure as music, the Greeks perceived and valued, alongwith the immediate pleasure of beauty, a definite ethical character andbent, much more was this the case with poetry, whose material isconceptions and ideas. The works of the poets, and especially of Homer, were in fact to the Greeks all that moral treatises are to us; orrather, instead of learning their lessons in abstract terms, they learntthem out of the concrete representation of life. Poetry was the basis oftheir education, the guide and commentary of their practice, theinspiration of their speculative thought. If they have a proposition toadvance, they must back it by a citation: if they have a counsel tooffer, they must prop it with a verse. Not only for delight, but forinspiration, warning and example, they were steeped from childhoodonwards in an ocean of melodious discourse; their national epics were tothem what the Bible was to the Puritans; and for every conjunction offortune, for every issue of home or state, they found therein a text toprompt or reinforce their decision. Of this importance of poetry in thelife of ancient Greece, and generally of the importance of music andart, the following passage from Plato is a striking illustration: "Whenthe boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what iswritten, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put into hishands the works of great poets, which he reads at school; in these arecontained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia ofancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in orderthat he may imitate or emulate them and desire to become like them. Thenagain the teachers of the lyre take similar care that their youngdisciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they havetaught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of otherexcellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to musicand make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children'ssouls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle and harmonious andrhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; for the life ofman in every part has need of harmony and rhythm, " [Footnote: PlatoProt. 325c. --Translated by Jowett. ]

From this conception of poetry as a storehouse of practical wisdom thetransition is easy to a purely ethical judgment of its value; and thattransition, as has been already noted, was actually made by Plato, whoeven goes so far as to prescribe to poets the direct inculcation of suchmorals as are proper to a tract, as that the good and just man is happyeven though he be poor, and the bad and unjust man miserable even thoughhe be rich. This didacticism, no doubt, is a parody; but it is a parodyof the normal Greek view, that the excellence of a poem is closely boundup with the compass and depth of its whole ethical content, and is notto be measured, as many moderns maintain, merely by the aesthetic beautyof its form. When Strabo says, "it is impossible to be a good poetunless you are first a good man, " he is expressing the common opinion ofthe Greeks that the poet is to be judged not merely as an artist but asan interpreter of life; and the same presupposition underlies the remarkof Aristotle that poets may be classified according as the charactersthey represent are as good as, better, or worse than the average man. 

But perhaps the most remarkable illustration of this way of regardingpoetry is the passage in the "Frogs" of Aristophanes, where the comedianhas introduced a controversy between Aeschylus and Euripides as to therelative merit of their works, and has made the decision turn almostentirely on moral considerations, the question being really whether orno Euripides is to be regarded as a corrupter of his countrymen. In thecourse of the discussion Aeschylus is made to give expression to a viewof poetry which clearly enough Aristophanes endorses himself, and whichno doubt would be accepted by the majority of his audience. He appealsto all antiquity to shew that poets have always been the instructors ofmankind, and that it is for this that they are held in honour. 

 "Look to traditional history, look To antiquity, primitive, early, remote; See there, what a blessing illustrious poets Conferr'd on mankind, in the centuries past. Orpheus instructed mankind in religion, Reclaim'd them from bloodshed and barbarous rites; Musaeus deliver'd the doctrine of med'cine, And warnings prophetic for ages to come; Next came old Hesiod, teaching us husbandry, Ploughing, and sowing, and rural affairs, Rural economy, rural astronomy, Homely morality, labour, and thrift; Homer himself, our adorable Homer, What was his title to praise and renown? What, but the worth of the lessons he taught us Discipline, arms, and equipment of war?" [Footnote: Aristoph. Frogs, 1030. --Translated by Frere. ]

While then there is, as we should naturally expect, plenty of Greekpoetry which is simply the spontaneous expression of passionate feeling, unrestrained by the consideration of ethical or other ends; yet if wetake for our type (as we are fairly entitled to do, from the prominentplace it held in Greek life), not the lyrics but the drama of Greece, weshall find that in poetry even (as was to be expected) to a higherdegree than in music and the plastic arts, the beauty sought andachieved is one that lies within the limits of certain definite moralpre-suppositions. Let us consider this point in some detail; and firstlet us examine the character of Greek tragedy. 

Section 6. Tragedy. 

The character of Greek tragedy was determined from the very beginning bythe fact of its connection with religion. The season at which it wasperformed was the festival of Dionysus; about his altar the chorusdanced; and the object of the performance was the representation ofscenes out of the lives of ancient heroes. The subject of the drama wasthus strictly prescribed; it must be selected out of a cycle of legendsfamiliar to the audience; and whatever freedom might be allowed to thepoet in his treatment of the theme, whatever the reflections he mightembroider upon it, the speculative or ethical views, the criticism ofcontemporary life, all must be subservient to the main object originallyproposed, the setting forth, for edification as well as for delight, ofsome episodes in the lives of those heroes of the past who wereconsidered not only to be greater than their descendants, but to be thesons of gods and worthy themselves of worship as divine. 

By this fundamental condition the tragedy of the Greeks is distinguishedsharply, on the one hand from the Shakespearian drama, on the other fromthe classical drama of the French. The tragedies of Shakespeare aredevoid, one might say, or at least comparatively devoid, of allpreconceptions. He was free to choose what subject he liked and to treatit as he would; and no sense of obligation to religious or other pointsof view, no feeling for traditions descended from a sacred past and notlightly to be handled by those who were their trustees for the future, sobered or restrained for evil or for good his half-barbaric genius. Heflung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discovererof a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from itnow the cynicism of Measure for Measure, now the despair of Hamlet andof Lear, now the radiant magnanimity of the Tempest, and departedleaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series of mutuallyincompatible landscapes. 

What Shakespeare gave, in short, was a many-sided representation oflife; what the Greek dramatist gave was an interpretation. But aninterpretation not simply personal to himself, but representative of thenational tradition and belief. The men whose deeds and passions henarrated were the patterns and examples on the one hand, on the otherthe warnings of his race; the gods who determined the fortunes theysang, were working still among men; the moral laws that ruled the pastruled the present too; and the history of the Hellenic race moved, undera visible providence, from its divine origin onward to an end that wouldbe prosperous or the reverse according as later generations shouldcontinue to observe the worship and traditions of their fathersdescended from heroes and gods. 

And it is the fact that in this sense it was representative of thenational consciousness, that distinguishes the Greek tragedy from theclassical drama of the French. For the latter, though it imitated theancients in outward form, was inspired with a totally different spirit. The kings and heroes whose fortunes it narrated were not the ancestorsof the French race; they had no root in its affections, no connectionwith its religious beliefs, no relation to its ethical conceptions. Thewhole ideal set forth was not that which really inspired the nation, butat best that which was supposed to inspire the court; and the wholedrama, like a tree transplanted to an alien soil, withers and dies forlack of the nourishment which the tragedy of the Greeks unconsciouslyimbibed from its encompassing air of national tradition. 

Such then was the general character of the Greek tragedy--aninterpretation of the national ideal. Let us now proceed to follow outsome of the consequences involved in this conception. 

In the first place, the theme represented is the life and fate ofancient heroes--of personages, that is to say, greater than ordinarymen, both for good and for evil, in their qualities and in theirachievements, pregnant with fateful issues, makers or marrers of thefortunes of the world. Tragic and terrible their destiny may be, butnever contemptible or squalid. Behind all suffering, behind sin andcrime, must lie a redeeming magnanimity. A complete villain, saysAristotle, is not a tragic character, for he has no hold upon thesympathies; if he prosper, it is an outrage on common human feeling; ifhe fall into disaster, it is merely what he deserves. Neither is itadmissible to represent the misfortunes of a thoroughly good man, forthat is merely painful and distressing; and least of all is it tolerablegratuitously to introduce mere baseness, or madness, or otheraberrations from human nature. The true tragic hero is a man of highplace and birth who having a nature not ignoble has fallen into sin andpays in suffering the penalty of his act. Nothing could throw more lighton the distinguishing characteristics of the Greek drama than these fewremarks of Aristotle, and nothing could better indicate how close, inthe Greek mind, was the connection between aesthetic and ethicaljudgments. The canon of Aristotle would exclude as proper themes fortragedy the character and fate, say, of Richard III. --the absolutely badman suffering his appropriate desert; or of Kent and Cordelia--theabsolutely good, brought into unmerited affliction; and that not merelybecause such themes offend the moral sense, but because by so offendingthey destroy the proper pleasure of the tragic art. The whole aestheticeffect is limited by ethical presuppositions; and to outrage these is todefeat the very purpose of tragedy. 

Specially interesting in this connection are the strictures passed onEuripides in the passage of the "Frogs" of Aristophanes to whichallusion has already been made. Euripides is there accused of loweringthe tragic art by introducing--what? Women in love! The central theme ofmodern tragedy! It is the boast of Aeschylus that there is not one ofhis plays which touches on this subject:--

 "I never allow'd of your lewd Sthenoboeas Or filthy detestable Phaedras--not I! Indeed I should doubt if my drama throughout Exhibit an instance of woman in love!" [Footnote: Aristoph. Frogs, 1043. --Translated by Frere. ]

And there can be little doubt that with a Greek audience this wouldcount to him as a merit, and that the shifting of the centre of interestby Euripides from the sterner passions of heroes and of kings to thistenderer phase of human feeling would be felt even by those whom itcharmed to be a declension from the height of the older tragedy. 

And to this limitation of subject corresponds a limitation of treatment. The Greek tragedy is composed from a definite point of view, with theaim not merely to represent but also to interpret the theme. Underlyingthe whole construction of the plot, the dialogue, the reflections, thelyric interludes, is the intention to illustrate some general moral law, some common and typical problem, some fundamental truth. Of the elderdramatists at any rate, Aeschylus and Sophocles, one may even say thatit was their purpose--however imperfectly achieved--to "justify the waysof God to man. " To represent suffering as the punishment of sin is theconstant bent of Aeschylus; to justify the law of God against thepresumption of man is the central idea of Sophocles. In either case thewhole tone is essentially religious. To choose such a theme as Lear, totreat it as Shakespeare has treated it, to leave it, as it were, bleeding from a thousand wounds, in mute and helpless entreaty for thehealing that is never to be vouchsafed--this would have been repulsive, if not impossible, to a Greek tragedian. Without ever descending fromconcrete art to the abstractions of mere moralising, without everattempting to substitute a verbal formula for the full and complexperception that grows out of a representation of life, the ancientdramatists were nevertheless, in the whole apprehension of their theme, determined by a more or less conscious speculative bias; the world tothem was not merely a splendid chaos, it was a divine plan; and even inits darkest hollows, its passes most perilous and bleak, they have theirhand, though doubtful perhaps and faltering, upon the clue that is tolead them up to the open sky. 

It is consonant with this account of the nature of Greek tragedy that itshould have laid more stress upon action than upon character. Theinterest was centred on the universal bearing of certain acts andsituations, on the light which the experience represented threw on thewhole tendency and course of human life, not on the sentiments andmotives of the particular personages introduced. The characters arebroad and simple, not developing for the most part, but fixed, andfitted therefore to be the mediums of direct action, of simple issues, and typical situations. In the Greek tragedy the general point of viewpredominates over the idiosyncrasies of particular persons. It is humannature that is represented in the broad, not this or that highlyspecialised variation; and what we have indicated as the general aim, the interpretation of life, is never obscured by the predominance ofexceptional and so to speak, accidental characteristics. Man is thesubject of the Greek drama; the subject of the modern novel is Tom andDick. 

Finally, to the realisation of this general aim, the whole form of theGreek drama was admirably adapted. It consisted very largely ofconversations between two persons, representing two opposed points ofview, and giving occasion for an almost scientific discussion of everyproblem of action raised in the play; and between these conversationswere inserted lyric odes in which the chorus commented on the situation, bestowed advice or warning, praise or blame, and finally summed up themoral of the whole. Through the chorus, in fact, the poet could speak inhis own person, and impose upon the whole tragedy any tone which hedesired. Periodically he could drop the dramatist and assume thepreacher; and thus ensure that his play should be, what we have seen wasits recognised ideal, not merely a representation but an interpretationof life. 

But this without ceasing to be a work of art. In attempting to analysein abstract terms the general character of the Greek tragedy we havenecessarily thrown into the shade what after all was its primary andmost essential aspect; an aspect, however, of which a full appreciationcould only be attained not by a mere perusal of the text, but by what isunfortunately for ever beyond our power, the witnessing of an actualrepresentation as it was given on the Greek stage. For from a purelyaesthetic point of view the Greek drama must be reckoned among the mostperfect of art forms. 

Taking place in the open air, on the sunny slope of a hill, valley andplain or islanded sea stretching away below to meet the blazing blue ofa cloudless sky, the moving pageant, thus from the first set in tunewith nature, brought to a focus of splendour the rays of every separateart. More akin to an opera than to a play it had, as its basis, music. For the drama had developed out of the lyric ode, and retainedthroughout what was at first its only element, the dance and song of amimetic chorus. By this centre of rhythmic motion and pregnant melodythe burden of the tale was caught up and echoed and echoed again, as theliving globe divided into spheres of answering song, the clear andprecise significance of the plot, never obscure to the head, being thusbrought home in music to the passion of the heart, the idea embodied inlyric verse, the verse transfigured by song, and song and versereflected as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of the limbsthey stirred to consonance of motion. And while such was the characterof the odes that broke the action of the play, the action itself was anappeal not less to the ear and to the eye than to the passion and theintellect. The circumstances of the representation, the huge auditoriumin the open air, lent themselves less to "acting" in our sense of theterm, than to attitude and declamation. The actors raised on high bootsabove their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tonesmechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not uponfacial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, butupon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation ofthat majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by arapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus becomemoving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep ofmusic between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and the spectatorwithout being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm ofimpassioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actoron the scene, received an impression based throughout on that clearintellectual foundation, that almost prosaic lucidity of sentiment andplot, which is preserved to us in the written text, but raised by theaccompanying appeal to the sense, made as it must have been made by suchartists as the Greeks, by the grouping of forms and colours, therecitative, the dance and the song, to such a greatness and height ofaesthetic significance as can hardly have been realized by any otherform of art production. 

The nearest modern analogy to what the ancient drama must have been isto be found probably in the operas of Wagner, who indeed was stronglyinfluenced by the tragedy of the Greeks. It was his ideal like theirs, to combine the various branches of art, employing not only music butpoetry, sculpture, painting and the dance, for the representation of hisdramatic theme; and his conception also to make art the interpreter oflife, reflecting in a national drama the national consciousness, thehighest action and the deepest passion and thought of the German race. To consider how far in this attempt he falls short of or goes beyond theachievement of the Greeks, and to examine the wide dissimilarities thatunderlie the general identity of aim, would be to wander too far afieldfrom our present theme. But the comparison may be recommended to thosewho are anxious to form a concrete idea of what the effect of a Greektragedy may have been, and to clothe in imagination the dead bones ofthe literary text with the flesh and blood of a representation to thesense. 

Meantime, to assist the reader to realise with somewhat greaterprecision the bearing of the foregoing remarks, it may be worth while togive an outline sketch of one of the most celebrated of the Greektragedies, the "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus. 

The hero of the drama belongs to that heroic house whose tragic historywas among the most terrible and the most familiar to a Greek audience. Tantalus, the founder of the family, for some offence against the gods, was suffering in Hades the punishment which is christened by his name. His son Pelops was stained with the blood of Myrtilus. Of the two sonsof the next generation, Thyestes seduced the wife of his brother Atreus;and Atreus in return killed the sons of Thyestes, and made the fatherunwittingly eat the flesh of the murdered boys. Agamemnon, son ofAtreus, to propitiate Artemis, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and inrevenge was murdered by Clytemnestra his wife. And Clytemnestra waskilled by Orestes, her son, in atonement for the death of Agamemnon. Forgenerations the race had been dogged by crime and punishment; and inchoosing for his theme the murder of Agamemnon the dramatist couldassume in his audience so close a familiarity with the past history ofthe House that he could call into existence by an allusive word thatsombre background of woe to enhance the terrors of his actualpresentation. The figures he brought into vivid relief joined hands withmenacing forms that faded away into the night of the future and thepast; while above them hung, intoning doom, the phantom host of Furies. 

Yet at the outset of the drama all promises well. The watchman on theroof of the palace, in the tenth year of his watch, catches sight atlast of the signal fire that announces the capture of Troy and thespeedy return of Agamemnon. With joy he proclaims to the House the long-delayed and welcome news; yet even in the moment of exultation lets slipa doubtful phrase hinting at something behind, which he dares not name, something which may turn to despair the triumph of victory. Hereuponenter the chorus of Argive elders, chanting as they move to the measureof a stately march. They sing how ten years before Agamemnon andMenelaus had led forth the host of Greece, at the bidding of the Zeuswho protects hospitality, to recover for Menelaus Helen his wife, treacherously stolen by Paris. Then, as they take their places and begintheir rhythmic dance, in a strain of impassioned verse that is at once anarrative and a lyric hymn, they tell, or rather, present in a series ofvivid images, flashing as by illumination of lightning out of a night ofveiled and sombre boding, the tale of the deed that darkened thestarting of the host--the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the goddess whosewrath was delaying the fleet at Aulis. In verse, in music, in pantomime, the scene lives again--the struggle in the father's heart, theinsistence of his brother chiefs, the piteous glance of the girl, and atlast the unutterable end; while above and through it all rings like aknell of fate the refrain that is the motive of the whole drama:

"Sing woe, sing woe, but may the Good prevail. "

At the conclusion of the ode enters Clytemnestra. She makes a formalannouncement to the chorus of the fall of Troy; describes the course ofthe signal-fire from beacon to beacon as it sped, and pictures inimagination the scenes even then taking place in the doomed city. On herwithdrawal the chorus break once more into song and dance. To the musicof a solemn hymn they point the moral of the fall of Troy, the certaindoom of violence and fraud descended upon Paris and his House. Once morethe vivid pictures flash from the night of woe--Helen in her fatalbeauty stepping lightly to her doom, the widower's nights of mourninghaunted by the ghost of love, the horrors of the war that followed, theslain abroad and the mourners at home, the change of living flesh andblood for the dust and ashes of the tomb. At last with a return to theiroriginal theme, the doom of insolence, the chorus close their ode andannounce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships theyhave suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestraannounces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, hersufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospectof his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithfulwatcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Thenfollows another choral ode, similar in theme to the last, dwelling onthe woe brought by the act of Paris upon Troy, the change of the bridalsong to the trump of war and the dirge of death; contrasting, in aprofusion of splendid tropes, the beauty of Helen with the curse towhich it is bound; and insisting once more on the doom that attendsinsolence and pride. At the conclusion of this song the measure changesto a march, and the chorus turn to welcome the triumphant king. Agamemnon enters, and behind him the veiled and silent figure of awoman. After greeting the gods of his House, the King, in brief andstilted phrase, acknowledges the loyalty of the chorus, but hints atmuch that is amiss which it must be his first charge to set right. Hereupon enters Clytemnestra, and in a speech of rhetorical exaggerationtells of her anxious waiting for her lord and her inexpressible joy athis return. In conclusion she directs that purple cloth be spread uponhis path that he may enter the house as befits a conqueror. After a showof resistance, Agamemnon yields the point, and the contrast at which thedramatist aims is achieved. With the pomp of an eastern monarch, alwaysrepellent to the Greek mind, the King steps across the threshold, steps, as the audience knows, to his death. The higher the reach of his powerand pride the more terrible and swift is the nemesis; and Clytemnestrafollows in triumph with the enigmatic cry upon her lips: "Zeus who artgod of fulfilment, fulfil my prayers. " As she withdraws the chorus begina song of boding fear, the more terrible that it is still indefinite. Something is going to happen--the presentiment is sure. But what, butwhat? They search the night in vain. Meantime, motionless and silentwaits the figure of the veiled woman. It is Cassandra, the prophetess, daughter of Priam of Troy, whom Agamemnon has carried home as his prize. Clytemnestra returns to urge her to enter the house; she makes no signand utters no word. The queen changes her tone from courtesy to angerand rebuke; the figure neither stirs nor speaks; and Clytemnestra atlast with an angry threat leaves her and returns to the palace. Then, and not till then, a cry breaks from the stranger's lips, a passionatecry to Apollo who gave her her fatal gift. All the sombre history of theHouse to which she has been brought, the woe that has been and the woethat is to come, passes in pictures across her inner sense. In a seriesof broken ejaculations, not sentences but lyric cries, she evokes thescenes of the past and of the future. Blood drips from the palace; inits chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of Thyestes wail inits haunted courts; and ever among the visions of the past that one ofthe future floats and fades, clearly discerned, impossible to avert, themurder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear of that, most pitiful ofall, the violent death of the seer who sees in vain and may not help. Between Cassandra and the Chorus it is a duet of anguish and fear; inthe broken lyric phrases a phantom music wails; till at last, at whatseems the breaking-point, the tension is relaxed, and dropping into thecalmer iambic recitative, Cassandra tells her message in plainer speechand clearly proclaims the murder of the King. Then, with a last appealto the avenger that is to come, she enters the palace alone to meet herdeath. --The stage is empty. Suddenly a cry is heard from within; again, and then again; while the chorus hesitate the deed is done; the doorsare thrown open, and Clytemnestra is seen standing over the corpses ofher victims. All disguise is now thrown off; the murderess avows andtriumphs in her deed; she justifies it as vengeance for the sacrifice ofIphigenia, and sees in herself not a free human agent but the incarnatecurse of the House of Tantalus. And now for the first time appears theadulterer Aegisthus, who has planned the whole behind the scenes. He toois an avenger, for he is the son of that Thyestes who was made to feedon his own children's flesh. The murder of Agamemnon is but one morelink in the long chain of hereditary guilt; and with that exposition ofthe pitiless law of punishment and crime this chapter of the great dramacomes to a close. But the "Agamemnon" is only the first of a series ofthree plays closely connected and meant to be performed in succession;and the problem raised in the first of them, the crime that cries forpunishment and the punishment that is itself a new crime, is solved inthe last by a reconciliation of the powers of heaven and hell, and thepardon of the last offender in the person of Orestes. To sketch, however, the plan of the other dramas of the trilogy would be totrespass too far upon our space and time. It is enough to haveillustrated, by the example of the "Agamemnon, " the general character ofa Greek tragedy; and those who care to pursue the subject further mustbe referred to the text of the plays themselves. 

Section 7. Comedy. 

Even more remarkable than the tragedy of the Greeks, in its rendering ofa didactic intention under the forms of a free and spontaneous art, isthe older comedy known to us through the works of Aristophanes. As theformer dealt with the general conceptions, religious and ethical, thatunderlay the Greek view of life, using as its medium of exposition theancient national myths, so the latter dealt with the particular phasesof contemporary life, employing the machinery of a free burlesque. Theachievement of Aristophanes, in fact, is more astonishing, in a sense, than that of Aeschylus. Starting with what is always, _primafacie_, the prose of everyday life, its acrid controversies, itsvulgar and tedious types, and even its particular individuals--forAristophanes does not hesitate to introduce his contemporaries in personon the stage--he fits to this gross and heavy stuff the wings ofimagination, scatters from it the clinging mists of banality and spiteand speeds it forth through the lucid heaven of art amid peals ofmusical laughter and snatches of lyric song. For Aristophanes was a poetas well as a comedian, and his genius is displayed not only in theconstruction of his fantastic plots, not only in the inexhaustibleprofusion of his humane and genial wit, but in bursts of pure poetry asmelodious and inspired as ever sprang from the lips of the lyrists ofGreece or of the world. The basis of the comic as of the tragic art ofthe Greeks was song and dance; and the chorus, the original element ofthe play, still retains in the works of Aristophanes a place importantenough to make it clear that in comedy, too, a prominent aspect of theart must have been the aesthetic appeal to the ear and the eye. Ingeneral structure, in fact, comedy and tragedy were alike; aestheticallythe motives were similar, only they were set in a different key. 

But while primarily Aristophanes, like the tragedians, was a greatartist, he was also, like them, a great interpreter of life. His dramasare satires as well as poems, and he was and expressed himself supremelyconscious of having a "mission" to fulfil. "He has scorned from thefirst, " he makes the chorus sing of himself in the "Peace":

 "He has scorned from the first to descend and to dip Peddling and meddling in private affairs: To detect and collect every petty defect Of husband and wife and domestical life; But intrepid and bold, like Alcides of old, When the rest stood aloof, put himself to the proof In his country's behoof. " [Footnote: Aristoph. Peace, 751 seq. --Translated by Frere. ]

His aim, in fact, was deliberately to instruct his countrymen inpolitical and social issues; to attack the abuses of the Assembly, ofthe Law-courts and the home; to punish demagogues, charlatans, professional politicians; to laugh back into their senses "revolting"sons and wives; to defend the orthodox faith against philosophers andmen of science. These are the themes that he embodies in his plots, andthese the morals that he enforces when he speaks through the chorus inhis own person. And the result is an art-product more strange to themodern mind in its union of poetry with prose, of aesthetic withdidactic significance, than even that marvellous creation, the Greektragedy. Of the character of this comedy the reader may form an ideathrough the admirable and easily accessible translations of Frere;[Footnote: In Morley's Universal Library. ] and we are thereforedispensed from the obligation to attempt, as in the case of tragedy, anaccount of some particular specimen of the art. 

Section 8. Summary. 

And here must conclude our survey of the character of Greek art. Themain point which we have endeavoured to make clear has been so ofteninsisted upon, that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it further. Thekey to the art of the Greeks, as well as to their ethics, is theidentification of the beautiful and the good; and it therefore is asnatural in treating of their art to insist on its ethical value as itwas to insist on the aesthetic significance of their moral ideal. But, in fact, any insistance on either side of the judgment is misleading. The two points of view had never been dissociated; and art and conductalike proceeded from the same imperative impulse, to create a harmony ororder which was conceived indifferently as beautiful or good. Throughand through, the Greek ideal is Unity. To make the individual at onewith the State, the real with the ideal, the inner with the outer, artwith morals, finally to bring all phases of life under the empire of asingle idea, which, with Goethe, we may call, as we will, the good, thebeautiful, or the whole--this was the aim, and, to a great extent, theachievement of their genius. And of all the points of view from which wemay envisage their brilliant activity none perhaps is more central andmore characteristic than this of art, whose essence is the comprehensionof the many in the one, and the perfect reflection of the inner in theouter. 

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Now that we have examined in some detail the most important phases ofthe Greek view of life, it may be as well to endeavour briefly torecapitulate and bring to a point the various considerations that havebeen advanced. 

But, first, one preliminary remark must be made. Throughout thepreceding pages we have made no attempt to distinguish the Greek "view"from the Greek "ideal"; we have interpreted their customs andinstitutions, political, social, or religious, by the conceptions andideals of philosophers and poets, and have thus, it may be objected, made the mistake of identifying the blind work of popular instinct withthe theories and aspirations of conscious thought. 

Such a procedure, no doubt, would be illegitimate if it were supposed toimply that Greek institutions were the result of a deliberate intentionconsciously adopted and approved by the average man. Like other socialproducts they grew and were not made; and it was only the few whorealised fully all that they implied. But on the other hand it is adistinguishing characteristic of the Greek age that the ideal formulatedby thought was the direct outcome of the facts. That absolute separationof what ought to be from what is which continues to haunt and vitiatemodern life had not yet been made in ancient Greece. Plato, idealistthough he be, is yet rooted in the facts of his age; his perfectrepublic he bases on the institutions of Sparta and Crete; his perfectman he shapes on the lines of the Greek citizen. That dislocation of thespirit which opposed the body to the soul, heaven to earth, the churchto the state, the man of the world to the priest, was altogether aliento the consciousness of the Greeks. To them the world of fact was alsothe world of the ideal; the conceptions which inspired their highestaims were already embodied in their institutions and reflected in theirlife; and the realisation of what ought to be involved not thedestruction of what was, but merely its perfecting on its own lines. 

While then, on the one hand, it would be ridiculous so to idealise thecivilisation of the Greeks as to imply that they had eliminated discordand confusion, yet, on the other, it is legitimate to say that they hadbuilt on the plan of the ideal, and that their life both in public andprivate was, by the very law of its existence, an effort to realiseexplicitly that type of Good which was already implicitly embodied inits structure. 

The ideal, in a word, in ancient Greece, was organically related to thereal; and that is why it is possible to identify the Greek view with theGreek ideal. 

Bearing this in mind we may now proceed to recapitulate our conclusionsas to what that view was. And, first, let us take the side ofspeculation. Here we are concerned not with the formal systems of Greekthought, but with that half-unconscious working of imagination as muchas of mind whose expression was their popular religion. Of thisreligion, as we saw, the essential feature was that belief inanthropomorphic gods, by virtue of which a reconciliation was effectedbetween man and the powers whether of nature or of his own soul. Behindphenomena, physical or psychic, beings were conceived of like naturewith man, beings, therefore, whose actions he could interpret and whosemotives he could comprehend. For his imagination, if not for hisintellect, a harmony was thus induced between himself and the world thatwas not he. A harmony! and in this word we have the key to the dominantidea of the Greek civilisation. 

For, turning now to the practical side, we find the same impulse toreconcile divergent elements. That antithesis of soul and body which wasemphasised in the mediaeval view of life and dominates still our currentethical conceptions, does not appear in the normal consciousness of theGreeks. Their ideal for the individual life included the perfection ofthe body; beauty no less than goodness was the object of their quest, and they believed that the one implied the other. But since theperfection of the body required the co-operation of external aids, theymade these also essential to their ideal. Not merely virtue of the soul, not merely health and beauty of the body, but noble birth, sufficientwealth and a good name among men, were included in their conception ofthe desirable life. Harmony, in a word, was the end they pursued, harmony of the soul with the body and of the body with its environment;and it is this that distinguishes their ethical ideal from that which inlater times has insisted on the fundamental antagonism of the inner tothe outer life, and made the perfection of the spirit depend on themortification of the flesh. 

The same ideal of harmony dominates the Greek view of the relation ofthe individual to the state. This relation, it is true, is oftendescribed as one in which the parts were subordinated to the whole; butmore accurately it may be said that they were conceived as finding inthe whole their realisation. The perfect individual was the individualin the state; the faculties essential to his excellence had there onlytheir opportunity of development; the qualities defined as virtues hadthere only their significance; and it was only in so far as he was acitizen that a man was properly a man at all. Thus that oppositionbetween the individual and the state which perplexes our own society hadhardly begun to define itself in Greece. If on the one hand the statemade larger claims on the liberty of the individual, on the other, theliberty of the individual consisted in a response to the claims. So thatin this department also harmony was maintained by the Greeks betweenelements which have developed in modern times their latent antagonism. 

Thus, both in speculation and in practice, in his relation to nature andin his relation to the state, both internally, between the divergentelements of which his own being was composed, and externally betweenhimself and the world that was not he, it was the aim, conscious orunconscious, and, in part at least, the achievement of the Greeks, tocreate and maintain an essential harmony. The antitheses of which we inour own time are so painfully and increasingly aware, between Man as amoral being and Nature as an indifferent law, between the flesh and thespirit, between the individual and the state, do not appear as factorsin that dominant consciousness of the Greeks under whose influence theirreligion, their institutions and their customary ideals had been formed. And so regarded, in general, under what may fairly be called its mostessential aspect, the Greek civilisation is rightly described as that ofharmony. 

But, on the other hand, and this is the point to which we must now turnour attention, this harmony which was the dominant feature in theconsciousness of the Greeks and the distinguishing characteristic oftheir epoch in the history of the world, was nevertheless, after all, but a transitory and imperfect attempt to reconcile elements whoseantagonism was too strong for the solution thus proposed. The factors ofdisruption were present from the beginning in the Greek ideal; and itwas as much by the development of its own internal contradictions as bythe invasion of forces from without that that fabric of magical beautywas destined to fall. These contradictions have already been indicatedat various points in the text, and it only remains to bring themtogether in a concluding summary. 

On the side of speculation, the religion of the Greeks was open, as wesaw, to a double criticism. On the one hand, the ethical conceptionsembodied in those legends of the gods which were the product of anearlier and more barbarous age, had become to the contemporaries ofPlato revolting or ridiculous. On the other hand, to metaphysicalspeculation, not only was the existence of the gods unproved, but theirmutually conflicting activities, their passions and their caprice, wereincompatible with that conception of universal law which the developingreason evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man withnature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic gods wasa harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action ofthe intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elementsthat had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their originalopposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internalevolution of their own consciousness. 

And in the sphere of practice we are met with a similar dissolution. TheGreek conception of excellence included, as we saw, not only bodilyhealth and strength, but such a share at least of external goods aswould give a man scope for his own self-perfection. And since theseconditions were not attainable by all, the sacrifice of the majority tothe minority was frankly accepted and the pursuit of the ideal confinedto a privileged class. 

Such a conception, however, was involved in internal contradictions. Forin the first place, even for the privileged few, an excellence whichdepended on external aids was, at the best, uncertain and problematical. Misfortune and disease were possibilities that could not be ignored; oldage and death were imperative certainties; and no care, no art, noorganisation of society, could obviate the inherent incompatibility ofindividual perfection with the course of nature. Harmony between theindividual and his environment was perhaps more nearly achieved by andfor the aristocracy of ancient Greece than by any society of any otherage. But such a harmony, even at the best, is fleeting and precarious;and no perfection of life delivers from death. 

And, in the second place, to secure even this imperfect realisation, itwas necessary to restrict the universal application of the ideal. Excellence, in Greece, was made the end for some, not for all. But thislimitation was felt, in the development of consciousness, to be self-contradictory; and the next great system of ethics that succeeded tothat of Aristotle, postulated an end of action that should be at onceindependent of the aids of fortune and open alike to all classes ofmankind. The ethics of a privileged class were thus expanded into theethics of humanity; but this expansion was fatal to its essence, whichhad depended on the very limitations by which it was destroyed. 

With the Greek civilisation beauty perished from the world. Never againhas it been possible for man to believe that harmony is in fact thetruth of all existence. The intellect and the moral sense have developedimperative claims which can be satisfied by no experience known to man. And as a consequence of this the goal of desire which the Greeks couldplace in the present, has been transferred, for us, to a futureinfinitely remote, which nevertheless is conceived as attainable. Dissatisfaction with the world in which we live and determination torealise one that shall be better, are the prevailing characteristics ofthe modern spirit. The development is one into whose meaning and endthis is not the place to enter. It is enough that we feel it to beinevitable; that the harmony of the Greeks contained in itself thefactors of its own destruction; and that in spite of the fascinationwhich constantly fixes our gaze on that fairest and happiest halting-place in the secular march of man, it was not there, any more than here, that he was destined to find the repose of that ultimate reconciliationwhich was but imperfectly anticipated by the Greeks.